Season: Spring 2015

All of us have stories about our lives. This lecture focuses on how we can change our lives by changing how we relate to our stories. We can use tools from shamanism and Jungian psychology to step outside of our daily routines and review our life stories. Then, we can use shamanic and Jungian strategies to make changes, bring our spiritual practices into everyday life, and manifest a new story.

1. Discuss the problem of being “stuck” in our stories.
2. Describe practices for ascertaining “what is” in our current story, what we would like it to be, obstacles to change, and ways to relate to transpersonal realms to gain energy and information to make changes.
3. Discuss what shamanism is about and the usefulness of Jungian languaging.

Learning Objectives:

1. Become familiar with ways to engage our current story and dream a new one into being using our rational and nonrational minds
2. Become familiar with ways to engage transpersonal realms using shamanic and Jungian practices to gain energy and information for change
3. Better understand elements of shamanism and Jungian psychology and how they can be used in the practice of clinical social work

Film Screening: In The Prophecy of the Seeress, a 40-minute film based on a thousand year old Icelandic saga called Voluspa, an ancient Viking Seeress predicts the destruction of the world. Her voice reaches across the centuries to tell us of the perils of our own time. Can we heed her dire warnings?
(www.cassandra-productions.com)

The film will be screened, followed by a Q&A with the director, Jungian analyst Laurie Layton Schapira.

“All life is bound to carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the experiencing of these alone makes sense of life”.
– C.G.Jung

In recent years there has been a drift in the philosophical envelope of Jungian analysis. It is a significant frame adjustment, a movement away from seeing analysis as metaphysical craft to experiencing depth therapy as scientific craft, as empirical enactment.

This presentation suggests that the core, unique aspect of Jungian psychology and analysis in this age of increasing metric profession, psychology by the numbers, is its fundamental psycho-spiritual orientation, its essential anchoring in liminal realms. This multi-media presentation will use film, art, and masked clinical example to attempt a contribution toward this rehabilitation of craft, this re-visioning of Jungian psychology and analytic vocation as religious event, as sacramental occasion. A brief concluding aside will allude to the growing planetary dimensions of this psychology and craft, stressing the urgency of reconnecting to the Anima Mundi spirit so wounded at the core of contemporary individual and collective psyche.

Friday night’s lecture will lay out an overview of the model, while Saturday’s session will deepen and amplify the material through interactive play with the presented media examples.

“Whatever spirituality is, we know from our glimpses along the frontier with the transcendent that it wants to step over into living”.
– Ann Belford Ulanov

What kind of intelligence guides our dreams? What is its purpose? Drawing on more than thirty-five years experience helping analytic clients, Jungian analyst John Beebe will guide us in an exploration of how and why our dreams have an objectivity of vision that we can rarely muster in waking life and how our inborn psychological orientation is both reflected and compensated in the dream world.