Weaving Our Lives:
Listening Within as Soul Becomes a Living Garment

WITH

JEAN PALMER-DALEY, NANCY ROMIG,
VERNESSA FOELIX, AND JOAN ABRAHAM

May 4-10, 2023
A BodySoul Retreat
Truchas Peaks Place • Truchas, New Mexico

Set in the land of enchantment in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico between Santa Fe and Taos, we will connect with the land in the outer world as well as our own inner nature. Through the weaving of our work, we will discover our own threads, find the unique expression of our truth, and explore the patterns of our own distinctive path. With the support of our community, we will celebrate a BodySoul journey.  

Join us for this in-person retreat following the format of BodySoul Rhythms® intensive workshops. The intensive format, which Marion Woodman compared with an initiation, allows participants to experience the work and its transformative power in an embodied way. We continue the work of Marion Woodman, Ann Skinner and Mary Hamilton and will explore our inner voices through dreams, voice, dance, movement, art, and mask work. Held in the sacred space created by the group, participants are encouraged to express and embody psyche’s energies, which may lead to the healing of old wounds and the emergence of new energies.

We recommend that you have some familiarity with the works of Marion Woodman. You can best access her work through her books and her recordings. Of her books we recommend Addiction to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin, The Still Ravaged Bridegroom, and Leaving My Father’s House. The retreat is limited to 21 participants and open to women who have completed at least 50 hours of Jungian analysis/therapy and 50 hours of bodywork  i.e. yoga, dance, authentic movement, SE, TRE, Feldenkrais, etc..

Questing for Our Personal Myth: Writing, Remembering, and Renewing Our Story Through the Teachings of Joseph Campbell

A Workshop with

Dennis Patrick Slattery

May 12-15, 2022
Hotel Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Living myths…are not to be judged as true or false,
but as effective or ineffective, maturative or pathogenic.
—Joseph Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander

Myths are living symbols. They serve each of us individually and collectively as guides to aid us in harmonizing our interior world with the surrounding landscape we inhabit. They serve us on a personal level as ordering and organizing principles whose aim is to offer our lives a sense of coherence, not perfection. Joseph Campbell believes that myths reveal the movement of psyche, indeed “of the whole nature of man and his destiny” (Flight,35).

This workshop will include a blending of many of the major insights Campbell discovered through a life-long quest for myths’ origins, structures and benefits for living a full and authentic life. In addition to two formal presentations on Campbell’s insights about myths’ values, as well as pages from several of his books for us to meditate on, we will engage in a series of riting meditations from my book, Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story, to allow participants to deepen their understanding of the myth that guides them, consciously and unconsciously, toward a fulfilled life. We will also discover, through a series of rituals, what connections myth and ritual share. We may, in the process, discover what essentials of our personal myth have exhausted their shelf life and what elements might be cultivated further.

The Heroine’s Journey
Through Myth and Memoir:
A Writing Workshop
for Women

Maureen Murdock

March 31-April 3, 2022
Hotel Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico

There is a potential heroine in every woman.
—Jean Shinoda Bolen

Like Hermes, the archetypal mediator between the realms of heaven, earth and the underworld, the memoirist mediates between time past and time present. Memoirs bring forward an event of the past and re-enact it by giving it form in writing. Myth fuels the psychic desire of humans to understand their origins and therefore their destinies, and contemporary memoirs address some of the same archetypal themes found in ancient myths such as origins, the fall, the parent-child relationship, quest, descent and return.

Most of us spend our lifetime trying to tease meaning out of the circumstances of our lives. We search for meaning as we tell the story about how and where we grew up, who our parents were, how the significant people in our lives influenced us, what challenges and obstacles we faced, and how we dealt with triumphs and failure.

The story we tell ourselves and others gives us a sense of identity. It helps us organize our life in a way that gives it meaning and direction. Although not every memoir reflects a mythic theme, most memoir writers unconsciously reveal mythic themes in their desire to find meaning in their lives. Who am I? What is my tribe, my family? Where am I going? How do I make my way? What is my purpose? Both myth and memoir arise from a human need for connection and that is why memoirs are so popular in culture today.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell presented a model of the mythological journey of the hero, which has since been used as a template for the psycho-spiritual development of the individual and a pattern for many screenplays. The mythic pattern we will explore, however, is the journey of the heroine, the quest to heal the deep wound of our feminine nature on a personal, cultural and spiritual level. We will use the stages of The Heroine’s Journey as a framework for our writing to look at the most significant moments in our lives. The journey often entails an initial separation from the mother and feminine values, seeking recognition and success from the metaphorical father, experiencing spiritual aridity and death, and turning inward to reclaim the power and spirit of the sacred feminine.

In an atmosphere of friendship, support, and safety, the workshop will include the elements of memoir writing, writing exercises, excerpts from published memoirs, time to write alone as well as in the group, and ritual work. Please bring a picture of your mother or an object she has given you. All participants will receive a complimentary copy of The Heroine’s Journey Workbook.

sea, spirit, sanctuary:
Nantucket and Herman Melville’s Epic, Moby-Dick, as Spiritual Quest

with

Dennis Patrick Slattery
and willow young

October 5-10, 2021
Nantucket Island

In the tradition of C.G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, we will sojourn to the “far off isle” of Nantucket, 30 miles into the wild North Atlantic Sea. During this time together, we will explore the mythopoetic depths of Melville’s Moby-Dick as we deepen our relationship with nature and seek to align with our constant companion, the wise soul within. This voyage will also include how there was “almost a biblical fervor with which the Nantucketers viewed their whaling destiny”, which Melville develops in what can be called his spiritual epic journey of one’s soul that is Moby-Dick. Once the whaling capital of the world, Nantucket is now a place of refuge for those seeking inner renewal and restoration.

Drawing on Herman Melville’s classic epic of America and his book, Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, professor and author, Dennis Patrick Slattery will guide us to a deeper understanding of place as well as to help us discover new levels of meaning in the tale of the white whale. There exists an intimate relationship between the industry of whaling and the spiritual quest of the soul offered through Quakerism as a spiritual path to one’s destiny, a path that Ishmael travels on board the Pequod. Together, we will pay close attention to the content of the readings as well as the context in which we will live while reading it.

Jungian analyst and professor, Willow Young will draw us into Jung’s life-long engagement with the natural world, his study of natural sciences, and the emergence of late 19th century scientific thinking. She will share her Nantucket, which has had a deep impact on her since her childhood on the island.

This retreat will nurture our capacities to listen to nature within as she speaks to us in our dreams, imaginings, and musings, and without, as we listen to the nature of place, landscape, and experiences of synchronicity. We come with an intention to nurture ourselves, with story, the nature of our imaginations, and inner promptings. The treasures of the natural world will be highlighted in the afternoon excursions on Nantucket Island. Melville’s epic will find resonances in the natural order of the island to create a rich experience for all participants. Exploring the island invites a metaphor for exploring oneself, with the ever-present unconscious prompting us to wholeness. Here, amidst the island solitude and quiet, we can discern our responses to the inner resonances of both body and soul.

Join us on this special journey to explore and experience Nantucket’s historical significance, its connection to Melville’s classic tale, our relationship with the natural world, and insights that arise in us from fathoms deep regarding our personal and mythic spiritual journeys.

HOMER TO HERODOTUS

a 14-day tour
through classical turkey
with Chris Downing

May 9-23, 2020 and May 26-June 9, 2020 (Both Cancelled)

ISTANBUL – TROY – PERGAMUM – HIERAPOLIS –
APHRODISIAS – IZMIR – EPHESUS – SAMOS – PRIENE –
DIDYMA – MILETUS – KOS – BODRUM

These trips will take us to the major sites associated with the Greek presence on the Aegean coast of Turkey, sites of important shrines to the Olympian deities. However, my lectures (unlike those of my 2007 Turkey tour or the 2018 trip to Sicily—or the several trips I’ve led to mainland Greece), will not be goddess or god focused, though of course I won’t be able to resist talking some about Aphrodite, Artemis, and Apollo.

What the 2020 tour will be focusing on is the literary unfolding of the Greek mythic imagination on the Ionian Coast of what we think of as Turkey. Greek myth, as it’s available to us, began with Homer from nearby Chios. His epics introduced the stories that the much-later tragedians revisioned. Lyric poetry also arose on the neighboring islands—think of Sappho of Lesbos. The so-called early “philosophers” (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras) with their very different ways of imagining the world and our relation to it came from Ephesus, or Miletus or Samos. Hippocrates, the quasi-historical, mostly mythic, founder of “rational” medicine, came from Kos. Herodotus who initiated the different kind of storying we call history—but relished relaying the myths of the many peoples he came in contact with—came from Halicarnassus (our Bodrum). All this happened in a radically multicultural context—a rich confluence of Greek, Ancient Near Eastern, and Persian perspectives.

Of course, to explore the unfolding of the Greek mythic imagination will also be to explore how myths and the imagination work in us, in our culture and in our psyches.

C.G. JUNG'S THE RED BOOK  
Poetic Epic & Personal Myth

A Writing Retreat with

Dennis Patrick Slattery

October 17-20, 2019
Truchas Peaks Place, Truchas, New Mexico

The publication of The Red Book in 2009 was a major moment in Jungian Studies. The book, written over a period of 16 years, wears many faces: a record of Jung’s own individuation process, a memoir, a spiritual odyssey, a treatise on the birth of the heroic—and as I believe, an epic poem in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, to name a few.

Join us as we explore all three sections of Jung's epic: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Scrutinies. This often enigmatic and perplexing epic can be understood as a poetic expression of one soul’s journey towards wholeness, gathering in its pilgrimage a host of characters, contradictions, paradoxes, psychological and spiritual discoveries, as well as a series of exquisite paintings by the author.

In addition, Jung’s epic journey is as well, and by the power of analogy, our own journey as we seek a greater and deeper understanding of ourselves and others from wherever we are currently in life’s mysterious flow. Jung himself wrote that from his perspective, “analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche”. So to read Jung’s epic is simultaneously to engage our own journey’s complexities and discoveries, insights and revelations of who we are in our own personal myth. We will, in fact, find in our explorations many correspondences to our own challenges and gifts in life. We will explore both Jung’s epic as well as our own mythic dimensions through discussion and cursive writing meditations.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS
OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL

The Romance of the Grail 
in the Forests of Brocéliande

WITH Evans Lansing Smith

September 1-8, 2019
France

The second in a series of Mythological Studies Tours, this trip takes us to the marvelous sites in Northern France associated with the Grail Romances of the Middle Ages. From our base in Rennes, the capital of Celtic Brittany, a series of day trips will take us to the stunning site of Mont-Saint-Michel, following which we journey into the interior of Brittany to explore the legendary Forest of Brocéliande, birthplace of Vivian, haunting domain of Morgan le Fay, and final resting place of Merlin. We then journey farther back in time to the megalithic Avenue of the Druids, along the far western coast of Carnac. In the Loire River Valley, we stop over to visit the formidable 13th century Château in Angers, to see the splendid Apocalypse Tapestries—the finest of the Anglo-Norman Middle Ages—before traveling to Chartres to explore the most famous of all cathedrals, with its Neolithic crypt, Black Virgin, and gorgeous labyrinth. From Chartres we move on to Paris, home of the magical Unicorn Tapestries, at the Musée national du Moyen Âge (formerly Musée de Cluny), and of the numinous cathedral of Nôtre-Dame, and the fabulous Medieval wing of the Louvre.

Your guide along the way will be Dr. Evans Lansing Smith, who travelled along the same route with Joseph Campbell, over forty years ago, in 1976. He will offer a series of reflections on that that journey, along with illuminated presentations focusing on the mythologies of France, from the Megalithic period to the Middle Ages.

EXPLORING FREUD'S WORLD
with Chris Downing

May 4-18, 2019

PRAGUE – PRIBOR – VIENNA – SALZBURG 
BAD GASTEIN – LONDON

Throughout this trip we had an opportunity to see the connections between the geographical and historical contexts of Freud’s life and the central themes of his theoretical vision. Beginning in the Czech Republic— where Freud was born and spent his early childhood—it lead naturally into consideration of his understanding of the lifelong impact of very early experience.

While in Prague we visited Terezin, the concentration camp where at least one  of Freud’s sisters died—which helped us recognize how radically the world in which Freud lived was ended by the Holocaust.

During our time in Vienna, where Freud lived for almost 80 years, we walked the streets he walked, visit the University he attended, the hospitals where he worked, the cafes he regularly visited, noticing that  Freud’s Vienna was also the Vienna of Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Mahler, Klimt, and Schiele.

We traveled to Salzburg, the site of the First International Psychoanalytic Congress (which Jung attended) and on to Bad Gastein, a favorite among the many Austrian resorts where Freud and his family spent most of their summers and where Freud did much of his most important writing.

We ended in London with a visit the house where Freud died 80 years ago, just after the outbreak of WWII. This house is now a museum that holds his antiquities, library, writing desk, and famous couch. On our very last evening we will had this space all to ourselves for a final celebratory gathering.

During her early evening lectures Chris shared “her Freud” with all of us—how her understanding of Freud has continued to expand and deepen during the 60 years since she first discovered how the “mothering” she had received from Jung needed to be balanced by Freud’s “fathering.”

C.G. JUNG'S THE RED BOOK  
Poetic Epic & Personal Myth

A Writing Retreat with

Dennis Patrick Slattery

March 7-10, 2019
Truchas Peaks Place, Truchas, New Mexico

The publication of The Red Book in 2009 was a major moment in Jungian Studies. The book, written over a period of 16 years, wears many faces: a record of Jung’s own individuation process, a memoir, a spiritual odyssey, a treatise on the birth of the heroic—and as I believe, an epic poem in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, to name a few.

We explored all three sections of Jung's epic: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Scrutinies. This often enigmatic and perplexing epic can be understood as a poetic expression of one soul’s journey towards wholeness, gathering in its pilgrimage a host of characters, contradictions, paradoxes, psychological and spiritual discoveries, as well as a series of exquisite paintings by the author.

In addition, Jung’s epic journey is as well, and by the power of analogy, our own journey as we seek a greater and deeper understanding of ourselves and others from wherever we are currently in life’s mysterious flow. Jung himself wrote that from his perspective, “analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche” (CW 9,2, par. 414). So to read Jung’s epic is simultaneously to engage our own journey’s complexities and discoveries, insights and revelations of who we are in our own personal myth. We found, in fact, in our explorations many correspondences to our own challenges and gifts in life. We explored both Jung’s epic as well as our own mythic dimensions through discussion and cursive writing meditations.

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 7

TRUTH AND POWER
The Delicate Dance of Integrity
Santa Fe, November 1-4, 2018

Coined by the Quakers in the 1950’s, ‘’speaking truth to power” is not a new concept, but it has taken on new relevance in the turbulent post-truth era. Current debate seems most often framed by appeals to emotion disconnected to facts, and counteracting this troubling trend requires that we galvanize our courage to speak up, speak out, and be heard. As we witness increasing polarization, insults and sarcasm move us farther and farther from the cooperation needed to find solutions, and it is tempting to give up trying to be heard. With our future dependent on successful dialogue, we can no longer recoil from the challenge we face. Speaking up to powerful forces—and finding space for meaningful idea exchange—begins by standing in our integrity, speaking from our center, and listening with an open heart and mind. Never has there been a more urgent need for civil discourse about the problems facing our nation and the world. Civilization in Transition 7, sponsored by Jungian International Training in Zürich Foundation, explored and addressed possible ways to transcend the polarization in our lives and make a difference in the world. This was a perfect example of Jungian deep thought and reflection on the world around us.

THE GODS AMONG US:
Archetypal Patterning and Archetypal Cosmology for the 21st Century
with
Richard Tarnas and Michael Conforti
Eranos, Ascona, Switzerland
July 22-27, 2018 (cancelled)

Seldom has an age been so profoundly in need of critical insight into the underlying forces at work in the human psyche and their role in shaping the historical moment the world finds itself in. We need what James Hillman called “an archetypal eye” with which to discern the patterns and powers that inform both the larger zeitgeist of the collective psyche and the unfolding experience and life challenges of each individual. For the archetypes that Jung helped the modern age become aware of are not just concepts, dry intellectual abstractions. They are powerful multidimensional forces that can overtake one’s state of consciousness, flood one with emotions, images, and somatic sensations, and possess an entire culture or epoch. Archetypal energies can be notoriously destructive, and yet they also hold the treasure of life’s deep meanings and purposes, and are responsible for the world’s greatest works of art and creative expression. It is with this sense of urgency on both the individual and global level that two of the foremost leaders in the fields of archetypal cosmology and archetypal patterning are coming together in the renowned cultural setting of Eranos in Ascona, Switzerland to offer a special week of presentations and discussions that engage some of the great issues of the day and explore the extraordinary resources of the archetypal perspective.

The Greeks in Sicily
with chris downing
Sicily, April 28-May 12, 2018

Like Turkey, and much of Italy, Sicily was part of Magna Graecia, Greater Greece. Between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE the Greeks established colonies there, bringing with them their language, and religious and cultural traditions. On this two-week trip with 32 participants around the island of Sicily  we visited Siracusa, Ortygia, Enna, Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, Palermo, Monreale, Mt. Etna, Taormina, and back to Siracusa for a Greek Tragedy in the ancient Greek Theatre built in the 5th Century BC. Chris illuminated our experience with rich lectures along the way, elaborating on the stories and myths associated with the temples dedicated to Athena, Apollo, Hera, Olympian Zeus, and the Dioscuri, as well as the myths about Heracles, Actaeon, Perseus, and other Greek heroes represented on the friezes that once decorated those temples.  This was an amazing journey for all and an astonishing opportunity for me to explore my Sicilian roots.