Miranda Hart, on Desert Island Discs Radio 4 Extra Sunday 29th November, said it was a long time before she could look in the mirror and say to herself she was "beautifully unique".
The day before, Jean Shinoda Bolen gave a seminar to the C G Jung Club London entitled 'Path with Soul / Path with Heart - The Inner Compass'. Her theme was that each person is unique in their particular mix of God-given characteristics ('God-given' used here because it is a well-known phrase - but it is not meant to mean the God of any particular religion, but whatever understanding of the Divine each individual has a sense of) and the importance of valuing, seeing as beautiful, whatever we are. With the exigencies of the culture of the day, all too often our God-given self becomes hidden or distorted from even ourselves.
Jung said that analysts should put to the side everything they have 'learnt', because, if not, stereotyping can set in, which goes against appreciating the uniqueness of the client and helping them to realise they are "beautifully unique".
4 December 2015
2 December 2015
The Woman's Voice in Today's Culture
Where is the woman's voice in this world? This is the passion of Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of the book 'Goddesses in Everywoman', to enable and energise what women can bring to the problems of our world today. She gave a talk to the C G Jung Club London on Friday 27 November about the indomitable independence of spirit women have, illustrated so well in the myth of the Greek Goddess Artemis, Where is the woman's voice in the British Parliament today as they discuss whether Britain should bomb Syria? She posited that it needs the fighting spirit that all women have in them, somewhere, even if they have not found it, to balk against this warring trend. It may seem to be a fruitless task, but calling upon Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Fields, she said how there is an accumulation of individual voices which then results in a tipping point of it having a major effect. You may be the 14th voice, but without that, there cannot be the 15th voice an so on, until it is the 100th voice, when the culture changes (from the myth of the 100 monkeys). It is a symbolic myth, the actual numbers are probably much greater, but the journey is the same.
Jean is a Jungian analyst, as such she believes that men have female characteristics inside them that, to be whole, need to be acknowledged and used, The route to doing that is often to be exposed to women who they feel for - Zeus dearly loved Artemis.
She was an inspirational voice.
Jean is a Jungian analyst, as such she believes that men have female characteristics inside them that, to be whole, need to be acknowledged and used, The route to doing that is often to be exposed to women who they feel for - Zeus dearly loved Artemis.
She was an inspirational voice.
The Darkness when the Clocks go Back
Jungian psychology respects and values the dark side. Here is what Brian Draper, Associate Lecturer
at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, said in Thought for the
Day on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday 24th October. That Saturday night the clocks went back.
“The British Summer Time debate continues as to whether we should keep British Summer Time all year round.
Studies suggest that kids are more active for longer when the evenings are
light, there are fewer road accidents and we would save on energy bills. On the other hand, Northern Scotland wouldn’t
see sunrise until 10 and early birds from farmers to postal workers would be
plunged in darkness for longer.
Beyond these practical arguments
however it is perhaps at the visceral level that we feel our descent into the
darkness of winter most sharply, accelerated as it is this weekend by the clock
change and the often depressing realisation that the darkness has crept up on
us again. This is not helped, I believe,
by the way we associate light and dark with good and bad. We tend to think in terms of binary opposites,
because a world of us and them, black and white and so on, is an easier place
to grasp. So when it comes to light and
dark, the most primal set of opposites we have, we tend not to like the dark
and try to keep it at bay. Yet if we
pause to peer into the beauty of natural darkness – for instance (our eyes do
adjust and we are soon reminded of its riches), if the light didn’t fade, how
could we appreciate a sunset, or the glimmer of the first evening star. How could we enjoy a deep and restorative
sleep? How could a seed ever germinate?
“At the heart of reality”, says the Quaker writer Parker Palmer
“opposites cohere in mysterious unity.”
Religion, if we are not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the
expense of the mystery, so we can end up believing that God’s role is just to
side with us. But it doesn’t seem to
work that way. As the poet Henry Vaughan
writes “There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness.” So much of what we have come to associate
negatively with being in the dark, such as not knowing or having all the right
answers, such as struggle, pain, or loss, is very much part of the mysterious
unity of the whole. Looking back to
darker times in our life we can often see that this is spiritually when we have
grown the most. The 16th
century monk Jonathan Cross, from the depths of a prison cell wrote eloquently
of his dark night of the soul and accepted it as a gift.
As the clocks go back, I wonder
if we can do the same with our winter darkness as much as with that extra hour
in bed.”
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