This Jungian Life Podcast

Many of us live with heavy awareness of cultural unraveling, and the natural world faces sustained and escalating threats. According to author, storyteller and podcaster MICHAEL MEADE, humanity has reached the end of an era, with no clear vision of what is to come. Michael's new book, The Heart of Transformation: Personal and Cultural Renewal on Earth, offers a fundamentally hopeful perspective. Despite the divisions, conflicts and betrayals of our time, the essential story of the world—birth, death, rebirth—endures and is ready to be rediscovered. The loose threads of our unraveling world are waiting to be woven into something new, and the secret of this transformation lies not in politics or activism, but in the depths of the individual heart and soul. Meanwhile, we inhabit a phase of life that is full of chaos and creativity. Like butterfly larvae, we rest in darkness, the outcome of our mysterious transformation unclear. We must find a way to accept the dark and recognize it as a rite of passage in service of new and transformed life. Michael Meade is a renowned storyteller and author who combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths. He is the creator of the Living Myth Podcast, and the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation. His latest book is The Heart of Transformation: Personal and Cultural Renewal on Earth. Visit our website to follow up on the resources we mention in this episode.Connect With This Jungian Life Join Lisa at the Kosmos Institute’s Colloquium in Switzerland this December. This Jungian Life listeners can now claim a 15% discount. Send a dream for us to analyze on the show Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Psychological inflation implies an exaggerated sense of self-importance, accompanied by an unconscious feeling of inferiority. For Jungians, it involves identification with an archetypal energy. When the ego starts to feel that it IS an archetype, rather than feeling awed by it or in contact with it, this can be dangerous psychologically.Negative inflation occurs when a person feels entitled and special because they are suffering, perceiving themselves as unusually and interestingly hard done by. They feel they are owed help from others to solve the problems they are experiencing.We all have experience of dealing with people in the grip of inflation. The word itself gives us an evocative image: the inflated person is puffed up by the oxygen of their own self-importance. They come across as pompous and presumptuous, because they feel more than human. Psyche seeks balance, so we may also observe that under the unbearable arrogance lie feelings of inferiority, terror of mortality, or awareness of weakness and vulnerability - all the aspects of the human condition that the inflated person seeks to deny. These are also people who can be subject to outbursts of rage, frustrated by the failure of reality to conform to their sense of omnipotence and entitlement.The second half of life offers us the possibility of surrendering to something greater and experiencing the relativization of the ego, essentially a deflationary process. If we do not surrender to this new humility and find a way to be in service to something larger, we may stumble into darkness.Join us this week as we circumambulate the concept of inflation, drawing on examples including Kanye West, Elizabeth Holmes, Icarus, Prometheus, and the fairy tale of the Fisherman and his Wife.Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.Connect With This Jungian LifeJoin Lisa at the Kosmos Institute’s Colloquium in Switzerland this December. This Jungian Life listeners can now claim a 15% discount.Download our free Dream Recall Meditation GuideSend a dream for us to analyze on the showWatch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one's life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or giving up.Patience asks us to go within, find the capacity for containment, and recognize that choosing non-action can be the needed form of action. We recognize, feel, and suffer the situation that has arisen, but resist the urge to immediate action in the external world. We search instead for discernment, containment, and meaning making in the internal world. It takes work to develop staying power. The fairy tale heroine in Six Swans worked in silence for six years to weave starflower shirts to liberate her six brothers. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey spent years weaving her father-in-law’s shroud each day and undoing it at night. Like them, we may be required to work patiently on taxing tasks with uncertain outcomes. The gift of such labors is a sovereign self in relationship with the Self.The quality of patience is central to psychoanalysis. Analysands arrive seeking solutions to urgent problems, but insights take time to unfold, and it may be longer before paths to meaningful change appear. The Jungian precept of holding the tension of opposites asks us to foster patience. We must neither collapse into despair nor take premature action. Patience is fundamental to inner growth and transformation.Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.Connect With This Jungian LifeAttend our free seminar: Dream the Dream On: A Dream School Taster on Active ImaginationDownload our Dream Recall Meditation Guide Send a dream for us to analyze on the show Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Adaptation is a bread-and-butter concept in psychotherapy - can we accept, adjust to, and thrive in the outer and inner worlds we live in? Given constraints, what does it take to find life at least meaningful, hopefully satisfying--and flourish? This week Jungian analyst and author JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D. joins us to circumambulate the complexities of adaptation. Successful adaptation involves making conscious choices based on a realistic understanding of the internal and external parameters in which we operate. Adaptation not only requires a true-to-life perception of possibilities and pathways in the external world, it may also require reassessment and reordering of our values and attitudes. We discuss Robert Langs’ “adaptive paradigm,” a distinct model of the mind and the unconscious and emotional components that connect inner life to the outer world. For example, Langs understands dreams as feedback about current adaptive challenges. This is both subtly different and complementary to Jung’s approach, which suggests that inability to solve an outer world problem is often due to an underdeveloped understanding of an aspect of inner life.Adaptation does not eliminate turmoil, suffering and loss; they are part of life. We need to recognize environmental actualities and internal limitations that cannot be changed—and develop ways to mitigate or adjust to them. Successful adaptation also requires mourning what cannot be changed, developing a less egocentric stance, and building a life in tune with reality. Visit our website to read today’s dream and a complete list of the resources we mention: https://thisjungianlife.com/adaptation/Follow UpRead John White’s book, Adaptation and Psychotherapy: Langs and Analytical PsychologySign up for our free summit on ⁠Depth Psychology and Artificial Intelligence⁠Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide Send a dream for us to analyze on the show Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.