It’s from reading Jung and his interpreters for 25 years that I think I connected the dots in my mind between a spiritual search and psychology. Fascinated by both, I could not understand or make sense of the separation of “body and soul.”  I remember the author and spiritual teacher Andrew Harvey (www.andrewharvey.net) saying once that the religion of the future had to be about immanence, not transcendence, that to truly save the world and ourselves, we had to get grounded and get real.  So much new age religion (and some old age religion too :) ) is about LEAVING this earth, about transcending beyond the problem, the messiness of incarnation, the issues of living — and that our reward would come only after we died. How did that make any sense? It seemed to me a good training tool for unsophisticated minds — better behave here, because you will go to Hell in the afterlife if you mess it up here.

I could not fit that in to a personal theology that worked for me. So I did the whole "new age" trip (helped greatly by the fact that I was living in it’s heart, Los Angeles, in the 80s and 90s).  Here are the things I tried:

  • Floating 1x a week in a sensory deprivation tank
  • Learning how to chant Hindu mantras in Sanskrit
  • Taking TM (Transcendental Meditation) and meditating twice a day 
  • Having my aura fluffed and cleansed
  • Regular appointments with a cranial-sacral body therapist where the bones in my head and sacram were subtly manipulated to release blocked energy
  • Massage (one practitioner actually walked on my back).
  • Chiropractic with woo woo music playing to release the space between my vertebrae
  • Astrological readings
  • Past life readings
  • Attending evening events with “channels” who “brought through” information from, you guessed it, “ascended” masters.
  • Had a reading with a psychic who contacted my recently deceased Uncle to see if he had anything he wanted to communicate to me.
  • Met with an Ayurveda medical practitioner who poured hot oil on my third eye (forehead, for those of you not up on the mysticism of the body) to release stress.
  • Spent a lot of time at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore on Melrose in LA, reading reading reading reading on esoterica, psychics, woo woo etc.  Thousands of books I read.
  • Burned sage and incense
  • Purchased red items with frogs (supposed to help with wealth) and five- sided mirrors which I placed strategically in my apartment to keep the energy balanced.
  • Yoga classes
  • “Energy healing” sessions with a “healer” who worked with famous people in Hollywood
  • Purchased hundreds of crystals; had them all over my house. traveled with them. Still have a lot of them… but that’s another post.
  • Studied and cast the I Ching endlessly to try and understand my messed up love life.
  • (Seems like I may not get to Carl Jung in this post…)
  • Went thru a return to my Catholic roots, went to Mass at a beautiful church in Santa Monica and prayed to Mary instead of Jesus, thinking that what I was really missing was a connection to the Divine feminine.
  • Found the 12 Step program for children of alcoholics and went and went and went and went and went and went and went to meetings. Did “service” at them. Took “12 step calls” all day and all night.
  • Went to therapy. And went, and went and went and went and went and went.  Added in a women’s support group, too. Went to THAT for 8 years. (Learned a lot about group dynamics in general and myself in particular.)
  • Spent New Year’s at Asilomar with Brugh Joy and about another 100 folks listening to New Age lectureres, having high volume music blared while we surrendered to it, saw Barbra Streisand there and Ellen Burstyn and figured Brugh was indeed THE teacher for me. He was. For a time.
  • Studied the work of Yogananda and went to his shrine in Pacific Palisades, just outside Malibu and wandered its gardens and ponds.
  • Went to hear Marianne Williamson “preach” The Course in Miracles at a huge theater in Hollywood, (every week on Monday nights), bought her books and her tapes and listened to them in my car while stuck in a traffic jam on the 405 freeway.
  • Flew to San Francisco to hear the Gyuto Monks chant, and got a special blessing from them and a blessed white silk scarf. Wore it a lot.
  • Applied to Harvard and Yale divinity schools to get an M.Div. Withdrew application after sitting in a blisteringly hot, un-air-conditioned office with an admissions counselor who dryly said to me, "We are not interested here in seekers."  Okay, then.  Next?
  • Walked the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and tried to focus my mind while walking on the spiritual experience i just KNEW I was going to have any minute. Prayed the rosary while I walked. Was soothing.
  • Studied Centering Prayer with a group in LA, then Boulder. Tried to do it at least once a day. Took a weekend seminar with its founder, Fr. Thomas Keating, in Malibu. Flirted with a priest who was there representing a local church.
  • Purchased colored waters (Aurasoma) which I was supposed to rub on my body to help clear the energy and refresh my chakras. Loved that store! Loved those little bottles of colored … oil? Can’t remember what the liquid was made out of…

There’s probably more, but I can’t remember. 

What does this have to do with Carl Jung and depth psychology????

Well, as a segue, I have to say that I love the t.s.eliot poem where he writes about returning home to “know the place for the first time.”  Indeed, probably the very first thing I ever did outside traditional religion was attend a lecture by Jungian therapist Robert Johnson at Wainwright House in Rye, New York. It was probably 1984. He talked about Carl Jung. I was deeply moved (meaning, deep inside) and my little pea brain could not comprehend what the heck he was really talking about but it resonated with me so I went to the library over the weekend and was stunned when I could not find a single book by Karl Young!!!!!!  I thought wow, this must be really esoteric if the local library isn’t carrying any of his books.  I was so disappointed.

Luckily, someone corrected my spelling and I found books. But they were hard to read, hard to understand, and I moved on (see above -ha!).

It wasn’t until I hit, square on, a whopping mid life crisis that I realized that all the stuff I’d done had left me with  no ground on which to stand during the most turbulent time of my life. My father had died after an 8 week illness, my partner left me, and I was invited to consider leaving my job. I’d just bought a house, I wasn’t really happy in my social life, and could not imagine what I would do to make living. I was 40 and had no idea what I would do with the rest of my life.

Thank god for Amazon.com

I was searching under the words midlife crisis; one night and found a book from a small Canadian publisher called "The Middle Passage" by a Jungian analyst named James Hollis. He had a small canon of books on the inner life, so I ordered a few. They came, and I started reading.

I finally had the epiphany I’d been promised in the Bible and in my childhood Sunday School classes. Reading Hollis on Jung was the “coming home” I’d been looking for my entire life. His writing pulled it all together, made sense of it all, and firmed the ground underneath my quaking feet for the first time in my life. Finally, something felt real, felt right, made intuitive sense and practical sense, didn’t ignore the calamity of living but offered hope and possibly even redemption through personal responsibility, and a lot of hard work getting to “know thyself” why simultaneously being able to bear the fact that you will NEVER fully know yourself because of this great thing called the unconscious.

While I still had to go through the midlife crisis, it was indeed a crisis of opportunity, because I was able to not become beaten down by my circumstances (which, I am sorry to say, got a ot worse before they got better.)

I got to know Jim Hollis, and have read every one of his books. His work saved my life and was the mast which held the sail.

Reading Hollis allowed me to go back to the original Jung, as well as other, newer interpreters. I speciialy found the works of James Hillman, Jerome Bernstein, Marion Woodman, Thomas Moore, David Richo extremely helpful.

If I could, I would not go back and remove one channeling session, weekend workshop or bottle of colored water from my past. Each thing, in it’s way, taught me something and grew me up a little more. Each one slowly inched my consciousness towards where it is today. If nothing else, its a funny sweet thing to read back these stories of my “quest” and I have so much compassion and love for the earnestness with which some part of me kept pushing forward.

The remnants are: I still have and buy crystals. They make sense to me in a way I cannot articulate, but their presence in my home makes me happy. I bring some of them to my readings; they rotate in and out of my “reading bag” depending on who the client is. I see them as my partners and my friends.

I still believe in the central tenets of Feng Shui. I think energy can be blocked, and I think "placement" matters.

My home is filled with statues of Kuan Yin, Green Tara and Ganesh. After all my explorations into Hinduism, I appreciate them as icons and archetypes, and they make me conscious — if only for a moment– when I pass them in the house.

I still chant mantras from time to time when I can’t sleep, and I try to do my TM meditation on a somewhat regular basis. I slack on that all the time, but when it’s regular, it makes me feel better.

But really, in the end, my spirit is filled by communing with nature; I see and feel “God” there; and through my work as an animal intuitive, I sense the oneness with all that I’d been searching for my whole. Mercifully, there are as many paths as there are seekers (Yale and Harvard Divinity schools notwithstanding.)

Keep looking til you find your way. You will.

I’m still not sure this piece connected to Jung. More on him later.