Barn Life Blog
Weekly Theme: Athena
This week we explore the qualities of Athena. Namely, her hero-favoring nature and her commanding and tempered presence. With Athena, we accomplish our goals with spear-pointed precision and our vulnerabilities are well armored and protected. Born from the head of...
Weekly Theme: Aphrodite
Aphrodite is one of the better known Greek deities. As goddess of LOVE and BEAUTY, her charms, jealousy, and refreshment capture one of the most powerful and one of the most treacherous domains of our psychological lives. In keeping with our series on the inner...
Weekly Theme: Hestia and the Hearth
For 5 weeks we have engaged with Greek mythological figures that help us to identify significant aspects of our inner life. First, we looked at the myths of the father and qualities of masculinity. Last week we started to explore the transitional or progressive...
Weekly Theme: The Great Momism of Psychotherapy
One of the greatest disparities of our modern day is the supremely undifferentiated nature of feminine archetypes. By feminine, I, of course, do not refer here to gender. So many depth psychologists are guilty of funneling femininity into the category of women and...
Weekly Theme: Hades
Daimons of the Unconscious We can no longer deny that the dark stirrings of the unconscious are active powers and that psychic forces exist which cannot be fitted into rational order. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are...
Weekly Theme: Poseidon
In my years as a clinical therapist and program director, I have encountered many Poseidon problems. Clients express that they feel over-possessed by the unpredictable waters within them. They feel overcome by the surfacing and powerful waves of buried emotions. Why...
Lightning Innocence: Zeus and Olympus
As we begin our work with Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, it is important to also differentiate the realms in which they oversee. We must better understand the role of different aspects of masculinity through these archetypal figures. To do this, we have to also take the...
Soulful Attendance to Myth and Fairytale
Magical consciousness has to accommodate shadows or it has immediately made its potency finite. Some vital energy is drained from us when we disconnect from moon-like rhythms of visibility. Certain thoughts are out like boomerangs and are not to accomplish themselves...
Weekly Theme: Archetypal Images of the Father
Uranus once ruled as the god of the skies. With Gaia (Mother Earth), Uranus fathered the primal forces of the universe. As strong and powerful forces, his children, the titans, held the elemental system together. And, like many fathers, Uranus reveled in his authority...
Weekly Theme: Introduction to Parent Models
Today we begin a new series on images of a healthy mother and father, or parent models. It’s no real stretch to suggest that parental styles influence who we become. From Freud to now, psychology has been dominated in large part by the reconciliation of childhood...
Weekly Theme: the Crown Chakra
The crown chakra, or sahasrara in Sanskrit, is our 7th and final chakra in our psyche and soma series. Here we engage with the purest and most balanced concept of a higher vision of the self and consciousness. That is, how we are aware of the moment and the experience...
Weekly Theme: the Third Eye Chakra
Undoubtedly you have heard of the third eye chakra. In large part, we might say the third eye is the favored center of consciousness for us westerners. Since the scientific revolution, humankind in the west began to reduce our concept of wonder, mystery, the divine,...
Weekly Theme: the Throat Chakra
We cannot discuss the throat chakra without a comparison to the Greek god Hermes. His character personifies the traveling messenger between all deities, sending signals and expressions of harmony, disharmony, life, and death. Hermes is a trickster figure, often moving...
Weekly Theme: the Heart Chakra
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! ... If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by...
Weekly Theme: the Solar Plexus Chakra
In our work with the psyche and soma connection, we introduced the concept that the interrelationship between the body and mind is a primary factor in the individuation of one's personality. Consider that we were to approach a client as an individual rather than a...
Weekly Theme: the Sacral Chakra
“Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with this physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earths animals” – David Abram Aristotle once wrote that the human soul is a rational soul. He observed how plants...
Weekly Theme: the Root Chakra
How will you hold the rare and perilous given you? Dawn begins in the bones – Risa Kaparo We are not just physical bodies, nor are we the untouchable substance of our thoughts and feelings. Somewhere in the interrelationship between our physical bodies (soma) and our...
Body and Psyche: Healing the Divide
Well, we made it! Starting this week Barn Life programs are officially on campus! I thought it an interesting experiment as we connected through such physical distance. Our last theme, I believe, reflected our best efforts under the strain of social distancing....