LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Jung Center of Houston presents Creativity and the Mystery of Healing - Path with Soul: One Step at a Time Individuation.  Best-selling author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen (pictured, Photo by Willie Gordon) offers a poetic, mythical pause for reflection and renewal.

Illuminate the path you are traveling using poetic metaphor and myth. Each of us is a work in process, shaped by our large and small choices, with intended and unintended consequences. Unchosen circumstances affect us: health, relationships, finances, random acts of violence. Once we realize that dreams, physical symptoms, moods, addictions, joy, contentment, gratitude and creativity are all indications about how we are doing, we can check in with ourselves and get our bearings.

The workshop is meant to be a serious pause for reflection. Lines from poems by Mary Oliver and from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets may challenge, inspire or ring true. We may find some myths apply to us and realize that some archetypes need cultivating. Our hearts call us to choose a path with soul. It may begin as an inner journey into the underworld or with an act of courage, which may be a call to adventure or take us into uncertainty. We will listen to stories (that turn out to be about us), participate in guided meditation, and have experiences in small groups around a sacred center.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and an internationally known author and speaker who draws from spiritual, feminist, Jungian, medical and personal wellsprings of experience. She is the author of many books, including The Tao of Psychology, Goddesses in Everywoman, Crossing to Avalon, and Close to the Bone. She is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.