Over 25 Million Downloads
Our Podcast
Eavesdrop on Lisa, Deb, and Joseph as they engage in lively, sometimes irreverent conversations about a wide range of topics and dream analysis through the lens of depth psychology provided by Carl Jung.
Over 25 Million Downloads
Our Podcast
Top five listener favorites
Spotify
Apple
YouTube
Tune In
Pandora
How Did I Become a Statistic?
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival.
Allerleirauh: When a mother’s legacy becomes a trauma
VIDEO AUDIO If you have been...
Purpose as Service to a Self-led Future
Purpose is a disciplined relationship with the future that is accountable to the Self, to our values, and to the consequences of our actions. We can strengthen Purpose through aligned actions that we can engage daily. We can clarify our Purpose by tracking what enlivens us and what depletes us. We can refine it by pondering, “What am I serving?” We can protect it by avoiding institutions that demand alignment with values that require obedience, secrecy, or contempt for dissent. We can deepen it by interpreting our dreams and resting in threshold states until we can glimpse a future worth living into. We stay realistic by allowing feedback to revise our plans without collapsing. We tend it relationally by considering how our Purpose affects the people we love and the communities we inhabit. We resist inflation by recalling that Purpose advances through small contributions rather than grand gestures. We stabilize it by understanding our Purpose appears differently over our lifetimes while maintaining its core. We end up with a Purpose that informs work, love, and loss, and that returns us, again and again, to a life that feels aligned with the Self.
Angels, Dreams, and Premonitions: How to Use Inner Messages Without Losing Yourself
Jung’s symbolic attitude helps us understand Angels as symbols that carry messages, offer mediation, and demonstrate contact. They cross a boundary the ego cannot tolerate. Jung tells us that angels symbolize transmissions; he said that if angels “are anything at all,” they are “personified transmitters of unconscious contents.”
Santa and Krampus: Why the “Nice List” Needs a Shadow
Santa Claus occupies a shared cultural role where consumer culture, family ritual, and childhood imagination intersect. In the current zeitgeist, he appears as a brand mascot, a mall employee, a streaming character, a meme template, and a seasonal workplace gaff. Many households treat Santa as an emblem to justify gift-exchange rules and attendance at holiday events. The “nice list” acts as a behavioral scoreboard that parents can deploy to maintain obedience with their kids, schools can echo the borrowed authority, and advertisers can amplify the promise of glorious rewards. Digital culture extends the influence of the myth through automated Santa trackers, package monitoring, and social feeds that stage evidence of Santa in real time. Santa also functions as a role model for adult generosity, charitable donations, toy drives, and anonymous giving. Contemporary debates cluster around parents propagating the myth with their children, equity in gift giving to keep status and power dynamics level, and the intrusion of capitalism and consumerism into a religious observance. The figure acts as a cultural symbol that combines desire, propriety, and communal ritual during the darkest weeks of the year.
Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moments when your life-organizing identity collapses. We call it burnout, divorce devastation, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a life-changing diagnosis. The alchemists called it death because the chemical content they were tracking suddenly became inert. Jung adopted the symbolic language because it perfectly captured a stage of psychological transformation that might lead to despair but placing it in a universal sequence provides confidence that this will eventually pass and new life will emerge.
How to Work with Denial: A Jungian Guide to Facing Reality
Denial, repression, and dissociation reflect different ways we manage what we know and feel. In denial, we face a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and we reject it, insisting it is not true despite the evidence. In repression, we once recognized a wish, thought, or event, and then it moved outside conscious awareness while retaining symbolic form. In dissociation, awareness divides into compartments with weak links between them. Memories, affects, perceptions, and self-states can function in semi-independent ways, with only partial mutual access. In clinical work, these distinctions matter. Repressed material often returns as thoughts, images, or narratives that feel displaced, intrusive, or out of character. What we deny discharges its intensity through behavior, bodily symptoms, and slips of language. Dissociation can be observed in sudden mood shifts, shifts in viewpoints, or changes in the sense of identity. Contemporary relational theorists emphasize that some defensive operations maintain experience in an “unformulated” state; it has not yet been shaped into symbolized meaning. When we track which of these mechanisms predominates, we get a sharper map of how a person has coped and where integration work can begin.
Have We Ever Really Read Jung? A New Edition of the Collected Works.
Jung's Collected Works are...
Gratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life
Gratitude tells you something about the relationship between everyday consciousness and a deeper organizing center that Jung called the Self. The “ego” is your ordinary sense of “I” the part that plans, worries, takes credit, and feels blamed. The Self refers to a larger pattern in Psyche that includes unconscious processes, symbolic images, and the sense that your life has a trajectory. Gratitude appears when the ego realizes it is not the only author of its life. You see that many good things came through other people, through chance, through events you never could have engineered. That realization softens rigid self-importance and opens space for symbolic meaning. From that attitude a benefactor may feel like an ancestor, a teacher like a carrier of a tradition, a turning point like “fate” taking an interest.
Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
Contempt presents as a cold, distancing attitude that devalues another person. It skips addressing concrete problems and attacks a person’s self-worth. Typical signals include eye‑rolling, a curled lip, sarcasm, a mocking tone, and a rapid jump from a single incident to a total judgment. Once launched, contempt breaks interpersonal connections, stops curiosity, and blocks empathy. People deploy it to manage their secret shame, fear, and hurt by exporting those feelings into someone else. The belief about themselves and others is, “You are below my excellent standards,” which provides a short burst of invulnerability. The contemptuous might experience themselves as providing efficient, justified feedback, but later they cycle through isolation and humiliation.
SEPARATIO: The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion
Before the separatio cut, we may live in a state of participation mystique, a fused state that blurs the distinction between me and not-me. Separatio begins when we tease the strands apart. We learn self-inquiry that helps us differentiate what happened out there from what stirred in here. This alchemical axiom can help us distinguish between the concrete facts and our idiosyncratic meaning. Many practical dilemmas hide behind this confusion. A person determined to file for divorce may need an inner parting, not a legal filing. Once we sort the outer action from the inner psychospiritual task, our next steps become obvious. With each clean distinction, room opens for choice. This happens when we recall our projection and feel our own anger, envy, or longing. We need to place our issues inside ourselves and stop hammering on other people to make us feel better. Like skilled surgery, the perfect psychological cut is in service to the healing process. The Ego stops hiding inside self-service interpretations and meets the object as an autonomous other. That clarification can bring grief, because projections carry love and hope. The mourning that follows marks the withdrawal of fantasy from its host. What remains is smaller and truer, thus enduring. In this way, separatio builds a durable relationship to people and to reality.
LUCID DREAMING: Have we turned sacred space into a playground?
Lucid dreaming is an interesting ego state when we are dreaming and regain full self-awareness. Being awake in the dream world can be useful, but imposing a rigid agenda can undermine the Dream Maker’s attempts to educate and help us. Each dream is crafted to incrementally expand our awareness and acceptance of unconscious factors we need in order to grow. When we wake inside a dream, we can lose track of that important attitude and may use the dream as our playground—most people try to fly and miss significant opportunities. If we can achieve a non-grasping clarity, lucidity can deepen our inner work by enabling us to engage dream figures with the full measure of our curiosity. Researchers have various suggestions for increasing the frequency of Lucid Dreams, and ancient traditions like Dream Yoga help the aspirant learn about their mental structures. Attaining access to the inner worlds is similar to Jung’s Active Imagination and can yield comparable or even better results.
