2026 Events

JANUARY 9-10

Honoring the Diamond Body Mysteries: Pregnant Darkness and Birth of the Light Body
Details

JANUARY 30 -FEBRUARY 1

Imbolc: Tending the Sacred Flame @ Zoom
Details

MARCH 21

Rewilding | Fort Collins Colorado | In-Person
Details

APRIL 11 & 12

The C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado, Spring Seminar
The Psychology of Transference
Details

June 1

Psychedelics & the Divine Feminine as Mediatrix
Details

June 26

The Romantic Poets as the Bridge between Ancient Alchemy and Jung’s Depth Psychology: Honoring Tom Elsner’s Opus
Details

July 10, 11, 12

Honoring the Diamond Body Mysteries: Pregnant Darkness and Birth of the Light Body
Details

July 21

Dreams, Death and Intimate Encounters with the Eternal
Details

SEPTEMBER 10-16

Ocamora Retreat: Pregnant Darkness and the Birth of the Light Body
Ocate, New Mexico ENROLLMENT IS FULL AT THIS TIME
Details

OCTOBER 11 & 25, NOVEMBER 8 & 22, DECEMBER 6 & 20

A FLASH OF GOLDEN FIRE: A Reading Group for Tom Elsner’s Book on Jung and the Romantic Poets with Tom Elsner’s Sons, Jake & Bennett Elsner & Monika Wikman
Details

DECEMBER 11 & 12

Where Peace Comes from in the Psyche: Alchemical Meditation Practices for the Sake of the World Soul
Details

Jung said the heart of his work was the “religious function” which he described as the art of learning to see and to hear in ever new ways.

We will explore practices for cleansing the lenses of perception, and creative ways of holding space for the symbolizing field to open. Tools for learning to shift the point of awareness, and practices for working with the somatic versus the psychic unconscious will be differentiated as well. We will bring alive simple practices and attitudes that ground the work with the psyche so that emotion and the trauma body can be held in a larger healing field where contact with the divine feminine takes place and transmutation and healing occurs.

Course will be facilitated through the  Institute of Psychedelic Therapy

According to Jungian analyst and author Thomas Elsner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great visionary poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is another link in that golden chain. In Elsner’s analysis, Coleridge’s nineteenth century night-sea journey can today be understood as a symbolic self-portrait of the collective unconscious, a self-portrait that, like the Red Book, finds its historical context and continuity in the alchemical tradition. Continuing the highly esteemed works arising from the Fay Lecture Series, sponsored by the Jung Center, Houston, Elsner’s A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” promises to further extend the understanding and appreciation of Jungian principles for practitioners, analysts, others interested in Jungian theory and practice, the psychological dimensions of Romantic poetry, and the evolution of Western consciousness.

RESOURCES: A Flash of Golden Fire: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of the Modern Soul in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Volume 22) (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology focusing on Chapters 1 and 2

During this weekend retreat Alchemical Series, we will explore a little bit of the fabric that depth psychology has as its true inheritance in the full round of Life, Death and the Beyond: The Diamond Body Mysteries. Honoring the descent mysteries and the Archetypal Mothers of the Nigredo, we will then explore the birth of emerging connection with the light and experiences of the resurrection body, the light body. Drawing from dreams, the work of Jung, Yeats, and Henri Corbin, along with experiences from the recent death process of my partner, Tom Elsner, threads will be woven in image, symbol, myth, dream and embodied experience to honor this evening in some small way, the mystery of the Diamond Body. “Die before we die”, we all know the line so well in depth psychology; it is the cornerstone of all transformation. And here, from my point of view, is its twin: “In dying discover the light body before we literally die as well.”

We will be tuning in together in over these three days with material from alchemy, real human life and death processes, near-death experiences, and sprinklings from the works of these luminaries, along with reflections on the astrological transits of our time.

Importantly for this transformative work over the weekend, Nathan Schwartz Salant’s wisdom on the formation of substitute skins that occur when the subtle body is not formed in early life, will be explored, with special attention to these substitute skins in ourselves and how psyche seeks to help us identify them, relativize them and also slither out of them into more and more of the subtle body beings we most truly are.

With the weekend retreat format, there will be time to see what stirs in your dreams over these days together, as we meditate upon the threshold of pregnant darkness to the light body. There will be ample time together for reflection and discussion, and plenty of time devoted to your inner life, to meditation, active imagination, and the growth of our shared field.

Kirsten Kairos’s unforgettable soulful music offerings during active imagination rounds help to invite us into our own erotic connection with the living imagination, where discovery of these mysteries seeks to reveal itself. We are fortunate to have her with us Saturday and Sunday.

And, as we know, this work is done by its very nature for the good of the world soul in these times. The dismemberment-rememberment forces of the psyche, so present in the order-disorder paradox, touch all of our lives more and more strongly as the collective problem is mounting. Our work with our own little piece of earth, our own vessel of consciousness as an offering for the good of the world, for the good of the collective unconscious, is real. And the need to give life to the religious instincts in the psyche comes to us with growing urgency in these times. The creation of the shared field together for this retreat is the fruit of doing this work together in the retreat.

Staying with the reality of the collective transmutations a little longer, with Yeats, his question is ever more alive as a burning question of our age: “What rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” What is happening with the collective unconscious and the changing god image as madness in culture mounts? Appreciating the “Rough Beast” and the way it is emerging now as demonic greed and militaristic fascism, many of us feel the need to make fresh offerings to the spirit of the depths in these times to help with the balance between consciousness and the collective unconscious. In this vein, this alchemical contemplative work with the Nigredo Mysteries and the Diamond Body is of utmost value. It allows the axis to the transcendent to grow individually and in relationship and allows new transmutations of spirit to happen. It allows consciousness to tune in with the One who knows better the way with and through what is to come.

Jung’s psychology is an incarnational psychology, it is about the soul coming into life and the soul leaving life, and it is in this round of life, death and rebirth that we each find ourselves. Exploration of dreams, experiences and archetypal phenomena surrounding death potentially help open us ourselves beyond our fixed thought forms, to the living imagination where it is possible to get a better felt sense of the many dimensions of the psyche and psychoid that hold and inform our lives and our evolution of consciousness. This half day seminar has this aim in mind.

What do dreams have to say about this threshold between the land of the living and the land of the dead?

How do we open ourselves to establish this bridge in our own psyche’s and in our daily lives?

This experiential seminar explores the psyche at the threshold between life and death, where dreams, imagination, and the subtle body open into encounters with the eternal. Drawing on my clinical research with dreams of the dying at UCSD Medical Center, Marie Lousie von Franz’s work on Death and Dreams, alchemy, and accounts of near-death and psychoid experience, we will explore how the psyche prepares for death—and how it continues to relate across the boundary.

We discover participation in the archetypal round of death and rebirth that pertains to our lives now. And we discover what Jung called the unus mundus—where inner and outer, living and dead, imaginal and material interpenetrate. Dreams arising near death, dreams while tending the dying, and dreams following loss of loved ones will be held in the symbolizing field where we listen together for the resonance and openings to the eternal world these dreams bring to life.

Participants will be introduced to alchemical perspectives on death as transformation, including motifs of burning, dissolution, and the formation of the subtle or “diamond” body. We will also explore the role of the imaginal faculty as a bridge between worlds, guided by Jung’s insight from The Red Book:

“Prayer increases the light of the star; it throws a bridge across death.”

The bridge between the land of the living and the land of the dead, and the development of the Subtle body will be the focus. The star is a living symbol for the imagination and each person’s connection to the imagination. The seminar includes guided meditation and active imagination practices, allowing participants to enter into direct, embodied relationship with dream images, inner figures, and the presence of those who have died. Through these practices, we will explore how conscious participation in the imaginal field can deepen our capacity to accompany the dying, metabolize loss, and experience continuity of soul beyond physical death.

This course is intended for clinicians, depth-oriented practitioners, and those drawn to the mystery of death as a living psychological and spiritual process.

During this retreat Alchemical Series, we will explore a little bit of the fabric that depth psychology has as its true inheritance in the full round of Life, Death and the Beyond: The Diamond Body Mysteries. Honoring the descent mysteries and the Archetypal Mothers of the Nigredo, we will then explore the birth of emerging connection with the light and experiences of the resurrection body, the light body.

Drawing from dreams, the work of Jung, Yeats, and Henri Corbin, along with experiences from the recent death process of my partner, Tom Elsner, threads will be woven in image, symbol, myth, dream and embodied experience to honor this evening in some small way, the mystery of the Diamond Body.

“Die before we die”, we all know the line so well in depth psychology; it is the cornerstone of all transformation. And here, from my point of view, is its twin: “In dying discover the light body before we literally die as well.”

We will be tuning in together in these three sessions with material from alchemy, real human life and death processes, near-death experiences, and sprinklings from the works of these luminaries, and reflections on the astrological transits of our time.

With the weekend retreat format, there will be ample time together for discussion, and plenty of time devoted to your inner life, to meditation, active imagination and the growth of our shared field. This will create a place of reflection for the value of cultivating the subtle body dimension.

And this work is done by its very nature for the good of the world soul in these times. The dismemberment-rememberment forces of the psyche, so present in the order-disorder paradox, touch all of our lives more and more strongly as the collective problem is mounting. Our work with our own little piece of earth, our own vessel of consciousness as an offering for the good of the world, for the good of the collective unconscious, is real. And the need to give life to the religious instincts in the psyche comes to us with growing urgency in these times. The creation of the shared field together for this retreat is the fruit of doing this work together in the retreat.

Staying with the reality of the collective transmutations a little longer, with Yeats, his question is ever more alive as a burning question of our age: “What rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” What is happening with the collective unconscious and the changing god image as madness in culture mounts? Appreciating the “Rough Beast” and the way it is emerging now as demonic greed and militaristic fascism, many of us feel the need to make fresh offerings to the spirit of the depths in these times to help with the balance between consciousness and the collective unconscious. In this vein, this alchemical contemplative work with the Nigredo Mysteries and the Diamond Body is of utmost value. It allows the axis to the transcendent to grow individually and in relationship and allows new transmutations of spirit to happen. It allows consciousness to tune in with the One who knows better the way with and through what is to come.

Events

Events

Friday Evening Lecture:
Where Peace Comes from in the Psyche: Alchemical Meditation Practices for the Sake of the World Soul

As technological change accelerates and collective tensions intensify, many people find themselves asking a deeper question: What can one human life contribute in a time of upheaval? Beneath the anxieties of our age, a profound religious instinct is awakening—a longing to reconnect with the deeper ground of being and discover a peace not dependent upon external circumstances, and carry this energy into the world.

Drawing on Jungian psychology, alchemy, Sufi cosmology, contemplative practice, and over forty years of clinical experience, we will explore together the origins of war and peace within the psyche, and the mystery of the “peace that surpasses all understanding.”

So, where does peace come from in the psyche, and how do we genuinely access it for the good of the world soul? In these times of great uncertainty, the call toward meditation is growing for many people as a vessel to “meet the unconscious halfway”, as Jung suggests. The need to plumb the depths to stay with the life of the soul through meditation is calling and there are new creations emerging in connection with the transcendent.

Attunement, co- regulating and down regulating, etc… all shifts in consciousness we can do to help the nervous system through anxiety and the trauma body experiences that surface– all this has become common parlance among many types of healing modalities, and is part of daily dialog in many households these days. Yet mind-body splitting remains epidemic in these times. Many of us are called to meet the transcendent in this work and feel the transcendent calling us from within this human suffering.

Unconscious fear, vibrations of trauma, drive consciousness into the mental body attempting to cope, or lead to completely checking out via dissociation, self medicating. The alternative to mind-body splitting is to pay attention to the animal body and various states of consciousness as sacred work, seeing the suffering as something seeking transformation in the human soul.

Prima materia is where the rejected and the potential for the transcendent to co-create with us lives, when we put it in a vessel. Alchemical meditation is this vessel. Alchemically speaking, we “reach for the foot of the angel,” (see Mutus Liber image), we are present with our vessel and reach for contact with the transcendent that is doing the work with us.

Tonight we will look into where meditation is taking people in connection with the transcendent; how dreams and meditation are guiding explorations into the psyche and psychoid– where new creations in consciousness are happening. (Including slithering out of old skins, old complexes and their psychologies, old ways of being involved with “dead-mother zones” and abandoned early selves, into the subtle body that is everyone’s birthright.)

We can think of this work as an antidote for the infection going on in the body of the world. Explicit examples of work with the somatic unconscious intersecting with the psychic unconscious generating new creations will be discussed.

So, in a nutshell, this lecture aims to outline the value of putting on our own oxygen mask before helping others. This requires an introversion of energy taken into meditation, with care for your own being allowed to be primary in order to give something true to the collective in these times. Alchemical meditation here being about how we can put on our own oxygen mask and make a sacred place for our being to reside in this world. The trauma body, dead mother zones, collective trauma can be met in this work, but it is not done with ego psychology alone. Here the focus is on learning, via meditation with what Jung called the somatic unconscious, to tune into the field, the neutral channel, discover the breath body anew, and the transcendent energies informing your field. And, in so doing– breathing in connection with source and the symbolizing field– learning to grow a constant connection of felt presence with the transcendent. And from here the Self in the field can multiply, ie.. with our presence the Self also helps others discover their living breathing connections with source and the symbolizing field.

We will look into dreams that guiding these explorations. And we will look into the nature of the psyche, the somatic unconscious, where working with the animal body brings us over the threshold into the realm of the sacred, into the realm of the Divine Feminine.

Jung’s work on alchemy, Schwartz Salant’s work on the field, Raff’s work with the ally and psychoidal alchemy, and Sam Hagan’s work on accessing third eye consciousness will be honored.

Topics will include:

• The psychological meaning of Pascal’s “infinite abyss” and the soul’s longing for wholeness (Hindu goddess of the void: Aditi, as mythological parallel)
• Wound as gateway between the personal and transpersonal psyche: The role of suffering, limitation, and the wound in individuation
• Jung’s understanding of the religious function of the psyche: “melting fixed thought forms of world religions and pouring this melted substance into the moulds of individual experience.”
• Meditation and active imagination as pathways to direct experience of the numinous
• The symbolizing field and the emergence of guidance from and growth with the depths
• The psychoid and the unus mundus: where psyche and matter meet, healing states of consciousness
• Learning to See in the Field together (see Nathan Schwartz Salant, Narcissism pg 113 to 148)
• Opening of the Third Eye: Erich Neumann’s dream of the great abyss and third eye opening
• The subtle body garment and the cultivation of inner radiance
• As Jung observed, it is not what we know about the unconscious that matters most, but how we live in relationship with it. This lecture explores how contemplative practice can deepen that relationship and help us become conscious participants in the unfolding of both individual and collective transformation.
  “Prayer increases the light of the star; it throws a bridge across death.” — C. G. Jung

Saturday Workshop
Where Peace Comes from in the Psyche: Entering the Alchemical Laboratory

We know peace does not arise through the elimination or avoidance of conflict; nor does it arise from continual submersion in overwhelm and suffering. From a depth psychological perspective, peace emerges organically through conscious relationship with the forces moving within us and the psyche at large, but we have to have a living working vessel with the living Imagination to meet this work. In meditative contemplative life, one can learn the ego’s true value in relationship with the numinous, allowing us to learn to live rooted daily in the source of Peace.

In the alchemical tradition we know this work is not done alone. All states of consciousness we experience are the prima materia and we reach for the foot of the angel, as we see in the Mutus Liber image. Creating then a vessel for meditative life where the longing for fresh contact with the divine can be met. Here, via work with the somatic unconscious, and the grace from the transcendent psyche, experience of the psychoid takes root, where spirit and matter are one, a new center of consciousness takes hold, and one’s essence is free of all identities and forms. From here we find we are again free to incarnate and play in life in the forms of what and who we love and devote ourselves to in the time we have left in this life.

Sharing dreams that guide and awaken consciousness to these realms of greater peace helps open the heart field toward the infinite potential of the collective unconscious, where we each can access source.

Entering the Alchemical Laboratory

Participants will be guided through experiential practices designed to deepen their relationship with the psyche and cultivate direct awareness of the larger field from which dreams, symbols, synchronicities, and transformative experiences emerge.

The workshop includes guided meditation, active imagination, experiential exercises, dream exploration, discussion, and opportunities for personal reflection.
As Marie-Louise von Franz observed, the task is to make room for the transmutations of the spirit. (See her essay, Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function)
No prior experience with meditation or Jungian psychology is required.

CEU objectives:

Participants will learn in the lecture and apply in practice:

• The psychological meaning of Pascal’s “infinite abyss” and the soul’s longing for wholeness
• Jung’s understanding of the religious function of the psyche
• Meditation and active imagination as pathways to direct experience of the numinous
• The symbolizing field and the emergence of guidance from the depths
• The psychoid and the unus mundus: where psyche and matter meet
• The role of suffering, limitation, and the wound in individuation
• The subtle body and the cultivation of inner radiance

This experiential workshop invites participants into the alchemical laboratory of the psyche through meditation, active imagination, dream work, somatic awareness, and shared field exploration.

Together we will explore:

• Developing sensitivity to the symbolizing field versus the complex discharging field
• Working with the somatic unconscious
• Learning to shift the point of awareness
• The Axiom of Maria as a contemplative practice
• Sufi understandings of the imaginal world
• Experiential relationship between personal and transpersonal dimensions of the psyche
• The psychoid realm and experiences of the unus mundus
• The emergence of subtle body awareness
• Restoring the Vertical and horizontal dimensions of consciousness
• Learning to See in the Field together (see Nathan Schwartz Salant, Narcissism pg 113 to 148)
• Opening of the Third Eye:
  Erich Neumann’s dream of the great abyss and third eye opening
• Breathing awareness technique from Samuel Hagan’s IST school.
• Alchemical approaches to transforming the “toxic waters” into living waters

Participants will be guided through experiential practices designed to deepen their relationship with the psyche and cultivate direct awareness of the larger field from which dreams, symbols, synchronicities, and transformative experiences emerge.

The workshop includes guided meditation, active imagination, experiential exercises, dream exploration, discussion, and opportunities for personal reflection.

As Marie-Louise von Franz observed, the task is to make room for the transmutations of the spirit. (See her essay, Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function)
No prior experience with meditation or Jungian psychology is required.

CEU objectives:

• Participants will learn in the lecture and apply in practice:
• The psychological meaning of Pascal’s “infinite abyss” and the soul’s longing for wholeness
• Jung’s understanding of the religious function of the psyche
• Meditation and active imagination as pathways to direct experience of the numinous
• The symbolizing field and the emergence of guidance from the depths
• The psychoid and the unus mundus: where psyche and matter meet
• The role of suffering, limitation, and the wound in individuation
• The subtle body and the cultivation of inner radiance

Monika Wikman, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst, astrologer, teacher/group facilitator with a deep emphasis on alchemy and the incarnation of the subtle body mysteries. (She also worked in the past as a cranial-sacral practitioner with the dying.) She is the author of Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness (Nicolas-Hays, 2004), and is executive editor and a contributor to Living with Fire: The Alchemical Imagination of Nathan Schwartz-Salant and its Impact on Depth Psychology (Chiron, 2026). She has also contributed chapters, articles and poems to numerous publications. A graduate of the Jung-Von Franz Center for Depth Psychology in Zürich, she taught for many years in the graduate program at California State University, Los Angeles, and was a dream researcher at University of California, San Diego Medical Center on dreams of the dying. She recently saw her mate, Tom Elsner, through his intimate death process, and now focuses primarily on living in nature, writing, and meditation. And meanwhile she also enjoys podcasting, giving lectures and leading retreats and workshops through the Center for Alchemical Studies. Her interests in projects as a member on the Earthways.org board focus on supporting indigenous peoples with care for their cultures and wild lands.

2026 Past Events

ACTIVE IMAGINATION SEMINAR:
Connecting with Source, Honoring the Abject Black and Fresh Connection with the Ally

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2026 | ZOOM WORKSHOP | 1-4p ET

For this workshop, we will bring threads from the lecture and discussion and begin the processes of active imagination. Honoring the Mothers of the Nigredo as the true ground of transformation, we will then turn to work with Jungian analyst Jeff Raff’s discoveries in his book, Practical Guide to Ally Work. We will bring his wisdom into active imagination with the intention of making fresh contact with your ally, your star, your vertical axis to draw the energy down into the rest of your being and your life.

The workshop aims to help participants develop various practices for cultivating attunement to the subtle body dimensions. The midline lives in every person, it is every being’s birth right. Osteopathy, cranial sacral work, Taoist alchemy each work with this energetic midline phenomenon. And many people are having spontaneous dream phenomena where tutelary spirits begin teaching these realities to the dreamer. This level of alchemical work is waking up in the psyche at large. Learning to attune to and differentiate the energy bodies (along with the bodies of complexes) is a big part of the work needed these days for the alchemical stone to grow in both worlds.

Meditations and Active Imagination with shamanic music by my friend, Kirsten Kairos, will be offered to help participants open to finding fresh contact with one’s own star, their own vertical axis informed by the transcendent.

2026 Past Event

January 30 – February 1, 2026

Welcoming Imbolc: Tending of the Flame and the Archetype of the Alchemical Bride
HONORING THE DIAMOND BODY MYSTERIES: Pregnant Darkness and Birth of the Light Body
LOCATION: Zoom

Designed around the celtic calendar, this seminar will ponder and enter into the myths and symbols of ancient Celtic Spirituality to open our consciousness to the alchemical mysteries of the Unus Mundus, the one world, where eternal and temporal, visible and invisible worlds join hands in our midst.

Yeats poetry that brings in this wisdom will be read and shared among us. Time for active imagination and writing exercises to help us activate our connection to the divine, to the Imagination, will have priority.

In terms of content, special attention will be given to Imbolc mysteries, the goddess Brigid, the keeper of the sacred flame and the archetype of the Bride. This links us to Sophia in gnosticism and in Jung’s work, and lives at the foundation of our lives.
It is fostering the inspired uniquely co-created field among us all that is our aim.

Suggested Readings:

• The Learning of the Imagination, by Kathleen Raines.
• The Collected Poems of WB Yeats.
• Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness, Chapter 4, 5, 6.
• Jung, C. G. (1997). Jung on active imagination, J. Chodorow (Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• An article by Lynn de Gerenday, one of our group participants, entitled: The Problem of Self-Reflective Love in Book III of the “Fairie Queen” (to be emailed).

Fee: $450
Place: 1536 Bishops Lodge Road, Tesuque, NM
CEU’s: 13.5

“If you do not listen to the helpful animal or bird, or whatever it is, if any animal gives you advice and you don’t follow it, then you are finished. In the hundreds and hundreds of stories, that is the one rule that has no exception.”
-Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairytales

Marie-Louise von Franz speaks from her wisdom of soaking in and working for four decades with fairy tales, discovering the archetypal patterns inherent in the psyche. How are we at listening to the animals and what they represent in the psyche? In this seminar, we will find our way into this material through the fairy tale first…

In a forgotten village, the treasure lies hidden—guarded by barking dogs deemed mad. The Dummling, who has been cast out of his father’s (the King’s) kingdom, wanders into the village. They reject this stranger and cast him into the castle walls where they expect the mad dogs will devour him. But the Dummling, landing hard on the ground inside the castle walls, stands up and finds to his surprise that he does not fear the raging dogs. Instead, he listens. He leans into what he is hearing and listens. And here he learns the language of animals. He asks them, “Why are you barking like this?”

And they, in turn, reveal the secret needing to be revealed: “We are barking incessantly, which the town people deem mad, but it is madness that no one listens. We are barking because we know the spell at the castle will remain unless the town people dig up the buried treasure. They must come dig! We are trying to get them to listen. This would break the spell and bring the buried treasure up into life, and we would…we then would stop barking.”

This tale—like many fairy tales—encourages us to learn to listen to the depths, and provide a place for transformation in so doing. It reminds us that healing begins when we discover new ways to fruitfully turn toward what has been rejected, feared, or silenced. Healing begins when we learn new ways of listening to the psyche where something needs to be heard. In such stories, it goes much better for those who attune with the animals. To speak their language is to uncover the treasure of the soul alive in instincts, and to discover embodied wisdom via deep instinctual knowing. It is a return to the wild center—the life force that sprouts its life up in symbols and somatic experiences, and knows how to restore balance and meaning.

In this workshop, we will follow the Dummling’s path. Through story, symbolic exploration, and somatic practice, we will explore the threshold where we are called to listen more deeply to where psyche needs our attunement. Ample time will be given for experiential exercises, including practices that attune us to the body and psyche—learning to listen to the somatic unconscious, where the language of animals leads us.

By “lending an ear to the great below,” as the myth of Inanna envisions it, by turning toward what has been split off or cast out, we recover compassion—for ourselves, for others, and for the forgotten parts of the soul that hold the keys to our wholeness. This may entail encountering “the voice in madness that is wanting” (Elsner, 2008). We will co-create and establish a field that brings support for this work of deeper listening together.

And here the treasure is the fresh connection to the living psyche and the growth of the subtle body states of consciousness, along with the ability to unite with the world soul. This is the buried treasure of digging in the ground of being and learning more in the art of listening. The heart of Jung’s work is the religious function, where the transcendent function comes alive in the psyche. Jung thought of the religious function as the art of learning to hear and to see in ever new ways. Then we may learn that with our little lives, we serve that Something Greater, psyche’s living mystery, that allows us to participate with the evolution of consciousness through the ages.

Participants will:

1. Learn how to participate to co-create a field to foster learning the art of listening to and with psyche.
2. Understand Jung’s theory of the somatic unconscious.
3. Learn to recognize and gather somatic information from ourselves and our patients.
4. Explore how to shift fight, flight, freeze, and collapse responses into new neural pathways through a co-regulated, restorative relationship with the sensing body.
5. Engage the instinctual psyche through active imagination in relationship to the body as a therapeutic approach to trauma.
6. Recognize that the “mad” parts of the psyche often hold the treasure, and that turning toward them enables connection to the transcendent function in the psyche where healing happens and consciousness evolves with subtle body states of consciousness growing. This brings a deeper sense of meaning to our lives, and here we also learn more wholehearted ways of living.

Required Reading: (PDFs will be provided for the first three)

• Elsner, T. (2010). Animals and analysis: The Grimm’s tale “The Three Languages.” Psychological Perspectives, 53(3), 313–334.
• Elsner, T. (2008). Book review: The voice that in madness is wanting. Jung Journal, 2(3), 98–122.
• Schwartz-Salant, N. (1982). Narcissism and Character Transformation. Inner City Books. Read pp. 110–123 and we will gather information from the somatic unconscious.
• von Franz, M.-L. (1995). Shadow and evil in fairy tales (Revised ed.). C. G. Jung Foundation Books Series. Shambhala. (Original work published 1974) Read the first 5 chapters: pp. 1–134.

Suggested Reading:

• Woodman, R. (2005). Sanity, madness, transformation: The psyche in romanticism. University of Toronto Press.

2026 Past Event

Monika Wikman + The Center for Alchemical Studies - Santa Fe, New Mexico

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