For Jung, psyche reveals itself in its creative images which beckon us to befriend the intuitive wisdom they offer, guiding and nurturing us towards greater balance and wholeness. In the images of our night world we witness the mysteries of the soul. Dreams, Jung says, are messengers of meanings that are embodied and inscribed in the images themselves. As we explore dream images creatively and attune ourselves to the imagistic qualities of their shapes and colors, their volumes, movements and rhythms, they disclose new insights and evoke rich intuitive resonances, while they remain rooted in their fertile, imaginal ground.

This course offers a reflective and a creative, embodied exploration of dream work from a Jungian perspective, as a process of befriending the soul. Students will engage the images of their night worlds with creative practices such as movement and painting, enactment, story-making and active imagination through the body. They will dance their dreams to discover, befriend and harvest the dream’s messages for growth, transformation and healing.

Images and their generative power lie at the heart of our being. They are the essence of psyche, or soul. Their timeless language is deeply inscribed in our embodied being and in the living fabric of our relationships between self and other, psyche and matter, body and world.

Soul and creativity are not limited to the human realm. They reside in the very fabric of the web of life with its radical mysterious openness, and in the human find expression in the images of the archetypal psyche.

The non-verbal or poetic language of the Expressive Arts invites us to give embodied creative expression to the soul’s images which beckon dormant or barely seen aspects of experience to awaken into awareness and burst open as seeds of transformation. Made tangible in creative form, the expressions of our experience shape and enrich the tapestry of our participatory awareness. They reawaken and deepen our embodied capacities for joyful belonging, and for celebratory engagement in the shared mystery of being within the web of life, into which we are inextricably interwoven.

From deep within our perceiving, sensing, feeling and imagining body arises the knowing of our intimate indwelling within the earth body.

It is through the body that we participate in the intimacy of being. Our experiencing body with its imagistic capacity is the portal into a lived knowing of the elemental communion which Merleau-Ponty calls the “flesh of the world”. The words of John Seed, ecologist and rainforest activist, echo this felt sense of the mutuality and interchangeability of being: “Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing.” (1988, p. 36).

The body, with its perceptions and gestures, is also the prima materia of the creative act, making Expressive Arts a privileged instrument for the deepening and the expression of our communion with the living earth.

Students in this course will engage in creative expressive modalities to evoke and celebrate an embodied, earth-embracing consciousness. These practices will unfold within an exploration of the growing field of ecopsychology and its urgent appeal to develop an ecological Self..

Yoga as Psychospiritual Practice III:
Posture and Poise - The Art of Stillness

At the heart of every movement in body, thoughts and emotions lies a vibrant stillness.When we come home into our body, let the attention settle in the breath and immerse ourselves in a sensate, felt mode of discovering and exploring the patterns of our movements, we can experience a deep sense of vibrant stillness. In this open awareness, we can explore patterns of movement within the breath, the body and consciousness.

Practicing asanas within this spacious stillness allows the body to be alive with its own intelligence, its own ways of knowing, and transforms every asana into a dance of internal motion which radiates from the inside out as we yield to it. At the center of this course lies the academic, experiential and meditative-reflective exploration of stillness as the dynamic quality at the heart of movement in body, mind and spirit, given form and deepened through the practice of asanas, breath work and chanting. Cultivating stillness as vibrant presence leads to a mind which is spacious and peaceful, and a heart which is wide and joyous.

This course is at once appropriate for students who wish to deepen and expand their practice as a sequel to ãYoga as Psychospiritual Practice I and II and for students who wish to begin or continue their personal exploration of this psychospiritual practice.