I attended a workshop on the individuation process in California over Mother’s Day this year. The workshop took place on the Ladera campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute with senior core faculty, Dr Robert Romanyshyn.
Professor Romanyshyn is a gifted teacher and masterful storyteller. The workshop is laced with story and spiced with poetry, visuals and music. Its alchemical opus circumnavigates the image, homecoming. The essence of individuation, a term and image carefully amplified through the arts by Dr. Romanyshyn, is original to the writings of C.G. Jung. Individuation is a journey home thinks Robert, and what it is not is shadow work or integration, a term associated with ego soul. The journey which is taken is not to do something external in the world. It unites one to something intimately carried central to the core of self, imaginal life, creativity and the emerging reflections of the soul showing each of us how we make sense and carry meaning fullnesses in an individual manner of inner making. One’s journey is a movement down and in to recover or uncover or discover who waits for us by the side of the road. Jung calls this way of seeing the world in conspectu mortis. One must look to the past so that life is not frozen in the past. Life is to be lived forward. My own sense for the workshop experience is one of reverie and this journey of reverie is the manner by which one will “dis” and “un” to “re” cover the meaning sense one carries in one’s own heart.
There are five guided meditations and should this workshop be offered again and you have the chance to participate, take it. In this brief essay I won’t share with you my entire experience of this weekend workshop, I will simply share with you one of my favorite reverie moments.
Read more of this essay now.
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