The Individuation Process

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.

MYTHOPOETRY ON FACEBOOK

I am a procrastinator when it comes to New Years Resolutions. Last year I suddenly realized what my biggest one ought to be in March. That is when I set up mythopoetry.com's facebook page. I promised myself last March when I set up this facebook page  I would pay attention to my fan base. I didn't quite know how I could convey this to facebook fans but here it is, almost a year later and the mytho-poetizing method appeared all on its own.

It happens I've been following to print a great new poetry book, "The Beauty Between Words," by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Chris Paris, Waterforest Press, publisher. The authors asked me more than a year ago if I would write the introduction to the book. I said yes. I saw the book when it was a manuscript. And, I saw it again this past November, 2010 as it went to press. WoW! It's stunning!  So, I found a reviewer for the book and this January I published a book review to Mythopoetry.com Book Reviews.

But, just before this I mentioned the book on facebook. I noticed a certain fan seemed to really go after the page links that mentioned poetry books in particular. So I wrote to this fan to ask if she would like an autographed copy of this book. She would, she wrote back. And she wrote again recently to say how much she needed to lose herself to good poetry and that she'd set aside a half hour every day to enjoy the book of poetry. She doesn't know about my secret vow to pay attention to my facebook fanbase. (Of course, she does now...) And here am I, a procrastinator true to form, just getting around to telling you about it. Just in time, too. Procrastinators' New Years is January 15th. By these standards I'm actually a little ahead of things. So here's to Sandi, and all fans of mythopoetry.com on facebook; from the depth perspectives of my heart, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sunrise, #2 RED

put a guy & a bible in a desert

and a Moses girl is bound to appear

it turns the event over

in something sexy; there is a kind of

magic in the red, worn out setting



outside floods the west wing

wall behind my solar

hills. See that

point of disappearance

see that blind spot of decreation

see that hero’s mound behind the

screened-in house of life― i



can’t see myself letting go here;

need the wing with the

making action in the soul of red

outsider girls draw blood

to that


i.e. enliven

bleeding and beating

in the death of a totem dye

a kind of magic

is red



a turning power is the bird

gathered in all those parts (except one)

brings life with humor

to life without



unheard is the little minute

in all (h)ours; don’t mistake this

for something



emerge



©2010 Sunrise, #2 RED
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com