CCA December Lunch & Learn | The Ancestral Unconscious & Its Impact Upon Us

There are layers of the collective unconscious – that part of the psyche described by Carl Jung as containing powerful energies and symbols that relate more to the universality of being a human than to our own personal histories – and each of those layers impacts us in different ways. Join John Schuster and the Community for Conscious Aging to discover the phenomenon of the ancestral unconscious, that layer so named for the ancestral memory that we hold and are either dimly or keenly aware of within us. For many of us, exploring this level of our psyche and attempting to integrate its images and symbols – the whispers and murmurings of ancestral energies – is an important part of becoming more self-aware, and a key element in Jung’s writings about aging. As modern humans, a kind of ancestral amnesia is often encouraged, and we need to work diligently to find what there is to learn from our ancestors. This session, borrowing on Celtic and indigenous spirituality, Jungian work, and the journeys of the presenter, will explore how searching for and through ancestral memory can add depth and richness to the journey of aging.