The spiritual alienation of living as a fragile, vulnerable, and fractured human being compelled both Jung and Buddha to explore the roots of our precarious human condition. Birth trauma initiates all of us into life. Then, western culture in particular, and its post-modern capitalism and emphasis on individualism, adds the additional traumatic separation from our true self and our instinctual and embodied life.
In the two hours of this class, I’ll guide you through a brief view into Jung’s and Buddha’s intense spiritual journey to heal this separation trauma and its alienation and to dismantle the defensive structures blocking wholeness or unitive consciousness. We all suffer from the myriad defenses that preclude a connection to the ever-present dynamism of reality.
You might gain insight into your own journey through seeing how this process transpired in an average person’s life. Blending a Jungian and Buddhist perspective, I’ll present images I painted from the major dreams tracking my own personal spiritual journey. I hope these images and their associations and amplifications provide you with an understanding of the struggles and lessons I learned from walking the arduous and often painful labyrinthian path of awakening. The path that leads to self-forgiveness and then forgiveness of others. I risk this transparency in hopes that, as the Tao tells us, with compassion toward yourself you reconcile all beings in the world.
