Friday night presentation 7pm
In all models of the journey archetype, one of the stages is the descent into the underworld, an initiation into the dark night of the soul. It’s an inevitable stage of life, one we enter many times over the course of a well-lived life. Jung certainly knew the underworld well, exploring it in his chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
This presentation explores the psychological topography of the underworld, and offers a map we can read to help us understand our journey. I will offer seven stages, seven “stations of the cross,” if you will, that we’re likely to visit during our time down under. I’ll introduce each stage with a myth, and then show how it manifests in our contemporary journeys. We’ll end with the more upbeat stage, “The Gifts of the Underworld.”
This presentation and Saturday’s workshop will provide a model that therapists and coaches can use with their clients; clergy; and lay ministers can use with their congregants, and friends and family can use with their beloveds in order to understand and support their underworld journey. It’s useful for creatives too—for example fiction and film writers can use it to imagine rich underworld journeys, songwriters can use it to create songs of the stages, and memoir writers can use it to name and frame their own time in the underworld. All of us can use it to more deeply understand, appreciate, and perhaps even elevate our time in the underworld.
Saturday workshop: Making Meaning From Our Underworld Experiences 9.30am
In Saturday’s workshop, participants will begin by making a timeline of their lives and mapping their underworld journeys onto it. They will then choose one of their underworld journeys to more deeply explore. We’ll go through each of the seven stages again, and participants will write about their parallel experiences inside of each stage, looking at the structure of their underworld journey and mining their experience for meaning because, as Jung believed, “Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”