Tu Kuy Friends!
I am very excited as we move into the summer season, it is a great time to be outside and connecting with the Nature and the dreamings of the plants, animals, and the elements. I will be working in Europe, then the Peruvian Amazon (July 17-August1), and finally will be back at Crows Nest USA in August (15-20) to lead an intensive retreat on Sacred Breathwork Dreaming™. I am launching a new series. “Activating the Inner Shaman Program through the Dreaming Field: Jung and Shamanism in Practice.

Shamanism, Jung, and the Dreaming Field
People often ask me “What is the common ground of Jung and Shamanism. I usually respond, dreams and the intentional use of the Dreaming Field, and the heart which speaks the language of dreaming fluently. Soul loss and soul recovery arise out of the fertile soil. The new Crows Nest International shamanic educational series is  inspired ancient shamanic wisdom, and contemporary dream-shamanism  by C.G. Jung, especially what we can learn from his own soul loss and recovery through his shamanic journeys into the Dreaming Field.

Jung’s Trauma, Soul Loss and Crisis
Nowhere is the value of dreaming, soul loss and recovery more salient than in Jung’s midlife crisis and depression. In the famous Red Book we see a man who has fulfilled his high ambitions to be honored, famous, powerful and wealthy find himself suddenly in a dry desert, caring little about his achievements, and finding his “ladder against the wrong wall” as Joseph Campbell put it. Jung had lost his identity in the mentoring by Freud and had been caught in the fantasy of becoming his “heir apparent.” When Jung was audacious enough to publish a few of his own ideas, Freud chopped off his  professional testicles, destroying his public persona and reputation. This was a traumatic event for Jung, one that catapulted him into a life-crisis of shamanic-initiatory proportions. So he embarked upon a self-styled series of shamanic journeys (active imagination) without the benefit of a human mentor. Jung felt he had no experiential knowing through his scholarly work alone, a mode of consciousness he personified as the “spirit of the times” (Reason). He writes:

“ At that time I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me, and horror came over me.” [Red Book 231-2]. Jung asked, “My soul where are you?… Do you hear me? “[Ibid., p.232]. It is at this point that his Nekyia, his initiatory descent into the depths begins.  During his descents he is instructed by the Dreaming Field, which he personified as  “The Spirit of the Depths.” ‘The Spirit of the Depths taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams.”

The Desert Adventure
Jung goes on to describe a desert and says that is an image of his inner condition: “…a barren hot desert, dusty, and without drink, an … eerie waste land.” But then Jung chooses to move into the desert and explore it, and comes to many figures, those “transpersonal others” who teach him about soul and the Dreaming Field. This is a homeopathic move, for “like cures like” and in the Desert to find lost soul, you must explore where it is not. In this empty solitude the soul progressively shows itself, through the Dreaming Field, as knowledge and reason dissolves. To find soul again, you must go into the desert like the ancient hermits; on a wilderness Dream quest like the shamans. Jung spent several years voyaging “beyond the fields we know,” all the while maintaining his clinical practice and family relationships.

The Death of the ‘Jung’ Hero
Initially the biggest revelation for Jung seems to be that the mind or intellect, with all its knowledge can not solve his problem, cannot help him recover soul. Like Sigfried, the young (Jung) hero must die, so that a soulful, authentic and wise life can be born. All this turns on Jung discovering the powers of the heart, the great gateway to the Dreaming Field, which is rich in knowing through images, intuition, instinct, and embodied feeling. “Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth….. The soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. …You can attain to this knowledge only by living your life to the full.”  [Red Book, 232].

ABOUT THE NEW WORKSHOP SERIES:
Activating the Inner Shaman Program through the Dreaming Field:
Jung and Shamanism in Practice.

October 4-6, 2013, I will launch a new cycle of workshop teachings at Crows Nest USA: Activating the Inner Shaman Program through the Dreaming Field: Jung and Shamanism in Practice. [June 7th in Crows Nest, France, and June 14th, Crows Nest Belgium].

This series will draw on the wealth of wisdom and potentiality found in shamanism and Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and focus on the Dreaming Field, the indigenous heart psychology, and the many ways to recovery soul. Through the many ways of Dreaming we will activate the Inner Shaman Program that is within each one of us. It can’t be taught; only awakened, activated, and expressed through regular access to the Dreaming Field. We will explore the Dreaming Field as it takes us well beyond the realms of sleep dream, those gifts of the night, and into awake intentional dreaming, shamanic dreaming, shamanic lucid dreaming, synchronicity tracking, shamanic re-entry into sleep dreams, medicine plant dreaming, soul recovery through dreaming, Dream Questing, and Sacred Breathwork ™ as a transpersonal dreaming process.

Dates and details coming soon.
Until then, Enjoy the summer.
Tu Kuy
Mikkal