Friday, March 24  | 7:30 - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

An Evening with Tim Lyons: Dreams, Visions, Psychedelics, and Non-Conforming Identities: Evolving Body Consciousness within an Autoimmune Culture

The often chaotic, unhealthy experience of living within our present inflammatory, autoimmune culture may be inducing a healing crisis that could open us to the highest levels of embodied health and individuation. In tonight’s program, we will explore how dreams, visions, and psychedelics, used adeptly, might be some of the best media through which we, as psychonauts, can embark on an odyssey to free ourselves from our attachment to the bad-object bio-psycho-social stressors.  In 1925 Jung recalled the nature of his own psychic voyage when he wrote, “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making.  I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them.”  Now, a century later, if we embarked on such a quest, we would encounter an even greater variety of non-conforming identities, and, for some, the spirits of plant medicines and pharmaceuticals.

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Five Alternate Mondays, March 27 - June 5  | 7:30 - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

Eros: The Agony and the Ecstasy, a course with Julie Bondanza

This semester will explore Eros, which can bring us to ecstatic heights or to the depths of despair, in five plays and novels. We will begin with the classic, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. We will follow this with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. I’m still thinking of the fifth, either Hippolytus by Euripides or A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (both of which we have done in the past but are always worth a reread).

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Five Alternate Thursdays, March 30 - May 25  | 7:30 - 9:00pm, Eastern Time

Joyce’s Ulysses: A Centennial Jungian Celebration: a course with Mark Napack

James Joyce's Ulysses: there is nothing like it! When Sylvia Beach published Ulysses out of her Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., a century ago on February 2, 1922 (Joyce's 40th birthday), did she know what was being unleashed on the world? James Joyce likely did. Carl Jung certainly knew something significant had happened and expressed as much in his essay, "Ulysses: A Monologue" (in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature). Jung compares Ulysses to a transformative, psychological experience, akin to those expressed in alchemy.

In this course, we shall enter the world of the psyche in Ulysses. Indeed, it is a profoundly psychological text. A neurologist, the first reviewer for The New York Times, stated, "I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute." In Ulysses, the inner world of the psyche is contained, laid bare, and released. On one ordinary day, June 16, 1904, mythopoetic patterns and archetypal dynamics, touching the core of human experience, are revealed. Ulysses is a world where language is psyche, and the psyche may discover itself through it. 

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Saturday, April 1  | 10:00am - 1:00pm, Eastern Time

The Heroine’s Journey in Everyone: A workshop with Erica Lorentz

The hero is king in our individualistic culture. Campbell popularized it. We all may need to be the hero at some point in our lives. But what about the heroine in all of us? Like the feminine in general, the heroine has been relegated to the cultural shadow, and it’s time she made her appearance again in our culture and our lives.

To move forward and save our planet and our humanity, we must find a new way. The warrior archetype is one sided; patriarchal control is non-inclusive and destructive; greed and narcissism abound.

Borrowing from the Iroquois, the heroine’s journey gives us a new perspective on how to challenge power and create democracy. Ghandi accessed it and brought it to the world stage. Martin Luther King and the women’s movement harnessed it here in the US. The heroine teaches us how to confront negative patriarchy and weave a social fabric that includes and listens to all.

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Four Tuesdays, April 4 - 25  | 7:30 - 9:30pm, Eastern Time

The Art of Storytelling: Finding Meaning Through Visual Artwork: A Course with Kaitlin Staples-Vigo

Join us for a four-week immersive art workshop where process artwork will be created, and stories will be told and heard. We will explore symbolic storytelling using process artwork, a single piece of art that is created over the course of multiple sessions. By the end of this workshop, you will have gained access to a visual method of storytelling that allows for a deeper relationship to unconscious creative content. Each participant will explore visual storytelling as an act of playfulness and creative stretching. Participants will be invited to share as little or as much of the stories they create as they’d like. Although led by an art therapist, this experience is not clinical in nature or intended as a therapeutic intervention.