NATURAL CYCLES, NATURAL SYMBOLS: Individuation as Ecology, a workshop by Melanie Starr Costello

Workshop

By aligning psycho-spiritual maturation with the natural process, our program envisages individuation as a path that embraces the inextricable relationship between life and death principles and assents to Creation as mystery. We will confront dominant cultural constructs that alienate us from the body and obstruct psyche’s connection with the non-human world. In hopes of redress, we construct an alternative model of consciousness, envisaging a nature-based-symbolic attitude that reconnects us with our roots in nature, conjoining mind, soul, and cosmos.

In Saturday's workshop, Dr. Costello delves deeper into how our environmental crisis and our collective fear of death stem from the same ideological root. 

To promote awareness of the link between maturation of consciousness and our acceptance of natural cycles, Dr. Costello will lead a life-review meditation during Saturday’s workshop. We then discuss the varied archetypal energies that have informed our identities and chosen place in the world.  We consider: what is the purpose of longevity? What is wisdom?  We conclude by reconstructing our portrait of the individuated person, elucidating the nature-based dimensions of social, family and spiritual life. 

** Please bring writing material to the workshop!

Melanie Starr Costello, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist, historian, and graduate of the C.G. Jung Institut-Zurich, holds a private practice off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.  She earned her doctorate in the History and Literature of Religions from Northwestern University.  A former Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Dr. Costello has taught and published on the topics of psychology and religion, medieval spirituality, and clinical practice. Her study of the link between illness and insight entitled, Imagination, Illness and Injury: Jungian Psychology and the Somatic Dimensions of Perception, is published by Routledge press. Currently her work explores archetypal currents running through the collective psyche in our times—a topic she takes up in her workshops on the Stranger, Aging and Spirituality, and on Dream Cosmologies.