The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung: Getting the Word from Within

Presented by Naomi Lowinsky, Ph.D.

Presentation
In the long winding path to becoming oneself, there are dangerous passages where monsters lurk. For those who are called by spirit, such monsters may wear the face of early experiences with institutional religion. Jung, for example, struggled with the lifeless Protestant theology which entrapped his father, a pastor. Jung had to face the dangerous passage of allowing taboo images to crush his father’s church before he could begin to claim his own spiritual experience. Drawing from poetry, dreams, a journey to a sacred place, and a conversation with a ghost, Lowinsky will share some of her own pilgrimage, including its dangerous passages, with Jung as her guide.

Writing Workshop
Our spiritual lives are awakened or assailed, shaped or shaken, cultivated or cauterized during our childhoods. In the course of our life pilgrimage we have to come to terms with those beginnings, and to find our way into a mature and grounded spiritual attitude–an ongoing conversation with our soul. If we are lucky, we find sacred places which provide sanctuary for experiencing what the Kabbalah calls “the beyond that lies within.” In this half-day writing workshop, we will explore our early sense of the Divine, the times, and the places in which spirit and soul spoke to us when we were young, and how they speak to us now.

Course Objectives:

• Describe what is meant by individuation, and give an example of how working with active imagination can contribute to this process.
• Give an example of what is meant by a confrontation with the shadow, and why it is necessary to the individuation process
• Describe what is meant by a mature and grounded spiritual attitude from a Jungian perspective
• Give an example of how our relationship to the Divine can become damaged and/or distorted from an early age

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D. is an analyst member of the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, a frequent contributor to and poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a widely published poet. She won the Blue Light Poetry Prize for her chapbook The Little House on Stilts Remembers. She is the co-editor, with Patricia Damery, of the essay collection: Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. Her book about the creative process, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, tells stories of her pushy muse. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections including Adagio and Lamentation—an offering to her ancestors—and The Faust Woman Poems, which trace one woman’s adventures through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. She blogs about poetry and life at: www.sisterfrombelow.com