Friday, July 21, 2017

Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine: Jung heals with a lullaby



Jung agreed to see a woman who had “incurable” insomnia that had resisted all previous treatment. In her presence, he found himself remembering a lullaby his mother had crooned to him in childhood. He started humming it aloud.
      The song was about a girl on a little boat on a  river, full of gleaming fish. It evokes the rhythms of wind and water. Jung’s patient was enchanted. From that night on, her insomnia was gone. Her regular doctor wanted to know Jung’s secret.
     “How was I to explain to him that I had simply listened to something within myself?," Jung reminisced, late in life, in the presence of his assistant Aniela Jaffe. "I had been quite at sea. How was I to tell him that I had sung her a lullaby with my mother’s voice? Enchantment like that is the oldest form of medicine.”
     Once again, we see that Jung's practice was that of a true shaman of the west.

DREAMING WITH JUNG

A new weekend adventure at magical Mosswood Hollow, near Duvall, Washington, on December 9-10

Jung labored to bring together the best of Western science and scholarship with ancient ways of soul travel and soul remembering. Throughout his life, he was guided by dreams and synchronicity, and in this class, we will learn from his practice rather than his theories. 
     We’ll journey, like Jung, through the many-tiered House of the Soul. We’ll walk with the Sacred Guide, as Jung walked with his Philemon. We’ll meet the Shadow. We’ll discover that dreams unlock the limitless field of nonlocal mind he called the collective unconscious.
    We’ll develop learn to navigate by synchronicity and practice field perception as Jung did when he watched the movements of wind and water, of a fox or a beetle, as he counseled his clients by Lake Zurich. Details here.

Art: Child and Boat by Edmund Tarbell (1899)

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