Our Mission

     Many of us have a personal sense of the sacred in spite of our alienation from traditional religions. However, when our religious traditions can no longer contain our spirituality, it may be difficult to consciously express our real spirituality. Fortunately, there is an innate form of spirituality that has no need of traditional doctrine and dogma and needs no hierarchy or sacred text. Our need to connect to the sacred can be satisfied using an approach based on depth psychology, especially the work of C. G. Jung. This approach is based on personal experience of the sacred dimension, which is synonymous with the archetypal levels of the psyche.

     Jung’s work on religion and spirituality gives us a new vocabulary for describing sacred experiences and allows us to express its contemporary manifestations in ways that have not previously been possible. The depth psychological approach also describes the emergence of a new God-image from the depth of the psyche. This new form of spirituality is now evolving alongside our existing spiritual traditions. It allows us to articulate traditional spiritual ideas using psychological language. Numinous experiences, or experiences of the sacred or the holy, may take completely unexpected symbolic forms, sometimes in ways that are personally meaningful but which are not seen as sacred within traditional religious thought. The depth psychological approach to spirituality focuses on new forms of revelation by means of dreams, visionary experience, the body, synchronistic events, the earth, and attention to our complexes.

     Our mission is to foster and disseminate a depth psychological approach to spirituality through personal experience, training, and publications.  We offer psychologically oriented approaches to spirituality, including dreamwork and a discussion of numinous experiences, in intimate group settings to professionals and laypeople alike. These two-day weekend intensive seminars, part of an ongoing series, will continue to combine experiential and scholarly components. These seminars are not intended to be a psychotherapy program and are not designed for individuals who are emotionally vulnerable. We will look at the archetypal underpinnings of traditional religious ideas, and we will focus on the personal experience of the numinosum or the holy.

     The program will be of value to individuals seeking a personal form of spirituality. A background in either depth psychology or religion is recommended for participants. In addition, we offer lectures introducing various psychological approaches to spirituality. Such topics include The Religious Function of the Psyche, The Problem of Suffering, Forgiveness, Non-Dual Spirituality, and Psychodynamics and Spirituality. These lectures are open to any and all individuals interested in studying a depth psychological approach to spirituality and are an excellent primer for the small group, intensive seminars.