Recent Programs
February
Friday Evening Lecture
What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
Apart from friends, family, and good work, what matters most in our lives? What values lead us to a freer, larger life, a more considered course? Together we will examine the crippling role fear management systems play in our choices, why we are called to chose ambiguity over familiarity, why the world is driven by verbs not nouns, how life is most meaningful in the face of mortality, and how genuine spirituality is a journey, not an arrival. A more considered life asks more of us than may be comfortable, but we are rewarded with a more interesting story.
Saturday Workshop
What Matters Most Workshop
Together we will consider the paradoxes that we encounter in conducting our lives. Leading a more conscious life brings us to choices which either enlarge or diminish. Our time together will bring a more considered reflectivity to our daily lives. Each person should bring pad and pen for personal reflection.
James Hollis, Ph. D., is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst in private practice in Houston, TX, author of thirteen books, and Director of the Jung Center/Saybrook Graduate School graduate program in Jungian Studies in San Francisco
March
Friday Evening Lecture
The Reddest Rose, The Unalterable Law: Primordial Wisdom and the Divine Feminine
The common vision underlying the world’s religions, which one might call Primordial Wisdom, has been overlaid with divergent structures and beliefs and is little known or understood today. This universal spiritual wisdom has often been symbolized by the reddest rose, a symbol also of the divine feminine.
In this multimedia presentation, we will trace Primordial Wisdom through 35,000 years of Western religious symbolism—including images and names from the ancient world, the Hebrew bible, the Gnostic and Aramaic gospels, and centuries of art, architecture, and literature. Often described as being transmitted through direct encounters with the divine, the core of Primordial Wisdom is radical inclusiveness: the sacred unity of all that is and the equal partnership of feminine and masculine as organizing principles of reality. Obscured over time, and perhaps actively suppressed in our culture, this “unalterable law” nevertheless continues to function—and our loss of connection to it may explain the social justice and ecological crises we experience throughout the world today.
Saturday Workshop (Please note time change!)
The Earth as a Sacred Realm
Saturday’s workshop builds on themes introduced in Friday’s lecture and explores the notion of the immanence of God. A “feminine” concept related to Primordial Wisdom, the immanence of God will be traced through such varied Western sources as the Hebrew bible, the Aramaic Gospels, Celtic Christianity’s emphasis on ecology and holiness, the writings of St. Francis of Assissi, and meditations from St. Catherine of Sienna (“all the way to Heaven is Heaven”). We will also explore the myth of Sophia, which describes how holy wisdom is imprisoned in matter until freed by humanity. And we will consider urgent messages from prophetic voices in our own time.
A journalist and former diplomat, Rosalind de Rolon is author of Prophecy of the Rose: The Feminine Face of God in Christianity and The Earth as a Sacred Realm. Her thirteen-year quest for the West’s lost Feminine has led to worldwide travel and research with teachers ranging from Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh to Siberian healer Valentina Iourtchenko. Rosalind holds a
B.A. in Russian Studies from Berkeley, a certificate in French Civilization from the Sorbonne, and a Masters in journalism from the University of Missouri.
April
Friday Evening Lecture:
Egyptian Immortality: A Pyramid Schematic
In this program Ann Kennedy will emphasize the Egyptian creation story and the lively archetypes that teach us about the cycles of renewal in human life and death. From books by Marie-Louise Van Franz and Joseph Campbell, Ann will take a look at Egyptian civilization as a whole and see that one of its most striking characteristics is something called a concreteness of ideas. We will seek to understand how the idea of immortality was not only conceived and taught in a religious manner, but has been acted out in matter. Many highly developed civilizations believe in a life after death in some form, but only the Egyptians have labored to ensure immortality by mummification of the body and by building enormous funeral chambers portraying every step of the dead person’s passage through the underworld.
We will attempt to make sense of a culture with an exclusive identity and mission and one that revels in life even as it is defined by death.
Ann Kennedy, M.A. is a licensed Mental Health Counselor and Nationally Board Certified. She was director of The Jung Center in Orlando, Florida for ten years before moving to Austin three years ago. She teaches the basic concepts of Jung’s psychology and Dream Interpretation as well as other Jung-related studies. She began her own study and training at the C.G. Jung Education Center in Houston, Texas in 1969 and has continued her own journey learning from many of the most renowned psycho-spiritual leaders of today each deepening her understanding of the healing potentials of enlightened consciousness.
Saturday Workshop
Picturing Egypt: A Jungian Travelogue
The Saturday workshop is a collaboration between Catherine Van Bebber and Gene Baker. Together they will contrast ancient and modern Egypt. Ms. Van Bebber has traveled extensively in Egypt and will show slides of various archaeological sites as they appear today. Father Baker will present pictures in addition to describing how medicine was practiced in ancient Egypt. Physicians in Egypt were familiar with psychosomatic medicine and even performed some surgical techniques that are still in use today.
Catherine Van Bebber’s studies include Philosophy of Religious Studies and History with a specialization in Early Greek/Roman/Christian times. She has worked for the last sixteen years for the Biblical Archaeology Society out of Washington D.C., conducting seminars throughout the United States and at Oxford. In addition, she lectures widely in the DFW area on a variety of historical and religious topics and currently has a special interest in the study of Islam.
Gene Powell Baker is a retired Episcopal priest and clinical social worker. He first became active in the Analytical Psychology Association of Dallas, predecessor of the C.G. Jung Society, in 1977 and has remained active in the organization ever since. He holds an M.Div. from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin and the MSSW from the University of Texas in Arlington. He has done post-graduate work in clinical counseling at the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles. Gene has served in a number of psychiatric settings in the Dallas area as well as serving as a visiting priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas.
May
Friday Evening Lecture
The Psychology of Love
In this lecture, we will encounter what Jung called, in his later years, "the incalculable paradoxes of love." Our single word "love" fails to adequately capture and express the powerful, often contradictory feelings that drive behavior and animate one's soul. We will turn to the three Greek words for love (eros, philia, and agape) and explore the psychological distinctions they express. We will look at both the interpersonal and intra-psychic dynamics of love, as well as its light and dark sides. Finally, we will address the healing and wounding nature of this greatest of paradoxes.
Saturday Workshop
Psychology of Love Workshop
The workshop will continue the lecture theme of love, exploring more deeply, through discussion and exercises, our personal experiences and reflections upon them.
Formerly dean of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Houston, Pittman McGehee is currently a Diplomate Jungian analyst, Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychology and Spirituality, and Caroyln Fay Professor of Analytic Psychology at the University of Houston. Dr. McGehee is widely known as a lecturer and educator in the field of psychology and religion as well as a published poet and essayist.
