I believe creativity, that symbolic function of the psyche, is evolutionary and plays a key role in our individual and collective survival.

A Mythopoetic Practice

Susanna Ruebsaat PhD, MA, T.Ed, DVATI,BFA, BCATR, RCC), RCC-ACS:

faculty member at The Vancouver Art Therapy Institute, City

University in the Masters in Counselling Program (doctoral

mentor), and a Jungian oriented therapist specializing in depth

psychology from a mythopoetic perspective.

She offers workshops, clinical counselling, art-therapy sessions,

clinical supervision and individual and group mythopoetic

mentoring sessions.

Her therapy sessions (with or without art making) and group

workshops explore life narratives (personal myths), and the

process of transformation and individuation.

The hands know what to do without the assistance of the mind.

Your hands can still move, despite the trauma,
despite the self-story.
They can still find an image, even in the dark.
Through art and mark-making, we tap into the larger fields of myth, of archetypal stories and into the unconscious.
That’s where the conversation starts, where the transformation of the story begins.

The ongoing Mythopoetic Mentoring Supervision Group

Is inviting new participants looking to develop a Jungian/archetypal lens

to their work as creative practitioners.

“When the soul wants to experience something. She throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it” (Meister Eckhardt).

Together we are exploring how we practice Deep democracy (Arnold Mindell) and Archetypal activism as cornerstones in our journey of individuation. And how this translates into our practice with patients

New intake begins January. Please submit a request to participate by December 31, 2024 to susanna.ruebsaat@outlook.com

We meet once a month for 2 hours.

Fee is $75 per session.

Quick links to pages

Philosophy: A Depth Approach - A Mythopoetic sensibility - Art Therapy - Workshops - Publications

First Book

Mourning the Dream/Amor Fati. An Illustrated Mythopoetic Inquiry

” I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all. In fact, it reminds me of Christian Gaillard's work The Soul of Art. Susanna Ruebsaat’s book is an exceptional blend of art, image, and meaning."
—David H. Rosen, author of Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul through Creativity

These questions offer the structure and nature of myth. They are the myth. Every myth holds loss. Loss is often the beginning of a myth, the events that form the very substance and structure of our myth: The fairy tale that takes us deep into the forest of life where we are lost amongst those trees whose roots reach to the core of our being.

Everyone has a tale. What is rare is the courage to follow this tale to the dark place it leads us to. Shadowlands. Descent. Abduction from ‘reality’. Depth Psychology is interested in Psyche's story after the descent.

Excerpt from book

The inner figure of the blind victim, the one that has the power to withstand the dark pull of the archetypal dynamic of illness/wholeness, was particularly active for a long period of time after I initially lost my eyesight.
She kept looking for what I could not see, checking each eye over and over again separately, crying out in despair to the other eye to see if it could not grasp what this one could not.
As a metaphor pointing to something not seen—shadow material not identified with—the soul of my blindness kept reaching out past her claustrophobic confinement to the blackness pressing in on her.
She was relentless in her efforts to stay connected to the “not-me” that might help her learn how to see in another less literal way.
I reflect now on how seeing and my sense of identity became symbiotic in that, what I could see I felt was still a part of me; I could still be whole. I still had a relationship with these parts of my experience. And what I could not see was lost to me forever vanished, as if my very sense of myself was suddenly unavailable, absent. Dead.

Testimonial

Workshop

Mirror Mirror on the Wall. The Longing for Self. Desire and Identity.    

Finding Myself in another “I” Looking Back at “Me”

Staying within the experience of my own presence while both recognizing and resisting the gravitational pull of self-narrative.

The life of the fictional self is a bridge into the imaginal that connects us to the collective archetypal strata of experience. How are we caricatures of ourselves in deep conversation, an ongoing dialogue using the language of the symbolic: The mythopoetic.

I have this idea about myself…

I respond to my own expression of this idea.

Here where I am I can feel myself.

Sunday December 1, 2024 3:30 to 6:00 online

Zoom. Link to be sent upon registration.

Fee: $50

Contact susanna.ruebsaat@outlook.com for registration or inquiries

Seeing Yourself as a Way of Seeing

The image of yourself as a mirror is of symbolic value.

Seeing your life as a mirror is the methodology of mythmaking, soul making.

This symbolic way of seeing is the imagination both mirroring back and seeing (interpreting) the experiences it has been presented with.

The image in the mirror is not you,

a)    it is the reverse image of you,

b)    reflecting significant dimensions of the soul Image,

c)     the portal into a mythopoetic journey

d)    a journey of art making that invites a depth dialogue with the unconscious.

Working With the Wounded Narrative

Overwhelmed and feeling powerless in the face of our own reactions to traumatic events and relationships, the psyche ironically identifies with the dark images of such inner or outer encounters.

·       These psychic images often then manifest themselves through varying physical and psychological symptoms including addiction.

·       Symptoms reinforce the neural pathways of the brain to repeatedly send the same signals to the nervous system.

·       Over time this generates the recycling of energy in the psyche and soma, that of the trauma vortex.

·       Creativity has the capacity to interrupt this endless cycle of despair through bringing us back to the core of healing that lies in the relationship between the conscious mind (ego) and the unconscious.

Because creativity relies on the activation of both conscious and unconscious engagement, the ego can learn to recognize an energetic link between trauma and transformation. It can do this through the body and the body of the art materials which create symbols for us to work with. The embodied symbols act as guides through the unknown. Both trauma and transformation are a “going beyond oneself” phenomenon. We encounter a void, a seemingly impossible experience: no-self. This could be devastating, a process of disintegration. Or a leap of faith in which a metamorphosis can take shape.

Trauma and creativity. A symbolic Response.

In essence, trauma is energy that has been trapped in the body (soma) and psyche.

·       Creativity opens a middle way, a path, if you like, between the conscious and unconscious where psychic material can bypass the conscious mind’s filtering and editing imperative and invite the body to express the previously suppressed energy and releasing the life force towards wholeness.

The art in this manner works both at a somatic and psychological level often without any analysis necessary, though some form of interpretation of the process itself can be helpful as it relaxes the conscious mind's protective mechanisms. Insights gained from both the physical and psychological processes mirroring each other and the resulting release and re-patterning energy clusters in or system can then be drawn on as “preventitive” as wel as act as resource when trauma is reactivated in our daily living.

·       Creative process literally helps metabolize internal tolerable events and feelings inviting the body and psyche to transmute this raw material into energy for healing and wholeness.

Your hands can still move, despite the trauma., despite the self story. They can still find an image, even in the dark of the unconscious. Through art and mark making, we tap into the larger fields of myths, of archetypal stories, and into the unconscious. That's where the conversation starts, where the transformation of history begins. 

Alchemical Relationship: EnSouling Projections

An embodied inquiry of:

• The necessity of projections.

• The image in the mirror tells me who I am. Or does it?

• What would it be like to “see through” a projection into its essence?

• Could this image point me to a part of myself I am both looking for, and giving away?

• Is the act/art of projecting a way the psyche manages its homeostasis through keeping within certain pre-set limits the parts of the self it can handle at any given time or circumstance?

• Could these be processes living in the unconscious and insisting on expression and embodiment?

• Aspects of the self I am not identified with I may be wanting to rescue, disown, off-load, reclaim, or mirror back as self-images through seeing them outside of myself as other?

• Projections can feed me or drain me of my life force.

An arts-based experiential inquiry:
the Trickster Archetype in Individuation.
 

This is an invitation to investigate the pivotal position of the Archetypal Trickster in relation to the Archetypes of the Shadow and the Self as these present themselves in Attachment Theory.

Archetypes

1.    Trickster

2.    Shadow

3.    Ego

4.    Self