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

Navigating Psyche’s Ulterior Motive. Following Psyche’s Footprints

As we learn to recognise the cues and signals from the imaginal

as symbolic processes wanting to become embodied through us,

we invoke certain animating forces that are key to our

individuation. There is a natural enlivening spirit that enters the

field of dreaming together through the art making.

The Art of Pendulating integration and Discernment as Core Processes of Individuation

As we navigate different layers and levels of our experiences in-

the-world and the landscape of Psyche, certain tools can be

developed to both orient us as well as assist us in engaging the

process of transformation.

Exploring our own personal as well as collective proclivity

towards evolving through our own experience – a mythopoetic

perspective – we can learn much about developing a symbolic

approach. Such a perspective naturally draws on the pendulation

of the known and unknown, conscious and unconscious, as well

as integration and discernment which broadens and deepens

experience, “Seeing through” as James Hillman would have it.

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.

The Traumatized Self as False Self.

The Search for the Authentic Self

"To will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair" (Kierkegard).

I would like to propose we work with the notion that the wounded or traumatized self is in fact a “false self”.

When we identify with the damaged remnants of the self (Kohut) we are stuck in a false self.As well, the compensatory function of the psyche produces defenses that act as protectors promising safety for the self. These “defences” however, also form a kind of false self (Winnicott).

In this workshop I would like to explore a deeper context within which the authentic self can recognise and “sees through” (Hillman) the disguises of both its identification with trauma (Kohut), as well as the compensations developed as defenses against re-experiencing trauma (Winnicott).

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 “preventative” 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 Relationships. 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.

The Most Difficult

Jung says, “The image is an expression of the unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment.” His images in the Red Book reflect his own experiences with psyche. The essence of psyche and its manifestation are images — dream images, active-imagination images, and those expressed in art.

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space.

How could it not be difficult for us? [...]

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

The Creative Process and Personal Aesthetic: Developing a Symbolic Tool Kit

The creative process is very much linked to what might be called our personal aesthetic. Our aesthetic has to do not only with what we like or appreciate, what we think of as beautiful for example, but with the very way we do things. Every movement, gesture and decision is intricately connected to our aesthetic. Like our fingerprint our personal aesthetic leaves its unique mark on everything we touch.

Exploring the nature of our aesthetic by looking at the more obvious patterns of how we do things, what we value, as well as the kinds of decisions we make on a consistent basis, can be a revealing and insightful process. If we more closely examine these patterns we may also recognize a kind of order that is operating beneath our conscious volition. This is the order of our aesthetic, the guiding principle that operates behind the scenes shaping our physical and psychic realities.

Our aesthetic is the creator of those realities, in a sense, as it determines the shape, colour, dimension and feeling tone of experience. It is what determines the form the creative process will take: what colour a certain shape will become, what quality of line will hold a particular movement, what gesture will contain a certain sentiment, what word will best explain a thought, what expression will be offered any given emotion, and what decision will evolve out of a certain set of circumstances. These are the ‘properties’ so to speak, offered by our aesthetic to give form and substance, and expression to the raw material of our experience.

Our aesthetic allows us to communicate who we are and what we experience in a way unique and particular to us. It offers us its tools of expression so that we might freely engage the creative process and fulfill that very human imperative to be fully ourselves.

Some of these “tools” naturally emerged in numerous group and private sessions that could easily make up our”

Symbolic Tool kit

What active symbols can enter a stuck dynamic?

Art-Making as Dreaming Process

Working with the unconscious through our bodies and the body of the art materials.

Harnessing the potent energies Psyche is gifting us with we can take up the venture of stepping into our own individual soul-making journey: individuation.

More Workshops

links to descriptions:

The Many Selves. Relationships

I myself am a dream. The child archetype

I Myself am a Dream Part VI. eros, logos, mythos and chaos

I Myself am a Dream VII. Moving the Dream Forward (Where Do I Go?)

Trauma and creativity. A symbolic response

How the body makes art

Finding containment while facing fragmentation

Art & archetype

My migration story

Images and stories of the child self through art

Exploring your innate creative self. A process oriented approach to art making

Seeing yourself as a way of seeing

Inner inquiry through art-making

Mourning the dream/amor fati. A mythopoetic inquiry through art making

A journey of discover into our own birth-death-rebirth archetype

Re-telling the tale: Re-imagining the journey

Light and Shadow

The role of supervision in working with the disturber

The Authentic Self and the False Self

Living in the dream. Living symbolically

Symbol-maker, story-teller. How psyche tells her story

Mythopoetic inquiry

I Myself am a Dream series:

I Myself am a Dream I. Psyche is Dreaming all the Time.

· Taking the perspective that our life and all the characters and encounters we experience are a dreaming process.

· Experience as a mirror of the myth that is living through us.

· What are the figures behind the figures (the inner figures that live mostly in the unconscious and are powerful parts of the dynamic of our intrapsychic landscape)?

· Any person in our waking life may carry the projections of this often hidden (from us) dynamic just as we carry theirs (projective identification).

I Myself am a Dream II and the Imaginal Ego

· If we were to re-engage particular experiences symbolically, that as if they (and us) were a dream, we might enrich more subtle sensibilities that lie beneath our consciousness.

· Taking a relationship or a life scenario for example and doing dreamwork with it through the art making activates a transmutation process of this raw material.

· As Alchemists we work with what is at hand and “cook” the ingredients in the safe vessel of the art and group process.

· *The imaginal ego is archetypal, that is according to Hillman, (1976) connects both to the personal as well as collective psyche. It has the capacity, like Hermes, a trickster figure, to cross boundaries including travelling back and forth into the Shadow. Because of its twofold nature it can hold opposing perspectives simultaneously and thus plays the role of archetypal activist within the dynamism of the psyche and its imperative towards transformation. This is not a choice. However, what we can decide on is to consciously participate in this process or “be dragged towards change as though she were a pig squealing on the way to slaughter!” (Daniela F. Sieff,2017. Trauma-worlds and the wisdom of Marion Woodman p. 8).

· The imaginal ego facilitates dialogue between the subjective and objective nigredo, a realm of the unconscious too dangerous for the fragile waking ego though sometimes activated in dreams. Drawing on the uncanny skills of the imaginal ego, we enter its world (the imaginal), and work symbolically. In this manner we gain access to the possibility of integrating personal and collective shadow material without destroying the necessary navigational role of “who I think I am”, the waking ego and sense of self.

I Myself Am a Dream III: Relationship as Mirrors

· Taking a relationship or life scenario and doing dreamwork with it.

· Look for paradoxical figures or situations where a polarity (often what is considered the “problem, obstacle or conflict”) will present the dynamic through which we gain access to the transcendent function (Jung’s fifth function of the psyche: thinking/feeling, sensation/intuition and the transcendent.

I Myself Am a Dream IV: The Unlived Life

· Living symbolically, that is, experiencing life as a form of dreaming, has its own deep logic often inaccessible to the conscious mind.

· Art making and other creative activities intuitively spiral around inner and outer events bringing forth intimations of what is emerging from the personal and collective liminal place between the conscious and unconscious.

· As humans we have a shared imagination in myths and archetypes that is the common ground of this imagining, this dreaming.

I Myself am a Dream V: The Child Archetype

· The courage and resilience of the Child Archetype keeps us leaning towards learning and growth.

· As we tap into this, one of the primary archetypes, through a dreaming process, we gain access to its potent and endlessly innovative energy for dreaming our myth forward.

· The Child is central archetype, the place of beginnings and the first wounding as well as being the infinite inherent archetype of creativity, learning, growth and resilience. An enormous personal and collective resource.

· We are dreaming together just as children are often in a semi-dream state instinctually connected to the imaginal (world of images). This world is filled with inner and outer figures as the child learns what is part of her and what is part of the world and that transition space between these called relationship. And how the inner and outer realms are mirroring each other becoming actually one process in the child’s experience.

I Myself am a Dream VI: Growing Down into our Mythological Roots through our Waking Dreaming Processes

· As we engage our personal and collective narrative, our myth, as if it (and us) were dreaming processes, we may gain entry to different ways of being in the world and within ourselves.

· As we enter this more symbolic or poetic immersion into lived experiences we move into the mythological and archetypal strata of humanity.

· Lying deep beneath our personal and literal histories vaster regions of the psyche beckon the ego to awaken into the fields of the imaginal, mundus imaginalis.

I Myself Am a Dream Part VII. eros, logos, mythos and chaos

· As we continue to inquire further into the notion of I myself am a dream, we come across particular dreaming processes of the human psyche that have been cultivated over millennia.

· Exploring the relationships between eros, logos, chaos and mythos invites us also to consider our ethos and telos, personally and collectively.

· Our mysterious telos, Psyche’s deeper intent for each of us draws us down into the depths and out beyond them and the limits of our understanding. This is our living extension of active imagination and to the psychic reality it invokes where/when ego speech does not drown out the voice of the imaginal.

· Possibly we could deconstruct the fixity of such stale meanings and dead beliefs about ourselves if we were to turn to the inherent dreaming processes of the psyche that offer life a certain jouissance (physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy).

· As we contemplate and inquire into the notions of eros, logos, mythos, and chaos including telos and ethos we are always already beyond the moment. We have entered the symbolic: I Myself am a Dream.

I Myself am a Dream VIII. Moving the Dream Forward (Where Do I Go?)

· Through exploring the vertical axis of the Transcendent Function (Jung) in relationship to the Descendent Function (Hillman) we enter a dialogue between spirit and soul (Hillman).

· Continuing to track how our bodies are dreaming through the simultaneous pull of the ascendant and descendant functions of Psyche/Soma we begin to navigate subtler regions of the felt sense without splitting.

· Mapping our experience through the four quadrants of embodiment/contemplation, and the transcendent/descendent functions, we bring a unique level of consciousness to our embodied inquiry of Moving the Dream Forward.

I Myself am a Dream IX. Who is the Dreamer?

· After having fairly extensively explored the notion of I Myself am a Dream we come to this point where we are examining the relationship between the dreamer and the dream-ego.

· What parallel realities the dream-ego travels become accessible to the conscious waking ego - the “I” I identify with – that adds depth and breadth to our experience?

· What does the dream-ego know that can only become apparent when the dreamer understands that one of them is an image of the other, mirror selves reflecting and refracting psyche’s deeper intent?

· Let us consider the words of 14th Century German theologian Meister Eckhart: “When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it” to engage the depths.

· Here we are examining the relationship between the dreamer and the dream-ego, parallel realities, mirror selves. Inquiring into the respective roles of the conscious and unconscious in the exploration of the imaginal invites the potential metamorphosis inherent in this most intimate of relationships.

· What parallel realities the dream-ego travels become accessible to the conscious waking ego - the “I” I identify with – that adds depth and breadth to our experience? What does the dream-ego know that can only become apparent when the dreamer understands that one of them is an image of the other, mirror selves reflecting and refracting psyche’s deeper intent?

1. The waking ego the I”, looks at the dream-ego and identifies with it, sees it as “me.”

2. The dream-ego sees from within the dream and connects the waking ego to the world of psyche.

3. The imaginal ego is connected to the Archetype of the Self which the ego is a complex of.

Art Making as Dreaming Process

· Working with the unconscious through our bodies and the body of the art materials.

· Harnessing the potent energies Psyche is gifting us with we can take up the venture of stepping into our own individual soul-making journey: individuation.

POWERED BY SQUARESPACE.

Workshops