Each of us is born with a living blueprint, the essential design to evolve the imagination. You enter the world with the capacity to make creative leaps of consciousness and quantum leaps in learning. In doing so you improve your physical and emotional wellbeing.

        In this seminar Dr. Aizenstat will introduce particular tools developed over 40 years of professional experience.  These skills enable you to access your deepest capacities of creativity and wellbeing. Based on his new book, The Imagination Matrix, participants will be offered an experience of journeying through imaginal fields of consciousness. Here you will encounter elemental inner figures, Soul Companions, who provide support and guidance. Next, through opening the Curious Mind, you engage in an inner journey that accesses the restorative resources of self-care and healing. Accompanied by these soul figures, you increase your Imaginal Intelligence and your Innate Genius. You come home to your authentic life calling.

Stephen Aizenstat is a professor of depth psychology with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, an author, and a licensed marriage and family therapist. He is Chancellor Emeritus and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute, and Founder of Dream Tending and the Academy of Imaginal Arts and Sciences.

For more than 35 years, he has explored the power of dreams through depth psychology. He has collaborated with Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, James Hillman, and Native elders worldwide.

He conducts dreamwork and imagination seminars throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. An organizational consultant to leading tech companies and a content advisor to Hollywood filmmakers, Aizenstat has lectured extensively on the experiences of dreams and the deep imagination.

The feminine principle in ancient times was projected into the form of a goddess and worshiped. Now it is sensed as a psychological force arising from the unconscious. Gretchen Watts, LCSW, will present a talk with images and symbols from artwork, sand trays, and dreams from women manifesting feminine growth and development. Jung understood that we still live in the peril of the one-sided patriarchal development of the male intellectual consciousness, which is no longer kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche as it once was during ancient times. There must be a synthesis that includes the feminine world. Only then will the individual human being be able to develop a psychic wholeness.

After this talk, we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Nashville Jung Circle with a short presentation and refreshments. 

Gretchen Watts, LCSW, is a Jungian psychotherapist, certified sandplay teacher, in the Sandplay Therapists of America (CST-T) and the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. She has maintained a private practice in Nashville, Tennessee for many years; the focus of her practice has been sandplay, dreams, and depth psychotherapy. She trains, consults and supervises therapists using sandplay and has published and taught both nationally and internationally. She is the past Co-President of the Nashville Jung Circle. Her publications include The Friendly Classroom for a Small Planet: A Handbook on Creative Approaches to Living and Problem Solving for Children (Co-Author, Avery,1978) and “A Young Boy’s Journey,” the Journal of Sandplay Therapy, Vol. 28, Number 2, 2019.

Website: http://www.gretchenwatts.com

In turbulent times, our inner complexes may overwhelm or possess us, as we unconsciously project unresolved issues onto people and things in our outer world. Self-work is the antidote, a daily contemplative practice, a meditation on archetypal, psychologically potent images. Tarot is a wonderful way to do just that. Bring your deck along to our March Zoom meeting, and we will discuss how to connect the dots between the personal and the collective. We will give our intuitive function its daily walk through the House of Seventy-Eight Doors.  Along the way we will discuss synchronicities, active imagination, and the healing power of narrative.

Alan Scalpone likes to wear many hats, both literal and figurative.  As a multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer, he has toured the U.S. and Europe and participated in films and theater.  Today Alan is a professional tarot card reader who gives expert private and group readings in the Nashville area and through his website at alanscalpone.com. He currently attends MTSU, where he is working towards a psychology degree. He voraciously consumes the works of C.G. Jung. and tries his best to live the symbolic life. 

In 1957 Jung wrote a book, Flying Saucers, on the UFO phenomenon, a topic of worldwide interest in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  After studying everything he could find on the subject for ten years and giving a newspaper interview that led to his being mistakenly labeled a “UFO believer,” he felt compelled to write this short book to clarify his views and reflect primarily on the psychological aspects of what he called a “worldwide rumour.” Jung hoped that exploring this ambiguous material would reveal deeper truths about the human condition and help us navigate such non-ordinary experiences.

In this talk, Dr. Slater will discuss his recent book, Jung vs. Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age, in which he contends that the industrial disruption of the outer world is being followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world. The shadow side of the online world and the impact of algorithms and AI on society and culture exemplify this disruption. Prominent plans to merge humans and machines focused on joining minds and computers are shown to be outgrowths of this phenomenon, which promises to alter the foundations of human existence.   

This lecture will set out critical areas of understanding that help us enter and reflect on this potentially radical turn in human evolution. It will particularly emphasize Jung’s insights into the dissociative and integrative dynamics of the psyche. 

Glen Slater, Ph.D., has taught for over 25 years at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he has recently chaired the Jungian and Archetypal Psychology program. His publications have appeared in a number of Jungian journals and essay collections in the areas of Jung and film, psychology and religion, and depth psychology and technology and include an essay on the roots of gun violence in the U.S. was the basis of a talk he presented to the Nashville Jung Circle in 2023. His book Jung vs. Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age came out in January 2024.