_Developing Spiritual Literacy: “Reading the book of the world,” “opening the 84,000 dharma doors,” “praying the ordinary,” “reading sign”—the various religious traditions of our world have many terms for spiritual literacy, reflecting their awareness that we are constantly surrounded with signs of spiritual support and guidance. These signs are messages that we are meant to read, but the confusion and ignorance of contemporary life have led most of us to become illiterate. The result is a serious diminishment of life. This is particularly unfortunate now, because we are living at a crucial time, when we need to be spiritually literate, to recognize what we are meant to do, where and how we are meant to do it. This workshop defines spiritual literacy and provides a variety of presentations and exercises to help participants develop this vital skill for living.
_Developing Your Intuition: The tumultuous times we live in are making it obvious that many of our old ways of thinking, living and working don‟t function very well any more, and change is happening faster than ever before. How might we cope? By using the whole of our brains—right as well as left sides, the intuitive as well as the rational mind. Because the intuitive mind operates outside linear time, it is particularly powerful in dealing with the future, allowing us to anticipate what is to come, to make realistic plans, and to stay safe from harm. This workshop opens with a brief introduction to the various forms intuition takes, followed by a short assessment of personal intuitive styles. Participants learn a variety of ways to access their intuition by working with personally relevant issues, coming away from the workshop with concrete information immediately applicable to their lives. They should bring to the workshop several questions about which they would like greater clarity or insight.
_Dreamwork Intensive for Therapists: A practical workshop training mental health professionals in the basics of working with clients‟ dreams, including over a dozen different “schools” of dream interpretation, the levels on which dreams operate, how to work with symbols and archetypes, and how to use dreams to foster healing. Included in the workshop are several one-on-one sessions with the instructor.
_Finding Your Mission in Life: Every person alive has a unique soul mission, a special way he or she is meant to make a difference in the world. When we discover our purpose we open our lives to greater joy, meaning and wonder. Using techniques suggested by the holistic healer Edgar Cayce, students handle a variety of tools and instruments to determine their purposes for living. Besides learning ways to get intuitive guidance about personal mission, participants in this workshop also discover their personality type and assess their range of talents.
_Honing Your High Sense Perception: It has been said that we draw on a small fraction of our true brain power. Equally, we go through daily life using a narrow range of our senses. This workshop introduces participants to their real perceptual ability, what some call our “high sense perception.” Via a series of assessment instruments and dozens of exercises, students discover their strongest perceptual mode, their psychological type and its effect on their sensory engagement with the world, and how to access and use the full range of psychic abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience (knowing beyond the normal range of hearing), and clairsentience (kinesthetic knowing). Key techniques required for further work with energy fields and energy healing are also presented, along with guidelines in psychic etiquette and safety tips. An essential course for all further energy work. _Introduction to Dowsing and Metaphysics: This experiential workshop explores the concept of geopathic stress, a natural phenomenon which affects certain places and can be damaging to physical, mental and emotional health. Geopathic stress is detectable only by dowsing. Dowsing is taught as both a means of detecting geopathic stress and as a tool for getting in touch with intuition.
_Introduction to Dream Work: Using a wide array of psychological theories that underpin the study of dreams, this course explores the methods, experiences, and applications of dream work, drawing upon our historical and cultural heritage. Students are required to maintain a dream journal, and to attempt analysis of their own dreams and those of their classmates. Hands-on experience in dream interpretation is stressed.
_Introduction to Fingerprint Analysis: Accessing and Claiming Your Soul Purpose: A course designed to teach students to decipher fingerprints toward defining their life purpose and identifying what might be keeping them from living their higher purpose. Includes personal fingerprint decoding and an individual consultation.
_Introduction to Working with Symbols: A basic course designed particularly for the student of dreams, focusing on the features, functions, history and sources of symbols, types of symbols (e.g. mandalas), symbols in alchemy and methods of working with symbols that are used particularly in Jungian psychology. An excellent course for students preparing for advanced work in hermeneutics, psychology, art and art therapy and counseling.
_Journey to Self: Using Personality Type as Guide to Personal Development: Jung‟s model of personality type can take us deep into who we are and provide a guide on our journey into the person we can become. In this experiential exploration of the unique “cast of characters” within each of us, participants can gain crucial skills for negotiating their life journey and having more satisfying relationships and careers, as well as greater happiness, enhanced health and well-being. In-depth explanation and treatment of the Myers-Briggs Type Instrument is also included in this course.
_Making Good Choices Workshop: We are living in a time when the choices we make will have far more crucial and long-term consequences than at any time in the past. This course explores a variety of questions related to making good choices, e.g. “What does it mean to „choose‟?” “What goes into making good choices?” “What assumptions underlie the choices we make?” and “What‟s going on now, in the larger context of our lives, that might impact our choosing?” Such questions are considering from a Jungian perspective.
_Making Your Kitbag Workshop: In “Aion,” Jung warned his students that “…anyone who is destined to descend into a deep pit had better set about it with all the necessary precautions rather than risk falling into the hole backwards.” (Collected Works, 9ii¶125) This workshop helps students take those “precautions” by identifying those items, ideas and pieces of information that can support them in times of spiritual crisis. An invaluable adjunct to the spiritual journey and useful for anyone who works with his or her dreams. _Mapping Your Interior Landscape: An experiential workshop that uses images, metaphors, myths and symbols to illuminate participants‟ journey through life. A variety of creative techniques foster students‟ perceiving their life experience in new and stimulating ways.
_Meeting Your Inner Partner: One of the most important of Jung‟s theories was his idea of the inner partner, the “anima” in a man, the “animus” in a woman. Part of the individuation process is becoming aware of this inner energy and how it shows up in our lives, projected on to other human beings that we are attracted to, fall in love with, marry, fight with and struggle to understand. This workshop supports students‟ wising up to the qualities and nature of their anima or animus via a series of exercises and analyses of their astrological chart.
_The Path of Individuation: An advanced course that integrates many of the other workshops in the Via Practica as well as several other courses in the Center‟s curriculum, to foster students‟ integration of the discoveries and insights made over years of living and learning. Via a wealth of exercises and assessment instruments students gain a sense of their unique spiritual path, as well as the various components of the soul‟s journey, set in the context of the individuation process.
_The Power and Uses of Sound: Recent discoveries in science are confirming ancient wisdom teachings on the power and healing potentials in vibration. This workshop joins music therapy, toning, and Pythagorean tradition to the new science of cymatics and clinical applications of sound. The experiential part of the workshop provides students with hands-on practice with toning, working with tuning forks, crystal and Tibetan bowls and a variety of shamanic techniques. Several movies enrich the exercises and discussions.
_Reclaiming the Divine Feminine: The Shaman‟s Path of Personal Healing: According to ancient indigenous prophecies the world over, we are at a turning point in human evolution when a new species of human will give birth to itself. Ancient wisdom teachings held by the medicine men and women of the Americas draw from Four Insights that heal disease, eliminate emotional suffering, and even grow new bodies that age and heal differently. In this course students learn how to master the Four Insights based on the ancient teachings of the Inka that allow them to participate consciously in their biological, emotional and spiritual evolution. Participants learn practical tools that help them dream a healthy, abundant and joyous world into being, for themselves, their loved ones and all creatures.
_Redeeming Your Suffering: The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung identified two forms of suffering: meaningless and meaningful. Meaningless suffering is everywhere, being part of the human condition, as the Buddha recognized. This existential suffering is the result of our trying to avoid pain, by denial and repression. None of us wants pain. We naturally shun it. But doing so leads to big trouble, dis-ease and perhaps even to physical disease. We turn meaningless into meaningful suffering when we stop repressing and take up our moral task as humans to deal consciously with our pain. In this process, we take up the pain that is endemic to living and work with it, in the knowledge that pain has a purpose: it is a warning, with an intrinsic message. We need to listen to our inner voices to learn this message. This workshop helps to initiate the process by defining suffering in its various forms, describing its purposes in our lives and the manifold gifts that it offers us when we have made it meaningful.
_Shadow Work: Jung defined the shadow as “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality,” a problem that can trip us up or cause all sorts of self-sabotage if we remain unaware of its activity within us. This workshop presents students with a variety of exercises that help to uncover the shadow, in both its good and bad guises, with the goal of expanding consciousness, and helping students to live compassionately.
_ Tarot and the Personal Path: A course that approaches the Tarot from a unique perspective that is both practical and penetrating. Beginning with a four-fold model of the human being as reflected in the archetypes of the Tarot court cards, each participant finds images of his/her own character and explores personal temperament and different aspects of personality. From this foundation, the course then considers the rest of the Tarot, in a format that is appropriate for both beginners and those who have worked with the cards for years.
_Values Clarification: This workshop examines values—what we value, how we value, the basic values that underlie our society and how these impact our spiritual life. Students discover their personal values through a series of exercises and assessment instruments, toward developing a set of values that actively support a spiritual life.
_Working with the Mantic Arts: This course introduces students to a variety of mantic arts, including numerology, Tarot, runes, and the I Ching, as well as some of the less well-known systems. The principles underlying these arts, how they are best used, how they can be misused, and the role these arts play in the spiritual sciences are some of the topics considered in the course.