EVENT DESCRIPTION: East & West: Stories of India Introduction excerpt - The Stories of India take place on multiple levels of reality. Themes from ancient mythology are woven into worldly events. Forces of destiny thwart one’s desire then open splendid new gateways. Ardent love from a past incarnation reaches across the centuries and heals a wound of the heart. Uncanny dreams warn of danger ahead. For me, following these stories was like watching a drama unfold on the stage, then looking up at a higher platform and seeing the gods enacting a play of their own… India’s soul contains stories within stories, a million layers deep. Strange and familiar, ancient and contemporary, human and divine, they beckon us to know them so that we may better know ourselves. Stories of India opens a gateway to wonders we will long remember.
FEATURED GUEST: Catherine Ann Jones holds a graduate degree in Depth Psychology and Archetypal Mythology from Pacifica Graduate Institute where she has also taught. After playing major roles in over fifty plays on and off-Broadway, she became disappointed by the lack of good roles for women and wrote a play, On the Edge, about Virginia Woolf and her struggle with madness in a world gone mad, Hitler and WWII. The play won a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Twelve of her plays, including Calamity Jane (both play and musical), The Women of Cedar Creek, and Freud’s Oracle, have won multiple awards and are produced both in and out of New York. Her films include The Christmas Wife (Jason Robards & Julie Harris), Unlikely Angel (Dolly Parton), and the popular TV series, Touched by an Angel. A Fulbright Research Scholar to India studying shamanism, she has taught for several years at The New School University (NY), University of Southern California (Los Angeles), and the Esalen and the Omega Institutes. Her books, The Way of Story: the craft & soul of writing, Heal Your Self with Writing (Nautilus Book Award 2014), What Story Are You Living?, True Fables: Stories from Childhood, Buddha and the Dancing Girl: A Creative Life, and East & West: Stories of India are used in many schools, including New York University writing programs. Based in Ojai, California, she leads The Way of Story and Heal Your Self with Writing workshops throughout the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
PANELISTS
Dyane Sherwood did her analytic training at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she was the founding Editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, which she edited for ten years, a frequent public speaker and teacher in the analytic training program, and a member of the Board. For the past ten years she has been an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, where she just completed her term as President. Before training as a psychotherapist, Dyane was a neurobiologist who studied mechanisms of change with experience using single cell recording techniques in invertebrates. More recently she has written about contemporary neurobiology research and its relevance to therapeutic change, including the close relationship between emotion and imagery. Dyane’s interests and writing have included such diverse topics as the influence of shamanism on the art of Wassily Kandinsky, the myth of Arachne and Athena, the Native American vision quest, and most prominently, the relevance of alchemy to analysis. She is currently working on a second book on the Splendor Solis, with an emphasis on its cultural commentary through the images of mythological events including in its illuminated paintings. Dyane also has a small publishing company, Analytical Psychology Press, which also publishes visionary and creative works under the imprint of Dancing Raven Press.
Ashok Bedi, MD, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and a board-certified psychiatrist. He is a member of the Royal College of psychiatrists of Great Britain, a diplomat in Psychological Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of England, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is a Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. His books include In the Eye of the Storm: Staying Centered in Personal and Collective Crisis; The Spiritual Paradox of Addiction; Crossing the Healing Zone; Awaken the Slumbering Goddess: The Latent Code of the Hindu Goddess Archetypes; Retire Your Family Karma: Decode Your Family Pattern and Find Your Soul Path; and Path to the Soul. He is the liaison for the IAAP for developing Jungian training programs in India and travels annually to India to teach, train the consult with the Jungian Developing groups at several centers in India including Ahmedabad and Mumbai. He leads the annual “A Jungian Encounter with the Soul of India” study group to several centers in India under the auspices of the New York Jung Foundation and the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago.
Dianne Skafte, Ph.D., Dianne Skafte received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. For the past ten years she has taught depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute (Santa Barbara), and she is a past Academic Dean of that institition. Her book, Listening to the Oracle (HarperCollins, 1997), has been translated into German, Spanish, and Dutch. Dr. Skafte lectures widely in the United States and Britain on oracular traditions.
Dianne Skafte, Ph.D., is the author of Listening to the Oracle(Harper, San Francisco, 1997.)
HOST
Dana White, Ph.D. a contributing faculty member to Pacifica's myth degrees and author of numerous volumes on mythology. Over the course of his career, Dana has worked in radio and industrial television, as a vice president of marketing for Merrill Lynch, and as an academic department chair at an art college. He edits and designs books, produces films and motion media for universities, corporations and non-profits, and is a professional photographer with more than 40 books to his credit.He currently produces and hosts the Myth Salon, a venture he co-founded in 2016 with Dr. Will Linn,
MODERATOR
Will Linn, Ph.D., Founder of Mythouse.org, Produces Psychedelic MixTapes for Fascinated by Everything and co-hosts a European TV series called Myths: The Greatest Mysteries of Humanity. He moderates the Myth Salon with Dana White and leads Sermons of the Earth for the Kin Earth Sanctuary. He is an Associate Producer of Dead Thing and co-creator of the Climate Bootcamp. From 2011-2021, Will led projects for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and from 2015-2023, he served as a professor and founding department chair for Relativity School—an innovative film and performing arts college in Los Angeles Center Studios.
MYTH SALON
The Myth Salon is all about cultivating community – bringing people and ideas into a delicious convergence every month to explore ideas of substance. Dr. Will Linn and Dr. Dana C White, the indefatigable moderators of our Myth Salon, congregate the mythological community to explore upon this rich and fertile path, and increase the amperage of myth and substance wherever we are. When we nurture and sustain our community relations and involvement, we all benefit! The full playlist of Myth Salons since the Spring of 2020 can be found Here. Special Thanks to the continued support of the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association.
Comments