“The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the choice of mates and lovers. A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before you will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
italy retreat
Villa dei Misteri
The inner lover
One of the greatest messengers of the unconscious, of intuition, is love. In Greek mythology, Eros is a psychopomp, a soul guide, a divine messenger. Eros is erotic impulse, desire, and the force which moves image (psyche, or soul) toward form. It is love that guides the soul. Therefore, our desire, yearning, and primal impulse can serve as the arrow pointing us toward what our soul is trying to actualize. The role of Eros is to fulfill soul image creatively. This relationship between psyche and eros is a love story that transcends human relationships, but too permeates the natural world and all of life.
In this upcoming retreat, The Inner Lover, we explore how this same mythic pattern unfolds internally, and within romantic love. Through the lens of depth psychology, Carl Jung named the “anima” and “animus” to represent the inner feminine and masculine images that live within us—the soul’s inner “other”—which are so often unconsciously projected onto our lovers—shaping our attraction, idealization, and longing. This ‘totally other’ signifies and must signify something numinous, something evocative, for "without this fateful confrontation with such a numinousum, this other half of the world, no life can attain to its full potential for maturity or wholeness". When we meet someone who stirs this fantasy within us, this projection becomes a conflict to conquer—and the relationship serves as the modern stage upon which psyche seeks integration—as we are invited to relate to these principles consciously, urging us toward greater intimacy and wholeness. Ultimately, 'projection' is not a bad word. In fact, it can show us a glimpse into the terrain of our souls deeper longing.
When we withdrawal projection through the shattering of romantic illusion (a reality check, disappointment, or heartbreak)—this is where the real work of any relationship only just begins, including the relationship to Self. We don’t love people because they’re good. When we open our hearts to love, we inherently open ourselves to our own and our beloveds shadow—the parts of ourselves that we have repressed or deemed shameful. Our anger, our lust, our wounds, our patterns, our fears. In the original myth of psyche and eros, it is through loving the shadow of our lover that we learn to love the world—what allows us to love honestly, and consciously—where ones beloved is humanized and love is spiritualized, where we love both the sacred, and life, through loving ones beloved. Therefore, the shadow is an integral part in the numinous, in the sacred, and in love. It urges for integration, not repression.
However, desire rarely arrives to us in its pure form. In contemporary life, eros has been reduced to an instinct to be controlled or a commodity to be consumed. We are taught to distrust our longing, to subordinate it to productivity, propriety, mimeticism, certainty before action, or social expectation. As a result, much of our erotic life is unclaimed, repressed as shadow material—not only our sexuality, but our creativity, vulnerability, passion, and hunger for meaning. What we repress does not disappear; it returns indirectly through the unconscious patterns that shape our relationships, and our life—including fantasy and projection. To encounter desire consciously, is to recover a neglected relationship with the soul itself.
Re-wilding, and re-claiming the feminine, including the sensuous, the erotic, the instinctual, and creative desire is not just a personal endeavour, but one with deep cultural and collective histories—documented cross-culturally in myths and stories, and has permeated art history and archeology for centuries. It is the reclaiming of the feminine mysteries with a developed ability to uphold its nature (the developed masculine), which fosters wholeness of the human personality. No better myth depicts this than the myth of Dionysus and Ariadne, and the Villa dei Misteri (Villa of the Mysteries), an archeological site located in Pompeii Italy, is an example of this.
Originally constructed in 2nd Century BC before it was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The frescoes that remain were rediscovered in 1909 before being fully excavated in the 1930’s and preserved. The Villa offers an archetypal mirror of what it means to reclaim the feminine mysteries (body, intuition, desire, and spiritual authority) that have historically been repressed or forgotten. What unfolds on its walls is more than a depiction of the Dionysian myth, but can be read as an archetypal drama of initiation, a journey of psychic transformation, a women’s rite of passage from maidenhood to womanhood (and often motherhood)—from innocence and fragmentation toward integration, maturity, and sacred wholeness.
As animus, a figure of the inner lover, Dionysus is one of the oldest conceptions of the divine masculine. He brings a woman into relationship with her instinctual vitality and divine eros. He does not dominate or control her, instead he initiates her into her own wholeness through a developed capacity to uphold the feminine (presence, stability, foundation, consistency, protection, safety, and grounded devotion). Dionysus is the lover of women, he is the liberator, and the natural companion to the free woman—the wild woman. He is the god of death and rebirth, liminality, fertility, instinct, theatre, and divine madness. Dionysus represents dis-memberment as the fragmentation which occurs through the tension between the rational and the natural, and the defeat of Dionysus reflected the growing dominance from culture which valued the rational over the instinctual. In fact, in the Orphic myths, Dionysus is torn to shreds in which Athena (the goddess of wisdom) retrieves his heart—a symbol for re-membering consciousness in the body, and the wisdom of the heart.
In this place-based depth psychological excavation and archeological pilgrimage, we re-imagine the figure of the lover as an inner union of feminine and masculine principles. We explore this mythic landscape with a visit to Villa dei Misteri, exploring the ancient relationship between mythology, psychology, anthropology, and archeology. We explore the Jungian concepts of anima and animus, projection, the numinous, and the shadow—marrying this wisdom with practical relational psychology to be applied toward Self and other. Finally, we explore the hermeneutics of desire, eros, imagination, intuition, pleasure, instinct, and yearning as the sacred stirring of the soul, the creative life force propelling us on our journey, re-membering the deep wisdom of the body (which must work in tandem with our discernment). The setting for this 5 day immersion takes place in the sensuous country of Italy, where between process work, workshops, and lecture, participants can experience the pleasures of food, wine, music, and Italy’s vibrant, romantic culture.