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Reading Blake
Mary Dowd

Sundays, March 1, 8, 15, & 22, 2020
2 to 4 pm
Maine Jung Center, 183 Park Row, Brunswick
Members $80, Non-Members $90

“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

William Blake was a poet, painter, engraver, satirist, radical thinker, prophet and visionary. All his life he saw visions and these informed all his work. He can be lyrical, gnomic, crude, inspirational, ranting, outrageous, and obscure all at the same time. He despised hypocrisy, dogma, and cant. He was thought mad by the critics of his day. And even a hundred years after his death, publishers were still reluctant to publish him. His ideas on human psychology prefigure some of Jung’s conceptions. Like Leonardo, Blake was out of his place in time. He strove all his life to raise “other men into a perception of the infinite.”

Reading him can be delightful, difficult, and exasperating. In this workshop we’ll look at his poems and paintings and prophecies and try to come to some understanding of the man and his times.

Mary Dowd, MD, is a physician and poet. Her poems have appeared in Chautauqua, the Atlanta Review, in the Shambhala Sun newsletter, Letheon, Ekphrasis 2013, the Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2017, and various other minor and sometimes defunct journals. In 2018 her collection of poems, The Heroin Diaries was published by Permanente Press. She has led poetry workshops for the Transformational Language Arts Network at Goddard College and The Examined Life Conference at the University of Iowa. For many years she led a workshop reading and writing poetry with men in long term treatment for addiction at Milestone Foundation. Since 2007 she has run the Poetry at the Library series at Merrill Library in Yarmouth, bringing poets, performances and writing workshops to the community. She is a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and the Almost Dead Poets’ Society.

Death Café Series (II)
Tuesday, March 3, 2020; 6:30 to 8:30 pm
FREE for Members and Non-Members

Maximum Participants: 18 (Pre-registration is Required)

Death is psychologically as important as birth, and like it, is an integral part of life.
~ C. G. Jung

Let’s gather together to talk about death. Not to grieve, not to seek therapeutic support, not to proselytize, but simply to have a group discussion with the intention to seek more awareness about death. Perhaps more awareness might help us to value the time that we have here on earth as fully alive human beings. How might we choose to live, imbued with more awareness of our own exit?

Death Cafés are happening all over the United States and Europe as open opportunities to the public, offering this simple intention for death to be a topic of group discussion without any agenda, objective, or conclusion. Donations may be made to the Jung Center in appreciation for providing a comfortable, accessible venue where attendees will be invited to speak and be listened to with respect and confidentiality. Please register for each two-hour event even though there is no fee. The discussion dates do not mean to imply a progression of any theme, and there is no expectation for a participant to attend consecutive discussions. Refreshments will be provided.

Martha Spruce, founder of Hearts & Hands Reiki, has been practicing and teaching Reiki in Brunswick and the greater mid-coast area for over 23 years. During much of that time she has also cared for dying people as a certified home Hospice volunteer. She also volunteered as a certified pastoral chaplain at Mid Coast Hospital. She is very grateful to the people who have invited her to be part of their lives at such a profound time of transition, because of the gifts of raw honesty and unwavering integrity that they brought along to give to those who were left behind. She has noticed that when people are dying, they usually want to talk about death, but she’d rather not wait till then. Martha has been a Maine Jung Center member for 12 years.

Facilitated by Jennifer Morris
Second Saturday every Month:
Continuing October 5, 2019
10 to 12 pm

FREE for members; No pre-registration is necessary

Required Text: What Matters Most by James Hollis

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
– C. G. Jung

Please join us for Jungian focused discussions about books, mythology, and fairy tales. Together we can explore the stories that, throughout time, give us important clues on how to live our lives more fully.

We will begin by reading What Matters Most by James Hollis. Taking a fresh look at the concept of happiness, Hollis uses a warm, accessible tone to encourage readers to learn to tolerate ambiguity, embrace growth rather than security, respect the power of Eros, engage spiritual crises, and acknowledge the shadow of mortality.

James Hollis, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice and executive director of the Jung Society of Washington. Educated at Manchester College, Drew University, and the Jung Institute in Zurich, he was a humanities professor for more than twenty years and is the author of fifteen books, including the best selling The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning at Midlife and The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other. Based in Washington, D.C., he lectures frequently throughout the country and worldwide, and has spoken at the Maine Jung Center numerous times.

Jennifer Morris’s Jungian experience started with seven years of personal work with a remarkable Colorado analyst, Katherine Kuisle, PhD. This experience profoundly changed Jennifer’s life, opening her heart to the guiding symbology around us and within us. She grew up in Yarmouth and lived in Maine for 40 years before moving to Colorado where she lived—when not working as a physician assistant in Alaska or adventuring on a sailboat in the Bahamas—for 23 years. Now retired, she and the cat are quite settled in South Portland, surrounded by her gardens.

Facilitated by Jeff Pinnette
Third Sunday every Month:
Starting October 20, 2019
10 to 12 pm

FREE for members; No pre-registration is necessary

Required Text: Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology by Marie-Louise von Franz

This work is a classic of Jungian literature that at its most basic level provides a map and guide to the recognition and reclaiming of projections. More broadly, this book explores the Jungian foundation to consciousness and the collective unconscious.

The format of the discussion group will be to read one or more Chapters each month prior to the discussion group as shown in the syllabus (see website for more information). Key passages will be read again during the session so that it will be possible to not keep up with the reading, but still participate in a meaningful way in the discussion.

Projection and Re-Collection 2019-20 Discussion Group Syllabus

Jeff Pinnette is a longtime member of the Center who served on the Board for six years including two as Board chair and four as Program Committee chair. He is currently serving a new term on the Board as Co-Chair of the Program Committee.

Facilitated by Peggy Schick
Third Wednesday every Month:
Starting October 16, 2019
6 to 8 pm

FREE for members and non-members; No pre-registration is necessary

Required Text: Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change by Sherri Mitchell

The Maine Jung Center is pleased to offer a new book group beginning Wednesday, October 16, that will meet to read and discuss Sherri Mitchell’s 2018 book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change. The Center is also excited to announce that Ms. Mitchell will be speaking to our community on April 3-4 in Portland. 

This book discussion experience will serve as an immersion into Mitchell’s profound and loving insight around affecting true global consciousness and change. Sacred Instructions is described as a narrative of Indigenous wisdom that provides a road map for the spirit and a compass of compassion for humanity.

Sherri Mitchell is a Native American attorney, author, teacher and activist from Maine. She has been actively involved with Indigenous land and water rights and the Indigenous way of life in the US, Canada and abroad for more than 25 years. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, in Sacred Instructions Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day, such as environmental protection and human rights. Sharing the gifts she has received from elders around the world, Mitchell urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.

This book group will be gently led by Peggy Schick, astrologer, Reiki practitioner, activist, and co-chair of the board of the Maine Jung Center.

CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19
Dancing in the Flames (2009) | Directed by Adam Greydon Reid
Viewing facilitated by Lois LeBlanc

Dancing in the Flames is a brilliant and intimate documentary into the life of Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman, who is known for her groundbreaking work as a teacher and author on feminine psychology and addiction. We are taken into a metaphoric representation of the unconscious imagery that Marion discusses so passionately and, in doing so, are invited to examine our own lives. Mystic and author Andrew Harvey interviews Marion as she explains the mysteries of her soul’s journey and reveals a series of psychological ‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths’ that have formed the consciousness into which she has evolved. The film presents a philosophy of dynamic opposites, the bridging of seeming contradictions. Life and death, love and grief, courage and submission are not at loggerheads for her—they’re part of a harmonious whole. By embracing these opposites we come into the totality of human experience.