All Programs

Ken Wilber’s Grace and Grit
September 24th, 2021 | Starts at 7pm
Viewing facilitated by Audrey McMorrow
Free for Members and Non-Members, No Pre-Registration Required
Zoom Link Here

This film, based on the book by the same name, details the five-year journey of philosopher Ken Wilber and his wife, Treya Kil­lam Wilber, through Treya’s illness, treatment, and death. Ken’s wide-ranging commentary—which questions conventional and New Age approaches to illness and reaches beyond the experience to find wisdom in pain—is combined with Treya’s journals to create a portrait of health and healing, wholeness and harmony, and suffering and surrender.

Members’ Eve 2021
The Psychology of Religion
with Ian McCallum

(Lecture)  Sunday, September 26, 2021
1:30 to 3:30 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members and Guests of Members $15

(Workshop)  Saturday, October 2, 2021
9 am to 12 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members and Guests of Members $20

Would the world today have been better off without religion? One of our greatest needs as human beings is the need to belong. Irrespective of its many expressions and denominations, religion will continue to be important in human life; it is psychologically relevant. As far as I am aware, we are the only species that seek more than food, friends, and freedom in our lives. We are seekers of continuity, meaning, values, symbols, and stories (both historical and mythical) that address the deep existential issues of our lives. When viewed through a psychological lens, the book of Genesis and the crucifixion of Christ (which Jung called the myth of our time) come alive. I will also discuss the significance of churches as more than mere bricks and mortar; they are moveable feasts, powerful gestures to the greater mystery of life. We will always need our religions, but can we have them without the politicization and paralysis of religious dogma?

Dr. Ian McCallum, MD is a psychiatrist, analytical psychologist, environmentalist, and poet. He is an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Graduate School of Business in Port Elizabeth, and an honorary lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of two anthologies of wilderness poems: Wild Gifts (1999), Untamed (2012), and a novel Thorns to Kilimanjaro (2000). His award-winning book Ecological Intelligence – Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature addresses the interconnectedness of all living things and ultimately, the survival of the human animal.

Members’ Eve 2021
The Psychology of Religion
with Ian McCallum

(Lecture)  Sunday, September 26, 2021
1:30 to 3:30 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members and Guests of Members $15

(Workshop)  Saturday, October 2, 2021
9 am to 12 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members and Guests of Members $20

Would the world today have been better off without religion? One of our greatest needs as human beings is the need to belong. Irrespective of its many expressions and denominations, religion will continue to be important in human life; it is psychologically relevant. As far as I am aware, we are the only species that seek more than food, friends, and freedom in our lives. We are seekers of continuity, meaning, values, symbols, and stories (both historical and mythical) that address the deep existential issues of our lives. When viewed through a psychological lens, the book of Genesis and the crucifixion of Christ (which Jung called the myth of our time) come alive. I will also discuss the significance of churches as more than mere bricks and mortar; they are moveable feasts, powerful gestures to the greater mystery of life. We will always need our religions, but can we have them without the politicization and paralysis of religious dogma?

Dr. Ian McCallum, MD is a psychiatrist, analytical psychologist, environmentalist, and poet. He is an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Graduate School of Business in Port Elizabeth, and an honorary lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of two anthologies of wilderness poems: Wild Gifts (1999), Untamed (2012), and a novel Thorns to Kilimanjaro (2000). His award-winning book Ecological Intelligence – Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature addresses the interconnectedness of all living things and ultimately, the survival of the human animal.

Earth Talk: Science and Spiritual Practice
October 8th, 2021 | Starts at 7pm
Viewing facilitated by Lois LeBlanc
Free for Members and Non-Members, No Pre-Registration Required

In this spirited talk, Rupert Sheldrake invites us to reflect on the shifting paradigm from a concrete, materialistic science to one which transcends this materialism towards embracing a living, conscious world. It points to seeing the cosmos which includes Gaia as a developing organism with inherent memory and embedded in field based phenomen.

Marion Woodman and the Conscious Feminine: In Conversation with Marlene Shiwy
Facilitated by Susan Farwell
2nd Saturday of the Month | Begins October 9th
Starts at 10 am

Marion Woodman was a very productive, grounded, and successful Jungian analyst in a range of applications including the feminine and masculine principles, body/mind work, and addiction. Her journey through and to individuation is deeply compelling. (Perhaps made even more so with her wonderfully trained voice).

This is a summary from the Collection filmed from her home in London, Ontario in 2005-2006:
In this set of six DVDs (9.5 hours), Marlene Schiwy interviews Marion Woodman on a wide variety of topics: the Death Mother and Death Father archetypes, the essence of dreams, the spiritual meaning of addiction, creativity as a healing force, and stories from Marion’s own analyses with Dr. Bennet and Miss Hannah. Additionally, there is a one-hour segment featuring both Marion and Ross Woodman and another hour with Marion and Marlene together on screen.

In this discussion group, each day we will watch one of the six, 90-minute segments together, then spend up to another hour (as needed) in an informal discussion concerning what arises for each of us out of the images, thoughts, and dialogues shared by Woodman and Schiwy.

(Photo credit Marie Louise Follayttar)

Moonwings: Synchronicity On My Life’s Path
with Martin Steingesser

Sunday, October 10, 2021
2 to 4 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members $15, Non-Members $20

Storytelling carries us forward, sometimes as if on a treasure hunt, through anecdote and song—an idiosyncratic journey following signposts of image and dream, by intuition and accident. Something, be it a benevolent hand, guide, ancestor, or angel, has kept me on a path. In the same way that we can only discern a path a boat has taken as we look back over the stern, I marvel at my own and how right it appears, at the coincidences, synchronicities, and intuitive choices, each like a cairn marking a pathway, leading me from an early, dark abyss within myself, the sense of a widening black maw under the breastbone. Looking back far as I can reach, follow with me as I try to thread a way through where I have been led, seemingly willy-nilly to something ofttimes intangible, unknowable. Maybe that’s it—not an ending, not even death, but an ever-deepening beauty—and mystery.

“I am a man, I am an artist, I am a failure,” wrote e.e. cummings, with whom three chance meetings initiated me to poetry, “a man, an artist, a failure must proceed.” To what do I feel closer? Perhaps it remains elusive, as Rainer Maria Rilke aptly expresses when speaking of the angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: “The eternal doesn’t want to be bent by us,” he wrote. Whoever was beaten by this angel “went away proud and strengthened…this is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.” A poem of mine will follow at the end of this talk, alive only when embodied, then on the breath and in the listening.

Martin Steingesser is author of three books of poems. He writes: “There are moments speaking poems aloud I love when windows, doors, walls blow off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening.” Martin served as Portland Maine’s Inaugural Poet Laureate from 2007-2009. His poems have also received awards, including the Betsy Sholl Award 2013 and First Place in Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance 2008 Maine Literary Awards. As a Teaching Artist, he was given the Maine Alliance for Arts Education’s 2006 Bill Bonyun Award “for exemplified talent and professionalism as an artist and for contributions to arts education.”

Science and Spiritual Practice by Rupert Sheldrake: A Book Discussion Group
Facilitated by Jeffrey Pinnette
3rd Sunday of the month | Begins October 17
10 am to 12 pm
Free for members, no pre-registration required

This discussion group will explore the effects of spiritual practices through Rupert Sheldrake’s book entitled Science and Spiritual
Practices. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier. In this book, Sheldrake illustrates how science helps validate seven practices that underpin all major world religions:

◊ Meditation
◊ Gratitude
◊ Connecting with nature
◊ Relating to plants
◊ Rituals
◊ Singing and chanting
◊ Pilgrimage and holy places.

Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research on what happens when we take part in these practices and suggests ways that readers can explore these fields for themselves. Science and Spiritual Practices illuminates the evolutionary origins of various spiritual traditions and gives a new appreciation of their power. It also shows how the core practices of spirituality are accessible to all, without the need to subscribe to a particular religious belief system. Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He is the author of more than eighty-five scientific papers and twelve books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and of Schumacher College in Devon, England.

In this discussion group, we’ll read the book together during each session with no reading assignments. This discussion group meets on the third Sunday of the month from 10 am to 12 pm.

Jeffrey Pinnette is the facilitator for this discussion group. He is a long-term Jung Center member and currently serves as co-chair of the Center’s Board and as the Program Committee Chair. He lives in Topsham.

Mildred Harris Lecture & Workshop
Hospitable Memory: Reckoning with Ghosts
with Patricia Reis

(Lecture) Friday, October 22, 2021
7 to 9 pm
Free and Open to the Public
Held Online via Zoom

(Workshop) Saturday, October 23, 2021
9 am to 12 pm
Members $25, Non-Members $30
Held Online via Zoom

The title, Hospitable Memory, comes from my reading of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who had much to say about ghosts in his concept of hauntology. In this presentation, I pay special attention to the unnamed missing, the buried, silenced, and disappeared. Ghosts are what I am talking about. I wish to remember them in the hopes of giving new meaning to their absences. In my reckoning, ghosts are not only human in nature. Caribou and farm fields, barns and hogs, ancestors and dogs, minks and lynx, landscapes and Paleo Indians—all make their ghostly claims on me.

Like fugitives, they appear in the shadows as dislocated, disturbed, and disrupted entities. They make their unbidden ghostly appearances and arrive on the doorstep of consciousness in a dream or nightmare, as in a dream, or in the headlines of a newspaper. A dislocated ghostly memory may not even be within personal experience, but we are implicated, as in the herd of caribou plunging to their death in Limestone Falls due to HydroQuèbec’s altering of a river for the sake of cheap electricity.

The question about what is preserved in memory and what is effaced, what calls out for justice, and what can be forgotten is my concern. I wish to offer Hospitable Memory so the haunting ghosts may be honored. In my understanding, this is the work of restorative justice. Ghosts who make it their business to remind me of their absence are what this talk is about. The following workshop will give participants an opportunity to explore and come into relationship with their own other-than-human ghosts.

“. . . the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice” – Avery Gordon

Patricia Reis is a writer and author of the memoir Motherlines, Women’s Voices (with Nancy Cater,) The Dreaming Way, Daughters of Saturn, and Through the Goddess, and the creator/producer of the DVD, Arctic Refuge Sutra. She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin in English Literature, an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Sculpture. In 1986, she earned an MA from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Depth Psychology and has a private psychotherapy practice. Patricia Reis has held positions as faculty, lecturer, and dissertation advisor and has mentored and facilitated many artists and writers in bringing their work to fruition. She divides her time between Portland, Maine and Nova Scotia.

Facilitated by Deb Freedman
Last Sunday of every Month:
Continuing October 31
2 to 4 pm
FREE for members and non-members; No pre-registration is necessary
(Donations Graciously Accepted)

We will explore fairy tales from around the world to see what we can learn about how these timeless tales illuminate psychic processes. Hearing and reading the stories can be entertaining and soothing. Interpreting them can unearth kernels of truth. Participants are encouraged to bring their love of stories.

Deborah Eve Freedman has been creating fairy tales for others for over twenty-five years. This ancient language of home as place on the outside and heart on the inside arrived as a surprise. She has presented her process during two global conferences at Oxford University and continues to be awed by its relevance.

Re-entering the Wild: Disruption, Resilience, and Empathy in the Emerging World
with Ian Ramsey

Friday, November 5, 2021
7 to 9 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members $15, Non-Members $20

As we emerge from Covid, everything is on the table for good and bad: a potential climate apocalypse, unprecedented progress in human rights and science, definitions of gender, digital automation. It may be that this virus was merely the opening scene in a story that, from this angle, seems almost unimaginable. As our twentieth-century institutions increasingly fail to adapt to the accelerating exponential change of the twenty-first century, we are called upon- individually and collectively- to adapt, to create, and to navigate a new world. In an age of technological hypnosis and fluctuating polemics, it seems an impossible task, but is this different from our ancestors who set out barefoot across continents or in small boats across unknown oceans? Could it be that, with the hard yards of ten thousand generations and their stories deep in our bones, we are built for this? Combining mythology, neuroscience, ecology, psychology, and poetry, writer and educator Ian Ramsey will discuss how we are re-entering the wild that countless generations of our ancestors inhabited, and how it may hold the seeds of our next evolutionary leap. How such a journey needs more than fluffy optimism but requires a gritty activism of the soul, and the imagination to dream a new world.

Ian Ramsey is a writer, educator, wilderness athlete, and musician. He directs the Kauffmann Program for Environmental Writing and Wilderness Exploration at North Yarmouth Academy, and is a founding board member of Physiology First, a nonprofit that gives students around the world tools to take control of their physiology and perform better. A published author, his book “Hackable Animal” will be published in 2022. A long-term backcountry traveler, ultrarunner, and climate change activist, he is dedicated to giving humans tools to flourish and live in accordance with the Earth.

Core Course – Myth & Ritual
Myth, Ritual, and Fairy Tales: Actively Engaging the Mythic Imagination
with Thankful Butler

Sundays, November 7, 14 & 21, 2021
2 to 4 pm
Held Online via Zoom
Members $45, Non-Members $60

The role of story in human history is the glue that holds a group, a tribe, or a nation together. The loss of a cohesive narrative leaves a group in disarray, scrambling to imagine and install a new identity, feeling shaken with anxiety as our psychic world wobbles. While this is always true, it feels particularly relevant at this time as we face multiple global crises. What story will guide us now?

“Jung saw the 20th century as one no longer in daily touch with the meaning of being which lies at the center of life. We have plumbed the resources of consciousness as best we could in our efforts to fathom and to control the contradictions and paradoxes of spirit that have remained to us, but we have lost touch with our roots and the symbolic life that these roots support and nourish” – Ann Ulanov writing on Jung on religion.

In this course, we will survey the role of myth and religion, fairy tale, and ritual as components of culture that have long been steadfast supports in forming and maintaining the unity and vibrancy of culture via stories that shape, entertain, frighten, soothe, or strike us with awe. These narratives seize our imagination and enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our place in the context of a shared story. We will look at some history related to the development of these stories, the role of entropy especially in mythic and religious story, and current technological developments that may lead to a vastly different image of ourselves as humans. We may even ask, if, in the future, myth will still be relevant.

Thankful Butler, LCPC, is a retired therapist living in Bath. She attended Pacifica Graduate Institute and is a long-standing member and former Board Member of the Maine Jung Center, and a member of the CG Jung Society of Phoenix. She is particularly interested in how Jungian dream-work, fairy tales, and myths inform our worldview and guide our individual growth. She is also an avid gardener and proponent of Green Technologies.

Marion Woodman and the Conscious Feminine: In Conversation with Marlene Shiwy
Facilitated by Susan Farwell
2nd Saturday of the Month | Begins October 9th
Starts at 10 am

Marion Woodman was a very productive, grounded, and successful Jungian analyst in a range of applications including the feminine and masculine principles, body/mind work, and addiction. Her journey through and to individuation is deeply compelling. (Perhaps made even more so with her wonderfully trained voice).

This is a summary from the Collection filmed from her home in London, Ontario in 2005-2006:
In this set of six DVDs (9.5 hours), Marlene Schiwy interviews Marion Woodman on a wide variety of topics: the Death Mother and Death Father archetypes, the essence of dreams, the spiritual meaning of addiction, creativity as a healing force, and stories from Marion’s own analyses with Dr. Bennet and Miss Hannah. Additionally, there is a one-hour segment featuring both Marion and Ross Woodman and another hour with Marion and Marlene together on screen.

In this discussion group, each day we will watch one of the six, 90-minute segments together, then spend up to another hour (as needed) in an informal discussion concerning what arises for each of us out of the images, thoughts, and dialogues shared by Woodman and Schiwy.

Rick Tarnas on the Planets in 2021
November 19th, 2021 | Starts at 7pm
Viewing facilitated by Beverly Feldt
Free for Members and Non-Members, No Pre-Registration Required

In his lecture on the planets in 2021, Richard Tarnas speaks with depth and sensitivity about the unfolding tapestry of planetary movements over the decades and to come as a coded language through which the cosmos conveys synchronistic meaning.  While squarely facing the possibility of planetary extinction due to global warming, he finds hope within the cosmos itself speaking to us through the planetary dance as well as in the commitment of the young to their future.

A master wordsmith, Tarnas brings planetary archetypes and their interplay to life, discussing how they manifest when caught in shadow and remain unconscious as well as emerging possibilities when we work consciously with their energies. He provides a provocative view that the globe is currently caught in an initiatory perinatal crisis of death and birth triggered by outer planetary aspects.

Destruct and Rebuild: The United States’ Pluto Return
with Peggy Schick & Beverly Feldt

Saturdays, November 20, 2021; January 15 & February 19, 2022
9:30 – 11:30 am
Held Online via Zoom 
Members $45, Non-Members $60

In archetypal astrology, Pluto is associated with the dark power repressed into the shadow that finds expression in our drives, obsessions, and compulsions. It imposes on us a calling and pulling into our depths for rebirth and transformation.

In February 2022, Pluto returns to 27°, 32’ Capricorn, the position it held on July 4, 1776. As it moves through Capricorn and the return approaches, we witness destruction and upheaval in the largest structures of society: government, big business, education, and religious institutions, and we are compelled to face the dark shadow of societal (social) systems into which our culture was born: slavery, systemic (structural) racism, misogyny, corporate greed (economic exploitation and oppression through capitalism and the murder of indigenous peoples and cultures along with the theft of their land).

In this presentation we will touch on the history of other nations-states at their Pluto Returns, primary characteristics of the USA’s natal chart, the Plutonian destruction (and power wars) our nation is experiencing, and the potential for transformation as we look ahead to planetary transits in the coming years.

Peggy Schick has been a professional astrologer and astrology teacher since 2017. Studies in spirituality, energy work, and Jungian psychology inform her work. Soul evolution is her specialty, and she offers clients an in-depth exploration of subconscious natal chart themes through regression hypnosis.

Beverly Feldt, LCSW, is a retired social worker and an ardent, long-term astrology student.

Science and Spiritual Practice by Rupert Sheldrake: A Book Discussion Group
Facilitated by Jeffrey Pinnette
3rd Sunday of the month | Begins October 17
10 am to 12 pm
Free for members, no pre-registration required

This discussion group will explore the effects of spiritual practices through Rupert Sheldrake’s book entitled Science and Spiritual
Practices. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier. In this book, Sheldrake illustrates how science helps validate seven practices that underpin all major world religions:

◊ Meditation
◊ Gratitude
◊ Connecting with nature
◊ Relating to plants
◊ Rituals
◊ Singing and chanting
◊ Pilgrimage and holy places.

Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research on what happens when we take part in these practices and suggests ways that readers can explore these fields for themselves. Science and Spiritual Practices illuminates the evolutionary origins of various spiritual traditions and gives a new appreciation of their power. It also shows how the core practices of spirituality are accessible to all, without the need to subscribe to a particular religious belief system. Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He is the author of more than eighty-five scientific papers and twelve books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and of Schumacher College in Devon, England.

In this discussion group, we’ll read the book together during each session with no reading assignments. This discussion group meets on the third Sunday of the month from 10 am to 12 pm.

Jeffrey Pinnette is the facilitator for this discussion group. He is a long-term Jung Center member and currently serves as co-chair of the Center’s Board and as the Program Committee Chair. He lives in Topsham.

Facilitated by Deb Freedman
Last Sunday of every Month:
Continuing October 31
2 to 4 pm
FREE for members and non-members; No pre-registration is necessary
(Donations Graciously Accepted)

We will explore fairy tales from around the world to see what we can learn about how these timeless tales illuminate psychic processes. Hearing and reading the stories can be entertaining and soothing. Interpreting them can unearth kernels of truth. Participants are encouraged to bring their love of stories.

Deborah Eve Freedman has been creating fairy tales for others for over twenty-five years. This ancient language of home as place on the outside and heart on the inside arrived as a surprise. She has presented her process during two global conferences at Oxford University and continues to be awed by its relevance.

Tales from the Golden Age: Romanian Urban Myths of the ’80s | Directed by Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu.
December 3rd, 2021 | Starts at 7pm
Viewing facilitated by Andreea Paine
Free for Members and Non-Members, No Pre-Registration Required

The final fifteen years of the Ceausescu regime were the worst in Romania’s history. Nonetheless, the propaganda machine of that time relentlessly referred to that period as the country’s golden age. Using the moniker as a starting point, Tales from the Golden Age spins the most popular, comic and bizarre urban legends from that harrowing period into a hilariously surreal omnibus film.

Acclaimed director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) wrote the scripts and commissioned the most talented young Romanian filmmakers to collaborate with him, including Razvan Marculescu (co-writer of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Tuesday, After Christmas) and Constantin Popescu (Portrait of the Fighter As a Young Man). With wit and style to spare, Tales perfectly re-captures the mood of a nation trying to survive under the twisted logic of a brutal dictatorship. It was an era when food was more important than money, freedom more important than love and survival more important than principles.

Containing Multitudes: Holding and Transforming Cultural Disruption in the Poetry of Walt Whitman
with William Furber

Sudays, December 5th, 12 & 19th
2 to 4 pm
Held Online via Zoom 
Members $45, Non-Members $60

This course will address the way that holding and containing irreconcilable cultural complexity within an individual psyche can produce creative interaction with the Self that promotes transformation for both the individual and the collective. Walt Whitman became deeply engaged in this kind of process at a tumultuous time in history not unlike our own. The country was torn apart by irreconcilable forces that would cause civil war within a few years. Whitman’s psyche became a crucible in which this turmoil and complexity could be held and carried. In this container of poetic imagination, conflicting aspects of the American whole were stretched, juxtaposed, and re-configured as they acted on his psyche and his psyche acted upon them. The all embracing “I”, containing multitudes, lived and breathed this cauldron of cacophony until its energy sparked the voltage needed for generativity and transformation.

Art is sometimes invoked by a living relationship between an artist’s need to create and the collective’s need for what is created. Through the auspices of the Self, the collective psyche seeks footing in the artistic imagination of an individual drawn to the task. The artist feels the faint stirring of new potential before it is manifest and finds creative expression to make it palpable. For the poet, the right word and the right phrase become a sacred text that penetrates the veil that separates us from the unknown trying to be known. At this level, poetry does more than describe emerging potential. It participates in it and gives it form. The word and the phrase become infused with luminescent imagination that draws us into an experience of communion. In this way an aspect of the sacred enters our psyche as the thing itself. This is what underlies the concept of transubstantiation. It is as if the actual flesh and blood of the holy is reconstituted and enters our psyche.

Using Whitman’s life and work as an example of this transformative process, this course will consider what it means to individuate through creativity within the context of an historical time and place that pulls an individual to serve the wider purposes of that time and place. The Self has always invoked its poets, artists and most sensitive psyches to serve in this way at times of great peril and potential.

Will Furber is a Jungian analyst. He helped found the Maine Jung Center and is a faculty member at the Boston Jung Institute, where he co-leads a recurring seminar on the collective process.

Marion Woodman and the Conscious Feminine: In Conversation with Marlene Shiwy
Facilitated by Susan Farwell
2nd Saturday of the Month | Begins October 9th
Starts at 10 am

Marion Woodman was a very productive, grounded, and successful Jungian analyst in a range of applications including the feminine and masculine principles, body/mind work, and addiction. Her journey through and to individuation is deeply compelling. (Perhaps made even more so with her wonderfully trained voice).

This is a summary from the Collection filmed from her home in London, Ontario in 2005-2006:
In this set of six DVDs (9.5 hours), Marlene Schiwy interviews Marion Woodman on a wide variety of topics: the Death Mother and Death Father archetypes, the essence of dreams, the spiritual meaning of addiction, creativity as a healing force, and stories from Marion’s own analyses with Dr. Bennet and Miss Hannah. Additionally, there is a one-hour segment featuring both Marion and Ross Woodman and another hour with Marion and Marlene together on screen.

In this discussion group, each day we will watch one of the six, 90-minute segments together, then spend up to another hour (as needed) in an informal discussion concerning what arises for each of us out of the images, thoughts, and dialogues shared by Woodman and Schiwy.

Death Café
Facilitated by Martha Spruce
Fridays, September 17th and December 17th
Starts at 7pm: Zoom Link Here

“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, but simply to have a group-directed discussion with the broad intention to increase our awareness of death. Perhaps that greater awareness might help us to deeply appreciate our lives right now, right here.

Death Cafes around the world give us all, young and old, an opportunity to talk about death without any agenda, advice, objective, or conclusion. We agree to respect each other’s viewpoints and confidentiality. Donations to the Jung Center are welcomed. You can find the Zoom link in the description above. The two discussion dates do not imply a progression of any theme, and so you may attend one, or both, sessions.

Covid has brought death very close to many of us. A Death Café may help us to become open to more acceptance and curiosity. Let’s refrain from trying to outsource death. It belongs to each of us, intimately.

Martha Spruce, founder of Hearts & Hands Reiki, has been practicing and teaching Reiki in the mid-coast area for over 25 years. During that time, she has also cared for terminally ill people as a certified hospice volunteer and homecare provider. She has also volunteered as a certified pastoral chaplain at Mid Coast Hospital. Being with people who are dying has helped her to learn what death might give as well as what it takes.

Science and Spiritual Practice by Rupert Sheldrake: A Book Discussion Group
Facilitated by Jeffrey Pinnette
3rd Sunday of the month | Begins October 17
10 am to 12 pm
Free for members, no pre-registration required

This discussion group will explore the effects of spiritual practices through Rupert Sheldrake’s book entitled Science and Spiritual
Practices. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier. In this book, Sheldrake illustrates how science helps validate seven practices that underpin all major world religions:

◊ Meditation
◊ Gratitude
◊ Connecting with nature
◊ Relating to plants
◊ Rituals
◊ Singing and chanting
◊ Pilgrimage and holy places.

Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research on what happens when we take part in these practices and suggests ways that readers can explore these fields for themselves. Science and Spiritual Practices illuminates the evolutionary origins of various spiritual traditions and gives a new appreciation of their power. It also shows how the core practices of spirituality are accessible to all, without the need to subscribe to a particular religious belief system. Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He is the author of more than eighty-five scientific papers and twelve books. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and of Schumacher College in Devon, England.

In this discussion group, we’ll read the book together during each session with no reading assignments. This discussion group meets on the third Sunday of the month from 10 am to 12 pm.

Jeffrey Pinnette is the facilitator for this discussion group. He is a long-term Jung Center member and currently serves as co-chair of the Center’s Board and as the Program Committee Chair. He lives in Topsham.

Marion Woodman and the Conscious Feminine: In Conversation with Marlene Shiwy
Facilitated by Susan Farwell
2nd Saturday of the Month | Begins October 9th
Starts at 10 am

Marion Woodman was a very productive, grounded, and successful Jungian analyst in a range of applications including the feminine and masculine principles, body/mind work, and addiction. Her journey through and to individuation is deeply compelling. (Perhaps made even more so with her wonderfully trained voice).

This is a summary from the Collection filmed from her home in London, Ontario in 2005-2006:
In this set of six DVDs (9.5 hours), Marlene Schiwy interviews Marion Woodman on a wide variety of topics: the Death Mother and Death Father archetypes, the essence of dreams, the spiritual meaning of addiction, creativity as a healing force, and stories from Marion’s own analyses with Dr. Bennet and Miss Hannah. Additionally, there is a one-hour segment featuring both Marion and Ross Woodman and another hour with Marion and Marlene together on screen.

In this discussion group, each day we will watch one of the six, 90-minute segments together, then spend up to another hour (as needed) in an informal discussion concerning what arises for each of us out of the images, thoughts, and dialogues shared by Woodman and Schiwy.

Destruct and Rebuild: The United States’ Pluto Return
with Peggy Schick & Beverly Feldt

Saturdays, November 20, 2021; January 15 & February 19, 2022
9:30 – 11:30 am
Held Online via Zoom 
Members $45, Non-Members $60

In archetypal astrology, Pluto is associated with the dark power repressed into the shadow that finds expression in our drives, obsessions, and compulsions. It imposes on us a calling and pulling into our depths for rebirth and transformation.

In February 2022, Pluto returns to 27°, 32’ Capricorn, the position it held on July 4, 1776. As it moves through Capricorn and the return approaches, we witness destruction and upheaval in the largest structures of society: government, big business, education, and religious institutions, and we are compelled to face the dark shadow of societal (social) systems into which our culture was born: slavery, systemic (structural) racism, misogyny, corporate greed (economic exploitation and oppression through capitalism and the murder of indigenous peoples and cultures along with the theft of their land).

In this presentation we will touch on the history of other nations-states at their Pluto Returns, primary characteristics of the USA’s natal chart, the Plutonian destruction (and power wars) our nation is experiencing, and the potential for transformation as we look ahead to planetary transits in the coming years.

Peggy Schick has been a professional astrologer and astrology teacher since 2017. Studies in spirituality, energy work, and Jungian psychology inform her work. Soul evolution is her specialty, and she offers clients an in-depth exploration of subconscious natal chart themes through regression hypnosis.

Beverly Feldt, LCSW, is a retired social worker and an ardent, long-term astrology student.

Destruct and Rebuild: The United States’ Pluto Return
with Peggy Schick & Beverly Feldt

Saturdays, November 20, 2021; January 15 & February 19, 2022
9:30 – 11:30 am
Held Online via Zoom 
Members $45, Non-Members $60

In archetypal astrology, Pluto is associated with the dark power repressed into the shadow that finds expression in our drives, obsessions, and compulsions. It imposes on us a calling and pulling into our depths for rebirth and transformation.

In February 2022, Pluto returns to 27°, 32’ Capricorn, the position it held on July 4, 1776. As it moves through Capricorn and the return approaches, we witness destruction and upheaval in the largest structures of society: government, big business, education, and religious institutions, and we are compelled to face the dark shadow of societal (social) systems into which our culture was born: slavery, systemic (structural) racism, misogyny, corporate greed (economic exploitation and oppression through capitalism and the murder of indigenous peoples and cultures along with the theft of their land).

In this presentation we will touch on the history of other nations-states at their Pluto Returns, primary characteristics of the USA’s natal chart, the Plutonian destruction (and power wars) our nation is experiencing, and the potential for transformation as we look ahead to planetary transits in the coming years.

Peggy Schick has been a professional astrologer and astrology teacher since 2017. Studies in spirituality, energy work, and Jungian psychology inform her work. Soul evolution is her specialty, and she offers clients an in-depth exploration of subconscious natal chart themes through regression hypnosis.

Beverly Feldt, LCSW, is a retired social worker and an ardent, long-term astrology student.