The Importance of the Body in Individuation by Kathleen Wiley, MHDL, Jungian Analyst

Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true. Jung, Visions Seminar, p. 1314

This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it. Jung, CW8, par. 619

If you want to know the state of your psyche, begin by tuning in to the felt sense of your body! Body is our primary home. It contains the “living being” that we are. Jung wrote that if we really knew, the body and the mind are different densities of the same energy. They both express psychic energies, the life force.

Western culture and Jungian circles have prioritized head processes like thoughts, ideas, logic, rationality, over the non-rational bodily sensations, innate affects, muscular armoring, and dis-ease states. Yet, Jung’s fundamental theory of complexes grew out of research tracking bodily changes as the indicator of unconscious complexes. If we are going to integrate our shadow (personal unconscious), we have to live consciously in our bodies.

The archetypal images that seduce many to Jungian flights of fancy “arise from the depths of the body.” Consciously holding opposites of archetype and instinct, thoughts/ideas and impulses/behaviors is key for the uniting third--our wholeness—to emerge.

The Saturday workshop will include experiential exercises for grounding in one’s body. We will explore the connection between body expressions of affect and sensation and the activation of complexes. We will address how to stay in one’s body when overwhelming states arise. We will deepen the concepts and understanding presented in the Saturday evening presentation.

Join Kathleen to explore how to live more consciously in your body in order to incarnate the living being you are, to experience transformation of complexes, and to receive the subtle communications of psychic energy in our body-mind.

Brief Bio:

Kathleen Wiley, MHDL, is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and diplomate Jungian Analyst in private practice in Davidson, North Carolina. Her work with analysands recognizes the importance of the embodied present moment, the moment of meeting between analyst and analysand, as primary. 

Kathleen believes that individuation, incarnation, and the forging of the philosopher’s gold all refer to the process of embodying your essence. To this end, she facilitates a self-paced embodiment circle through www.onlinesacredcircles.com. She also interweaves Jungian psychological concepts and Christian scriptures in her books, New Life: Meditations on the Birth of the Christ Within and New Life: Symbolic Meditations on the Promise of Easter and Spring. Her work empowers people to live out of a conscious connection to God within the Self.