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Ancient Images – Educate -
Inspiration -
Support -
Serpentine -
Winter 2024 -
The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, Volumes I and II -
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The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, Vol III -
Carl Jung, reading Vol III
Welcome. For more than fifty years, my life and work have been shaped by an ongoing conversation with the images that arise through dreams, fairy tales, art, writing, psychotherapy, and the unexpected moments when psyche asks us to pay attention.
The Practice
I began The Eagle’s Nest Holistic Mental Health in 1986, and throughout the years since, I have had the privilege of accompanying individuals as they have sought to understand not only the difficulties and transitions of their lives, but also the deeper questions that so often emerge through them. My work as a depth psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse practitioner has taught me that symptoms matter, but they are not always the whole story. Sometimes what first appears as anxiety, depression, loneliness, loss, or a troubling dream may also become an invitation to listen more closely to what is seeking to be known.
Beyond the Consulting Room
Over time, this same way of listening has carried me beyond the consulting room and more deeply into writing and teaching. Dreams, fairy tales, symbolic images, and the creative unconscious have become enduring companions in my work, each offering its own way of understanding the movement of psyche and the unfolding of the soul’s journey.
This Website
This website has grown from that larger conversation. It is a place for my writings, books, essays, classes, and reflections on dreams and the imaginal life, as well as a doorway into the teaching that has become an increasingly important part of my work. Here, I hope to offer opportunities to linger with an image, enter the wisdom of a fairy tale, follow the unfolding of a dream, or consider the ways in which psyche continues to speak within the ordinary circumstances of our lives.
Clinical Practice
My clinical practice remains an important part of this work. As a depth psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse practitioner, I continue to work with individuals seeking psychotherapy, consultation, and psychiatric care. Yet after many years of private practice, I find myself increasingly called to extend the conversation beyond the consulting room through writing, teaching, and the shared exploration of the imaginal life.
Perhaps that is the deeper invitation of this website: to create a place where we might remain curious about the images that find us, the stories that accompany us, and the questions that ask to be lived rather than too quickly answered.
Jungian Analytic and Depth Psychology: A New Phase
For many years, we have explored dreams, fairy tales, mythology, and psychological theory together. That foundation remains essential. Yet over time, another question has quietly emerged:
How do we move from studying the symbolic life to living it?
After many years of studying, teaching, and living in conversation with depth psychology, I find myself increasingly drawn to a simpler and perhaps more demanding question: How do we live what we have learned? At this season of my own life, I am less interested in arriving at definitive interpretations and more interested in creating a place where we can listen together for what psyche continues to ask of us. This evolution of our monthly gathering grows naturally from that place.
In this next phase, we will begin each month with a living theme or image and allow our conversation to unfold from there. Dreams, synchronicities, personal experiences, poetry, art, and selected readings will guide our conversations. Jung, von Franz, Edinger, Hillman, and others will continue to accompany us, but theory will increasingly serve the image rather than asking the image to serve the theory.
Our work together will be simple, though not easy:
Learning to see.
Learning to stay.
Learning to participate.
Learning to live symbolically.
Our monthly gathering remains a place of learning, but increasingly it is also becoming a place in which we practice living in relationship with psyche.