Explore ongoing classes and immersive courses in Jungian psychology, symbolic life, dreams, fairy tales, and the imaginal. Whether you’re new to depth psychology or continuing your studies, these offerings invite careful attention to the psyche through discussions, reflection, and lived experience.
Living the Symbolic Life Monthly Commentaries Fairy Tale Class Six-Week Course Register
Living the Symbolic Life
A Monthly Gathering for Those Who Wish to Live More Deeply
“The symbolic life is not mastered. It is practiced.”
Meets Fourth Sunday of each month, 4:00 p.m. Tuition $40 per class
This is not an academic course, nor is it a certification program. It is a monthly gathering of people who share a common desire: to cultivate what C. G. Jung called the symbolic attitude. Together we explore those images that have accompanied humanity across centuries — not to master them, but to allow them to become companions in the continuing formation of our own consciousness.
A welcome from Dr. Wilkins
If you have found your way here, perhaps it is because you have begun to suspect that life speaks in more than facts alone. Perhaps a dream has remained with you long after waking. Perhaps a line of poetry has continued to echo in your thoughts, a fairy tale has refused to be forgotten, or an unexpected coincidence has quietly asked for your attention. Whatever has brought you here, I am grateful our paths have crossed.
For more than forty years, my work as a depth psychotherapist, psychiatric nurse practitioner, teacher, and writer has convinced me that the deepest questions of our lives are seldom answered by explanation alone. They are approached through relationship — with dreams, with stories, with works of art, with nature, with one another, and with those images that seem to know us long before we understand them.
Years ago, while studying at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Stephen Aizenstat offered an invitation that has remained with me ever since: Host the dream. Receive it with enough hospitality that it has an opportunity to reveal its own life before you begin asking what it means.
Over time I came to realize that this invitation extends far beyond dreams. Fairy tales ask for the same hospitality. So do myths, poems, works of art, synchronistic events, and the quiet experiences of ordinary life that unexpectedly remain with us. To live symbolically is, perhaps, to cultivate this same openness toward every image that seeks our attention.
Each month we gather around a single theme that invites conversation among dreams, fairy tales, mythology, poetry, psychology, philosophy, and the ordinary experiences of daily life. C. G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Homer, Shakespeare, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Grimm Brothers, contemporary writers, and many others become fellow participants in that conversation. Their voices are joined by my own reflections, shaped by decades of clinical practice, teaching, writing, and an ongoing dialogue with the imaginal world.
Rather than moving quickly toward conclusions, we practice something increasingly rare in contemporary life. We slow down. We remain with an image a little longer than is comfortable. We listen before we explain. We discover that understanding often arrives quietly, emerging from relationship rather than analysis.
During the past year, while preparing a presentation for Pacifica Graduate Institute, I believed I would be speaking about artificial intelligence. Instead, I found myself drawn toward a much older question. In an age increasingly shaped by information, speed, and technological sophistication, will we continue to cultivate those uniquely human capacities that no technology can replace? Will we continue to dream, to imagine, to contemplate, to wonder, and to remain faithful to those images that slowly shape a human life?
That question has become the heart of this gathering.
What you will find each month
- A thoughtfully curated Study Guide introducing the month’s theme.
- Reading selections from depth psychology, mythology, fairy tales, poetry, philosophy, and related literature.
- An original commentary that weaves the month’s conversation into a unified reflection.
- An annotated bibliography introducing the featured authors and texts.
- Questions for personal reflection, journaling, and group dialogue.
- Companion readings drawn from my own books and essays, including The Alchemy of Fairy Tales.
The readings are important, but they are not the destination. They are companions for the journey. The real work begins as you return to your own life, noticing dreams that linger, conversations that unexpectedly deepen, books that seem to find you at precisely the right moment, and those quiet synchronistic events that gently invite a broader way of seeing.
Joining the gathering
- Call or text. Reach me at 913-530-2802 and tell me which month you would like to begin. There is no application and no prior study required.
- Receive the details. I will send the Zoom link or the in-person address, along with the month’s Study Guide and readings, several days before we meet.
- Complete tuition. $40 per gathering, using the PayPal button below or by arrangement. You are welcome to come month by month.
If a gathering is full, or if you would prefer to begin in a later month, ask to be added to the list. I will write to you personally when a place opens.
Payment can be made using the PayPal button below.
Fairy Tale Class
Meets Second Thursday of each month, 7:00 p.m., on Zoom Tuition $30 per class
Each month participants gather to explore a selected fairytale through the lens of depth psychology and the Holographic Mind Model. Alongside the tale, students receive a dream to enrich discussion and deepen symbolic understanding. Drawing from my books, The Alchemy of Fairy Tales, the class examines the psychological patterns, archetypal images, and transformative themes woven into these stories. No additional reading or materials are required.
Payment can be made using the PayPal button below.
“Begin with what is happening, not what you think it means.”
Entering the Space
An Introduction to Symbolic Life, Witnessing, and the Imaginal
When Tuesdays — next cohort date to be announced Time 7:00–8:30 PM Central Length Six weeks, limited to 15 participants Tuition $450, due in full prior to the first session
Most approaches to inner life begin by asking what something means. This course begins elsewhere. Across six weeks, participants are introduced to a different way of attending to experience — one that does not move immediately toward interpretation, diagnosis, or resolution.
Read the full course description
Instead, attention is placed on what is actually occurring in the moment, allowing experience to become recognizable before it is explained.
As this capacity develops, participants often discover a quieter and more stable relationship to thoughts, emotions, dreams, images, and uncertainty itself. Rather than reacting impulsively, analyzing prematurely, or forcing closure, they begin learning how to remain present long enough for deeper patterns of meaning and relationship to emerge organically over time.
The course offers practical experience in:
- Developing the capacity for witnessing rather than immediate reaction
- Recognizing the difference between interpretation and direct experience
- Learning how symbolic life appears through ordinary moments, dreams, relationships, creativity, and emotional states
- Increasing tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, and emotional complexity
- Strengthening reflective awareness in both personal and professional settings
- Cultivating a more grounded relationship to imagination, inner imagery, and emotional process
- Discovering how slowing down changes perception, communication, and clinical presence
Participants frequently find that this way of working deepens:
- Clinical listening and therapeutic attunement
- Creative process and symbolic imagination
- Emotional regulation without suppression
- Relationship to grief, transition, and life change
- Capacity for presence in caregiving, leadership, and intimate relationships
- Trust in one’s own lived experience without rushing toward certainty
The work is quiet and precise. It requires no special background, though it does ask for a willingness to slow down, to notice carefully, and to remain with what is present without forcing immediate conclusion. This is not primarily a course in theory. It is an introduction to a way of attending that can gradually reshape one’s relationship to clinical work, creativity, emotional life, and the experience of being human itself. Each session includes brief teaching, guided experiential work, reflective exercises, and contained discussion. The pace is deliberate, allowing recognition to emerge through direct contact rather than explanation.
Register
This course is intentionally small and relationally focused. The form below helps ensure that the group is well matched to the nature of the work.
Following the Image
Every gathering this year explores a single question from a different perspective: What happens when we trust an image long enough for it to become a companion rather than an object of interpretation?
August Following the Image
Synchronicity, Guidance, and the Unfolding Psyche
Companion Tale The Bremen Town Musicians Voices Jung, von Franz, Hillman, Homer
Most of us have been educated to believe that understanding begins with explanation. We encounter a dream and immediately ask what it means. We read a fairy tale and search for its lesson. We experience an unexpected coincidence and wonder whether it is trying to tell us something. We have learned to move quickly from image to interpretation, assuming that the sooner we understand, the more fully we have received what has been given.
The symbolic life suggests another possibility. Perhaps understanding begins, not with explanation, but with relationship. Before an image asks to be interpreted, it asks to be received. Before it becomes an idea, it is an encounter. The image arrives with its own integrity, carrying something of itself that cannot be exhausted by our explanations. It asks first for our attention and only later for our understanding.
Why Certain Stories Remain
This summer, many people have found themselves speaking once again about Odysseus. Some have returned to Homer’s epic because of renewed cultural interest, while others have discovered the story for the first time. Whatever draws us back, it is worth asking why certain stories continue to accompany humanity across centuries. Why does one generation after another return to Odysseus, to Antigone, to Cinderella, to Hansel and Gretel, or to the parables of the Gospels? Why do these stories refuse to disappear?
Depth psychology suggests that they endure because they are more than stories. They are living images that continue to address questions every generation must ask anew. Their settings belong to another age, yet the psychological realities they reveal remain startlingly contemporary. We do not preserve these stories simply because they are old. We return to them because they continue to illuminate something essential about what it means to become fully human. The stories do not merely survive the centuries; they continue to live because each generation discovers that they are, in some mysterious way, already speaking about them.
An Older Question
This conviction has gradually become one of the central orienting principles of my own life. During the past year, I found myself returning to it in an unexpected way while preparing a presentation for Pacifica Graduate Institute. When I accepted the invitation to speak, I believed I would be reflecting on artificial intelligence and its implications for depth psychology. As the months passed, however, I gradually realized that artificial intelligence was never the true subject of the presentation. It had become the occasion for a much older conversation. The deeper question was whether, in an age increasingly shaped by information, efficiency, and technological sophistication, we would continue to cultivate the distinctly human capacity to remain in relationship with images that refuse to be reduced to information.
That realization returned me with deep gratitude to the tradition in which many of us have been formed. During my years at Pacifica, Stephen Aizenstat invited us to host the dream — to receive psyche with a hospitality that resists the temptation to explain an image before it has revealed its own life. Over time I have come to recognize that this invitation extends far beyond dreams. It is equally true of fairy tales, poetry, works of art, synchronistic events, and those ordinary moments that quietly alter the direction of our lives. To live symbolically is, perhaps, to cultivate this same hospitality toward every image that seeks our attention.
The Symbolic Attitude
Jung described the symbolic attitude as a way of living in which consciousness recognizes that it is not the only source of knowledge. Dreams, fantasies, fairy tales, and meaningful coincidences all participate in the gradual formation of consciousness. Synchronicity, as Jung understood it, is not remarkable because it defies probability. It is remarkable because an inner experience and an outer event suddenly illuminate one another in a way that cannot be accounted for by causality alone. We experience such moments not primarily as intellectual puzzles but as recognitions. Something within us knows that we have encountered an event whose significance exceeds its immediate circumstances.
Fairy tales have always known this. Their wisdom seldom appears through argument. It emerges through images that quietly accumulate meaning. A traveler offers kindness to an old woman. An animal is spared. A forgotten object is carried almost absentmindedly. At first these moments seem inconsequential. Only later do we discover that the entire story has been shaped by what appeared least important. The fairy tale invites us to trust that the psyche often works in much the same way. What seems ordinary today may later reveal itself as the quiet beginning of an entirely different life.
James Hillman extends this invitation by reminding us that every interpretation carries a certain danger. If we explain an image too quickly, we risk replacing the image with our explanation. The image ceases to live as an image and becomes an illustration of something we already think we know. Hillman invites us instead to remain in conversation with the image, allowing it to disclose dimensions of meaning that cannot be reached through analysis alone. This is not an argument against interpretation. Rather, it is a reminder that interpretation has its proper season, and that understanding often ripens through companionship before it matures into language.
The Bremen Town Musicians
Our companion tale this month, The Bremen Town Musicians, offers a quiet example of this movement. Four aging animals leave behind lives that have come to an end and begin walking toward a city they never reach. From the perspective of the ego, the story appears unfinished. Yet from the perspective of the psyche, something far more important has occurred. The image of Bremen has already fulfilled its purpose. It awakened movement. It gathered companions who otherwise would never have met. It carried them beyond despair into a place that unexpectedly became home.
There is an interesting parallel with Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus believes he is trying to return home. The animals believe they are traveling toward Bremen. In both stories the destination matters, but not in the way we first imagine. The journey transforms the traveler long before the destination is reached. In the Grimm tale, Bremen quietly disappears from the story, having already accomplished its symbolic work. The image has done what it came to do. It has called life forward.
Looking back over our own lives, many of us can recognize similar moments. A book opened almost by chance. A dream refused to be forgotten. A conversation lingered long after it ended. An invitation accepted with little thought became the beginning of an entirely different vocation. At the time we seldom recognize their significance. Only years later do we begin to see that these seemingly unrelated moments belonged to a larger pattern that was quietly unfolding.
One of the deepest realizations to emerge from my own work over the past year was the recognition that while I believed I was remaining faithful to certain images, those images had, in their own mysterious way, been remaining faithful to me. They continued to return. They patiently awaited my readiness. They accompanied me through seasons when I scarcely understood what they were asking. In time I came to wonder whether the symbolic life is less about our search for meaning than about our willingness to recognize that meaning has long been searching for us.
Entering This Month’s Readings
As you enter this month’s readings, I hope you will resist the understandable desire to master them. Read Jung slowly. Allow Marie-Louise von Franz to remind you that fairy tales have their own way of knowing. Let Hillman encourage you to remain with the image before translating it into psychological language. Read The Bremen Town Musicians as though it were describing a movement that has already begun within your own life. Read the accompanying commentary not as an explanation of the tale but as one person’s ongoing conversation with it.
Most importantly, notice what begins to accompany you during the coming month. Attend to the dream that remains unusually vivid after waking. Listen for the line of poetry that returns unexpectedly. Pay attention to those ordinary encounters that quietly refuse to disappear from memory. Resist the impulse to decide too quickly what they mean. There may be wisdom in allowing them to remain images a little longer.
If the symbolic life teaches us anything, it is that consciousness is not formed by accumulating explanations. It is formed by entering into an ever-deepening relationship with those images that patiently accompany us, often long before we recognize that we have been accompanied.
Perhaps that is why these ancient stories continue to find us. We imagine that we have chosen to read Homer, the Grimm Brothers, Jung, or a poem by Rilke. Yet there are moments when it seems equally true that these stories have, in some mysterious way, chosen us. They have waited patiently through generations, carrying questions no single lifetime can answer and offering images no single interpretation can exhaust.
Our task is not to solve them. Our task is to keep them company long enough for them to become companions in the ongoing formation of our own consciousness.
September The Symbolic Home
Rooms, Thresholds, and the Architecture of the Psyche
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
October Into the Forest
Losing Our Way and Finding the Soul
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
November Hospitality to the Stranger
Welcoming the Unknown Within
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
December The Long Night
Waiting, Hope, and the Return of Light
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
January Vocation
Listening for the Work That Calls Us
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
February Love and Eros
The Images That Shape Relationship
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
March Thresholds
Death, Renewal, and Psychological Transformation
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
April The Living Earth
Nature as an Imaginal Presence
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
May Memory and Ancestry
The Stories That Continue to Live Through Us
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
June Creativity
Participating in the Work of Imagination
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.
July Returning to the Image
Living the Symbolic Life
Commentary for this month will be posted before the gathering.