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.
Monthly Classes Fairy Tale Class Six-Week Course Register
PLEASE NOTE:
Classes are being held either in person or using the Zoom platform. Contact Dr. Wilkins @ 913-530-2802 in advance if you wish to attend either of the classes below.
Ongoing Monthly Classes
Jungian Analytic and Depth Psychology: Living the Symbolic Life
Meets Fourth Sunday of each month, 4:00 p.m. Tuition $40 per class
Beginning in September 2026, this monthly class enters a new phase in its ongoing exploration of psyche and the imaginal life — moving from studying the symbolic life to living it. Each month begins with a living theme or image, and the conversation unfolds from there.
Read about this new phase
For many years, our gatherings have invited us into the rich traditions of Jungian and depth psychology through the study of dreams, fairy tales, mythology, psychological theory, and the writings of those who have helped shape our understanding of the unconscious. That foundation remains an essential part of our work together. Yet, as our conversations have deepened, another question has gradually 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.
This next phase of our work invites us to explore that question together.
Each month, we will begin with a living theme or image and allow our conversation to unfold from there. Dreams, fairy tales, poetry, art, mythology, synchronicities, personal experiences, and selected readings may all enter the conversation. Jung, von Franz, Edinger, Hillman, and other depth psychological thinkers will continue to accompany us, but theory will increasingly serve the image rather than asking the image to serve the theory.
Our task is to practice a different kind of attention: to slow down, to remain with an image before explaining it, to listen for what psyche may be asking of us, and to notice the ways symbolic life continues beyond the consulting room, the classroom, and the dream itself.
The movement underlying this new phase might be described simply:
Learning to see.
Learning to stay.
Learning to participate.
Learning to live symbolically.
Throughout the year, participants are invited not simply to interpret psychological material but to develop an ongoing relationship with it. A dream may remain with us for months. A fairy tale may unexpectedly illuminate a relationship. An image may return in a different form. A synchronicity may ask us to reconsider something we thought we understood.
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.
Perhaps the question before us is no longer simply, What does this image mean?
Perhaps the deeper question has become, What kind of relationship is this image asking me to enter?
And from there, another question quietly follows:
How might my life change if I listen?
View the full year of monthly themes (September–August)
Each month we will gather around a theme that opens a doorway into the symbolic life. These themes may evolve as the group itself evolves, but our journey may include:
What happens when we find ourselves between what has been and what has not yet taken form? We will explore beginnings, endings, transitions, and the psychological experience of standing at the threshold.
What happens when an image continues to accompany us beyond the dream or the moment in which it first appeared? We will consider synchronicity, guidance, recurring images, and the unfolding dialogue between psyche and everyday life.
How do we receive what we do not yet understand? We will explore the capacity to welcome unfamiliar dreams, emotions, experiences, and inner figures without rushing to explain or resolve them.
As the year moves toward its darkest season, we will consider images of light, darkness, waiting, solitude, and the small illuminations that appear when certainty is no longer available.
What remains within us that has not yet been lived? We will explore possibility, vocation, abandoned paths, emerging desires, and the ways psyche may continue to call us toward new life at every age.
The symbolic life does not unfold in isolation. We will explore relationship as a place of psychological encounter, considering projection, intimacy, conflict, longing, friendship, and the mystery of truly meeting another person.
Animals appear repeatedly in dreams, fairy tales, myths, and ordinary encounters. We will consider what animal images may reveal about instinct, embodiment, protection, vulnerability, and forms of knowing that exist beneath conscious thought.
What do we make of moments when inner experience and outer events seem mysteriously connected? We will explore Jung’s understanding of synchronicity and the possibility that meaning sometimes appears in the spaces between psyche and world.
We will explore creativity not simply as artistic production but as a way psyche enters the world. Dreams, writing, images, music, movement, and unexpected acts of imagination may become ways of listening to what is seeking expression.
Beyond profession or occupation lies the deeper question of vocation: What has life asked of me? What continues to ask something of me now? We will explore calling, purpose, aging, contribution, and the evolving relationship between who we have been and who we are still becoming.
Loss changes the landscape of the psyche. We will consider grief not as a problem to be solved but as an experience that may reshape identity, memory, relationship, and our understanding of what it means to carry forward what we have loved.
Our year will conclude by returning to the everyday world. We will explore the possibility that the symbolic life is not found only in extraordinary dreams or profound experiences, but in gardens, kitchens, conversations, animals, coincidences, relationships, and the quiet images that accompany an ordinary day.
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 fairy tale through the lens of Jungian depth psychology and the Holographic Mind Model developed by Dr. Lois Wilkins. Alongside the fairy tale, students are provided with a dream to enrich discussion and deepen symbolic understanding.
Drawing from Dr. Wilkins’ books, The Alchemy of Fairy Tales (Volumes I & II), the class examines the psychological patterns, archetypal images, and transformative themes woven into these timeless 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.