I am a man in his seventies. My body has no trouble reminding me of this fact. I am not as physically strong as I used to be nor has my body the trim and fit appearance that it had until sometime in my forties when midlife issues shifted to a more psychological dimension. I have just begun chapter two of Baldoni’s book, Man Enough, called Big Enough. For the first half of life, the psyche is focused on the outer world,…
It has been a month since my last post. It has been a busy month for me, a month where I got to play grandfather on two separate visits, got to be in the role of a supportive grandfather, and was there to stand with my son when he needed my support. On my last visit, just a few days ago, my son lent me his copy of the book seen on the right, a book called Man Enough: Undefining…
To our friends and family outside of Canada, I want to correct the story being told about Canada via American talk radio programs, One America Network News, Fox News, NY Post, Washington Examiner, The Federalist, Dailywire, Chicago Tribune, etc. Martial law was not enacted in Canada. The military were not called in to quell the occupation funded mostly by Americans and other foreign nationals – slightly more than 70% foreign money. City police from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and provincial…
As promised, I have returned to follow up on the Chicken Little theme which mirrors the conflict that is raging on the planet. I want to begin with a quote from C.G. Jung which is found in the little book by Daryl Sharp. “The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion…
More than twenty-five years ago, I made the acquaintance of a Canadian Jungian psychoanalyst by the name of Daryl Sharp who owned Inner City Books out of Toronto. Daryl wrote a lot of books which have become integral works in a much larger collection of books on Jungian psychology. One of the books that I bought in 1994 was called “Chicken Little: The Inside Story.” I want to spend some time with this book once again, sharing ideas with you…
It appears that I have abandoned this site for too long. With only one post in two and a half months, JungianLens definitely shows signs of having abandonment issues. That is about to change. Why has the site been avoided, ignored, and perhaps even starved? Call it distraction by the outer world. I have spent way too much time on Twitter, venting and raging against anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and a government that was democratically elected here in Canada. I wasn’t…
The years pass in a relationship. It seems that almost suddenly, your relationship is self-destructing. You begin to question yourself and your partner. You even wonder about how your partner has become a stranger. I use the word relationship purposefully, as it encompasses more than just the traditional marriage between a woman and a man. How did this happen? Like most people in relationships, you have been doing your best as a partner to keep the relationship afloat, especially when…
I want to step sideways in this series about midlife crisis. Since we are all different, there would only naturally be a different response to midlife crisis for each of us. Yet, for all of that, there are some things about one’s personality that needs to be considered. As always, I look through a Jungian lens when approaching an idea. First, in general one is either an introvert or an extravert in orientation/attitude towards the outer world. Any decent personality…
I want to retreat a bit before continuing on, back to the point where one “falls in love.” The reason lays in the statement, “You aren’t the man/woman I married.” To be honest, one doesn’t manage to avoid this if one is honest. Change is constant though the core self is constant. Try as hard as one can, one can never, ever be anything other than one’s self. So, where does this universal statement come from? Now, I can’t speak…
Jung described youth as the period from puberty to midlife. Roughly speaking, we can translate that to the wakening of one’s sexual nature, desires, and needs. For a male, this is the shift from childhood curiosity about one’s penis and scrotum, to a either a repulsion or fascination with sexuality. Why? Well that isn’t the topic of this post. It is enough to simply accept the definition of youth as given by Jung. Now I know that there are a…