DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY EVENTS PRESENTS
Questing for Our Personal Myth:
Writing, Remembering, and Renewing
Our Story Through the Teachings
of Joseph Campbell
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY
May 12-15, 2022
Hotel Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Living myths…are not to be judged as true or false,
but as effective or ineffective, maturative or pathogenic.
—Joseph Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander
Myths are living symbols. They serve each of us individually and collectively as guides to aid us in harmonizing our interior world with the surrounding landscape we inhabit. They serve us on a personal level as ordering and organizing principles whose aim is to offer our lives a sense of coherence, not perfection. Joseph Campbell believes that myths reveal the movement of psyche, indeed “of the whole nature of man and his destiny” (Flight,35).
This workshop will include a blending of many of the major insights Campbell discovered through a life-long quest for myths’ origins, structures and benefits for living a full and authentic life. In addition to two formal presentations on Campbell’s insights about myths’ values, as well as pages from several of his books for us to meditate on, we will engage in a series of riting meditations from my book, Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story, to allow participants to deepen their understanding of the myth that guides them, consciously and unconsciously, toward a fulfilled life. We will also discover, through a series of rituals, what connections myth and ritual share. We may, in the process, discover what essentials of our personal myth have exhausted their shelf life and what elements might be cultivated further.
Copies of writing meditations featured in Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story will be provided, as will pages from Campbell’s books.
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY EVENTS PRESENTS
Sea, Spirit, Sanctuary:
Nantucket and Herman Melville’s Epic,
Moby-Dick, as Spiritual Quest
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY AND WILLOW YOUNG
October 5-10, 2021
Nantucket Island
In the tradition of C.G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, we will sojourn to the “far off isle” of Nantucket, 30 miles into the wild North Atlantic Sea. During this time together, we will explore the mythopoetic depths of Melville’s Moby-Dick as we deepen our relationship with nature and seek to align with our constant companion, the wise soul within. This voyage will also include how there was “almost a biblical fervor with which the Nantucketers viewed their whaling destiny”, which Melville develops in what can be called his spiritual epic journey of one’s soul that is Moby-Dick. Once the whaling capital of the world, Nantucket is now a place of refuge for those seeking inner renewal and restoration.
Drawing on Herman Melville’s classic epic of America and his book, Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, professor and author, Dennis Patrick Slattery will guide us to a deeper understanding of place as well as to help us discover new levels of meaning in the tale of the white whale. There exists an intimate relationship between the industry of whaling and the spiritual quest of the soul offered through Quakerism as a spiritual path to one’s destiny, a path that Ishmael travels on board the Pequod. Together, we will pay close attention to the content of the readings as well as the context in which we will live while reading it.
Jungian analyst and professor, Willow Young will draw us into Jung’s life-long engagement with the natural world, his study of natural sciences, and the emergence of late 19th century scientific thinking. She will share her Nantucket, which has had a deep impact on her since her childhood on the island.
This retreat will nurture our capacities to listen to nature within as she speaks to us in our dreams, imaginings, and musings, and without, as we listen to the nature of place, landscape, and experiences of synchronicity. We come with an intention to nurture ourselves, with story, the nature of our imaginations, and inner promptings. The treasures of the natural world will be highlighted in the afternoon excursions on Nantucket Island. Melville’s epic will find resonances in the natural order of the island to create a rich experience for all participants. Exploring the island invites a metaphor for exploring oneself, with the ever-present unconscious prompting us to wholeness. Here, amidst the island solitude and quiet, we can discern our responses to the inner resonances of both body and soul.
Join us on this special journey to explore and experience Nantucket’s historical significance, its connection to Melville’s classic tale, our relationship with the natural world, and insights that arise in us from fathoms deep regarding our personal and mythic spiritual journeys.
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY EVENTS PRESENTS
C.G. Jung’s The Red Book:
Poetic Epic & Personal Myth 2
A Writing Retreat with
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY
October 17-20, 2019
Truchas Peaks Place, Truchas, New Mexico
The publication of The Red Book in 2009 was a major moment in Jungian Studies. The book, written over a period of 16 years, wears many faces: a record of Jung’s own individuation process, a memoir, a spiritual odyssey, a treatise on the birth of the heroic—and as I believe, an epic poem in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, to name a few.
Join us as we explore all three sections of Jung's epic: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Scrutinies. This often enigmatic and perplexing epic can be understood as a poetic expression of one soul’s journey towards wholeness, gathering in its pilgrimage a host of characters, contradictions, paradoxes, psychological and spiritual discoveries, as well as a series of exquisite paintings by the author.
In addition, Jung’s epic journey is as well, and by the power of analogy, our own journey as we seek a greater and deeper understanding of ourselves and others from wherever we are currently in life’s mysterious flow. Jung himself wrote that from his perspective, “analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche”. So to read Jung’s epic is simultaneously to engage our own journey’s complexities and discoveries, insights and revelations of who we are in our own personal myth. We will, in fact, find in our explorations many correspondences to our own challenges and gifts in life. We will explore both Jung’s epic as well as our own mythic dimensions through discussion and cursive writing meditations.
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY EVENTS PRESENTS
C.G. Jung’s The Red Book:
Poetic Epic & Personal Myth 1
A Writing Retreat with
DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY
March 7-10, 2019
Truchas Peaks Place, Truchas, New Mexico
The publication of The Red Book in 2009 was a major moment in Jungian Studies. The book, written over a period of 16 years, wears many faces: a record of Jung’s own individuation process, a memoir, a spiritual odyssey, a treatise on the birth of the heroic—and as I believe, an epic poem in the tradition of Gilgamesh, Inanna, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, to name a few.
We explored all three sections of Jung's epic: Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Scrutinies. This often enigmatic and perplexing epic can be understood as a poetic expression of one soul’s journey towards wholeness, gathering in its pilgrimage a host of characters, contradictions, paradoxes, psychological and spiritual discoveries, as well as a series of exquisite paintings by the author.
In addition, Jung’s epic journey is as well, and by the power of analogy, our own journey as we seek a greater and deeper understanding of ourselves and others from wherever we are currently in life’s mysterious flow. Jung himself wrote that from his perspective, “analogy formation is a law which to a large extent governs the psyche” (CW 9,2, par. 414). So to read Jung’s epic is simultaneously to engage our own journey’s complexities and discoveries, insights and revelations of who we are in our own personal myth. We found, in fact, in our explorations many correspondences to our own challenges and gifts in life. We explored both Jung’s epic as well as our own mythic dimensions through discussion and cursive writing meditations.