I study depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

It’s fascinating.

Depth psychology was pioneered by Carl Jung.  It explores the unconscious aspects of the psyche.

Depth perspective considers the deeper levels of your unconscious as the primary factors that rule your life.  Also, much of the time, it is this very area of which we are, in fact, not conscious.

Since 1998 I have kept a morning practice.

I am not always consistent.  It does not always happen in the morning.  It often differs.  But the point is, I have fifteen years of cultivating consciousness of my inner life from day to day.

For anyone who knows me, this practice of meeting what I call the mystery, or Great Love, deep down inside my self is my means of accessing the sacred in an approachable, every day way.

LUNAR BELTANE

Carl Jung said we use the ego, which lives in the consciousness, to illuminate parts of our unconsciousness.  In this way we experience a tension of opposites.

Think about this the way you might a pressure cooker.  The pot itself is the container,  your ego.  The heat cooking it is more numinous, shapeless.  Your unconscious, rising closer to the surface of consciousness.  The transformation of cooked roast inside, that’s your new understanding.

In Jung speak, this is the transcendent function that other psychologists term human potentiality.

In Wild Wisdom speak, this happens in an up and down spiral way conducive to the patterns (of which we are an inherent part) of nature.  Like a never-ending helix, our consciousness and unconsciousness do this in a cohesive dance of flux and retreat.

Beltane, traditionally, celebrates the union of male and female.  In Jung speak, male is animus and female anima.

In soul or wild wisdom speak we are not talking about genders.  We are talking of active, and receptive, energies.

Recall the full moon is a symbol of bringing in to full consciousness a new energy from our own darkness, or unconsciousness.

So this full moon–Lunar Beltane–is the union of some part of our own shapeless dark, or unconsciousness, being contained by our awareness, or consciousness.

Think back on your own journey through winter’s dark this year.  This moon brings your first gifts of manifested transformation out of that struggle!

Meaning Beltane most importantly celebrates CONCEPTION!!  The transcendent function–the new birth–that arises might be happening in your life in a real, present way like a new friend or job or relationship or opportunity….or in a settled new aspect of self-understanding.

These are the Wild (meaning still connected to the larger earth and celestial tides,) or Wise, Woman Ways.  As within so without, and the other way around!!!

The old pagans would dance spirals around the Maypole and handfast with new lovers, celebrating sex and fertility.  Look outside, our earth is such a show off in all her fragrant decorations of pinks and yellows and purples and flowers and buds–it’s in the air!  This is the magic of Beltane.

It’s also happening in each of us, starting deep inside.

I’m heading inland to Monrovia to celebrate over a bonfire with Paul and Jill.  Happy Beltane kids!