Forever Jung: What Makes a Conscious Life?

July 20th, 2018

7:15am: Check-in, Coffee/tea
7:30-9:40am: Featured Program/Discussion

 

Jerry M. Ruhl, Ph.D. Teacher, Author, Psychologist, private practice, BoulderHost: Barry Erdman

About The Presentation

What makes a conscious life?  Before becoming conscious, things just happen.  When we challenge habits and patterns that constrain our lives, we begin to find inner authority; life gains greater choice, purpose, and meaning.  Even those aspects of experience that we don’t want and would never choose, can be made meaningful.  This lecture explores how to claim inner authority by listening for “slender threads;” how to navigate change, loss, and suffering; and how to step into the journey of a lifetime — becoming who you truly are.

Individuation is psychologist Carl Jung’s term for finding meaning and purpose in life. While life offers us no interpretation of itself and may seem meaningless, our task is the expansion of consciousness.  But what does that mean for daily life?  How do we know when we are on the right path?  What is happening to ethics in our society? Why do big ideas about achievement and enlightenment just get in the way?  Dr. Ruhl will apply a lifetime of Buddhist and Jungian study and practice to address the requirements of living consciously while we struggle with confounding oppositions such as good/evil, love/hate, inner/outer, heaven/earth.   Please join the discussion.

About the Presenter

Jerry M. Ruhl, Ph.D,. is a psychologist, teacher, and author living in Longmont, CO.  He maintains a psychotherapy practice in Boulder, lectures nationally, and conducts dream seminars. He served for six years as Executive Director of The Jung Center in Houston, and currently is on the board  for Boulder Friends of Jung.  Dr. Ruhl is the co-author with noted Jungian scholar Robert A. Johnson of three books:  Living Your Unlived Life; Contentment: A Way to True Happiness; and, Balancing Heaven and Earth.

Additional Resources

Website:  JerryRuhl.com

Books:
Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Explores the essential developmental task for achieving true maturity—rectifying the loss of abandoned dreams and unrealized potentials to achieve our full potential. It is a profound and important guide to the psychological tasks of our mature years when we are beckoned to grow beyond the requirements of family and society, to navigate transitions, and to secure our own relationship to wholeness.

Contentment: A Way to True Happiness
Most of us believe we’ll somehow achieve contentment just as soon as we get a better job, find a new partner, buy a bigger house, retire, or attain some other goal. Our society conditions us to think this way. But with this approach to life, contentment forever eludes us. Contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is. Honoring ‘what is’ is just the opposite of living out of a ‘just as soon as’ mentality … contentment is about the dance between what you want what reality presents. Contentment is a way of being at home with yourself and a way of affirming the reality of your life.

Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams and Realizations.
A moving and instructive memoir in the tradition of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, ReflectionsBalancing Heaven and Earth is filled with the wisdom of a lifetime devoted to balancing the inner and the outer, the masculine and the feminine, the eternal and the everyday.

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