Package tour to the soul

You mean you’re also a seminar rat?" Dero asked during a break at the success seminar he was giving at the penthouse of the Buendia Tower. It was about sunset and outside there was a spectacular view, but we were in the air-conditioned room doing a crash course on catching up.

"Yes," I confessed. "I love seminars and go rather indiscriminately." We laughed noting silently where our shared interest had taken us. Dero now holds seminars on success, money, life skills. I conduct writing seminars. Ironically, neither one of us ever intended to conduct seminars for a living. Both of us at some point went to seminars to explore or maybe escape our strenuous professions for a while. Dero was once entrenched in entertainment as I was once in advertising. Our old worlds or previous lives always verged on the maddening and hectic. One small slip and you could fall down the tunnel like Alice in Wonderland. Or maybe we were in Wonderland and the seminars we indiscriminately attended were our adventures into reality.

"I remember when I met you," an old friend reminisced, "you were carrying a book by Carl Jung. Who were you trying to impress?"

"Not you," I said, in my inimitable thoughtless way, "I was trying to read Jung and failing miserably. I had a sense that he had something to teach me but I could never understand what he was trying to say. He was so hard to read, " I said in my defense. Twenty years later, my friend had gone on to the next life while I still could not read Jung but I read about the Jung Festival organized by the Friends of Jung Society (Philippines) and have been a Jung follower ever since. That festival, that series of seminars, changed my life. It began my journey within.

I knew for sure I was grown-up when I started to go to wakes by myself, not dragged kicking and screaming by my grandmother, not intimidated by my mother. I would be at a wake because my friend or relative had passed away and my children were past the age when I could intimidate them into coming with me. I am now old enough to have close friends die reminding me that I too can go any time. I now find death interesting. It is a journey we all must embark on, we just don’t know when our precise departure date is. So when I go to wakes, I now contemplate the dead where once I chose not to look because I wanted to remember them alive. How small and shrunken we are in death! To me this means that our soul, which gives us life, which animates us, is our most vital part. When it goes we become small, inanimate and dead but our souls live on, proceed to other incarnations maybe, flourish elsewhere maybe. There’s a good chance.

I believe that souls live forever picking up identities along the way like sweaters pick up lint and then the lint becomes part of the sweater. I believe that the soul of the departed is present at his or her wake. I read that somewhere and I feel it. Or maybe it’s my imagination that makes me sense it. Or maybe the rituals stimulate my imagination. Nine days of prayer. They used to say those were for the nine days the soul stayed on earth after death. Now, we celebrate the 40th day because that’s when the soul really crosses over. We really don’t know, do we, when precisely the soul crosses over or how that happens but most of us believe in the soul. I do profoundly. If you believe like I do, then like me you would have to believe that the only worthwhile journey is inward, to your own soul. No jet lag, no visas required. One of the best package tours to the soul I’ve ever taken is the Jung seminar.

The good news is: The Friends of Jung Society (Philippines) is holding another seminar series at the Filipinas Heritage Library. The workshop is made up of four Wednesdays – June 19, 26, July 13, 10. The first Wednesday covers The Process of Individuation, The Hero’s Journey and in the afternoon, the Mandala. Individuation is the process by which you become fully yourself, your own unique self, your own true self. The Hero’s Journey is the metaphor for our journey through life. There’s something very imaginative and poetic about these seminars that make your soul feel very expanded and refreshed afterwards. I don’t know enough about the Mandala. Maybe I should go to that session. The Mandala is a circle, a figure that was Jung’s favorite way of connecting to the unconscious. Jung thought the Mandala was a symbol of wholeness.

The following Wednesday participants get to study the basic archetypes, the Anima (female side), Animus (male side), Persona (public face) and Shadow (private self). In the afternoon, Dreams, meaning dream analysis. I’m looking at this program and it’s making my mouth water like a menu would. My soul must be hungry for some stroking.

Yes, if you’ve been afflicted with that is-this-all-there-is feeling, if there’s a drag on your step and on your life, I think you should seriously consider going to this Jung seminar for a change of pace. If you want more information, contact Marina at 892-46-10 or Lenlen and Meds at 453-45-53 or e-mail rubycomm7@ yahoo.com. Since I feel the way I do, you might even see me there.

Remember though, this isn’t the sort of seminar that will give you rules and regulations so if that’s what you seek, I don’t think you should go to this one. This one is profound but fun, creative, imaginative, like nothing you’ve ever taken before. You will leave knowing yourself better and maybe wanting to know more. This is really a packaged tour to the soul.

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