Finding myself through Jung

I climbed up the stairs to the second floor and got to the room breathless. You need to pick up your exercises, I murmured to myself, simply smiling at the crowd around me. I did not know many of them but there was L., who had been my student in writing class, a jolly, happy woman, and N., who attended one of our tree seminars. It was a good crowd, here, taking the Basic Jung seminar at the Ateneo University at Rockwell. Early that Thursday morning, before I knew them all intimately, that’s all I could say.

The Friends of Jung who handle the seminar are all old friends of mine. There’s Dido Gustilo, Rose Yenko, c s l Bernie Nepomuceno, and Sophie Sim-Bate. I met them 10 years ago when I first saw a Jung festival advertised in the newspaper and decided to attend it. It was their first and my first. It blew my mind because the seminars are so enjoyable, the lectures so easy to understand, the insights so profound and yet all the knowledge you get just creeps up on you. It doesn’t hit you on the head with a sledgehammer so you sit there catatonic for hours. You begin to see slowly and then it begins to sink in until you have an "aha! moment" many nights later. Then you feel so good, so alive, so happy to be alive.

For those people who clipped my column but didn’t come, why would anybody ever think of going to take the Basic Jung seminar? It happens to all of us. Sometime in the middle of our lives we look at what lies around us and we wonder: Where am I going? What am I supposed to do? Who am I, anyway? If you’re a woman, you probably read about the Jung seminar and decided to go. If you’re a man, you probably are curious but you don’t want to move. Not yet, anyway. What, your wife might think you’re gay. Or maybe, you might think you’re gay. But there is nothing gay about going to Jung. The closest thing you get is happy.

So most of the participants are women, though we had a brave young man, who even extracted a copy of my column for all of us to see. He said his boss sent him. "Is your boss male or female?" I asked, being accustomed to the fact that I am read mostly by females. "Male, ma’am," he said with a grin.

How does the seminar work? Very simple. It begins with a few lectures on Carl Jung, his life, his beliefs and how he believed that every person takes a journey towards finding himself or herself. The journey is continuous, it doesn’t stop until you die. The journey is also mostly inward, though it has outward manifestations.

Carl Jung, however, used the word archetypes to describe the energies we all have within us. To enable us to understand the traits of these archetypes, he uses the names of Greek gods and goddesses to describe them, because the gods and goddesses were imperfect to the max. So you could see their good points and their bad points well. Now, you get interested in their lives. One of my classmates, B., came to the second weekend with a book on mythology that she had picked up and was enjoying reading.

After the lectures in the morning, we take the test and score ourselves. Then we break for lunch. When we return we sit together in batches and the Jungian psychologist reads the results of our tests for us. This is what builds our friendships, gives us knowledge and affection for each other. So we develop from a good class to a superb class, becoming quite close.

I think I was the oldest person there, one of those who had taken the most journeys but also one whose stroke forced her to question everything in her life again. Anyway, the other good thing that came out of that was a bunch of classmates who said they’d always wanted to take my writing class. So now I just launched their writing class and will launch a knitting class, too. This answers one of the questions I had. What am I supposed to do? I am to become a teacher. Everything I have done since the beginning of this year has led me nowhere. Everything I tried to do that did not involve teaching. But when it comes to teaching, everything clicks and I get it done.

You know, I must recommend that you all take this Basic Jung class. It is the most important and you need to take it before you do the other classes. Basic Jung is for men and women, but they also have a Jung for men, I think, in October. We asked if we could attend that one and we were told no, it was only for men.

I think Jung’s basic teachings are gaining ground. I was watching the Today show one morning and a man was being interviewed. He had just written a book about parenting his sons. He said, "Sometimes you must say something to them that sounds like Zeus because you must get their respect. . ." Zeus? I thought. This guy, surely, must have taken the Jung seminar.

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