Writing Prompts

Week 10

  • Our process will slow down over these next three weeks as we integrate the images and embodied practice into living experience, orienting ourselves within our psychological development and our deepening relationship to the psyche. Prompts will be spread out to allow for spaciousness to ground new knowing (of our depth and capacity to meet it) in the body. 

    Stay anchored in your daily meditative practice. Our radiance meditation in particular is expanding our energetic capacity to hold and express the fullness of our individual essence. As we generate the inner tension the meditation requires of us in posture and meditative focus and meet it with curiosity, we expand our awareness of our own living field and its interconnectivity to the world around us, beyond locality. We create powerful coherence in our own field whereby more of our truth becomes embodied and known. 

    If you've fallen off practice, simply come back again. Open your practice with intention and return to your original devotion to develop intimacy with the Self — the wholeness of us that includes the unconscious and the potency of our latent possibility. Our ability to meet ourselves in meditative practice strengthens our connection to this rich, unseen realm of creative possibility within us. 

  • Today, look back on that initial inward pull from psyche. Describe any early events and feelings you felt led into your inner life to explore its depths. What discoveries have you come to in this exploration over a lifetime? What connections and values have been brought to light?

    Recall your earliest call to explore your inner world including the outward events and their related feelings. What have you discovered in that inward place? Consider the connections and values you’ve found through this movement.

  • We've spent the last two plus months tethering between our inner and outer worlds. We've moved deep into our shifting interior landscapes through our meditative and waking dream practices and in our writing, and we've emerged with the wisdom we've gathered there, grounding our experience into our exterior lives with deep presence and growing sensual awareness. This movement between realms, between the manifest (outward, expressive) and implicit (or, inward, unseen) aspects of our being, creates that tension between them; with patience, it brings about that third thing, a transformative, evolution of the self into deeper consciousness, rooted within both the profundity of the unconscious and the materiality of our bodies.

    This outward movement is especially significant. We have to continually replant ourselves within our terra firma, and with each outward movement we come to express more of those inner impressions—we come to more fully embody our essence.

    Yesterday, we considered those early remembered pulls toward our inner life. Today, recall where they led. How did these early explorations come to express in your outward expression? Think, too, about how you might already be bringing new inner discoveries out into your material world.

Week 9

  • Prompts will be explored today within our second activation workshop.

  • Spend some time today in reflection of your imaginal unfolding. Consider the qualities of setting or landscape as an image of the psychological threshold you are within during this period of life. Recall textures, colors, and temperature, the quality of light within this space. What does the setting reveal about your own liminality or state of betweenness? What does it have to offer? Thinking back to this question of what is missing, consider what was given. Oftentimes noticing gaps or our own sense of longing reveals a generative space that can be filled by imagination. As we've been exploring together, imagination connects us to the deeper intelligence and wisdom of the unconscious as that which re-pairs the conscious aspect of psyche to its own wholeness. 

  • Building on last week's prompt where we considered our armour, let us turn toward the symbolic scarab, the image or encounter that, as in the session with Jung, taps at the window of psyche to be let in to reform you.

    Consider any meaningful encounter with an inner image in your outer life. How did you “open the window” to let the image inform you? Are you allowing the image to remain alive within you, to reveal its multiplicity of meaning? Sense into the opening the encounter created within you. What stance is softening? What is this making room for?

  • Take the day to catch up on any past prompts.

  • As the writer Maria Popova has said, “it takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge.” Today, take note of where you've come to realize the edges of your self-knowledge. Where has this become apparent over the past eight weeks? Continue this exploration by honoring that "special grandeur of spirit," that majestic aspect of the self that yearns to recognize, challenge, and expand the limits of its knowing.

    Explore the boundaries of your knowledge (and self-knowledge). How has the realization of these borders come to light over your time in the course? Honor that special aspect of the self that is curious to find and push the boundaries of its knowing.

  • As we meet with the boundaries of our knowing, we are faced with the recognition (remembrance) of a rich and fertile world beyond our knowing. Explore the way a recent image may represent a key opening the way into that unknown and unexplored terrain. How are you developing intimacy with this image or figure in material life? In what ways might you continue to relate in order to deepen into relationship? How are you signaling your interest to relate? What is being shown as you do so? 

Week 8

  • Continue your exploration of your prima materia. Deepen into the inquiry.

    How is your prima materia inspiring your growth? What is needed in the work?

  • For today’s prompt, imagine your current prima materia as the irritant that forms a pearl.

    Imagine the pearl forming within the deep self.  

  • Today, notice any place of lightening. Where are you feeling a new sense of ease and insight?

    Locate and feel into any arising insight and lightness.

  • Creative work requires that we constantly break down our current ways of seeing and being to see and respond anew. As the writer Rachel Cusk has said, "to really change artistically does require some breaking down of your personality, and breaking down deep sediments of your identity."

    Feeling into the energy of deep, inner shift, ask again what you feel ready to release. What edges of your personal identity are changing form? How are you seeing the world anew? How are you relating to your own mystery?

  • Listen to the newest lecture, Synchronicity & the Unus Mundus then consider the poetic images you've come to discover in both your inner and outer life.

    Take today to catch up on any prompts you may have missed over the past week or so.

  • In this week’s lecture, we heard the story of Jung’s famously “difficult” client and her dream of the golden scarab, a symbol long associated with rebirth, metamorphosis, and the regenerative intelligence of nature. The dream itself began to soften the client's rigid rationalism, loosening her exclusive reliance on intellect and opening a threshold toward the unconscious. This opening deepened in a moment of synchronicity in session when a beetle — remarkably similar to the dream image — came tapping at the window and flew into the room just as they were speaking of the dream. Jung wrote of this moment:

    "when the 'scarab' came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move.”

    Today, consider your own "armour." Where do you notice rigidity, certainty, over-identification, or habitual defensiveness in your inner life? What attitudes, stories, or ways of knowing have helped you survive but may now be limiting your capacity to be surprised, affected, or transformed?

  • Check in on your practice today. Please consider the following questions and respond in your correspondence doc. 

    How anchored are you within the daily practice? What new sense of ease do you feel in practice and otherwise? What is softening? Where is resistance present? Where do you feel stuck?  What is revealing? 

    Instructions: 
    1. Open your correspondence document (find your link here)

    2. Add a new tab and title it "Reflection Week 8"

    3. Respond to the questions above. 

    4. Add a comment and tag me on any new tabs.

Week 7

  • Ground deeply into your physical being today. Come back to your senses. In today’s prompt, stay focused on the material dimension of your experience rather than internal feelings. You may notice any feelings of pleasure or discomfort in your perception but focus your language on the physical qualities in this exploration.  

    Feel into the potency of your perception. Get into the texture and dimension of a concentrated moment. What do you see, taste, smell, feel, and hear?

  • Our practice is expanding our capacity to be with what is. This is linked to the Greek term euphoria, the ability to bear oneself: our life force, our intensity, our full sense of feeling. 

    Euphoria has come to be linked to elation and pleasure, but the original Greek meaning was to be well-bearing. Well-being was seen to be a matter of fit: an alignment between what is happening and what can be held. 

    On the other hand, dysphoria is about burden without containment and the capacity to hold. 

    Today, consider capacity. Where do you feel your capacity is being stretched? Acknowledge ways in which burden feels too great to carry. Extend your frame to include ways in which contemporary culture & its evolution carry impact on your nervous system and its ability to process and hold. 

  • Explore your hidden resources today. Connect to those deep reserves of courage, strength, perseverance, and dream. How have they served you in surprising moments throughout your life?

    What hidden resources do I hold? How have they served to expand me?

  • In alchemy, the raw material that gets transmuted and transformed into the philosopher's stone is called the prima materia. The prima materia can sometimes be a massa confusa, or nigredo, the dark and confusing mass of experience or events that pull you into the depths to discover its invaluable potential, the gold. The prima materia leads you to uncover more life force. Today, consider your own prima materia—the events, experiences, and circumstances of your life that seem to hold potential. Perhaps this raw material has already been transformed. Look at a handful of past events that have proved difficult but led to deeper doorways into the self. Consider, too, what raw material is present now, asking you to get nearer and work with it.

    Take a look at your prima materia. What difficult events, experiences, and circumstances have you transformed in the past? What is unfolding now? Imagine ways you might work with the material to alchemize it.

  • Before considering today's writing prompt, listen to our most recent lecture (16 min) where we probe deeper into the ideas of the prima materia and the pearl.

    After listening, explore your irregularities in relation to the pearl. How has your unique life experience and history attributed to your precious gem nature?

    What are your poetic irregularities of shape and form?

  • Take the day to rest or catch up on past prompts. 

  • Check in on your practice today. Please consider the following questions and respond in your correspondence doc. 

    What is happening for you energetically this week? How are you physically? What insights have been brought to light? Where are you feeling a sense of release or renewal? Where have there been openings for the unknown? How have your images and their metaphors continued to inform you?

    Instructions: 
    1. Open your correspondence document (find your link here)

    2. Add a new tab and title it "Reflection Week 7"

    3. Respond to the questions above. 

    4. Add a comment and tag me on any new tabs you add to so I know to take a look and respond. 

Week 6

  • No prompt today.

  • No prompt today.

  • A new lecture is available on the portal: Weaving Threads (13 min). 

    Today we practice inquiry. Cultivating a stance of openness and unknowing is an art that opens us to the infinite world of the unconscious where we come to see and experience ourselves in deep entanglement with the world around us. We come to find the world (and we) are not as we seem. As the poet, philosopher and complexity theorist Nora Bateson once pondered, “Finding where exactly the outside world ends and I begin—is not so easy.”

    Open your writing with a question today. Rather than attempting to answer it, see if it can lead you to deeper and deeper questioning.

  • Continuing our cultivation of openness and learning, today we turn toward our sense of wonder.

    Look upon the world and your life with new eyes and ask, where does my wonder and astonishment lie?

  • In the act of placing (or re-placing) your wonder and astonishment, did you notice any losses? Did the gesture of recall reconnect you to places both within and without?


    Where in my life might I want to commit to more presence to invoke again a childlike sense of wonder at the beauty and patterning of self and world?

  • Today marks 40 days, and if you've been working with the meditations in daily practice, you may be beginning to sense the internalization of their effects. This length of time makes deep and lasting changes in our physical, mental, and psychic systems.

    Consider today what deep shifts you feel since beginning the practice. What has been brought to your awareness? Our kriyas have been working specifically on our solar center, the seat of our personal power; our lunar/yin channel, connected to our ability to be receptive and connect to our potentiality; and our radiant body, the electromagnetic field around our aura that encapsulates our being and radiates our essence. Tuning into each of these energetic domains within you, what has emerged?

    What physiological, energetic, mental, and psychic shifts are emerging after 40 days of practice?

  • Consider the following questions as you look back at the last two weeks. Please add your responses to your correspondence document (see instructions below). 

    • What physiological, energetic, mental, and psychic shifts are emerging after 40 days of practice?

    • How did your meditations go this week? Did you practice daily?  

    • Where are you experiencing resistance? 

    • What might the resistance be showing you or saying? 

    • What shifts do you feel or see? 

    • What did your images have to say? How did they inform you?

    • Have you experienced profound insights? Synchronicities? 

    Instructions: 
    1. Open your correspondence document (find your link here)

    2. Add a new tab and title it "Reflection Weeks 5 & 6"

    3. Respond to the questions above. 

    4. Add a comment and tag me on any new tabs you add to so I know to take a look and respond. 

Week 5

  • The American poet Wallace Stevens has said that there is always poetry at the heart of things. Choose a scenario in your life in which there is tension or discomfort and look for its poetry. It might be a tense relationship, illness, recurring or demanding symptoms. What myth is alive? You might ask the archetypal question, "what does this event, this thing, move in my soul?"

    Where is poetry at work in my tensions and discomfort?

    A reminder to respond to check-in questions this weekend. Please reply to any daily email to let me know you've updated your document — that way I can review and respond in time. 

  • Over the past week, in our workshop and in individual sessions together, we've been turning to the unconscious through imaginative tending. Use the writing prompt today as an opportunity to deepen into this relationship. We honor the unconscious as we continue to give life to its images, allowing them to speak to, through, and with us. Spend time with an image that has been present with you this past week. You might consider writing a letter to an image or figure. How might you continue to show up and reflect your commitment to the relationship? What are you willing to offer in return for the gifts and wisdom and insight they offer you? Plant seeds of intentions with your words.

    Honor the unconscious today by tending to an image that has been present this past week. How might you act in ways that create reciprocity and valuable exchange? Use your words to plant seeds of intentions in this relationship.

  • We're nearing a momentous new moon & solstice this weekend — a time of turning inward and moving slowly. Please move at your own pace. Stay anchored in practice and tend to the basic needs of the body: hydration, care, rest. 

    Ask yourself today, where is your grief? What deep sorrow lives in the body? Where is it located? How deep does it dwell? Is it accessible?

    Where does my grief live within me?

  • Today, ask, what am I surrendering? 

  • Come back to your intention today. Restate and reaffirm it in writing; let it resound (re - sound)  within you again. Is there anything that lies hidden beneath the intention? Something deeper? 

    Consider an image that might be symbolic of the intention. Make a simple drawing and keep it somewhere close, somewhere visible. 

  • Honor your capacity today. What does that look like? 

  • Turn inward today and return to your intentions.

Week 4

  • Today’s prompts will be offered and given space in our active imagination workshop today.

  • Stay attentive this week to the ways in which the images presented in your imaginal journey stay with you, what they continue to stir and activate you, the way they speak to you not only in your inner world but outside of you. Notice any synchronicities of encounter. Reflect on the sense of meaning you felt within the journey itself and the threads of connection that may have emerged as you listened to the experiences of others. This ongoing weaving of connection helps us to open hidden pathways to the multiplicity of meaning and self-reflection possible within the images.

  • Stay attentive this week to the ways in which the images presented in your imaginal journey stay with you, what they continue to stir and activate you, the way they speak to you not only in your inner world but outside of you. Notice any synchronicities of encounter. Reflect on the sense of meaning you felt within the journey itself and the threads of connection that may have emerged as you listened to the experiences of others. This ongoing weaving of connection helps us to open hidden pathways to the multiplicity of meaning and self-reflection possible within the images.

  • We'll be spending the next few days preparing to enter deeper into the imaginal realm as we approach individual sessions. Pan out to your life over the past six months to examine both the inner and outer shifts taking place.

    Examine the past several months to place yourself contextually within this moment. What challenges have you been moving through? How has your life transformed in subtle or apparent ways? What relationships have ebbed and flowed?

  • Zoom out further today to consider the past several years of your life. In what areas have you faced challenges and where have you grown? What major transitions have you encountered and how did you pass through them? In your reflections today, take time to appreciate and celebrate your movements through time. Honor the depth of your experience and express compassion for struggle where this may be due. Notice your strength and how it emerged in necessary moments. Notice where feelings of weakness live within you and which settings and events bring this out. Are there any patterns that seem to re-emerge over time?

    Examine the past several years of your life. Honor the transitions, struggles, and growth points along with moments both of strength and weakness. What patterns have been present?

  • Have you had any dreams over the past two weeks? Continuing to prepare for deeper entry into the imaginal, spend a few moments with any images, figures, or senses arising from the recent nighttime. As Mary Watkins writes in her study Waking Dreams, "The dream does not provide for direct dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. It is the acts of recalling, recording, and associating to the dream that provide the points of meeting."

    Explore a dream image.

  • Please sit with the following questions as we conclude week 4: 

    How have you been since our activation workshop last week?
    Were you able to work with an image from the experience?
    Any new insights arising from the practice and prompts this week?
    Any signs of resistance and how are you working with it?

    Please share your responses in your private correspondence document. Find the private link to your document here.

Week 3

  • Listen to the lecture, Entering Active Imagination, to prepare for our first workshop session next Saturday. 

  • Note in detail your day in taste. Pay close attention and express the textures, dimensions, and qualities of taste.

  • Today we shift our attention to the realm of touch. Throughout the span of a day, tune into the skin of your body, your sense organ for perceiving touch. Stay connected to the external here, touch as it relates to the physical. Note the textures, temperature, pressures, vibrations, and sensations you sense.

    Describe your movement in a day through the lens of the skin.

  • Tune today to your sense of scent. Feel free to venture into the realm of memory, but allow the external, present world lead the way.

    What openings do I perceive through scent today? Follow the pathways these openings lead.

  • We've spent the last three days attending to the more subtle of our senses: taste, touch, and scent. The stimuli we perceive from these senses play a part in our navigation through the world and in the way we are roused in enjoyment, pleasure, and discomfort, but they are often registered unconsciously. We now turn to the senses that are more at the forefront of our conscious lives, beginning with sound. We typically perceive and process sound according to its surface input (for example, what someone's words say to us).  Attempt to deepen your conscious perception of sound by tuning into qualities beyond the literal. Pay attention to pitch, inflection, a sense of chaos and order, harmonics, and the way vibration of sound enters and resonates within the form of your body throughout the course of the day. Pay particular attention to your own sound current when you speak and express—what does your own vibration feel like within your body? Open your ears not just to the conversations that take place in your day, but the subtle sounds of the world around you: the buzz of appliances, the soft song of birds, the patter of footsteps, the rustle of wind...

    How does sound enter and inform you today?

  • We bring our attention to our final sense, that of sight. Practice the act of close looking today. Spend time with objects, people, and surroundings that you engage with often to notice details and visual qualities you don't often notice or appreciate. Get granular. Practice also zooming out, seeing the big picture as you go about your day. Take in the larger view: look up at the sky, the treetops, and the peripheral.

    What visual qualities did I take time to notice and appreciate today?

  • Today and each Friday moving forward, we’ll use our prompts as an opportunity to connect around your process and practice, to examine and express what might be emerging or shifting for you. Please take a moment to respond to the check in email before our workshop tomorrow.

    How did your meditations go this week? Did you practice daily?  
    What subtle shifts and insights are coming up for you?
    Where did you struggle this week?
    Were there any interesting revelations that came through the daily writing prompts?

Week 2

  • Sit with the inquiry: what is the nature of my integrity? What does self-integrity mean to me? 

  • This past week, we've been in the dark phase of the moon, representing the dark of the unconscious. Today, before we move out of this particular stage of the lunar month, take a moment to honor a dark aspect of the self. Feel into any feelings of pain, longing, confusion, unknowing, criticism or anger present within you. Where do you feel a wall within yourself? Spend time with this feeling without trying to shift or change or transform this aspect. What does this feeling want to express within you? How might it be guiding or informing you? How can you honor its point of view?

    Honor an aspect of darkness within you as you consider its point of view. 

  • Orient yourself within the new practice — where do you find yourself? What resistance feels present? What feels like a stretch? 

  • "From the moment the inquiry begins until the day it ends. Nothing is dismissed as meaningless, random, or inconsequential. On the contrary, all things, every object and every action take on significance to soul."

    —The Art of Inquiry: A depth psychological perspective, Elizabeth Coppin and Joseph Nelson

    Begin to take note of what has been and is unfolding in your inner and outer world over the last ten days. The journey we are embarking on is one of intentional self-inquiry, the work of circling around (for embodied understanding of) our own nature. 

    Consider the nature of the flower you brought into your welcome call — what is its nature and how does its aesthetic appeal (the way it called to you) mirror your desire for expression? 

    Welcome the flower as an ongoing guide during this time. Honor it, carry it with you. One way to do this is to make it material. Write a poem about it, draw it, sculpt it, make a representation of it, write a letter to it, sing a song of it. 

    Assignment: Please email me the name of your flower and three words that it evokes within you. If you do not know its species name, take a picture of it & do an image search to identify it. 

  • Honor what is present : resistance, anxiety, trepidation, fear, emotional insight, subtle revelation. Give voice to your inner landscape. 

    As Coppin and Nelson suggest, nothing should be dismissed. Everything matters. Make it matter by giving it form via language. 

  • The American poet Wallace Stevens has said that there is always poetry at the heart of things. Choose a scenario in your life in which there is tension or discomfort and look for its poetry. It might be a tense relationship, illness, recurring or demanding symptoms. What myth is alive? You might ask the archetypal question, "what does this event, this thing, move in my soul?"

    Ask, where is poetry at work in my tensions and discomfort?

  • Rest.

Week 1

  • What is my intention as I begin this journey? What brought me here? Are there traces of something within me that is longing to be expressed? What unknown voice or voices are asking to be heard?

  • What if I am on purpose?

  • Who am I on purpose?

  • Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and comparative scholar, devoted his life to understanding how humans make sense of their existence through story, symbol, and ritual. He suggested that what we truly seek is not abstract “meaning,” but a felt resonance with life itself—a state in which the outer world awakens something inwardly alive.

    “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive—so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive" (Campbell, The Power of Myth). 

    Consider where and in what you feel the rapture of being alive. 

  • "Many repress their calling because they do not know how to defend and protect it from the judgement of others," says contemporary philosopher Joel Uili (“On the Repression of Vocation”).

    Consider calling: what calls? In what ways do you answer what calls to you and in what ways do you hold back?

  • Today is the new moon — always an alchemical time as the sun and moon come into alignment with the earth. As our planet's most important cosmic bodies, the sun and moon are symbolic of the dual aspects of the self (we see this symbolically represented in ancient and medieval alchemical texts). The union of sun and moon marks a moment where dual parts (yin and yang, receptive and active, conscious and unconscious) come into union to (potentially) produce new gnosis within us (new embodied understanding or knowing).


    Bringing this sense of possibility into our awareness, we can work with/in these moments, to deepen our self knowledge. 

    The new moon also marks the beginning of a new lunar cycle. In the shadow of the earth, the moon becomes completely dark in a moment of reset before a new cycle of waxing and waning illumination. The dark moon is a time of deep inner feeling — this sense of ourselves and our inner emotional fields prior to language. 

    This particular new moon is potent because we also have Mercury here too, in cazimi with the sun. A cazimi translates to "at the heart of the sun," and Mercury is the archetypal form of the trickster figure, the psychopomp who can move between worlds (inner & outer) and rules communication. Mercury is the Roman name for the Greek god Hermes, the winged-foot messenger who is also the god of commerce & thieves. Mercury is also the ruler of the mind so using a symbolic lens, we can imagine the mind seated at the heart or throne of the sun. 

    We also have Lilith conjunct (right there with) sun, moon, Mercury. Lilith refers to the lunar apogee, the point where the moon is farthest from the earth in its elliptical orbit. Lilith is the archetypal coordinate of the unclaimed feminine, the shadowed instinct, sovereignty, erotic truth, exile, the refusal to submit.

    (We're looking through an archetypal, symbolic lens here). 

    All these cosmic bodies and lunar apogee are in the same position right now, right at the cusp of the domains of the sky where the constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius live. Scorpio is interested in our darkest, unconscious depths and Sagittarius is the archetypal archer, the one who draws his arrow toward a very specific target. 

    This moment in time is offering us an opportunity to feel deeply. To sense the parts of ourselves that have something to say to us, especially those parts that may have been hidden. We are gifted with an opportunity to meet our own deep longing so that we can draw back our arrows and point our bow directly into our own hearts, so that our target is our own center. And with the support of the lunar apogee (Lilith) here, we can do so in a way that liberates our own wild, erotically alive nature (eros being the part of us that feels fully). 

    Today, sit with your own deep longing. We've already spent time getting in touch with this place with us (such timing as we begin this journey!). The invitation today is to go all the way in. To the deepest part of you. Feel what is present. 

    Language should come secondary here. Perhaps you leave it behind all together for today. Simply feel.

  • Rest.