Active Imagination: Honoring the Abject Black & Fresh Connection With the Ally

A Workshop With Monika Wikman

For this workshop, we will bring threads from the lecture into the processes of active imagination. Honoring the Mothers of the Nigredo as the true ground of transformation, we will turn to work with Jungian analyst Jeff Raff’s discoveries in his book, Practical Guide to Ally Work. We will bring his wisdom into active imagination with the intention of making fresh contact with your ally, your star, your vertical axis, to draw the energy down into the rest of your being and your life.

The workshop aims to help participants develop various practices for cultivating attunement to the subtle body. The midline lives in every person; it is every being’s birth right. Osteopathy, cranial sacral work, and Taoist alchemy each work with the midline. Many people have spontaneous dreams during which tutelary spirits begin teaching these realities to the dreamer. This level of alchemical work wakes up the psyche. Learning to attune to and differentiate the energy bodies (along with the bodies of complexes) is a big part of the work needed today for the alchemical stone to grow in both worlds.

Meditations and active Imagination with shamanic music by my friend Kirsten Kairos will be offered to help participants open to finding fresh contact with their own star, their own vertical axis informed by the transcendent.

Monika Wikman, Ph.D, is a Jungian analyst and astrologer. Author of Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness, she has also contributed chapters, articles and poems to numerous publications including a chapter in The Dream and Its Amplification, edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Furlotti. A graduate of the Jung–Von Franz Center for Depth Psychology in Zürich, she taught for many years in the graduate department at California State University, Los Angeles, and was a dream researcher at UCSD Medical Center on "Dreams of the Dying."   She hosts a non-profit project under Earthways.com, The Center for Alchemical Studies.  Podcasts with Monika on various topics can be found at Shrinkrapradio.com and SpeakingofJung.com