Courses & Lectures

The Psychoneuroimmunology of Shadow Projection (Part 2)

An Evening with Tim Lyons  June 25, 2021

“May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men’s eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves.” C. G. Jung, The Red Book

“I’ve spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything?” C. G. Jung, The Red Book

            In part 2 of this program, we will explore how we can develop somatic consciousness in order to unlearn some of our most primal, instinctually and biologically conditioned attachments. The child’s awakening at birth is charged with duality from the first cry of chaotic, inflammatory emotions that interrupt the sleeping, dreaming experience of oneness in the womb. The first breath of air boots up the immune system of the infant and the essential journey of seeking connection begins. The initial inflammatory shadow projection of chaos at birth is appeased as the archetypal instinct to search for nourishment kicks in. If one is lucky enough, the flow of mother’s colostrum, the yellowish fluid, “liquid gold,” almost narcotic, dense in nutrients and antibodies, soothes the infant. The golden shadow of paradisal oneness is projected within the union of mother and infant.

The ultimate vulnerable shocking moment at birth triggers the fight or flight response of the sympathetic nervous system. Then, in an alchemical transformation, it shifts to the emotionally healing, digestion and procreation supporting, immune enhancing, parasympathetic nervous system. This alternation of compensatory dualities; psychic and somatic, diastolic and systolic, of dark and golden shadow projection, is the beginning of the hero’s object relations journey.

The embodied pattern of dependent object relations, once essential for the survival of the infant, may develop into attachments to the bad object. These stressful, auto-immune-inducing, co-dependent attachments can become deadly, even as we struggle to grow to independence. Understanding these frightful situations can help mobilize our will to turn inward so we can make conscious choices that are biologically and emotionally sustainable to the Self. The goal is to transform our own natural internal psychopharmacology to promote nourishing inner peace and conscious individuation.

Incubating Awareness into the Cycle of Night and Day

An Evening with Tim Lyons: August 13, 2021

      “I [Jung]: Allow me the indiscrete question: have you ever had an incubation sleep in your

      kitchen?

       L [Librarian]: No, I’ve never entertained such a strange idea.

       I [Jung]: Let me say that you’d learn a lot that way about the nature of your kitchen.

       Good night, Sir!”                                                                           C.G. Jung, The Red Book

         Tonight’s program is about using dream incubation and lucid dreaming practices to mine the wisdom of the psyche and body so we can take direct responsibility for our health and individuation. Through these techniques we can develop our intentional awareness by asking our dreams for guidance, not just for revelation for healing our traumas and diseases, but also to prevent them.

          What are the shelves of our inner kitchen stocked and conditioned with; what are our minds and bodies consuming? Through dream incubation and lucid dreaming, we can learn to prepare and embody Self-loving nutrients for our inner alchemical processor. In these recipes the ingredients will be fresh organic mind matter, not digitally enhanced through artificial intelligence. There will be no GMO’s or harmful additives. We can draw from the world of the archetypes for unpolluted minerals and spices. We do not have to worry about fake news in these depths. Instead of the popular habit of binge watching, we can take on our own hero’s journey rather than watch someone else’s.

         The premonitory wisdom of our body and psyche can let us know, especially if we ask, where we are being taken health wise. This way, we may not need to wait for a mental or physical health crisis to develop in order to act. We can listen to the needs of the psyche and body to become aware of what triggers inflammatory projections psychologically and biologically. Through lucidity practices we can learn fearlessness and peace of mind, refine our emotional and physical actions, and strengthen our body’s immune systems. Developing incubation and lucidity practices in our waking life helps us to turn inward to reconnect with ourselves despite increasingly addictive distractions of daily life. Instead of experiencing numbing passivity, we can actively pursue our own self-realization and holistic health.

Breaking Down the Dissociative Walls to Our Many Selves

An evening with Tim Lyons: August 20, 2021

Cooking With Self Love in the Psychic Kitchen, Part 2. Three Friday evening talks (you are invited to attend all or each) on exploring how to “cook” holistically with the inner fire of your alchemical kitchen, and hopefully, get to taste some nourishing dishes.

“I called my soul and asked her to dive down into the floods, whose distant roaring I could hear… And thus she plunged into the darkness like a shot, and from the depths she called out: “Will you accept what I bring?” C.G. Jung, The Red Book

“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/ It is not dying…/ Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void/ It is shining…/ That you may see the meaning of within/ It is being…/ That love is all and love is everyone/ It is knowing….” Tomorrow Never Knows, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

How we can authentically participate, embody, and co-create with the inexhaustible depths of the psyche and reap benefits from this divine resource is the focus of tonight’s program. We are all possessed of many personality parts and the more dissociated we are from these parts, the more we are unwittingly possessed by them. Building a bridge of relationship to these many selves yields more than a duality of good and evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The dive down might more resemble Alice going down the rabbit hole and encountering an entire world of characters. There we may meet a talking rabbit or receive an invitation from an unseen, traumatized inner child, which may come to us from the compelling experience of a panic attack.

Common genres of the multiplicity appear at various depths in the psyche holding different qualities of emotional energy, such as parental and child voices and identities conceived in trauma. Self-attacking parts that emerge on the daily stage, like the judge and the perfectionist are abundant, as are the needy indecisive, the angry, the fearful, the risk taker, the procrastinator and the devourer, etc. At deeper levels the intergenerational transmissions of trauma hold energy from unresolved ancestral patterns. Available are lovers, tricksters,  hags, wise guides, goddesses, prophets, magicians, gender fluid beings, shamanistic animals, and unlived lives. Deeper still, we may encounter experiences that seem so real and so historic they feel like memories from past lives or even the progression of a future life.

All inner multiplicities interact at a cellular level, transforming our neural pathways and immune systems. They determine how we relate, eat, work, exercise, sleep, individuate and find love, health and peace. By experimenting with lucid dreaming, creative imagination and visions, and other inner work practices, we expand our somatic consciousness to open to all experience. The dissociative walls that once served to contain our pathologies and shadows can now ripen and dissolve into a “participation mystique” with the many selves and the macrocosm. This can open us up to a lifetime of guidance and healing from the depths and in turn, the multiplicities learn from us.

Collecting, Digesting and Honoring the Harvest of Inner Work

An evening with Tim Lyons: September 3, 2021

“To recognize and know your ambitions and your greed, to gather your craving, to cultivate it, grasp it, make it serviceable, influence it, master it, order it, to give it interpretations and meanings, is extravagant.” C.G. Jung, The Red Book

In this evening’s talk we will examine how creating a special collection of our most impactful dreams and nightmares, rapturous visions and imaginings, from both the night and day, can open us to our highest potentials. Recording and getting to know these experiences intimately, can help us embody our evolving personal myth and live more vitally in the present. But, paradoxically, becoming too attached to these experiences is “extravagant.” Ultimately, we need to be able to dissolve our attachment to these patterns and the identities that have created obstacles to our health, individuation, and liberation. In order to accomplish this dissolution, as Jung wrote in the Red Book, “I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself, until I know only that I am.”

Most dreams are best interpreted from the standpoint that their appearances are generated from within. If they do reflect an outer event, earlier seeds of premonition or warning can be recognized when we compare our inner record with our current outer experience. If we discover synchronistic connections to the present, their numinous energy can refine our direction. Through dreams and regressions, we may also discover unlived lives and past lives. By studying the genealogy of our inner and outer lineages which have created patterns of intergenerational transmission, we can identify the sources of our traumas and empowerments. Whether real or imagined, these, perhaps, phantoms of the soul’s evolution, give us essential insights about our present state of individuation.

            The next stage of the process is learning to choreograph rituals to honor this inexhaustible harvest. Using wisdom from alchemy and other traditions as Jung modeled, we can develop our own experimental rituals to honor and dissolve these identities, from the darkest painful demons to the brightest ecstatic gods. Then, as if awakening lucidly in a dream, we can perceive that all experiences can be learned from symbolically, and we can avoid acting out our projections. By letting go of our myths of identity, we can break the habits of self-limiting behaviors, and use the reclaimed energy for living our creativity in the present.

Awakening the Healing Self in a Time of Inflammation and Numbing

An Evening with Tim Lyons: December 3, 2021

“It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason there is no adequate protection from psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.” The Symbolic Life. C.G. Jung.

An unfortunate trend during the pandemic is that many people are slipping into self-destructive inflammatory behaviors and numbing, even as the planet, the extension of our being, is heating up. These familiar dynamics of stress and trauma grow out of prolonged exposure to the collective contagions of fear and confusion. This dynamic has brought to a boil psychic and biological maladies that were incubated or problematic before the pandemic. The development of compensatory addictions to numb the pain, especially in the areas of comfort foods, the internet, substance abuse, workaholism, profit, etc., evoke a flush of need, shame and greed. This escalation corresponds to our “addictions” to hypervigilance, anxiety, and depression. Understanding the archetypal patterns of addiction – chaos, shame, self-destruction and rebirth, with their roots at a deep cellular level –  is key to awakening the healing Self. Both inner and outer integrative work to diffuse fear is necessary in order to reclaim life force for rebirth.

There is no blame for this existential human predicament, but seeking blame, projecting onto outer enemies, and self-attack are part of the archetypal process that imprisons us. The damage is evident in the very young, even the unborn, and the aging. Children as young as seven are being medicated with antianxiety and antidepressant drugs in unprecedented numbers. Food addictions affect people of all weight categories, but the fact that 80% of Covid victims hospitalized are overweight, may push us to understand the roots of the epidemic of obesity. Among the elderly, the spiraling rise in metabolic diseases has led to increased prescriptions to compensate and numb the symptoms. Unfortunately, these drugs do little for the underlying causes. 

Will we be like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating water who does not sense the increasing danger of boiling to death? In actual experiments the frogs do jump out, but for many of us humans we have become numb. Advancements in the science of vaccines and a growing interest in preventative medicine are starting to meet these escalating challenges. How might we personally awaken and turn down the heat on our inflamed pain body? Perhaps, we can bring mother earth, our ultimate source of nourishment, along with us on our quest to heal ourselves.