Embedded Files
The River That Moves
Qi Gong, Aging, and the Art of Coming Home to the Body
Every morning, before the world fully arrives, I stand in my living room with its sweeping view of the city below and the mountains beyond, and I move. Slowly. Deliberately. As if the air itself has weight, and I am learning to respect it.
This is Qi Gong.
I have practiced for years now, folding it into my morning ritual the way one folds a beloved letter — carefully, with attention, knowing what’s inside matters. And I have come to believe it is one of the most quietly radical things a person — especially an older person — can do.
What Is Qi Gong, Really?
Qi Gong (pronounced chee-gong) is an ancient Chinese practice that combines slow, intentional movement, breath, and focused awareness. Translated loosely, qi means life force or vital energy, and gong means cultivation or skill. So Qi Gong is the skillful cultivation of life force. Already, doesn’t that sound like something worth doing?
Unlike the aerobic urgency of many Western fitness traditions — the burning, the pushing, the conquering of the body — Qi Gong moves toward the body with a kind of reverence. It asks: Where is the energy blocked? Where does the river run thin? And then it invites flow.
The movements are often deceptively simple. Raising the arms like wings. Turning at the waist with an open chest. Sinking slowly into the earth and rising again. But in that simplicity lives extraordinary complexity, because the attention is internal. You are not performing. You are listening.
Why It Matters More As We Age
Here is what I have noticed in my own body, and what I have witnessed in decades of accompanying others through the landscape of their lives: aging is not primarily a problem of the body. It is a problem of relationship to the body.
We live in a culture that worships the young body and subtly — or not so subtly — treats the aging body as a failure. Something to be corrected, concealed, or pharmaceutically managed. We absorb this message so deeply that by the time we reach our sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond, many of us have developed a kind of estrangement from our physical selves. The body becomes a site of complaint rather than communion.
Qi Gong offers a different story.
In its cosmology, aging is not a deterioration — it is a deepening. The older practitioner brings something the young student cannot: accumulated experience of loss, limitation, and the slow wisdom that comes from having lived inside a body through many seasons. Qi Gong meets us
exactly where we are. If you can only stand for five minutes, you stand for five minutes. If balance is uncertain, you can practice seated. There is no failing here.
The physiological benefits are real and increasingly well-documented: improved balance and fall prevention, reduced inflammation, lower blood pressure, better sleep, relief from joint pain, and enhanced immune function. For those of us managing the particular negotiations of an older body, these are not small things.
But what moves me more deeply is what happens inside.
The Conversation Between Qi Gong and the Inner Life
I am a Jungian depth psychotherapist. I have spent fifty years accompanying people into the underworld of the psyche — the dreams, the shadows, the unlived life. And I have found that Qi Gong and inner work are, at their root, practicing the same thing: the cultivation of presence.
Meditation, as most of us have come to understand it, asks us to sit with what arises. To observe the stream of thought and sensation without being swept away. It is a profound and necessary practice. But for many people — particularly those who carry trauma, anxiety, or what I think of as a particularly restless qi — pure stillness can feel like a battle. The mind has nowhere to go, so it wheels and dives.
Qi Gong gives the body a task. Not a strenuous task, not a distracting task — but a gentle, rhythmic, repetitive movement that becomes, itself, a form of meditation. The mind quiets not because we have forced it to sit still, but because it has been given something beautiful to attend to. The movement becomes the anchor that mindfulness often seeks.
I think of it as meditation in motion. Or perhaps more accurately: as the body discovering that it, too, knows how to pray.
The Quality of Attention
What distinguishes Qi Gong from simple stretching or gentle exercise is the quality of attention it requires. You are asked to feel the energy moving through your hands. To sense the connection between your feet and the earth. To notice the internal landscape of your own body, the way you might notice weather — without judgment, with curiosity.
This quality of attention is exactly what mindfulness teachers have been pointing toward for decades. And it is exactly what Jungian depth work cultivates: the capacity to be present to what is actually happening, rather than what we fear is happening or wish were happening.
When I raise my arms in the morning, palms softly upturned, I am practicing receptivity. When I sink my weight downward, I am practicing groundedness. When I breathe into the movement, I am practicing the most fundamental truth: that I am here, now, alive in this body, in this moment, in this one wild and miraculous life.
For those of us who have lived long and accumulated much — grief, wisdom, love, loss, the particular tenderness that comes from having been broken open more than once — that practice of here, now, alive is not a small thing.
It is everything.
The Animal Teachers
Sometimes, as I move in contemplation, I become aware of my Salukis watching me. Or more precisely — resting near me, in that particular Saluki way that is never quite stillness and never quite alertness, but something sovereign and exquisite in between.
I find myself looking at them. Their beautiful, athletic, impossibly graceful bodies. The architecture of a breed that has run alongside humans for five thousand years, shaped by desert and wind and the long horizon.
And something happens that I can only describe as felt kinship. I begin to feel into how they inhabit their bodies — the ease, the aliveness, the complete absence of self-consciousness about being a body. They do not evaluate their movement. They do not hold back. They live in sensation the way water lives in a riverbed: naturally, completely, without apology.
This becomes its own deepening of my practice.
Jung understood the animal as a carrier of instinct — that which we have over-civilized in ourselves, that which knows things the ego cannot. When I let my Salukis teach me what unconflicted embodiment looks like, I am not being fanciful. I am receiving instruction from very old wisdom. The kind that does not come through words.
Qi Gong, at its deepest, is moving toward exactly that: the body returned to itself. The animal nature reclaimed. The qi flows, not because we have commanded it, but because we have finally stopped blocking it.
A Practical Invitation
If you are curious, I encourage you to begin simply. There are excellent Qi Gong teachers available online — Jeff Chand’s gentle morning sequences have been a companion of mine — and many community centers and senior programs offer in-person classes. You need no equipment, no special clothing, no particular level of fitness. You need only a few square feet of space and a willingness to slow down.
Begin with five minutes. Stand (or sit) with your feet hip-width apart, close your eyes, and simply breathe. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the air moving in and out of your lungs. Then, slowly, begin to move your arms — forward and back, up and down — as if you are moving through warm water. Let the breath lead. Let the movement follow.
Notice what happens.
I suspect what you will find — what I find, every morning before the city wakes — is that the river of life is still running in you. That the qi has not abandoned you. That your body, this remarkable, faithful, long-traveled body, is still capable of something that feels, surprisingly, like joy.
Afton Blake, Ph.D. is a Jungian depth psychotherapist with fifty years of practice in depth psychology, past life regression, and Enneagram work. She writes at Wandering the Deep about the inner life, aging, consciousness, film, art, and the breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty of being alive.
Every Life Contains a Thousand Deaths
On transience, my friend, and the fire I refuse to surrender
My friend died on a Wednesday night, just before midnight. She went peacefully — smiling, making eye contact in her final days, unafraid. What had troubled her most in those last months was not death itself but what came before it: the neuropathy from chemotherapy had slowly taken her walking, then the movement of her arms. To be stilled in the body before the body is finished. That loss — of motion, of reach, of the simple freedom to move through the world — stayed with me as its own particular grief within the larger one.
I had been with her two nights before. We sat close. I held her hand, cheek to cheek, and felt something I can only call grace — a soul preparing itself without panic, without rage, without resistance. My friend was surrounded by her chosen community, the people who had become her truest kin in the second half of life. At the end, it was friends who kept vigil. And those friends gave everything.
She went gently into that good night.
I am not built that way.
Dylan Thomas wrote those famous lines for his dying father — rage, rage against the dying of the light — and when someone brought the poem back to me the morning after my friend's passing, something in my chest answered: yes. That is me. Not rage born of bitterness or fear. Rage as pure aliveness. The refusal to go quiet before my time, to stop mattering, creating, wandering, loving. I am eighty-four years old. I have a 400-day walking streak, a litter of Saluki puppies, a new Substack, a Jungian practice of fifty years, trips to Granada and India ahead of me. I am not finished.
My friend's way was beautiful and right for her. Mine will be different. And sitting with her death has made me think — as death always does, when we let it — about all the other deaths a single life contains.
* * *
Ernest Becker argued that the awareness of biological death is the hidden engine of everything — our civilizations, our religions, our legacies, our wars. We build what he called immortality projects: elaborate structures that let us feel we transcend the plain fact of our ending. He was right. And he didn't go far enough.
Because by the time we arrive at biological death, we have already been dying for decades.
There is the death of innocence — that first unprotected encounter with the world's indifference. The death of youth, announced quietly in a mirror. The death of relationships — love that ends without funeral, trust that doesn't recover, the friendship that reveals its limits. Nobody sends flowers for that one. Nobody sits shiva for the loss of being truly known.
There is the death of belief — in religion, in institutions, in the country we thought we understood. That last one feels particularly acute right now, for millions of us watching something we loved reveal a shadow we did not know how to hold. The death of belief in one's country is one of the loneliest griefs, because it is not permitted to be grief at all.
And above all these named losses: transience itself. The continuous dying that is simply what it means to be alive in time. Not a series of discrete events but a condition — the medium we move through. Each moment already gone as it arrives. Every conversation, every face, every morning light on the hills. Impermanence is not what happens to the life. It is what the life is.
Our culture, which cannot hold even the single biological death, has no container for any of this. There is no ritual. No acknowledged mourning. You grieve the lost friendship alone. You metabolize the disillusionment in silence. You feel the body changing and find no elder who says: this too is a dying. It is allowed to be grieved as such.
And then there is ageism — a death-while-living that those of us in the second half of life know with peculiar intimacy. The gaze that slides past you. The voice that rises to explain something you understood before the speaker was born. The moment when you are finally seen, and the first and only thing registered is the category: old. Every decade of accumulated wisdom, every present aliveness, every precise and singular quality of who you are right now — waiting behind a door that is frequently never opened.
* * *
And yet. Beneath all of it — beneath every loss, every erosion, every indignity — something does not die.
I have sat with people in their deepest unraveling for fifty years. What I have witnessed, again and again, is this: the soul persists. Not unchanged. Not unscathed. But present. The ego — that structure of identity, role, appearance, social function — is exquisitely vulnerable to time and loss. The soul is not.
This is not consolation offered lightly. It is what the regression work my mother pioneered taught us, what the Sufi poets have always known: die before you die and discover there is no death. The soul moves through, not into nothing. Transience is the condition of the ego-life. Constancy is the condition of the soul. And all the inner work — the long patient return to one's own depth — is the practice of learning to live from the level that does not die.
My friend knew this, I believe, in the way that people who have done real inner work eventually know it. Her peace was not resignation. It was recognition.
* * *
I want to close with an invitation, because that is what my friend's death has given me — and what every death gives us, if we let it.
Sit with these questions. Not in a morbid spirit but in the spirit of someone who loves their life enough to want to live it fully, all the way to the end:
What deaths have you already lived through — the ones no one called death? The lost friendship, the abandoned dream, the country you thought you knew. Have you grieved them as the real losses they were?
What is the soul beneath your losses? Not what you do or how you appear or what role you carry — but what persists in you, what has always been recognizably, irreducibly you?
And when the final threshold comes — what would make it yours? Who do you want present? What music? What beauty around you? Have you told anyone?
My friend went gently. The Mastery Circle held her. It was grace.
I intend to rage — tenderly, gratefully, with every remaining ounce of my fire.
Both are good deaths.
* * *
Afton Blake, Ph.D.
Jungian depth psychotherapist, writer, painter, and Saluki breeder
A Film That Broke Me Open: Sirat
SIRĀT: Descent into the Dark Heart of the World
Wandering the Deep | Afton Blake, Ph.D.
Sirāt (Arabic: صراط) — the path, the way; in Islamic cosmology, the razor-thin bridgestretched over the abyss of Hell that every soul must cross. To walk it is to be weighed,tested, unmade. The righteous pass. Others fall. Many fall.I did not know this when I pressed play. I was drawn in — unaware of what lay ahead —deeper and deeper into Hell. First the drive over torturous terrain in a vehicle whollyinadequate to the task. Food and fuel diminishing. And then: unbearable loss. I weptuncontrollably, raging and shaking, for over an hour — more intensely than I had in avery long time. I was grateful to be alone. There was no one to perform composure for.This is not a film review. It is testimony.
The ancient Greeks had a word for it: katabasis — the soul’s descent into theunderworld. Not death, but something the living must pass through to be remade.Orpheus descended for love. Persephone was taken. Dante descended with a guide. Thekatabatic arc is one of the oldest stories the human psyche knows: you go down, you arestripped of everything, and — if you survive — you return carrying something that hasno name yet.Sirāt is katabatic cinema. The Sahara is not backdrop. It is protagonist. Ancient,indifferent, merciless — the desert as the unconscious itself, vast and pre-personal,stripping away everything the ego brought along for the journey.I have dreamed of desert my whole life. I do not love it. I want water and green, theflowing and the fertile. And yet the desert keeps arriving in my dreams, unbidden,insistent. The psyche is faithful to our wholeness, not our comfort. The desert holdswhat the conscious mind resists. Sirāt found me on an ordinary evening and pulled meall the way down.
Three bands of travelers — each already carrying the weight of their own private ordeal,their own liminal crossing through life’s wilderness — are thrown together by road andcircumstance. I call them bands deliberately. Not families, though family feeling willgrow between them. Not groups. Bands — the word that holds the sense of peoplebonded by ordeal, like medieval pilgrims, like soldiers who did not choose each otherbut cannot now be separated. Each arrives in the desert already wounded. Each is mid-crossing before the real crossing begins.
The maimed move through the film like figures out of Bosch — a man with one leg, aman with no hands. The desert does not spare them. It does not spare anyone. Manywho attempt the bridge will fall. This is the truth Sirāt does not flinch from: the Sirātbridge is razor-thin, and most who walk it do not cross. And those few who do surviveare left with the most devastating question the film asks, the question that echoes longafter the screen goes dark: survived — but for what?And yet something extraordinary happens in this furnace of extremity among those stillwalking: the separate bands begin to dissolve into one another. Not through choiceexactly. Through necessity. Through the radical human impulse, even in hell, towardcaritas — care. They share what little remains. They tend each other. Out of threeisolated sorrows, something new forms.In Jungian depth psychology we speak of the temenos — the sacred container, theprotected space where transformation becomes possible. It is the consulting room, thedream circle, the ritual space. Here, impossibly, the temenos forms in open desert, heldtogether not by walls but by shared extremity — and by a dog.
Her name is Pipa. In Spanish it means lover of horses — and she arrives in this film atthe very threshold of the Year of the Fire Horse, as if the universe had cast her withintention. She moves freely between the bands where human pride and grief cannot. Shecarries what the humans can no longer afford to carry openly: innocence, unconditionallove, trust. In Jungian terms she is the anima mundi — the world soul in miniature,alive and warm at the center of apocalypse. And her name, in Chinese, belongs to astringed instrument whose very word is onomatopoeic — the sound the strings make asthey are played. She is music. She is pulse. She is the life force given a body.There are two scenes with Pipa I cannot shake.The first: she appears to be dying. And the bands — these strangers, these separatesorrows — gather around her small body and place their hands on her. Gently.Completely. They cannot stop the mines. They cannot reverse the descent. But they canplace their hands on this creature and mean it utterly. In hell, love is still the response.The second: Esteban — the child — sleeping with Pipa in his arms. The boy holdinginnocence while he sleeps. It says: even here. Even now. Even in this, something is held.And then the van rolls backward.It is the child who dies first. And with him, Pipa. And with them both: innocence itself,and the belief that there is a future worth surviving toward. Not the warrior. Not thebroken or the maimed. The child — the unquestioned assumption that the worldcontinues, that life is worth the living of it. And the dog who never once doubted thatlove was the appropriate response to existence. In one moment the film takes both: thefuture and the faith in it.
And the father is left standing at the truest edge of the Sirāt bridge — not the desert’sedge, but the interior one. With love gone from the world, he must decide whether to goon at all. Whether there is a self remaining that wishes to. This is the abyss beneathevery other abyss in the film. Not can he survive — but does survival mean anythingwithout the ones who made it mean something.Pipa was the golden thread running through the temenos. Her vulnerability forebodedwhat was coming — when innocence is threatened, the animal body of the group knowsbefore the mind does. The soul is leaving the container. The apocalypse does notannounce itself through fire first. It announces itself through the loss of the innocent.
And then — the drum.Not music exactly. Not civilization, not culture — those were abandoned long ago on theroad behind them. This is something prior. The life pulse beneath all of it. The heartbeatthe body remembers before the mind has language for survival. The drum does not askyou to feel better. It simply insists: you are still here. Your heart is still beating. This isenough.And they dance.But here is what undoes you: they do not dance together. Each dances alone. In ultimateseparateness. Each body moving in its own private language, its own private grief, itsown private defiance. The dance is not celebration. It is not consolation. It is themomentary escape — however brief, however insufficient — from pain, from grief, fromdespair, from the inevitable death that waits beyond the next dune. The body rises whenwords cannot. The body says I am still here even when the mind has surrendered theargument.This is the Dionysian resurrection — the god torn apart and reborn not as the sameself, but as something deeper and more essential. Each dancer individuating in the fire.Each utterly alone and yet held, impossibly, by the same pulse.The dance is the climax of Sirāt. Everything the descent has asked, the dancing bodyanswers. Not in words. In pulse. In the life force insisting on itself against all reason.
And then: the train.Survivors — the few who crossed the bridge. Each in their own compartment. No longerentwined. The temenos that the desert forged — that extraordinary sacred container ofshared suffering and shared tenderness — has dissolved back into the ordinariness ofseparate lives. The desert gave them to each other. And now the desert is behind them.Each carries what cannot be spoken. Each changed in ways that no one who wasn’t therecan quite receive.
This too is the katabatic truth. Orpheus descends. He is remade utterly. He returns. Andthe world above cannot hold what he brought back.The drum has stopped. Pipa is gone. Esteban is gone. The train moves on.And yet — and this is what Sirāt leaves in the body long after the screen goes dark — thesilence at the end is different from the silence at the beginning. It has the dance in it. Ithas all those hands placed on Pipa’s small body. It has the child sleeping, holdinginnocence, for one last night.How do you go on?Or do you?You discover you already have.
I did not plan to watch Sirāt at this particular threshold. But the psyche does not consultour calendars. We are now riding the Year of the Fire Horse — that blazing,ungovernable, creative force that arrived in February and asks everything of us. To ridethe Fire Horse you must first shed what you have been carrying. The Wood Snake yeartaught us that: the long, patient, necessary work of release.Sirāt completed something in me. That hour of weeping and raging and shaking — thatwas not breakdown. That was the last skin of the Snake year finally, fully released. Thegreat cleansing. The katabasis completing itself so the ascent could begin. I emergedfrom that hour emptied — and therefore, at last, ready.The film may do the same for you.If you feel called to watch it, I invite you: do not brace yourself. Do not manage yourresponse. Let the desert do what deserts do. Let the drum find your pulse. Let whateverneeds to move through you, move. Grieve what you have been carrying. Rage if rage isthere. This is not comfortable cinema — it is initiatory cinema, and it will ask somethingreal of you.And when it is over — when the train has carried the survivors into their separatesilences and the screen goes dark — notice what has shifted in you. Notice what skin youmay have left behind in the watching. Notice whether, in the emptying, there is alsosomething that feels like space. Like breath. Like the first trembling possibility offorward movement.The Wood Snake has shed its skin. The Fire Horse is running.The bridge is razor-thin. Many fall.But you are still here.Shed what you have been carrying. Mount the Horse. Ride.
Afton Blake, Ph.D. is a Jungian depth psychotherapist, writer, and wanderer. She writes at Wandering
the Deep on Substack.
The Fire Horse Rises: on the threshold of a 60-year flame
A meditation on hope, shadow, and the rare convergence of a new season with an ancient fire
Here in the hills of Los Angeles, we measure our seasons differently. Winter is our time of green — the hillsides flush with new grass, the air carrying rain. Now, as the light shifts and lengthens, I feel the particular quality of change that comes not just with the turning of the year, but with something older and rarer: we have just entered the Year of the Fire Horse, a cycle that comes only once every sixty years.
I know the Horse intimately. I was born in the Year of the Water Horse — the same equine shaped by a different element. Where the Fire Horse charges forward with blazing intensity, the Water Horse carries deep currents beneath the surface: intuition, flow, wisdom, the deep feminine. To have lived from one Horse year into another across sixty years — to feel this animal return, transformed, fiercer rising to the outer world. Emerging into the wise elder, understanding cycles that only a long life can teach.
The Horse returns, but now he is on fire. Something in me recognizes him. Something in me rises to meet him.
We need him. We are living through a time of profound collective shadow — upheaval, cruelty, the unraveling of things we believed were solid. The darkness is not imaginary. Jung understood that when the shadow rises collectively, when it erupts into the public sphere with such force and visibility, it is both a crisis and an invitation. The invitation is to consciousness. To witness what has been denied. To refuse the seduction of despair or escape into false comfort, but to stand facing the truth of what is - faith in the knowledge that this is not the end of the story.
The Fire Horse is precisely the energy such a moment calls for. Not passive hope, but active, embodied courage. Bold action. Authentic expression. The willingness and energy to be seen, to speak, to move — ACTION - even when the ground feels uncertain beneath us. His fire does not comfort. It clarifies. And clarity, right now, is a form of love. Action is love.
Hope is not naïveté. It is the hard-won knowledge that darkness is not the final word — that something is always composting, always preparing to rise.
In fifty years as a Jungian depth psychotherapist, I have sat with people in their winters — those interior seasons when the shadow rises and makes itself known personally, intimately, in the chambers of a single life. What I have learned, again and again, is this: the shadow carries treasure. The unlived life, the buried grief, the longing we were never permitted to feel — when these are witnessed rather than suppressed, they become fuel. They become the very material of transformation. What is true in the individual soul is true in the collective.
This season — whatever season you are inhabiting, whether the world outside is greening or turning gold — I invite you to turn toward what you have been turning away from. Not with force. Not with rage. But with the curiosity of one has the courage to jump into the fire. Courage, Action, Vision. Hope. Faith.
The Fire Horse asks for these. He comes once in a lifetime. Let us not waste his fire.
I walk into this year with my five orienting words: Equanimity. Vision. Wandering. Grace. Gratitude. I offer them to you as companions — wherever you are, whatever season holds you. Intermingled Courage, Action, Vision, Hope, Faith
— Afton Blake, Ph.D., is a Jungian depth psychotherapist, writer, and artist with fifty years of practice exploring the depths of the human psyche. She lives and works in the hills of Los Angeles. This is the first dispatch from Wandering the Deep.
The Shadow Descends: Reflections on This Day of ICE OUT
By Dr. Afton Blake
January 30, 2025
Today, January 30th, 2025, a cry rises across America. In Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, small towns and great cities alike — people are closing their shops,leaving their desks, gathering in the bitter cold to say enough.
They call it the National Shutdown. ICE Out. No school, no work, no shopping.
But those of us who have spent our lives tending the depths of the human psyche know it is something older than a protest. It is a collective expression of what Jung called the moral instinct — that ancient knowing in the human soul that recognizes when the fabric of communal life is being torn.
I have sat with people for fifty years. I have witnessed the shadow — personal and collective — in all its manifestations. I have learned that what we do not face within ourselves, we project outward. And what a nation refuses to integrate, it enacts violently upon the most vulnerable among us.
We are watching our shadow in uniform.
The administration speaks of “criminals” and “enforcement.” But the data tells a different story: nearly 52% of those arrested have committed no criminal offense other than crossing a border. Mothers separated from children. Workers vanishing from job sites. Children watching agents take their fathers away. In Fridley, Minnesota, a school superintendent reports being followed by ICE — to her workplace, to a bingo night at a school.
This is not law enforcement. This is terror as policy. Fear as governance.
The Somali Community: Survival Upon Survival
My heart turns especially toward the Somali people of Minnesota — the largest Somali community in America. These are people who have already survived displacement, civil war, years in refugee camps, the long labor of building new lives in a foreign land. Now they are being pulled from cars, dragged from businesses, targeted in immigration sweeps through their shopping centers and neighborhoods.
Nearly 58% of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the United States. Of those who are foreign-born, 87% are naturalized citizens. Yet families are running out of food because they are afraid to step outside their apartments. Children are watching their parents worry about leaving the house. Parents have instructed their children on what to do if ICE agents come to their home. Even mosques report that attendance has fallen —people too frightened to gather in prayer.
As activist Amina Adan said: “The Somali community has always been resilient, but this feels different. We are not just fighting for our rights; we are fighting for our very existence in this city.”
The President called these people “garbage.”
I think of what it takes to survive war. To flee your homeland. To wait years in a refugee camp with your children. To learn a new language, a new climate, a new way of being in the world. To build businesses, raise families, become Americans. And then to be told by the leader of your new country that you are garbage, that you are not wanted, that armed agents will be sent to hunt you down.
This is the shadow projected onto a community that has already carried more than most of us can imagine.
For Those Who Cannot March: The Alchemy of the Inner Work
And what of those of us who cannot be in the streets today? The elders, the homebound, those whose bodies or circumstances keep them from the cold and the crowds?
We are not without power.
For those of us who cannot march in the literal collective, we can go inward.
This is not escapism. This is soul work. This is alchemy.
The alchemists knew that transformation begins in the dark — in the nigredo, the blackening, when everything seems lost. They understood that you cannot make gold without first confronting the lead. The base matter. The weight of what is.
We are in the nigredo now. We are being asked to hold the unbearable — the images of families torn apart, of agents smashing car windows, of a man dragged away while his daughter cries for him in the street. This is the lead. Heavy. Toxic. Seemingly irredeemable.
But the alchemists also knew that the lead contains the gold. That the work of transformation is not to escape the darkness but to stay with it, to apply the heat of consciousness, the moisture of compassion, until something new emerges.
Today, if you cannot march, sit in stillness and imagine the future you want to manifest. This is the alchemical operation. This is how we participate in turning lead into gold.
See it clearly. Feel it in your body. A world where families are not torn apart. Where children do not learn to fear a knock at the door. Where the Somali grandmother can walk to the market without clutching her papers. Where the word “neighbor” means something again.
Jung understood that images have power — that the psyche does not distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a lived one. When we hold an image with enough intention, it begins to work on us, and through us, on the world. This is not magical thinking. It is the activation of what the mystics and alchemists have always known: consciousness participates in the creation of reality.
So hold the image. Breathe it. Apply the fire of your attention and the water of your tears. Let the transformation work in you.
The Rising
The shadow is real. But so is what rises to meet it. I see thousands braving subzero temperatures in Minneapolis to honor Renee Nicole Good — a 37-year-old mother of three, shot dead in her car. I see nurses and teachers and small business owners closing their doors in solidarity. I see ordinary people choosing to bear witness.
I see more than 500 people signing up to be part of rapid response teams — learning their rights, training to document raids, showing up when their neighbors are in danger. Everyday people: restaurant owners, teachers, nurses. “Minnesotans feel very targeted,” one organizer said, “because we love our Somali community.”
This is not politics. This is soul work on a collective scale. This is the opus — the great work — unfolding in real time.
Today I bring my morning words into this darkness: Equanimity. Vision. Wandering. Grace. Gratitude.
Equanimity to hold the horror without being consumed by it. Vision to see the possibility that lives beneath this nightmare.
Wandering — the willingness to move beyond certainty, to follow where soul leads.
Grace — which finds us when we least expect it.
And gratitude — for every person who shows up today, in the streets or in the silence of their own hearts, who refuses complicity, who says: Not in my name.
Whether you march or you sit in stillness and imagine — whether you carry a sign or carry a prayer — you are applying heat to the lead. You are part of the opus.
The shadow is real. But so is the gold hidden within it.
May we all be part of the transformation.
Becoming the Black Lion
Becoming the Black Lion
Posted: 1/19/26
A black lion was racing toward the car. My father was driving. I had a choice: stay in the safety
of the vehicle, or get out and meet what was coming.
I got out.
I found myself on a descending path—leaving my father, leaving the car, leaving the known. The
lion didn't attack. He came alongside me, befriended me. And then something stranger still: I
became the black lion.
I was never afraid.
_______________
I could feel his body as my own. The strength of him, and yet a lithe lightness—the joy of
moving in this new form. I had ruby eyes. The moment I shifted from my familiar body into
owning the lion's body was transformational. Not symbolic. Felt. Known in my muscles and
bones.
________________
In dreams, we ask: what does this image want from me?
The lion—king of beasts, symbol of instinct, power, sovereignty—but black. Not the golden solar
lion of conscious authority, but something risen from the shadows. Something I hadn't yet
claimed. And those ruby eyes: the color of blood, of life force, of seeing with passion rather than
cool detachment.
My father at the wheel? Perhaps the inherited way of navigating life—the familiar vehicle,
someone else steering. I loved my father deeply. And the dream asked me to leave him there.
Not to abandon him, but to individuate. To step out of the car he was driving and find my own
way down.
________________
In my dreams, I often descend—downhill toward a stream, toward the ocean below. Depth
psychology teaches us that down is where the riches lie. The underworld. The unconscious.
Water as the source. We must leave the known road and descend if we want transformation
rather than mere travel.
I walked down, and the lion met me, and I became him.
__________________
I'm going to paint this lion now. Perhaps realistically, but more likely in colors and
textures—abstract expressionism has always been my way of knowing what I don't yet
understand. The ruby eyes will come through. The black that isn't absence but presence.
___________________
I'm still living this dream. Still learning what it means to move through the world as the black lion
rather than ride in my father's car.
What has been running toward you that you've been avoiding? What would it mean to get out of
the vehicle, walk downhill toward the water, and let yourself become what's been waiting?
Solstice: The Invitation to Go Inward
Posted: 12/19/25
A season of many moods. Our culture turns outward with connection and shared celebrations—Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the ancient pagan celebration of Yule. Celebrate. Gather. Eat. Drink. Gift giving.
Meanwhile, the earth has gone quiet. Animals burrow. Seeds lie dormant. The longest night approaches—and nature is still. She is waiting in the dark.
Bare branches. Underground stirrings. In an extroverted society, the default is to turn away from the introverted pull. But what if we checked in with what our individual soul yearns for? For some, the extroverted way is their way—and that is right for them. Yet there are those of us pulled toward the quiet, creating space to go inward.
Tomorrow I gather with a group of spiritual women for our bi-annual ritual. We celebrate the Mt. Washington neighborhood we are blessed to live in, we honor our individual journeys, we drum and dance, share each other's savory dishes, exchange a symbolic gift. We bring clothes for the homeless. And we each speak on a topic—this year, INSPIRATION. It is a beautiful threshold moment, a communal honoring before the deeper descent.
After that gathering, my own journey turns inward. The rest of this sacred season I will spend in quietude—listening for what wants to emerge, sitting with the dark rather than fleeing from it. This is my way. This is what my soul asks of me.
The season climaxes with New Year's Eve—again, predominantly celebrated together. But there is another way: the quiet, individual review of our personal journey. Here we can reconnect with our purpose. What is it? And how are we doing on this path of individuation? What comes next? The awe of being here.
Bette Midler reminds us in her haunting rendering of "The Rose"—
"Just remember in the winter / Far beneath the bitter snows / Lies the seed that with the sun's love / In the spring becomes the rose."
What looks like death is preparation. What feels like ending is gestation.
A Closing Reflection
This Solstice, you might pause and ask yourself: What is my way through this season? There is no right way. Only the invitation to listen—to your own soul, to the quiet earth, to whatever is stirring beneath the surface of your life, waiting for its time to bloom.
May the longest night hold you gently. And may you trust the dark.
ENNEAGRAM WORKSHOP
The Enneagram: A Map of the Soul's Journey
Posted: 11/05/25
The Enneagram is an ancient system of personality typology that reveals not just who we are,
but why we are—uncovering the core wounds, defense mechanisms, and unconscious patterns
that shape our lives. Far more than a personality assessment, the Enneagram serves as a
profound tool for shadow work, self-compassion, and spiritual awakening.
This workshop weaves together theoretical understanding and experiential practicum,
offering both intellectual insight and embodied recognition of type patterns in ourselves and
others.
Participants are encouraged to take the Enneagram assessment at
www.enneagraminstitute.com prior to the workshop, though it is not necessary. Self-discovery of
your type will also emerge through the work itself.
Workshop Components:
● The sacred geometry and spiritual origins of the Enneagram
● How the Enneagram intersects with Jungian psychology, shadow work, and individuation
● Deep dives into all nine types: core motivations, defense mechanisms, childhood
wounds, and paths to liberation
● Practical exercises: identifying your type, recognizing subtypes, and working with wings
and arrows
● Relational dynamics: how types interact, conflict, and complement one another
● Integration practices for transforming type patterns into conscious choice
The Nine Types:
Type 1 — The Perfectionist/Reformer
Driven by a need to be good, right, and beyond criticism. Core wound: "I am flawed." Struggles
with inner criticism and repressed anger. Path to freedom: embracing imperfection and
spontaneity.
Type 2 — The Helper/Giver
Motivated by the need to be needed and loved. Core wound: "I am not worthy of love as I am."
Gives to earn love while suppressing own needs. Path to freedom: recognizing their own
inherent worthiness.
Type 3 — The Achiever/Performer
Driven by the need to succeed and be valued. Core wound: "I am only lovable for what I do."
Identifies with accomplishments, losing touch with authentic self. Path to freedom: discovering
identity beyond achievement.
Type 4 — The Individualist/Romantic
Seeks identity through uniqueness and depth. Core wound: "Something essential is missing in
me." Prone to melancholy and longing. Path to freedom: recognizing wholeness in the ordinary
present moment.
Type 5 — The Investigator/Observer
Needs to understand and conserve resources (energy, time, emotion). Core wound: "The world
is invasive and depleting." Withdraws into mind. Path to freedom: engaging fully with embodied
life.
Type 6 — The Loyalist/Skeptic
Driven by need for security and certainty. Core wound: "The world is dangerous and I am
unsupported." Tests loyalty, anticipates worst outcomes. Path to freedom: trusting inner
authority and present-moment courage.
Type 7 — The Enthusiast/Epicure
Seeks stimulation, pleasure, and possibility. Core wound: "I will be trapped in pain and
deprivation." Avoids difficult emotions through distraction. Path to freedom: staying present with
what is, including discomfort.
Type 8 — The Challenger/Protector
Needs control, autonomy, and strength. Core wound: "I will be controlled or betrayed if I show
vulnerability." Denies weakness. Path to freedom: embracing tenderness and interdependence.
Type 9 — The Peacemaker/Mediator
Driven by need for inner and outer peace. Core wound: "My presence doesn't matter." Merges
with others, loses sense of self and priorities. Path to freedom: claiming their voice and sacred
anger.
This workshop is transformative for therapists, seekers, and anyone committed to becoming
conscious.
Five Saturdays in January 2026:
January 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31 (4:00-5:45 PM)
Virtual
email draftonblake@gmail.com to book a spot
All Hallow's Eve: When the Veil Grows Transparent
10/31/25
There are threshold times when the boundary between worlds grows gossamer-thin. Halloween—All Hallows' Eve—is such a time, an optimum opportunity to connect with our ancestors and with those who have crossed to the other side. They have left us, and yet not really.
I invoke my mother as I place her photograph on my altar, alongside her rose quartz and her snow leopard. In Jungian psychology, we speak of the temenos—a sacred, protected space where transformation can occur. My altar becomes a space —a threshold between worlds, a container for what is both deeply personal and profoundly numinous.
A joyous energy floods the room. She is thrilled—and relieved—that the book is finally being birthed. What a sacred connection publishing Through My Looking Glass has been. She is delighted by the Enneagram spiritual path I have embarked upon, and by my brother's completion of his book, Laurel Street, after decades of gestation.
All of us have taken decades, but the journey has been deep. This is what it means to live—to tend the soul's work across time, across the veil, in the company of those we love, both here and beyond.
Within the temenos of remembrance, death does not sever relationships. It transforms it.
The Pandemic & Creativity
09/25/21
Liminal Space:
This pandemic shift into liminal space - a place where we have let go of the past and do not know what the future will bring - has created many challenges. Now in our 18th month, we are all well aware of the great hardship, loss, pain, anxiety, and depression many have experienced worldwide.
But through the darkness, some of us have found a golden light.
Blessings:
I would like to focus on one unexpected blessing: Renewal or discovery of our creativity.
For some of us, who have consciously yearned for the time and space the bring forth their creativity, the transition has been easy. We may relish this reclusive time and space. But for others, especially extroverts, whose energy has been directed to the outside world, it has been more challenging. For all, forced isolation can be an opportunity to re-discover creativity that has been buried since early childhood.
Clients & Creativity:
Like most therapists, I have transitioned to meeting on Zoom. Among the many discovered benefits, I have found that it is easy to be with clients as they work in their own homes.
Some who have never considered exploring any artistic medium have opened a long-locked doorway into a hidden creative dimension. I have clients who have discovered they have a gift and a love, which will now be a permanent part of their identity.
When I suggested to one client struggling in isolation, who had done no art since kindergarten, that they take some colors and just see what happened, the results were amazing. Work with colored pencils this soon transformed into acrylics and then to watercolors. Amazing feelings triggered memories which deepened our psychological and spiritual work. This brought great energy and joy into our sessions as well as into their life.
Another client has discovered through our integrating her art into therapy that what was a hobby is now a desire to move from her career of teaching into professional life as artist.
Many professional and established artists and musicians have enriched and deepened their practice as we have worked to integrate feelings stirred by loss, fear, and isolation.
Creativity has manifested in many different ways for different clients - for some, through cooking (some beginning for the first time) or gardening. Many have turned consciously manifesting their soul into their living space, expressing who they are by designing and renovating their homes.
What a Joy to be there with you all!
Personal:
I have carved out space and time for the art I left behind in my 20’s. I have always felt myself to be an artist, but in my busy professional and intellectual life devoted little time to it. Through the external and internal shifts prompted by the pandemic, I finally began a project I had only previously been planning to undertake “someday” - creating my own version of Jung’s Red Book. In it, I paint or draw on one side and write a poem on the opposite leaf. I make no attempt to polish either. Rather, I am learning to trust the muse coming through me.
My grandson’s voice comes to me with his injunction, “Grandma, you can’t start over, just keep going,” when I try to say to myself, “I don’t like this. I will just start over.” I am learning the beauty and satisfaction that can come out of persisting. Or, perhaps, if I indeed feel it is a disaster, then a learning of what not to do going forward. I use colored pencil, charcoal, pastel, acrylic, and watercolors.
In addition, I have taken up the clarinet. I am not a musician and never will be. But I wanted to know how it feels to create sound. I chose an instrument that is, by all reports, difficult - the clarinet. Why the clarinet? Well, first and foremost, because I wanted an instrument that I could easily travel with; and, second, because I just happened to have one. I have both a saxophone and a clarinet. I took them to my synchronistically manifested teacher to help me chose. She looked at them both and said the saxophone was “junk” and the clarinet was “a treasure.” So it was decided. Well, me and my clarinet….that is another story…
I invite each of you to join in exploration of your own way of expressing yourself through creativity. If you have not discovered how your unique voice call forth your courage and welcome the journey.
Reflection on The Crown
02/08/21
I am mesmerized by the Netflix series “The Crown.” One could say I am addicted. As is often the case with many incredible series, each night I eagerly return to immerse myself in this other universe.
In contemplating why I am so captivated, I discover that “The Crown” explores my favorite Jungian themes: Shadow, Individuation, Myth, as well as Nature versus Nurture (how the environment and genes intertwine to form one’s personality and character.) Other spiritual and psychological themes include the nature of one’s destiny and how might this conflict with Individuation. Many of the characters in the show have been forced to live an unfulfilled life. The series further looks at how family patterns of abuse are passed down through the generations.
For many viewers any idealization of Royalty is dispelled.
Each of the characters is portrayed from a deeply human perspective. That is, they are exposed from their shadow sides; bitter, resentful, mean, sad, unloving (and unloved), envious, frightened, repressed, and frozen.
If “following her bliss” (to use Joseph Campbell’s concept), Queen Elizabeth would have devoted herself to horses - breeding them, training them, racing them. She would have lived and breathed horses and horse people. The one place where she could truly relax and be herself.
Prince Philip would have become an aviator, and, in his wildest fantasy, an astronaut.
Prince Charles would have been an actor.
Yet each, through the roles assigned to them by virtue of the families they were born into, was to follow the script given to them. Although not all did. The most renown of those who refused, perhaps, is King Edward, who abdicated the throne in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, thus thrusting Queen Elizabeth into the Queenship.
Princess Margaret had the constitution and desire to be the Queen, but birth order intervened.
Further blogs will explore in more detail the Jungian concept of Individuation as portrayed by these characters, including what it means to take the point of view of the Shadow when developing a character. Generational abuse will be looked at in detail.
Elizabeth never wanted to be Queen, yet by the accident of being the first born (after Edward, who refused the crown in order to be with his love), she came to the throne. Her younger sister Margaret would have basked in being Queen. Thus envy created lifelong bitterness between them. And Philip by virtue of his being first-born son was thrust into the role of Crown Prince.
When a series has many episodes going on for years there is the opportunity to amply explore not only the depth of each character but their developmental process as they mature through their life. Most of these individuals do not Individuate in the true Jungian sense, but they do strengthen and develop character.
We also see through flashback to family backgrounds the effect of cruel, often abusive and traumatic upbringings. Each had withholding, unloving, even cruel, mothers, and, in the case of Philip, an extremely abusive father. Philip, in turn, perpetuated abuse onto his son Charles.
None were loved nor received affection or even affirmation. Parenting was focused on rigid shaping of who they were scripted to become.
The Crown enters the myth of ROYALTY and dispels our ordinary man’s idealization.
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