Photo courtesy Ashok Bedi
When the pandemic reached Wisconsin last March, Ashok Bedi, Milwaukee’s well known Jungian analyst, began to journal his feelings and, as he explains, pay “extra attention to my dreams and synchronistic events.” And like an observant Jungian, he noticed when a synchronicity occurred. His colleague from LA, Robert BJ Jakala, had been thinking of him and suggested they collaborate on a daily blog about “cultivating resilience” during COVID and, after May, the social upheaval following George Floyd’s death.
Their method involved Jakala sending a photo or other image and Bedi writing in response. The exercises in accessing and interpreting archetypes from the unconscious resulted in Bedi and Jakala’s new book, In the Eye of the Storm: Staying Centered in Personal and Collective Crises.
As the title suggests, In the Eye of the Storm isn’t a curio from 2020 but is meant to be relevant across time and situations. “Encouraged by peers and readers [of their blog], we decided to pull about 50 of our essays and amplified them further and published it as our book. We now offer this manual for resilience cultivation, using the reader’s inner resources and paradigms to access these archetypal treasures embedded deep inside each one of us as a repository of our timeless ancestral wisdom,” Bedi says.
One of the book’s aims is to encourage healing from enduring psychological wounds, even ones that have remained undetected. Bedi and Jakala urge their readers to “keep the portals open” to the flow of consciousness “that is all around us and within us.” Mindfulness of the present moment is a vital exercise, along with the gift of silence and—as the book puts it—“listening to the whispers of our soul via fantasy, dreams, synchronistic events, relationships,” through “myths and fairy tales” and through creativity as well as contemplation.
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Along with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung was a pioneer in “depth psychology,” the exploration of the unconscious depths of the human psyche. But where Freud focused on early childhood as the determinant, Jung discovered a fabulous world of archetypes shared by humanity, the “collective unconscious.” In other words, the mother board of who all of us are was formed over millions of years of evolution but is programmed differently in each of us according to our circumstances and experiences.
