hey thank you [Applause] people come to see a psychiatrist or jungian analysts as i am when they are in crisis you go along with life and it seems to be the way it is and then suddenly something changes that's very painful a relationship ends you've thought of yourself in great health and you get a blood test back and it says you have something very very serious or it happens to someone close to you or you're in an automobile accident you were perfectly fine five minutes before the accident now you're going to spend a lot of
time in rehab and in hospitals this is what life is like it goes smoothly and then crisis and i'd like you to think about the many crises that you have had in your life i don't think you can get through life without at least a couple dozen of them there are major crises and then there are smaller ones but each one is very similar in the way that what was is no longer you can't go back to what was the relationship really is over or you were fired from your job or you failed a course
in school and suddenly you are in a crisis and crisis brings on something that is good to think about as a liminal space because that's where during this pandemic global pandemic caused by covid 19 we are all now in this liminal space where we can't go back hundreds of thousands of people have died they're not coming back people are out of work their jobs are over the businesses are done you can't go back to what was and you don't know what is coming next because during a liminal time and the word comes from the latin
word for threshold threshold is in between in between what was and what will be or what next one way or another we are in this in between space where life is not the way it used to be but there is a gift to liminal time when you are examining and feeling and sharing it and you don't know what's coming next that's when there is space in your psyche mostly it's an inner kind of experience and you think is this all there is and there is a a kind of dishearten out of touch with what is
authentically you and that is when the work of listening to one's dreams of remembering what your what your hopes were when you start examining and feeling from inside out you've been so busy trying to please other people or or live up to or whatever it was that you have spent so much of your energies doing and now in the middle of the pandemic life is not quite the same for many people it's really really not the same and somehow in that kind of liminal time that we all find ourselves in we start to remember what
we forgot that mattered to us and this is one of the richest times of the gift of liminal time you start to remember and have dreams and think about what it was that was important to you before long before maybe so in the liminal time of being in between who you used to be and who you might be becoming this is when the dreams can have an enormous ability to evoke that part of yourself that you suppressed and it may be for example a talent you had that from the very time you started out interested
in that people around you said ah you can't make a living doing that except right now you might be in a liminal unemployed time when you might think about what it is you really love to do and you might think about what is it that you do that you get so involved in what you are doing that you actually lose track of time and only you can say when you say yes to something is it going to be meaningful to you will it be fun for you it may be really a lot of work but
when you do that when you try learning that you are so engaged in it that for you it's fun and the other thing is what you are drawn to do motivated by love love of the space you get into when you do it love of being with that person and what that person represents it's a very inside out kind of decision to make about how you spend the energy of your life the idea of a crisis is a turning point and i'm remembering the labyrinths that i've walked and how it is you think you're going
in a straight line and then oops turning point and you the path that you were on suddenly moves you in yet another direction but if you stay on that path because it is your path you'll have many different turning points but it is the way your life unfolds through the turning points of crisis through the times when you stop and feel and follow heart and soul and make decisions sometimes it's unexpected and a positive thing i think about how it is that i turned out to be a doctor in part because i was a surprise
because in high school and what i was on track to be was to go into law but i went up in the mountains one summer just before becoming a senior in high school and i thought about my birth injured brother who never even learned to talk i could have been him there's no reason why he came into this world and had to suffer his impaired life and i was a star of the family there was just at that point a deep sense of humility of that i had done nothing to to be the spared child
it was a a sense of deep humility and a sense of wanting to know what i should do with my life and in that mountainous area i got the strong interior message that you should be a doctor and i promised i would i was never that great in the the sciences and so i said well maybe i made a mistake and then i started to work with people and i had a sense that helping people was really what my assignment was there's something about this liminal space between what was and what will be where synchronicity
in the form of what i call the dandelion effect that you pick a dandelion and you blow out the seeds and the winds take them it's a it's the internet winds carry the words that i may speak out somewhere and the idea is that people need words to understand what's going on inside because they need to to have a sense of why they are motivated from inside out to do what they are doing and if i say something and it goes out on the internet winds and it lands in a fur in the fertile soil
of a soul that just needed some justification the right words just to say this is who i am this is who i was meant to be and this liminal time of being in crisis is an opportunity the chinese word for crisis the pictograph it's made up of two pictures danger and opportunity and that's where we all are in this liminal time in this time of pandemic where things are not the same but one of the things that most people are doing more than they used to do is that they are dreaming more that they are
feeling more and remembering more of what it was in their path on their path that brought them to where they are now where they are in a moment of choice about what they will do with their lives now in liminal time there's the opportunity to decide what you're going to do with your time what is your dream saying and might this be a time not just for you personally but for humanity in general there is a global pandemic going on there's a global warming going on in california anyway where i live we've had wildfires there
was a day when the sky was orange it was like the end of end of time so we are in an extraordinary important liminal time where every person can contribute something to shift it one direction or another and i have been writing a number of things and i put a memoir out into the world and then i got interviewed for a lifetime achievement award recently and and they have a whole bunch of questions and one stood out what do you want your legacy to be i'm 84 this year and i thought i'm not done yet
and so i pulled the memoir back because i am not done yet and that's the kind of inner feeling that that doesn't come from outside and to pay attention to what's inside that's saying what it is and that's what happens when you are in a liminal time and you're receptive to being who you are synchronicity comes in and invitations or possibilities come in and pay attention because you have an opportunity to shift not only your course but to contribute to the humanities course and i'm thinking about how it is that we have this this time
this liminal time to make a difference in the jungian world we have an understanding of a collective unconscious that we are actually linked in some way that we can't totally understand because it's not entirely visible and tangible trust that you came into this world with something to do here somebody something to love here trust that that it matters and trust that there's an invisible world that supports you it goes back to to that realization that my handicapped impaired brother who died young could have been me and as i look across the world and i see
people that are part of the human family not just my personal family but all the people that are born under terrible circumstances in hardship places why wasn't it me it could have been me it could have been any one of us but we are here and it does matter we in a liminal time what we do here matters we can make a difference on the world in our families and become true to ourselves in the doing of it and when you are true to yourself there is something about becoming who you were meant to be
that just from inside out means that over and over again you say yes from inside there are three questions will it be meaningful will it be fun and lastly isn't motivated by love the other day i was reading three lines from real kay who said i live my life in widening circles that go across the world i'm on my last one i don't know when it will end but i am committed to see it i'm not done yet thank you you
