The value of journeying into the underworld in change-work - Dr Joanna Laprade

Be Mythical

This week’s show is with the amazing Dr Joanna Laprade. Joanna LaPrade, M.A. Ph.D., is a Registered Psychotherapist, author, speaker, and educator.

Joanna LaPrade, M.A. Ph.D., earned her doctorate in Jungian and archetypal psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is now the founder of Aion Psychotherapy and a practicing Jungian psychotherapist in Colorado. Her therapeutic work focuses on helping clients find a meaningful connection to their inner worlds. Outside of her practice, Dr. LaPrade is a speaker and educator whose expertise focus on myth, psyche, and the Jungian and archetypal perspective. She is also the author of Forged in Darkness: The Many Paths of Personal Transformation, a book that unites self-discovery with mythology, to handle an important dilemma of our times—how to navigate the darkness of life.

In this conversation, Dr Joanna and Lian dived deep into the underworld, what that means for us personally and in our work with others, the challenges of that given the functioning bias of our modern culture, and how we can better honour and become intimate with the dark places in our psyches and our work.

I’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Our culture is so focused on functioning, the direct route, bigger, brighter and braver, it can be very unwelcome to be pulled into the underworld to meet the parts of ourselves that have been left there, especially when that entails a risk of not functioning

• As change workers we need to go first, embodying and modeling an intimacy with the darkness, it is only from here that we can hold the space for our clients to do the same

• The myths can illuminate the path into and out of the darkness - allowing us to see the deeper, collective, and archetypal nature of what we’re experiencing

Resources and stuff that we spoke about:

• For more information about Dr. Joanna’s work, visit www.aionpsychotherapy.com

Thank you for listening!

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Thank you! Lian and Jonathan