Pacifica Extension and International Studies goes all out every year to make Journey Week something that we look forward to the entire year, and 2024’s event exceeded all our hopes. Thank you to all of our wonderful students, alumni, faculty, and the larger community for participating in this wonderful yearly event that celebrates the diversity of scholarship within the depth psychology community of Pacifica and addresses complex questions ahead for our society and for psychology as a field. This year’s theme, “Beyond Boundaries: Caring for Psyche, Soul, and Imagination in a Posthuman Age” truly made for an immersive week of learning and connection at PGI.
Journey Week began this year with a film screening & panel discussion in partnership with Illuminate Film Festival. The film “Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness” with a PGI faculty panel was thought-provoking and generated deep discussion. PGI panelist Dr. Juliet Rohde-Brown observes, “I truly enjoyed watching the film and being invited to speak on a panel afterward. This new collaboration between Pacifica and Illuminate Films is inspiring and offers a platform for further community engagement. I look forward to what may emerge from the new relationship.”
Setting the intention for Journey Week of creating community, Dr. Susan Evergreen Hericks (Integrative Therapy & Healing Practices) and River Sauvageau brought their Ojai-based mandala project to campus, inviting Journey Week attendees to contribute to a community mandala, finding a place within the greater whole, in front of Barret Center. Juliet Rohde-Brown notes, “The mandala painted at the front of the Barrett Center was beautiful and colorful, suggesting the subtle nature of our interconnection across various cultures, views, and images.” And River Sauvageau shares that “A dream I’ve been carrying in my heart for many years now is to bring community mandala-making as a way of connection, beauty-making, and peace to cities all over the world. Our mandalas on the ground are large, between forty to sixty feet in diameter. As people paint a part, they’ll get up and walk around and somatically experience the greater work around them. They correlate their small piece as part of the great whole. Others working in the space are having this experience together.”
MYTHFEST! also welcomed attendees, and is described by Monica Mody, as “a collaboration between the Mythological Studies program and the Joseph Campbell Foundation that celebrates myths and mythmakers.” Featured were booths and tables where interested attendees learned about the Mythological Studies program, the International Society of Mythology, and the PGI student Group, Mythic Nexus. The Joseph Campbell Foundation hosted interactive booths like “Meet a Mythologist” and “Nectar and Ambrosia,” and hosted a Mythic Writing Workshop. Dr. Mody summed it up as “an opportunity to explore the world of myths in a fun way!”
The Keynote addresses followed, an opportunity for attendees to connect with nationally recognized leaders, scholars, authors, and artists. Sonu Shamdasani spoke on “The Emergence of Jung’s Cosmology.” Leonie H. Mattison, PGI President/CEO, gave remarks on “Dreaming the Dream Forward: Temperance and Embodiment in a Technology-Driven World,” and we were honored to have Christophe Le Mouël, Executive director of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and Co-Chief Editor of Psychological Perspectives, share his thoughts. Keynote speaker John Bucher discussed “The Oracle and the Algorithm: Our Search for Mythos in the Machine” and relates that “Seeing people who are interested in myth, psychology, and consciousness come together at Journey Week made my heart very full. Connecting at MythFest! and having the opportunity to share ideas around myth and technology in my keynote were both experiences I won’t soon forget.”
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
