Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Poetry reading at Nefeli Café in Berkeley

Oct. 9th, 2009, 7 PM

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will be reading at Nefeli Café in Berkeley
Neighborhood: UC Campus Area
1854 Euclid Ave
(between Hearst Ave & Ridge Rd)
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 841-6374

“The Word Made Flesh: The Living Symbol - San Francisco Jung Institute

Oct. 10th, “The Word Made Flesh” a presentation at the San Francisco Jung Institute Conference on The Living Symbol.

CONFERENCE:
The Living Symbol In and Out of the Consulting Room - Maria Chiaia, Naomi Lowinsky, Richard Stein, Bryan Wittine, Suzanne Wagner
Saturday and Sunday, October 10 & 11, 2009
9:30 am – 3:30 pm

Reserve for this event at San Francisco Jung Institute"Symbols act as transformers"
- C.G. Jung (CW Vol. 5: 232)
Living symbols are messages from the depths of our being to our conscious "I", messages that reveal mysterious things about ourselves and our lives. Psychotherapists across traditions have found that symbolic images open the way to the creative possibilities of the unconscious. We discover these images through free association, dreams, fantasies, creative productions, and within the relational field between analyst and analysand. They evoke fascination, awe, fear, joy, upset, disorientation, but are inevitably transformative when we approach them with respect and attend to them in a contemplative way.

In this conference five Jungian analysts with different approaches will speak to their experience of living, transforming symbols in their lives and clinical work. What does the living symbol look like in clinical practice and in life? How does the symbol enter our psyche, and what does it do once it becomes known? What are the spiritual implications of symbols? Through lectures that include theory, art, poetry, and clinical material, the speakers will offer their unique perspectives on the ways symbols guide processes of growth in and out of the consulting room.


The Word Made Flesh - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
It is as if the poet could still sense, beneath the words of contemporary speech and in the images that crowd in upon his imagination, the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual worlds, and possessed the capacity to make them come alive again. As Gerhart Hauptmann says: "Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word." - Jung, (CW 5 p. 303)
Our medium, in analysis, is language: the spoken word. Like poets we seek the "primordial word." We are engaged in the Promethean art of bringing life, fire, libido back to our analysand's word: so the word is made flesh; the symbol comes to life; the God is renewed.

When a person stumbles into analysis, she is typically split off from the surge of her libido, cut off from the meaning of her words, severed from her authenticity and from her Gods. She is incarcerated in taboos and constrictions that block her feeling, steal her breath, smother her fire.
If the analysis goes well she will find her way back, through the circumambulations and meanderings of the analytic conversation, to her own primordial word. She and her analyst will create a private language, a personal Tarot deck of living symbols, born of their shared wanderings in her internal landscape: her Gods and demons, dreams, memories, wounds, and longings. This is the stuff of her soul. Together they come to know what moves her, what excites her, how her words become flesh. Perhaps she will find a creative form in which to manifest the power of her personal symbols.

I propose to tell the story of such an analysis, the one I know best – my own – and to reflect on how language and poetry expresses the living symbol: the word made flesh. A series of poems about my analytic experience will structure the talk.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a widely published poet. Her book on creativity, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, has just been published by Fisher King Press. She has published a collection of poems about the analytic experience, crimes of the dreamer. She is the poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives, teaches writing classes in many settings, and is in private practice in Berkeley.

San Francisco Jung Institute Monthly Writing Group

Once a month writing group at the SF Jung Institute.

Deep River: Writing as a Spiritual Practice - Naomi Lowinsky
Saturday October 17, 2009 and 7 Subsequent Second Saturdays
1 – 5 pm

I listened to the earth-talk
- Mary Oliver

Poetry of the natural world is a deep river in American literature. From Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver, American poets have heard the spirit of the earth and its creatures, have spoken for forest and mountain lake, gray whale and marsh hawk. threatened habitat and lost wetlands. Theirs is the prophetic function of giving voice to our fear and our grief. Theirs is the shamanic function of re-imagining our place in nature.

This coming year in the Deep River Writing Circle we will track our own relationship to the natural world. We will read Whitman, Oliver, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Patiann Rogers and others, and write under their influence.

The Deep River writing circle is a place to find your own voice, to develop your writing practice, to participate in a small community of writers, to study great poems, to make your own connection to the deep river of nature writing. New members welcome, space allowing. Our first meeting will be on Saturday, October 17th from 1-5 in the Institute Library. After that we will meet on second Saturdays, November 2009 through May 2010. Limited to 12 participants.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

What others are saying about Naomi and the Sister from Below

What Others are saying about Naomi Lowinsky and the Sister from Below:

“Naomi Lowinsky has given us a remarkable, fearless, and full autobiography. Speaking in poetic, psychologically sensitive, scholarly dialogues with her shape-shifting muse, she has created a new form . . . This is a beautiful book to treasure and spread among worthy friends.”
—Sylvia Perera, Author of Descent to the Goddess and Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction.
“. . . Naomi Ruth Lowinsky offers us a superbly detailed investigation of the powerful, mythic forces of the world as they are revealed to the active creative self. Don’t miss this enlightening and fascinating book.”
—David St. John, Author of Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems and Prism.

“Naomi’s poetry and prose is infused with the suffering and joys of humans everywhere. Insightful and deeply moving, she brings us the food and water of life.”
—Joan Chodorow, Author of Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology, Editor of C.G. Jung on Active Imagination.

“A passionate love letter to those who yearn to be heard. A must read for every woman who longs to write poetry.”
—Maureen Murdock, Author of The Heroine’s Journey and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory.

“Naomi Ruth Lowinsky reinterprets mythic and historical reality in provocative versions of the stories of Eurydice, Helen, Ruth, Naomi, and Sappho. The voice of the Sister from Below argues, cajoles, prods, explains, and yes, loves her human counterpart, and becomes the inspiration for Lowinsky’s stunning poetry in this highly original book.”
—Betty de Shong Meador, Author of Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart and Princess, Priestess, Poet.

The Sister from Below is a personal story, yet universal, of giving up a creative calling because of life’s obligations, and being called back to it in later life. This Fisher King Press publication describes the intricate patterns of a rich inner life; it is a traveler’s memoir, with outer journeys to Italy, India and a Neolithic cave in Bulgaria, and inward journeys to biblical Canaan and Sappho’s Greece; it is filled with mythic experience, a poet’s story told. The Sister conveys the lived experience of the creative life, a life in which active imagination—the technique of engaging with inner figures—is an essential practice.

The Sister speaks to all those who want to tab into their creative source and fulfill an unlived promise—those on a spiritual path, those who are filled with the urgency of poems that have to be written, paintings that must be painted, journeys that yearn to be taken…

In addition to The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way and The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Weber Studies, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tiferet and Runes. Her two poetry collections, red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005) were published by Scarlet Tanager Books. Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice and poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives.

Naomi has recently been awarded first prize in the Obama Millennium contest for her poem “Madelyn Dunham, Passing On” in which she imagines the spirit of Obama’s deceased grandmother visiting him as he speaks to the crowds in Chicago after his election. The poem will be published in the literary magazine New Millennium Writings this fall. To learn more about Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and her many publications visit www.sisterfrombelow.com

The Sister from Below:When the Muse Gets Her Way
—ISBN 978-0-9810344-2-3
Published by and available for purchase directly from Fisher King Press.
Also available from your local bookstore, and a host of on-line booksellers.
Publication Date: June 1st, 2009