Deep Vocation: Recovering Your Soul’s Purpose, Power & Pleasure

This program explores various ways depth and archetypal psychologies can help us answer the poet Mary Oliver’s key question about vocation—“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We’ll mine myths, stories, poetry, biography and memoir, indigenous wisdom, archetypal astrology, typology and other typing systems, our embodied experience of bliss—to name a few of our tools—in an attempt to excavate our authentic vocation, and to discover, uncover, and/or recover our soul’s purpose, power, and pleasure.

THIS PROGRAM WELCOMES PARTICIPANTS WHO MAY BE

• Feeling stuck at a vocational impasse or stopped at a professional dead end
• Considering a career change or a way to be enlivened with their current work situation
• Seeking a deeper psychological understanding of their vocational choices in order to find the courage to change
• Struggling with the tension between the external demands of the marketplace (how do I make money?) and the internal demands of the soul (how do I make meaning?)
• Wishing to live a vocational life more in alignment with their sense of purpose and in attunement with their sense of calling

Participants are welcome at any stage of life, whether they are just beginning their vocational journeys; whether they find themselves in midlife with their ladders against the wrong wall; whether they are of retirement age, seeking to do work in the world in alignment with their souls; and any stages in between.

FORMAT

After an opening three day residential, we will continue the study of vocation online. Every two weeks, a new module will open in our online learning platform. Modules include required reading (approximately 50-100 pages), an audio or video faculty presentation on the material, a discussion assignment including engagement with the faculty and the other participants, some suggested journal for deeper reflection, and bonus content including videos, audio lectures, readings, links, and more.

Midway through the course, participants will be invited to schedule a thirty minute private session with the instructor to discuss how the course is furthering their vocational wanderings and wonderings.

The course culminates in a final reflection paper where participants explore the question, what have I discerned about how I want to live my one wild and precious life?

MORE ABOUT THE RESIDENTIAL

The residential will be a time to gather on the gorgeous campus of Pacifica Graduate Institute to create our temenos, the sacred container within which we do our soul work together. It’s a time for both deep witnessing of where we’re all at in our vocational journeys, and deep listening for the yearnings of each of our souls. It’s a time to create those healthy connections Somé speaks of, to receive the support of others in bringing your unique gifts into the world. It’s a time for intentionally creating a community of companions. Etymologically, companion comes from pan—the breaking of bread, and com—together. During the residential, we will literally and metaphorically break bread together, making our subsequent time together online feel more like sitting around the kitchen table sharing a rich meal with friends, rather than sitting in isolation in front of a computer screen interacting with strangers.

The residential will serve two other major functions: content and process. Jennifer will introduce the participants to a content overview, laying the ground for our inquiry into vocation as a sacred calling. She will also introduce participants to the online process, so everyone feels confident upon leaving campus that they know how to access the course and navigate it with ease.

MORE ABOUT THE MODULES

Topics Include:

• Sleuthing our Childhood for Vocational Clues
• “Follow Your Weird”: Joseph Campbell’s Original Advice
• Amor Fati: Learning to Love Our Fate
• Money, Money, Money: A Noose or a Necklace?
• “Doesn’t Everything Die at Last and Too Soon?” The Relationship Between Death and Vocation
• Is it Written in the Stars? What Archetypal Astrology May Reveal About Our Vocation
• Individuation as Vocation: The First and Second Half of Life
• “The Tyranny of the Shoulds” and Other Internalized Parental and Cultural Voices
• What the Psyche and Eros Myth Can Teach Us About Love, Pleasure, and Vocation
• What Type Systems Can Reveal About Our Vocational Superpowers
• The Body in Bliss at Work
• The Archetypal Goals We Say and the Roles We Play
• Indigenous Perspectives: Ancestral Calls and Responses