My Pacifica Reflections on the Experience

Pacifica Graduate Institute is a unique place, as anyone with an experience of it will attest. Among the questions most frequently asked of Pacifica alumni include “Why did you go?” and “What was it like?” This is dedicated to sharing reflections of the Pacifica experience. The Alumni Association of Pacifica Graduate Institute brings together favorite memories of teachers, students, staff, alumni, community, and visitors alike. Together, these personal gems convey a sense of Pacifica’s collective light.

Pacifica has offered to me a unique perspective that spoke to me deeply. It allowed me the ability to explore and find my voice as a practitioner. I was enrolled at another very conventional university when I found Pacifica, or rather, when Pacifica found me! I didn’t know what Depth psychology was at that time, but i knew I had been introduced to something very special. It has truly been a transformative experience.

Pacifica offers an expansive curriculum in applications of depth psychology. My experience studying depth psychological perspectives of Community Psychology, Liberation Psychologies, and Ecopsychology (CLE) at Pacifica, has been life-changing both in regard to my personal journey and academic career. For example, last summer I volunteered to teach in a prison education program. It was the first time I ever taught, and the first time I severed as a volunteer in a prison setting. I am certain that this fieldwork experience provided me with an opportunity for passionate inquiry into an area of deep concern, and it lead me to recognize where my strengths can be best applied. When I started Pacifica I was not yet self-confident enough to think I could teach especially, in a prison setting.

There are many gifts I have received from my time at Pacifica. One of the many is that Pacifica has offered me multiple lenses in which to view the world. As a nonprofit leader I utilize the theories of Jung, archetypes and the collective unconscious, with mythology/story to merge organizations, and to bring new life and vision to volunteers and staff. I use story/mythology and archetypes to bring the mission of the organization to life for the public and to brand the organization. All of us have stories even organizations.

C.G. Jung describes the time near mid-life as an opportunity for expanded consciousness. For many, including me, Pacifica became the organic extension of this call. Pacifica’s greatness lies in the ability to hold and contain the multiplicity of experience while growing towards a more authentic self. No matter how one arrives at Pacifica, the experience is transforming. By sharing and developing a collective language of soul and service we each operate in the world changed, and better for it.

I’d first enrolled in the Ph.D. in Depth Psychology program, with its inauguration on Friday, 13 September, 1996 — it was my birthday. Nevertheless, I soon came to realize that I needed to change to the Clinical program, to deepen my knowledge and practical skills as a therapist, while still attending to “depth.” From 1997 to 2000, this was it: What excitement, what effort, what struggle, what satisfaction! These were easily the best years in all of my life’s academic learning, and I’ll be forever grateful for them. At this time (and with my first book just published), I look forward to being an engaged member of Pacifica’s Alumni Association, contributing as I can to much-needed Archetypal Activism. Greetings (from Zurich, Switzerland, this spring!).

I continue to be in awe at the speed at which our beloved Alumni Association grows and multiplies. I feel so incredibly honored to be involved with all the dear souls who have made this possible.

Pacifica allowed me to liberate mySelf and gain confidence in formulating my narrative with racism and sexism as it pertains to Black women in America. Liberation is an important factors in the relationship work I offer the world, Pacifica enhanced that process. Using my voice and being in service to the world is a gift from My Pacifica.

I am honored to be among those who feel they arrived at Pacifica through a series of synchronistic events. After working through the counseling program and diving into the depth psychology program (almost finished), I can honestly say that everything I do (family, work, and otherwise) has been affected and fortified by my experience as a Pacifica student. I am so grateful to those who keep the structures in place at Pacifica and nurture the immense vision of tending soul in the world. It is an amazing feat to hold this intention in the midst of fostering individual growth and strength through the study of Jung et al in a traditional institutional setting. I will always be a champion of Pacifica Graduate Institute.

I was older than most when I enrolled at Pacifica, and I was in the myth program, as it was the most appropriate for my own career; but what I shared with students in the other programs was a love of the institute’s mission, and an appreciation for the faculty’s commitment to it. This is not a program or campus that is conducive to the ordinary. Because of its steady focus on meaning, you will be challenged differently and in some ways more intensely than you would be in a more traditional environment. It calls you to be authentic, to be part of something larger than yourself. It requires you to find a life’s work in its presence, and to bring that to the world after you leave.

Often I’ve wondered why students really come to study at Pacifica. Of course it is to get a degree in their chosen fields of study, and often to receive training to prepare them for the vocation of psychotherapy. But many schools offer degrees and training. As graduation ceremonies are approaching I have been thinking about what many of the students say about their experience as they receive their diploma. Bottom line I believe Pacifica’s greatest gift for our students is the experience many of them take away of being in a community of like-minded people in which they are stretched and encouraged to become and grow into themselves. And for many of our students that process is greatly facilitated by the way in which Pacifica is devoted to the recognition and tending of a deeper dimension of the self than the ego. As students take away that experience, both from their inner work while here, their studies and training, as well as the experiences shared with classmates, they often describe feeling more prepared to assist others to do the same as clinicians, in community fieldwork, or in their creative pursuits.

In my work with Dianne Travis-Teague and the Alumni Association, I have seen firsthand that Pacifica Graduate Institute is more than just an education institution — it is a journey and a place of discovery. During the first steering committee workshop weekend, it was obvious that, while students, the group had developed a community of kindred spirits that continue to grow, experiment, and experience rebirth together. I have been asked what I think about the Pacifica alumni group, its rituals and soulful dialogue. I have come to realize that, every time I leave an Alumni Association gathering, I feel my soul has been warmed, and I am thankful that Pacifica alumni have allowed me in the circle to experience it.

Pacifica is a wonderful place to grow and experience yourself as your grow in spirit and intellect of working with the spirit. The transformation at Pacifica is unlike anything that I have ever encountered. As you learn to work with the soul you can feel yourself becoming enlightened. The growth that I have experienced for myself and for my clients has made me a better clinician.

When I became the first Pacifica Ph.D. student to defend his dissertation in the summer of 1991, I had no idea how many doors would spring open as a result. Having never previously published anything, I published a book based on that dissertation in the fall. Soon the phone began to ring. Offers to teach, consult, write more books and many other opportunities resulted. All that has passed since was seeded by those few years of study, research, and writing at Pacifica. Now I am proud to be faculty at the same Alma Mater that both nurtured and then launched me on a new career. Pacifica’s greatest and enduring gift to me was its atmosphere of radical academic freedom in which I could follow my own passions with the support and encouragement of the excellent, accomplished, and caring faculty. I learned to follow my dreams and, if not my bliss, then my real affect.

My very first weekend at Pacifica, Dr. Diane Skafte taught us a class on shamanism which opened my eyes to ways that the physical world interacts with the spiritual world and how we can use this interchange for healing. The way shamans take so much time to set sacred space by building an altar and invoking the presence of healing spirits made a big impression on me and had a great influence on the way my life and work developed. During the time I was trying to pick a thesis topic, I found a lump in my breast which turned out to be malignant. The night after my surgery, spirit told me to write a book about my experience and title it Cancer As Initiation: Surviving the Fire, and that book became the popular form of my dissertation on the emotional aspects influencing cancer survival.

I was one of the first female undergraduates admitted to study history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England in 1979. My male professors laughed at my proposal to write a dissertation and pursue my Ph.D. I knew one day I’d prove them wrong. Pacifica gave me my voice as a writer. It celebrated my research into the role of dreams and imagination in the writing of history. Now I share my story with my high school students. I tell them, “Just because one teacher tells you, you are not good enough, doesn’t mean you can’t follow your dream. Listen to your inner voice. Follow your dream and one day you will prove them wrong. I followed my dream and never gave up on it. You can do the same.” They love hearing this. I can see the lights go in their eyes, and I thank Pacifica for empowering me as a teacher and a writer. Because of Pacifica, I can turn the lights on in my students eyes.

What are we doing here, at the Open Center and Pacifica? Learning and spreading the word about how to be in the world — in specific fields and in our lives. When Pacifica called and proposed a collaboration to reach out further than our individual campuses, I recognized the leadership and genius of that initiative. The Open Center welcomes this new, creative, hybrid form of learning, and the access to such good teachers in New York City and our Internet world. It works!

One generally comes into an academic program at Pacifica with a desire to earn a degree — whether to learn a new craft or to enhance one’s work with new insights and skills. Upon leaving, however, one realizes that they have gained so much more — a lasting community of colleagues, teachers, and friends; a deeper sense of Self (BIG ‘S’ SELF) through personal transformation; and a greater commitment to tending the soul of the world.

When people find out you are going back to school, they always want to know what you are going to school for. When your school is Pacifica, how do you answer them? I am going back to school to change my life. I am going back to school to discover, uncover, recover, the essence of who I am. I am going back to school to return home to myself, anew. I am going back to school to surprise myself with who I am. The better question is, who are you going to school for? And when your school is Pacifica, the answer is always, I am going to school for my Self. I am going to school to heed and hone that Self, to find and refine that Self, and to set that Self free in the world to be of service to the Other which is the beloved. You can’t give them that answer because you might not have known it yourself then, at the start of your journey, but you know it now, in your breath and your bones, at the end.

In 1937, in the second grade, sitting at my desk and trying to complete a math quiz, I looked out the window at a beautiful blue sky. “Mrs. Scheimer!” I shouted. “Look, there’s a puffy cloud and it looks like little puppy dog.” The teacher marched to the window, abruptly pulled the shade, and said, “Do your math quiz.” In 1996, at the reception desk of a writers’ conference in Santa Monica, I was handed a brochure by a woman named Diane Huerta, who I later learned was the director of admissions at the time for a school called Pacifica Graduate Institute. Describing courses in subjects such as Mythic Traditions, The Sacred, and Imaginal Perspectives, the brochure was irresistible. A year later, after having practiced scientific medicine and surgery for nearly forty years, I enrolled in the depth psychology program. Since receiving my Ph.D. in 2001, I have dedicated myself to writing and teaching about a union of science and spirituality in the healing arts. Thank you, Pacifica! You showed me how to reclaim that beautiful little puppy dog in the cloud.

Sand play, authentic movement, dream work and other imaginal techniques invite clinicians to use their own creative voice to heal while holding to the traditions deeply grounded in the collective psyche. Counseling West honors Pacifica for its passionate, insightful students and faculty, and we look forward to many more years of a depthful relationship.

All the care that staff, administration, and faculty take in their work enables each student to experience the life-changing power and inspiration of being an integral part of a learning community. We can not understand what we need to by ourselves alone. We need communities where we can place our knowings alongside others’, forging our visions into shared paths toward common dreams.

When we found each other, I was in a state of silent despair over the steppingstone of my life upon which I had landed, venturing at that time, no farther. Like Jung, I had always been committed to my inner life even before ever hearing his name or reading his words, but I was stuck. I knew what I was looking for, but didn’t know existed until told about Pacifica. The catalog alone convinced me, ratified the very next day by an introduction day, as well as the next three years of study. The academic experience was exceptional, providing me the means to gain licensure, yet it was this opportunity to again move forward, heeding that inner call of my contemplating psyche, that was most important to me. I was able to step toward the next stepping-stone because I found a place, a committed faculty, and other students who were committed to honoring many of the still to-be-developed facets of my life. Until I attended to my own psyche, I could not move to the next stepping-stone of my life. I am forever grateful we found each other.