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A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID JOY

By

Luanne Sberna

This spring I had the pleasure of meeting with David Joy who recently retired after 36 years at Burlington College where he was an instructor and Chair of the Transpersonal Psychology and Independent Degree Programs. David is also a Holotropic Breathwork facilitator and avid gardener.

LS: I was thinking the most sensible place to start with was when you first heard about Jung and how you got interested in Jungian Psychology.

DJ: I was introduced to Jungian psychology when I was in my sophomore year, first semester sophomore year, at UVM, and it was a toss up between comparative religion or some other kind of major. I ended up doing three majors. Comparative religion had two [faculty] people that had studied for several, a couple years, at the Jung institute in Zurich. So they were introducing (this was back in ‘67)…Jung into comparative religion studies. And I got really thunderstruck…“Oh my lord, I have never heard of this kind of stuff before. This is very fascinating.” So I, in essence, avoided as much of the Christian stuff as I could, which I was very successful at. I was pretty much able to study with the Jungian professors. So, I studied Jung in college and then continued on with my master’s degree at St. Michael’s college. They had a very straight counseling program. They allowed me to move it into Jungian studies as well.

LS: Did you take a break between the two? Or you went right into St. Mike’s?

DJ: I graduated in ‘76, in May, and started graduate school in July.

LS: So, I’m curious, Comparative Religion. What were the other two majors?

DJ: Anthropology and Sociology.

LS: Oh, OK. All interrelated.

DJ: Yes. No psychology!

LS: No psychology? Not til you got to St. Mike’s?

DJ: Not until I got to St. Mike’s.

LS: And they were pretty accepting it sounds like of the Jungian.

DJ: Well, I was very troublesome in class. I raised all kinds of questions and issues. There was a professor the first semester that was talking about major theorists and he started talking about Carl Jung and how he was born into a Catholic family. And I went “Wait a minute! No, no no!” And after a while, the students asked if it would be possible. I mean I was really messing with the guy, the students were really very. disturbed that I was being so aggressive

LS: Uh huh.

DJ: And clarifying matters that were being presented as accurate. To the point that I was bringing in books to read from. To show them.

LS: Had you read the collected works by that point?

DJ: Oh yea. I had not [read] all of them, but I had read the majority of them…This was 76. Including all of the little articles in strange journals. But, in essence, they said “Why don’t you individualize your degree. Design it. Find the faculty for it that will support it, and we will honor it so that you no longer have to stay in classes.

LS: Now was it St. Mike’s faculty or did you have to go outside the school.

DJ: No, no, no. I used some St. Mike’s faculty, but mostly I found other faculty, independent, that all had PhD’s and it was individualized study.

LS: Now, was there much of a Jungian community around in Vermont then.

DJ: No, not that I was aware of. This was the 70's.

LS: So other than the professors at UVM you were kind of on your own.

DJ: Oh, yeah. Well, by that time I had run into Roger Woolger .*

LS: OK

DJ: He taught at UVM [University of Vermont] in ‘74. So he and I co-taught courses. He was the lead instructor.

LS: What type of courses?

DJ: They were Jungian psychology. One was around alchemy and the other one I don’t remember now. They were well attended. There were 15-20 students. And so we would switch on and off, and I’d run small groups as well as the seminars for discussion.

LS: I don’t know that anything like that happens up there [UVM] now, does it?

DJ: No. There’s no Jungian psychology there at all. That changed…But Roger was the connection in Vermont.

LS: So you were pretty much struck by lightening by this Jungian stuff. Can you talk about what are some of the main concepts that really had an impact on you?

DJ: ... By the time I had graduated with my BA, I was really studying very strongly and reading a ton of texts. I was very, very struck with both the profound symbolism and complexity of it as well as its cultural context because I was really keenly aware of how the hermetic sciences and spriritualism and science were still quite unified [in Jung’s writing], and really wanted to understand, and this continues probably to be the crux of what I am fascinated with both culturally and psychologically. Looking at these issues of how…man both culturally, socially, or societally I should say, and individually understood relationship of self… to other, to the universe. So I was devouring the alchemical texts.

LS: Those are hard pretty texts…to me they’re the hardest to read.

DJ: Well, yeah, they are hard. You’ve got to take your time. But, I was pretty diligent. I’ve still got the texts that I used. I go through them, and, oh, my lord, I underlined with a ruler. (Laughs) I don’t do that anymore!

LS: Do you think you could sort of, in a big nutshell, talk about how alchemy relates what you were just saying about man’s nature?

DJ: It’s the process of individuation. And also alchemy understands that it’s a complex relationship. The process of individuation really does demand that one enter the “nigredo” state, the blackening, which can be quite abysmal. And then it starts talking how it comes out into solution, “solutio.” It starts looking at gender issues: masculine and feminine, which are absolutely crucial to us as beings. And then, how does this whole thing that he talks about, the marriage of the king and queen, the marriage of the brother and sister, looking at that unification process. And this is all around the process of individuation. And is all personal process of individuation. For me it gathered in the complexity of the situation in such a profound way…I just simply never met anyone that talked this profoundly on these kinds of issues.

LS: Did you find that you started making changes in your own life or that changes happened in the way that you thought or felt or related to yourself and others as a result of that?

DJ: Well, yeah, but it’s hard to separate. This was in the 70's, early 70's. And so much change was going on at that point…by that time, in the late 70's, I actually met my spiritual master, initially through my readings of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh.** And that was in ‘77. It was the first time that I had been taught very directly in a very spiritual kind of way that just knocked out my intellect. Not that it stayed knocked out, but it opened up something that was so utterly different from how I understood things. That was a profound change. So, I left the States and went to India for a long time.

LS: So, you were in an ashram? With Rajneesh?

DJ: Well, with Rajneesh, yeah. I lived outside the ashram and went to the ashram every day for meditation.

LS: How long were you there?

DJ: A year and a half.

LS: A long timel

DJ: Yes, it was. It was very profound.

LS: I’ll bet. You turned off the some of the thinking function in a way.

DJ: Yeah, very strongly turned it off and something emerged. Though I must say, it was pretty frightening.

LS: I imagine in the ashram they have ways of containing that experience. Not to block it but to help you through it….

DJ: Well, it’s there, but in a very limited degree. I mean, you were really on your own.

LS: Oh.

DJ: To be processing your stuff. You gotta remember…at least 8,000, 9,000 people [were] passing through there any given day. And they were doing groups. They had very large groups going on year round. I don’t mean that they went for a year.

LS: Right

DJ: They were running one week, two week, sometimes one month groups.

LS: What type of groups do you mean?

DJ: Almost invariably it was really born out of the humanistic psychology movement. Some of the leading people in Europe and out of Esalen lived there full time permanently…The majority of the groups were psychological. They were very powerful groups that penetrated a number of different things… I spent two and a half…my first three months there going to various types of groups. There was insight vispassana anywhere from ten days to a month.

LS: So, was this also introducing you to the more humanistic and transpersonal psychologies?

DJ: It did. I was aware of them. I hadn’t done any kind of really strong therapeutic work [in them]. Before I left for India I had a private practice and was doing primarily dreamwork. And worked in a federal drug rehab program.

LS: Uh huh, right here in Burlington?

DJ: In Burlington, yeah. It morphed, eventually to what is now Champlain Drug and Alcohol.

LS: Which has now been subsumed by the Howard Center… So the culture was wide open then, too. There was a lot going on.

DJ: Yes, there was. A lot continues to go on.

LS: So what inspired you to go East…?

DJ: There was a book. My girlfriend and I went to the Caribbean. We were going to stay down there 5 weeks. She couldn’t handle more than a week. Took off and came home. Settled that matter. I had brought a book which was called The Mustard Seed… I remember taking The Mustard Seed as all about…Jesus Christ. And I started reading it. That was the experience. I’d be on the beach all by myself. I was on the back side of St. John’s. Nobody was there. This was in July. You don’t go to the Caribbean in July. I did. I spent the whole month of July in the Caribbean. I started reading and then I just started spontaneously meditating. I’d never meditated. I’d read ten pages, if I read that much for an entire day. I read normally 100 to 200 pages a day easily, and if I have more time I will read more. But 10 pages, no that’s not happening. Not even with the alchemical texts did that happen. Didn’t get close to it. So it was hitting me in such a profound way. I needed to pursue that.

LS: So that led to India.

DJ: Eventually. I left for India two years later.

LS: So it was a process.

DJ: Oh yeah, it was a process. A process of just wanting to really reopen and open in different kinds of ways. And I started reading…Rajneesh who’s written so much.

LS: I don’t think I’ve read any of his work.

DJ: They’re all discourses that happened. Every day.. for all of his years both in Bombay and Puna, every day he would give a two hour lecture. One day would be from a particular text, that he would dedicate for two weeks, around a particular type of religious, spiritual text. He would teach around the Koran, around Sufism, around Buddha, Taoism, Christianity and on and on.

LS: So he wasn’t just Hindu?

DJ: Oh no, not at all. So there’d be a lecture for two days that would be just spontaneous things he would talk about, and the next day there would be a question and answer. Every other day you’d get a lecture and then responses to questions. And very often, always, the questions would be able to be tapped into what was being talked about, the issues. These spanned maybe 30 years.

LS: So that’s about a year and a half [in India] you said, and then you came back here. What was that like?

DJ: [Laughs]. I remember I was coming back and I was going to go back to being a therapist. And I flew in. I remember the pilot saying we are now crossing the continental shelf of North America. So we were maybe 200 miles out. Suddenly, all of my aspirations, all the plans I had made, just went [makes whooshing sound]. Literally, it shocked me. Just fell out of me, and I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a whit of an idea.” That was pretty terrifying. Interesting to talk about that with the changes now. I had to think about how I wanted to work. My girlfriend was pregnant. And so, I decided that whatever I would do, I’d always had fantasies that I’d never done before. I said I want to drive a taxi cab and I want to work in a post office. Weird strange fantasies. I did both of those over a period of a couple of years. And really started to then ground myself in gardening, and became very, very strongly involved in gardening.

LS: And what was happening with the old psychology, that part of you, your studies?

DJ: My studies had really changed. I had left Jungian psychology, I left it behind. For quite a long period of time. I was interested in other cultures. Interested in particularly the study of dreams. How they were understood. So in that sense, I kept with Jungian studies but from a cultural basis, other cultures both past and present with the dreams.. I became very interested in anthropological issues, looking at spirituality and religion in the context of how that comes into a society. But looking at how that helps to ground a society or an individual. I really didn’t do much with Jungian psychology. Some, but it was always revolving for the most part around the alchemical stuff. Still going back to that but it had really branched off into a very different area of its own…I always wanted and always made sure that Jungian psychology was right there [at Burlington College], from the introductory classes to being able to put them into upper level classes, though as you well know, if it had the title Jung in it, it doesn’t work. People don’t get it, they get scared.

LS: What do you think they get scared of?

DJ: They don’t know it. They don’t have any idea.. If you call it Jungian Psychology they’ve never heard of it, you know, unless they’ve taken Intro to TP [Transpersonal Psychology]. But beyond that, they have no sense of it. No sense of it at all. Which always struck me as rather strange. In all honesty, academic psychology, in college classes, Jungian psychology is hardly ever mentioned. It just doesn’t exist.

LS: Yeah, at least in our country. I don’t know, is it different in other countries?

DJ: Yeah, it’s somewhat different in Europe, you can get it in European Colleges. But American Colleges, if it’s not experimental, it’s behavioral.

LS: It’s kind of like he lost out when he and Freud split up. That was it until the behaviorists came along.

DJ: Well, it wasn’t as a result of that. It was that result of a split in [that] World War I happened and all of the behavioralists fled Germany to come over here.

LS: Oh, ok.

DJ: This was literally at the time 1910. 1910 William James was at the forefront of psychology. Then he died that year. He was the mainstay of things that would have gone into a much more humanistic and transpersonal perspective.

LS: He invited Jung over, didn’t he? For those conferences…

DJ: Yes. The Clark Lectures. That was really a very important change in American psychology…

LS: Jung had been here several times, lectured. So what do you think that says about our culture?

DJ: …for the most part we’re an infant. We’re very young. And at the same time, we have a persona that is extremely assertive and aggressive. Our persona is always out in front of us and there is relatively little reflection done culturally or socially, societally. And so I think our psyche is such that we keep needing to progress. Progression, progression. American psychology kept wanting to expand how… we understand the individual and that’s through various metric, various measurings, looking at social relationships, but they’re are always going to be stuff that are external. Now, I think there’s also a reaction to the kind of Freudian psychology that was going on which really freaked out a number of people because, to the degree that it does, it was looking at repressed memory. It’s still looking at it from a very personal unconscious level, whereas Jung is going to the collective phenomena, going beyond just a personal process…and obviously not understood, and obviously [he] had been labeled as being a mystic or a spiritualist which was really missing the point of where he saw things.

LS: Well, in some ways you’re saying that we deny the deeper levels of the unconsious.

DJ: Yeah, at least culturally we do for the most part. Thus being part of the big explosion of the 60' and 70's and with the advent of LSD, drugs and getting into some of those really profound human growth movement processes for which many things have evolved out of, [Holotropic] breathwork one of them…Grof *** developed it while he was at Esalen in the 70's.

LS: At some point you were back from India, you did these other careers, you somehow got back on the track with that piece of psychology…

DJ: I had been, let me think, it was in February of ‘93 I became more of a [full-time] staff at Burlington College and was kind of developing the IDP [Independent Degree Program]. There was somebody who was interim director. He didn’t want anything to do with it after three or four months and I took it over. It was at that point that I made a deciision that I thought the most important way to develop that program was to focus on 2 different majors, one of which was Transpersonal Psychology. That’s what I did and it took off like crazy.

LS: There was a lot of interest.

DJ: There was a lot of interest, actually. A great deal of interest. And it had always been a major at the college, on campus. I was going to use it as a springboard to get students in.

LS: Before that you were adjunct faculty?

DJ: Yeah, I had been adjunct faculty ...started in ‘77. That’s when I was doing dream groups around Jungian work and teaching classes on dream and culture, stuff like that. I left and when I came back from India. I started teaching more anthropologically oriented classes, trying to dive more into looking at spirituallity, and how does that click. It became eventually sort of focused on the evolution of consciousness.

LS: Say more about that.

DJ: Two basic approaches to that: One is how the individual evolves, becomes more conscious. But also how do we as a species evolve and is there anyway to understand that process from a cultural perspective. So again, both the macro and the micro points of view here. I have studied Vicco, Rohmer, and Aurobindo and many others who have talked about this from a cultural perspective as well as becoming involved with Holotropic Breathwork as a technique.

LS: When did you start getting interested in that?

DJ: I started doing breathwork in April of ‘95 when I had been nursing my ex-wife. We’d been divorced 17 years but she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

LS: That’s Maureen [Joy] (Maureen was an Art Therapy instructor at Burlington College)?

DJ: That was Maureen. And we had a son together. And it was important that I help her to cook and bring her to the chemotherapy, which happened quite a bit. And we were doing other kinds of alternative processes to help get over this. And so I’d been doing that for about 4, 5, almost 5 months...I’d been talking with a friend of mine that I met in a spiritual group out of France and found, lo and behold, that he lived in southern Vermont and that he was a holotropic breathworker. He’d been trained and he ran groups. I was like, ok, I’ve been looking for this, and that’s where it started. I started doing breath workshops almost every month or two for a while. I had been going to Israel every two months developing a program.

LS: What type of program?

DJ: A psychology program. It was a straight psychology.

LS: Where was that?

DJ: It was all over Israel, It had about 13 different sites. This was the IDP in Israel from Burlington Collge…

I did that for one year. Then I started doing the training, but never finished my certification. There was one last thing that I had to do. By that time I was really involved with doing breath workshops up here…

LS: What was the specific appeal of breathwork?

DJ: Well, really often breathwork is associated with, because of Grof’s own experiences, with LSD…but to be able to understand that one can go deep into the psyche without having to use a drug. And yes, I’m not a virgin to LSD, but my experience with it was very, very profound. It affected me very, very strongly, Influenced me in a very deep kind of way. But there were experiences that were extremely difficult, if impossible, to integrate, and with breathwork, I was able to have a much greater sense of intention. And the experience is almost always as profound, if not even more so, than my experiences with LSD.

LS: So a more natural way.

DJ: And a way that allowed me to integrate material so that you don’t have to go and take LSD once a week. There was a period I was doing breathwork every month, every month and a half. But you don’t have to keep doing that once it becomes a process by which you start to realize and work through some of these issues both on a personal level, but getting it, the experiences become much more powerful in a transpersonal sense. So the experiences were, from a Jungian sense, very archetypal. Being able to be involved with that and process that and take it back to my personal life opened up a whole new level of understanding that I had kind of just not gotten.

LS: Now when you do the processing is it in the group or individually. How does that usually happen?

DJ: The integration is done, I mean you’re in a group for a weekend, and there is processing but it’s extremely limited. It’s not meant to be a group process as such, though there’s group sharing every night. Whoever has been breathing, and even not breathing, would share what they’re experiences were and would take whatever degree of time they needed to do that. There was absolutely no expectation. There was just simply a sharing.

LS: That sounds very similar to Authentic Movement. (Authentic Movement is a form of Jung’s active imagination process whereby the body is moved in reponse to sensations or images.)

DJ: Yes. And you do a mandala drawing as a part of that process, and then you come home and you’re with this process. I did a lot of journalling and imagery work. This is my dream couch. You’re sitting on my dream couch!...I have images I simply spend time with…influenced by Hillman’s whole approach to looking at dreams and allowing it to stay congruent with the image…not contrive to interpret, just be present to it. And that can be a trick and a half. And it’s now almost second nature to do that.

LS: So it’s a Hillmanesque active imagination?

DJ: Yes, it is. At least for me it is. That is something that for me has continued to be at least…4 nights a week, easily, I’ll be out here for 2-4 hours, then I’ll go back to bed or I’ll stay up and read.

LS: So you’re really committed.

DJ: I am. It’s so organic; it’s just such a part of our marriage that has always been like this. It has been like this a long time. But it has become much more…. I keep forgetting that my Jungian stuff stopped becoming so intellectual and became much more involved with looking at active imagination. There were experiences I had in the late 70's before I headed off for India , about a year before, where I’d be sitting and I’d sudenly have this vision…9:30, 10:00 in the morning… of this old man and woman walking into my living room. They’re in my living room. My living room is there, but here are these ancient, they were old, they’re in my journals. It’s been a long time since I talked about this. And the woman says, “You’re going to need to learn to nurture your child.” And suddenly I had a baby. There’s a baby in my arms. And suddenly I grow breasts and I’m nursing the baby. And the baby just starts to grow, becomes a young man. And I’m looking at these two. There’s something going on with them. They’re changing too, and it just dissipates. I’m looking around my living room going, “What the hell just happened?” I mean I’d had a number of experiences before but this one came out of no seeming trauma going on, no issues. Just [popping sound] full grown…I think it was actually in ‘78.

LS: In some natural kind of way, you’ve always been open to experiencing.

DJ: Yes, it went from the very strict intellectual. I mean, and that was one of the major issues for me of being able to open up in my 20's…my 30's, my early 30's, when I went to India,…right at the cusp of where all of the intellectual drive to succeed in college, to be a straight A student, to succeed in graduate school, to succeed as a therapist…started changing to become more of an internal process…not that the intellect ever dropped aside. It didn’t…Then I went to India and got the crap kicked out of me. Totally destroyed. Came back and became much more focused in terms of this internal process,,,which really was a driving factor in what was my purpose here. And I realized that my purpose was more around educating people. That I was able to reach more people through education as well as through the holotropic breathwork. Because it’s so an education model. It’s not therapy. It opens up things. It may be introduced in a therapeutic setting, but it doesn’t have to be at all. It’s just an extension of educating people and allowing them to choose their own parameters and how to get involved. But that they need to know that there are issues out there as to how they see themselves as human beings. We need that in our culture. We’re still so young, and I think that we’re right at the cusp of some very important decisions as a species, some very important decisions. The.. deeper that we can sense ourselves as human beings is going to be absolutely crucial…

LS: To help people be aware of that and educate them. You anticipated where I was going next. I was going to ask what you thought your role as an educator is and you’re saying that. To help people see the other side of life, not just....

DJ: To see those deeper connections within themselves. What is prompting them, what is opening them up. Why is it that their marriage is so strifeful and they’re wanting to change things? What are those things all about? And not getting into the therapeutic aspect of them but to open up to understand who am I.? Why am I here? Why am I struggling with X, Y and Z, and what does this mean in terms of maybe another person or just within myself? How is it important for me to gain some perspective on, not become so enmeshed in, it? That is the problem. We get so enmeshed in our hurts, but what does that do? Not much. You need to be able to feel it, but you need to be able to go outside of it too. You can honor that process and that really starts to, I think, unify, the feeling and thinking functions in a different kind of way. Now, I am saying that because that was so important for me to be able to unify, to be able to bring some synchronicity between the thinking and the feeling functions. My intuition has always been very acute, and my senses are ridiculous. I have no sensation function with any development whatsoever. The best it gets it I have a good green thumb.

LS: There you go!

DJ: And I’ll stay there as a peasant. It’s OK.

LS: So, essentially, your way of educating is not to give people the answers, but to give them the means to find the answers.

DJ: Yes. From my mind, you can’t give people answers. You can respond to the questions, but that’s to allow them to see a larger perspective. Most people have a very limited perspective and that perspective can be quite debilitating, both intellectually and feeling-wise…

LS: So, we’re talking about going in two directions at once. Seeing the outer world more clearly, but also the inner world as well...

DJ: People are often… striving for something without it having an inner component that has to be responded to. So you need to be able to do both, but as the educator I’m going to be looking at the outside issues, the outside perspective and trust that they will in their own way, however they need to, be able to find, to respond to inner turmoil.

LS: So how do you pair that with working at a college, where people want credits. They want degrees. It’s very traditional.

DJ: Actually it’s very easy. The reason I say that is because the design of studies, the learning modules in the Independent Degree Program would be a conglomeration…there’s a lot of reading, it’s very academically rigorous. But there also needed to be internal exploration, when it was relevant. It’s not always relevant. Some people would be able to do a study of Jungian dreams, and anaytical psychology, but they’d also be able to do some dreamwork, they would do their own processing. They would do paintings, drawings that would become a part of the understanding of what the intellect is studying for them to internalize it, to start to see the connections for themselves. And you could do that in so many different kinds of ways. You could do that with something that totally has nothing to do with psychology at all. I remember there was this woman. When she started the program she had nothing to do with psychology, and still has nothing to do with psychology and was an activist in Vermont in terms of looking at pesticides and issues around chemical poisonings that were environmental, partially because it had affected her life profoundly. When she came into the program she was oriented that way. We would talk and I talked about looking at both of those issues… from looking at the the environment but looking at your inner environment. How has this impacted you? What has this brought up for you? And was able to bring that into her learning model. Lo and behold, within about 2 years, she’s now actively publishing on environmental issues but has gone into much more than that because of that creative process for her. It took her where her intellect was strongly leading, but also opened up something that she had no idea about her own creative spirit.

LS: It sounds like helping her to be much more grounded and a rounded out person by that process she’s engaged in. That’s really neat.

DJ: Well, it’s wonderful that she responded in such a profound way. Not all cases are like that. The opportunities are there, and if people take them, as you well know, you go as far as you can go with it and in that time frame. There can be other kinds of constraints.

LS: Sometimes you need a rest and then you get back to it after a rest. At Burlington College do you think there’s a difference, say between the IDP students and the campus program?

DJ: There are some differences, but I’d say for those students that are interested in Transpersonal Psychology for the most part they’re older which is the case in IDP, but they’re not that much older. They’re in their late 20's.

LS: Not fresh high school graduates?

DJ: Oh no, None of them are that. And the difference is in the IDP the average age is close to 40. The would be the case for almost all of the [IDP] transpersonal students, they’re in their 30's and 40's. And of those that entered the program, I mean I actually did a study of this about six years ago, at the beginning of that program which was in the fall of 2004. And at that point, 65% of all the transpersonal psych . students that graduated went on and graduated with a master’s or some went on to a PhD. That figure, I know, has grown since then. Now almost all the TP grads go on to graduate school. Many of them go on to counseling now. Not earlier. They just went to study further and didn’t go into counseling. They weren’t interested in that. Counseling has entered a whole new cycle where people are more interested in doing it whereas 15 years ago they weren’t.

LS: Well, maybe that’s a good thing too because it feels like a losing battle sometimes. From my own perspective as a therapist, with the cognitive and behavioral and the managed care world, nobody wants you to look too deep anymore from that perspective.

DJ: And they’re only willing to fund brief therapy. How profound can you get in 6 weeks? Come on, give it a break.

LS: It’s frustrating.

DJ: All right you get twelve weeks.

LS: And then call back.

DJ: You call back and get a new diagnosis.

LS: It drives me nuts. So, it’s good to hear that. I wish there were more schools around the country doing what you did.

DJ: On the undergraduate I don’t think you’re going to find it. Very little. And, then as you well know from your own graduate school program, there’s control issues around graduate school programs.

LS: Control issues around?

DJ: In terms of their focus. This is what psychology’s about. You’re gonna get stamped with our brand.

LS: And then you get a license because of it. It leads to a license.

DJ: Yes, right. Which means you can pay your [student] loans back.

LS: Right, you can pay your loans back and you can fight the system to get more sessions.

DJ: And then have to pay another therapist because you are so frustrated and gettomg burned out having to deal with two hours of paper work for every hour of therapy.

LS: Ain’t it the truth. It’s a labor of love.

DJ: Oh, it has to be. It has to be.

LS: Some of us have to do it.

DJ: Yes.

LS: As an INFJ I’m not sure I’m suited to a whole lot of other things with my particular personality, to be honest. What else could I do? Garden! I could garden. That’s my passion too lately. It’s like having babies.

DJ: This past year we’ve enlarged the whole garden hugely. A decision last year that I really wanted to do it… My two sons are living here. My oldest one is …trading. He lives here, but he helps us around the house with projects, cause he really likes to do things ..so last summer I built ten raised beds and filled them up and now they’re full of vegetables and fenced them in….

LS: So just a couple more questions… you talked about who your most influential teachers were. For the most part we’ve got that.

DJ: Yeah. Jung, Hillman, Rajneesh, Rajneesh, Rajneesh.

LS: And the holotropic breathwork, I wanted to ask about…Grof. Did you actually study directly with him at some point.

DJ: I did, yeah.

LS: Always a student it sounds like.

DJ: Always.

LS: Always reading. Have you seen the announcement about the Red Book?

DJ: I’ve already ordered it.

LS: You ordered it. I should have known.

DJ: Are you kidding me!

LS: How much is it? Tell me?

DJ: It actually retails for $150 bucks. But Amazon dropped it to 95 and the college gave me a gift certificate for 200 bucks at Amazon. So that was the first thing. I knew it was coming out some time. There’s a website, Philemon.

LS: Yes.

DJ: It was at the top of the page: preorder the Red Book. I clicked on it last week.

LS: Wow. That must have been satisfying.

DJ: It was unbelievable. Last week. I hadn’t been to Philemon for a couple of months. This spring has been quite dramatic for me. ...

LS: So what is next for you?

DJ: What is next for me? I am Gardening. Gardening and I’ll take that to more profound levels centering around the house and also I want to get certified as a master gardener. We’ll see.

LS: Through the Extension Service?

DJ: Yeah, through the extension service. But in the fall. I am already registered. I’m going to be doing hospice training. I want to work at hospice as a volunteer.

LS: Well, you sort of have some experience. Being a support person.

DJ: Yeah, I do and also in my own internal processes with death, where death was imminent and how to be present to that.

LS: So can I just ask you to summarize quickly? You have your bachelor’s in Comparative Religion...

DJ: Anthropology and socialogy.

LS: From UVM.

DJ: And a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Actually it’s in humanities, counseling...humanistic counseling and psychology from St. Michael’s college.

LS: You’ve been teaching for how many years now at Burlington College?

DJ: I’ve been teaching since 1977. Having some breaks there, but fairly continuously for 36 years.

LS: And there’ve been periods when you’ve practiced as a therapist.

DJ: I practiced as a therapist almost 10 years both in the drug rehab program and as a private therapist. And I worked, I’m technically not a facilitator, but I’ve worked to facilitate holotropic breath workshops for, oh Lord, for 10 years easily.

LS: Anything else you’d want to put out there to be in the article? From your perspective?

DJ: I think I’ve covered it.

LS: Well thank you so much.

DJ: … Well, thank you. I’d forgotten some of these things!

*Roger Woolger is a psychotherapist, lecturer and author specializing in past life regression spirit release and shamanic healing. He trained as an analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. His method is today called Deep Memory Process.

He began his practice with conventional Jungian therapy methods, including dreamwork, but through this began to discover images which seemed to be past life memories. He found a therapeutic and spiritual value in this method, which entails trauma release, psychodrama, deep body therapy, Tibetan "bardo" work and shamanic spirit release. His synthesis is today called Deep Memory Process. (Information cited from Wikipedia.com).

**Osho, born Chandra Mohan, calling himself Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh during the 1970s and 1980s and taking the name Osho in 1989, was an Indian mystic and spiritual teacher.

A professor of philosophy, he travelled throughout India in the 1960s as a public speaker. He began initiating disciples and took on the role of a spiritual teacher. In his discourses, he reinterpreted writings of religious traditions, mystics and philosophers from around the world. Moving to Pune in 1974, he established an ashram that attracted increasing numbers of Westerners. The ashram offered therapies derived from the Human Potential Movement to its Western audience and made news in India and abroad, chiefly because of its permissive climate and Osho's provocative lectures. (Information cited from Wikipedia.com).

***Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist with over forty years experience of research into non-ordinary states of consciousness (induced by psychedelic substances and various non-drug techniques) and one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. He and his wife, Christina Grof, developed Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful approach to self-exploration and healing that integrates insights from modern consciousness research, anthropology, various depth psychologies, transpersonal psychology, Eastern spiritual practices, and mystical traditions of the world. The name Holotropic means literally "moving toward wholeness" (from the Greek "holos"=whole and "trepein"=moving in the direction of something). (Information cited from Wikipedia.com).