Right now, if you have nothing better to do, get dressed, pocket P2,000 and head for the Ricco-Renzo Gallery at the LRI Mall on Reposo Street, across Alliance Francaise. Today, Saturday, Bernie Nepomuceno is giving a one-day seminar on Synchronicity and the Tarot. Who is Bernie Nepomuceno? She is a lovely woman, also an intellectual, and a disciple of Carl Gustav Jung, one of the other psychiatrists after Sigmund Freud. She is also president of the Holy Angels University in Angeles, Pampanga.
Bernie is an excellent psychologist and reader of tarot cards, which she uses as a medium for reading whatever you want her to read about you, most likely your personality. She is also somewhat metaphysical. If you have a comatose relative you want to talk with but cannot, she can intercede for you. This is one of her special gifts. I would die to attend this seminar on Synchronicity and the Tarot but I committed to attend a left-brained meeting elsewhere in the morning and I have a class in the afternoon, which automatically strikes me out. But believe me, Bernie Nepomuceno’s session will be well worth your while. It will cost P2, 000, including lunch.
But if you need more time to prepare – more than a few hours – plan on going to the Wild Woman Archetype seminar. This is a longer one, two days, September 30 and October 1 (Friday and Saturday). It will cost you P4, 000, including lunch, on both days. The Wild Woman Archetype will be run by Sophie Bate, another lovely young woman psychologist, another disciple of Jung.
We first heard about Wild Woman from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the wild woman who wrote the book Women Who Run with the Wolves. I remember reading that book and falling in love with one of its images. It tells you about an old woman in the desert who walks around picking up the bones of wolves. Night after night she walks, picks up bones until finally, when she discovers she has all the bones, she sets them down on the sand in the form of a wolf and begins to sing. She sings and sings and the bones grow flesh and fur and the wolf becomes whole, gets up and runs wild into the night.
The Wild Woman Archetype seminar will help you discover your creative, spontaneous, intuitive, instinctive, daring, loyal, deeply wise, fun, unhampered self, a.k.a. your wild woman. That seminar I am definitely not missing. That really sounds like fun, especially for a person like me who only has a vague recollection of once having been a very wild woman but is now rather tame. I wonder if I might become wild again. If you want to go to this one, I suggest you call either Marina at 892-4610 or Lito at 850-6814 for reservations. You’d better call early because they have a limit on the number of people in class. I already made my reservation, so I beat you to it.
I remember that before my stroke I went to one of the more recent Jung seminars. There I met an interesting lady who had the same first name set I had – Concepcion Barbara. She was born the first week of December when, once upon a time, St. Barbara’s feast day was December 4 (honored until the ’50s when it was decided that St. Barbara never existed but was a myth, meaning they’re waiting for me to die and be declared a saint, hahaha!) and the Immaculate Conception was December 8. Concepcion Barbara was what my mother’s mother was called. Her birthday was December 4 but always celebrated on December 8. I just inherited her name. Anyway, this lady, Concepcion Barbara, was quite interesting, said she had read about the Jung seminars in my column at some point and decided to sign up. It was a dream series then. There were many people who filled up the hall, all of whom went home very satisfied with the seminar.
Yes, Carl Gustav Jung is the sort of companion you’d like to have when your life feels miserable or bogged down or confusing. When my life is like that, I go to bed tired and wake up even more tired. Going to the Jung Festival then cured me. It filled me with some magic, some enchantment, it was personally elevating and marvelous. I recommend it heartily to anyone who thinks she’s looking for something only she doesn’t know what. If that’s the way you feel, call right now.