What does it really mean to be a grown up in today's world?

We assume that once we get it together with the right job, marry the right person, have children, and buy a home, all is settled and well. But adulthood presents varying levels of growth, and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of thirty-five and seventy when we question the choices we've made, realize our limitations, and feel stuck--commonly known as the midlife crisis. Jungian psycho-analyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning.

In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis explores the ways we can grow and evolve to fully become ourselves when the traditional roles of adulthood aren't quite working for us, revealing a new way of uncovering and embracing our authentic selves. Offering wisdom to anyone facing a career that no longer seems fulfilling, a long-term relationship that has shifted, or family transitions that raise issues of aging and mortality, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life provides a reassuring message and a crucial bridge across this critical passage of adult development.

From bestselling author and Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. James Hollis comes a new collection of essays exploring life's challenges and celebrating evolving questions on life's mysterious journey.

In a world seemingly set up for distraction, life can often feel like it's dividing you not only from others but also from yourself. Yet even within the cacophony of life, deep down you can intuit your own soul, that part of you that knows you better than you know yourself, and that offers direction and moments of solace, even amid uncertainty.

This disconnect from your inner source of guidance leads to self-doubt, but in Living with Borrowed Dust, Hollis provides a reminder that you carry within what you're so anxiously looking for from a crazed world. Behind the noise and beneath the surface, something in the soul of each of us cries out, he says. While we may be distracted from this summons, the soul keeps asking that we pay attention. These summonses come to us through symptoms, dreams, and restless nights. Gaining insight into these inner callings, the meaning within our challenges, and the courage it takes to move through our journey can help us feel better connected through difficult times. Here, Hollis reveals tools you can utilize to engage in this conversation with the soul.

In this collection of essays, readers are guided to reflect deeply on questions that explore and celebrate life's challenges in our evolving world, including how happiness is attained, how to approach your dreams, the divided soul of America, the fear and fascination with death, and the conflict between good and evil. With each new insight, Hollis aims to steer you toward an individual, self-determining path, zeroing in on the need for personal accountability and decisive growth. Using analytic psychology as a vehicle for the recovery of a spiritual life in a secular age, you'll find inspiration for reconnecting with deep wisdom, bringing renewed purpose and dignity to this mysterious journey called life.

A Masterful Author and Jungian Analyst Examines the Qualities That Bring Meaning to Our Human Journey.

What is it that brings meaning to your life? Our culture tells us to seek wealth, power, prestige, or even enrollment in someone else's idea of a worthy cause--yet where do we turn when these paths fail to fulfill our need for purpose? When the old stories and beliefs that once defined us have played out and grown exhausted, teaches Dr. James Hollis, our task is to access our inner compass, the promptings of the psyche that help us find our way through the complex thickets of choice.

A Life of Meaning is Hollis's profound exploration of the nature of meaning and how we can orient toward it or away from it with the choices we make. Hollis offers an examination of myth, literature, historical figures, and the wisdom of depth psychology that provides penetrating insight into the search for purpose. Join him to explore:

- How even cherished narratives splinter and lose potency over time
- Why dreams are windows into your internalized patterns and base assumptions
- How to excavate and understand your earliest, most foundational beliefs
- The power of fear and how it shapes unconscious reactions
- Recognizing and rising to the occasion of a summons of the soul
- How to anchor yourself during times of uncertainty and change
- Why it's important to be aware of and closely examine your shadow
- How to reckon with old feelings of shame, betrayal, resentment, and regret

We all have to discover our own sense of meaning. No one else can do it for us. In A Life of Meaning, Hollis offers no easy answers or feel-good certainties--instead, he shares his most valuable questions and reflections to help you find the courage, persistence, and inspiration to navigate your own odyssey. It's humbling work, this process of getting our lives back, he teaches. Yet I submit to you that's worth the price of the ticket, for in the journey our lives become ever more luminous.

An Invitation to Listen to Your Soul's Calling

How do you define growing up? Does it mean you achieve certain cultural benchmarks--a steady income, paying taxes, marriage, and children? Or does it mean leaving behind the expectations of others and growing into the person you were meant to be? If you find yourself in a career, place, relationship, or crisis you never foresaw or that seems at odds with your beliefs about who you are, it means your soul is calling on you to reexamine your path.

With Living an Examined Life, James Hollis offers an essential guidebook for anyone at a crossroads in life. Here this acclaimed author guides you through 21 areas for self-inquiry and growth, challenging you to:

- Recover Personal Authority--how to stop living in response to the expectations placed on you
- Choose Meaning Over Happiness--why seeking truth instead of entertaining distractions ultimately leads to greater fulfillment
- Exorcise the Ghosts of the Past That Bind You--how the voices that haunt you can lead you to grow
- Bestow Love on the Unlovable Parts of You--recovering the guiding force concealed in your Shadow
- Construct a Mature Spirituality--the five essential elements of integrating meaning and mystery into your life
- Seize Permission to Be Who You Really Are--the challenge of fully showing up for your life

With his trademark eloquence and insight, Dr. Hollis offers Living an Examined Life to inspire you toward a life of personal authority, integrity, and fulfillment. It is my hope that this book will be a tool to recover your respect for that which abides deeply within, writes Dr. Hollis. You will not be spared disappointment or suffering. But you can know the depth and dignity of an authentic journey, of being a real player in your time on this turning planet, and your life will become more interesting, taking you deeper than ever before.

The celebrated author of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life delivers a unique look at happiness, sharing a Jungian approach to finding a fearless, authentic path.

Why are we here? What is the meaning of existence? What truly matters the most in life? To even begin to answer these questions we must start by exploring our own internal ideals, values, and beliefs. Presenting the unique perspective of respected analyst and author James Hollis, Ph.D., What Matters Most helps readers learn to appreciate (even be amazed by) events unfolding within, even as the external world creates constant struggles.

Taking a fresh look at the concept of happiness, Hollis uses a warm, accessible tone to encourage readers to learn to tolerate ambiguity, embrace growth rather than security, respect the power of Eros, engage spiritual crises, and acknowledge the shadow of mortality. Providing inspiring wisdom and personal reflections to address our deepest worries, What Matters Most yields far more than mere self-help clich s. Instead, Hollis guides readers in uncovering the heart of the matter, discovering what it means to truly live life to its fullest, most meaningful state--as fully engaged citizens of the world.

Also available in an open-access, full-text edition at http: //oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/85764

What we wish to know, and most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp. With these words, James Hollis leads readers to consider the nature of our human need for meaning in life and for connection to a world less limiting than our own.

In The Archetypal Imagination, Hollis offers a lyrical Jungian appreciation of the archetypal imagination. He argues that without the human mind's ability to form energy-filled images that link us to worlds beyond our rational and emotional capacities, we would have neither culture nor spirituality. Drawing upon the work of poets and philosophers, Hollis shows the importance of depth experience, meaning, and connection to an other world. Just as humans have instincts for biological survival and social interaction, we have instincts for spiritual connection as well. Just as our physical and social needs seek satisfaction, so the spiritual instincts of the human animal are expressed in images we form to evoke an emotional or spiritual response, as in our dreams, myths, and religious traditions.

The author draws upon the work of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies to elucidate the archetypal imagination in literary forms. To underscore the importance of incarnating depth experience, he also examines a series of paintings by Nancy Witt.

With the power of the archetypal imagination available to all of us, we are invited to summon courage to take on the world anew, to relinquish outmoded identities and defenses, and to risk a radical re-imagining of the larger possibilities of the world and of the self.

The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves explores the need to know ourselves more deeply, and the many obstacles that stand in our way. The various chapters illustrate internal obstacles such as intimidation by the magnitude of the project, the readiness to avoid the hard work, and gnawing self-doubt, but also provide tools to strengthen consciousness to take these obstacles on.

Additional essays address living in haunted houses, the necessity of failure, and the gift and limits of therapy.

Most of all, Hollis addresses the resources we all have within, or can obtain for ourselves, to lead a more abundant life and to step into larger possibilities for our unfolding journeys.

What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms-spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries-which move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come. James Hollis, PhD, is a co-founder of the C. G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia and Saybrook University's Jungian Studies program, director emeritus of the Jung Center of Houston, vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, and an adjunct professor at Saybrook University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He resides in Houston, Texas, where he conducts an analytic practice.

The Best of James Hollis: Wisdom for the Inner Journey is a collection of excerpts from the writings of James Hollis, PhD, Jungian psychotherapist and author. These selections span across his body of work from The Middle Passage (1993) to Prisms (2021) organized into different topics ranging from the psychological concepts of Carl Jung to the everyday tasks of our living and callings. Hollis's wisdom will challenge readers to find their own path, to be who they are called to be, to take the risks to trust their soul, and thus live a life worthy of their unique gifts. Hollis's writings ask us to live a deeper and more authentic life.

Working with the Shadow is not working with evil, per se. It is working toward the possibility of greater wholeness. We will never experience healing until we can come to love our unlovable places, for they, too, ask love of us.

How is it that good people do bad things? Why is our personal story and our societal history so bloody, so repetitive, so injurious to self and others?

How do we make sense of the discrepancies between who we think we are--or who we show to the outside world--versus our everyday behaviors? Why are otherwise ordinary people driven to addictions and compulsions, whether alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, infidelity, or the Internet? Why are interpersonal relationships so often filled with strife?

Exploring Jung's concept of the Shadow--the unconscious parts of our self that contradict the image of the self we hope to project--Why Good People Do Bad Things guides you through all the ways in which many of our seemingly unexplainable behaviors are manifestations of the Shadow. In addition to its presence in our personal lives, Hollis looks at the larger picture of the Shadow at work in our culture--from organized religion to the suffering and injustice that abounds in our modern world. Accepting and examining the Shadow as part of one's self, Hollis suggests, is the first step toward wholeness. Revealing a new way of understanding our darker selves, Hollis offers wisdom to help you to acquire a more conscious conduct of your life and bring a new level of awareness to your daily actions and choices.

What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms-spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries-which move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come. James Hollis, PhD, is a co-founder of the C. G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia and Saybrook University's Jungian Studies program, director emeritus of the Jung Center of Houston, vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, and an adjunct professor at Saybrook University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He resides in Houston, Texas, where he conducts an analytic practice.

Prisms: Reflections on the Journey We Call Life summarizes a lifetime of observing, engaging, and exploring why we are here, in service to what, and what life asks of us. These eleven essays, all written recently, examine how we understand ourselves, and often we have to reframe that understanding, the nature and gift of comedy, the imagination, desire, as well as our encounters with narcissism, and aging.

James Hollis, Ph.D., a Jungian Analyst in Washington, D.C., explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.

Table of Contents:

1. Archetypal Presences: The Large Forms Rolling Beneath The Surface of Our Lives

2. Reframing Our Sense of Self and World in Plague Times

3. Who Heals the Healer?-The Profile of the Wounded Healer

4. On the Psychology of Comedy: Is the Joke on Us?

5. Permutations of Desire

6. All Is Fire: The Imagination as Aperture into Psyche

7. Narcissus's Forlorn Hope: The Fading Image in a Pool Too Deep

8. Theogonys and Therapies: A Jungian Perspective on Evil

9. The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Yeats's Passage from Puer Aeternus to Wise Old Man

10. The Necessity of Personal Myth

11. For Every Tatter in Our Mortal Dress: Stayin' Alive at the Front Of the Mortal Parade

Afterword

Bibliography

What guides us when our world is changing? Discover the path to deeper meaning and purpose through depth psychology and classical thought.

How did we get to this crossroads in history? And will we make it through--individually and as a species? We all assumed that learning, rationality, and good intentions would prove enough to bring us to the promised land, says Dr. James Hollis. But they haven't and won't. Yet what we also do not recognize sufficiently is that this human animal is equipped for survival. In time, as we have seen of life's other insolubles, we grow large enough to contain what threatened to destroy us.

Dr. Hollis's readers know him as a penetrating thinker who brings profound insight and sophistication to the inner journey. In Living Between Worlds, he broadens his lens to encompass the relationship between our inner struggles and the rapidly shifting realities of modern human existence. You will learn to invoke the tools of depth psychology, classical literature, philosophy, dream work, and myth to gain access to the resources that supported our ancestors through their darkest hours. Through these paths of inner exploration, you will access your locus of knowing--an inner wellspring of deep resilience beyond the ego, always available to guide you back to the imperatives of your soul.

Though many of the challenges of our times are unique, the path through for us, personally and collectively, will always rely on our measureless capacity for creativity, wisdom, and connection to a reality larger than ourselves. Here you will find no easy answers or pat reassurances. Yet within the pages of Living Between Worlds, you will encounter causes for hope. We can find what supports us when nothing supports us, Hollis teaches. By bearing the unbearable, we go through the desert to arrive at a nurturing oasis we did not know was there.

The Best of James Hollis: Wisdom for the Inner Journey is a collection of excerpts from the writings of James Hollis, PhD, Jungian psychotherapist and author. These selections span across his body of work from The Middle Passage (1993) to Prisms (2021) organized into different topics ranging from the psychological concepts of Carl Jung to the everyday tasks of our living and callings. Hollis's wisdom will challenge readers to find their own path, to be who they are called to be, to take the risks to trust their soul, and thus live a life worthy of their unique gifts. Hollis's writings ask us to live a deeper and more authentic life.

The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves explores the need to know ourselves more deeply, and the many obstacles that stand in our way. The various chapters illustrate internal obstacles such as intimidation by the magnitude of the project, the readiness to avoid the hard work, and gnawing self-doubt, but also provide tools to strengthen consciousness to take these obstacles on.

Additional essays address living in haunted houses, the necessity of failure, and the gift and limits of therapy.

Most of all, Hollis addresses the resources we all have within, or can obtain for ourselves, to lead a more abundant life and to step into larger possibilities for our unfolding journeys.

What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers one's transformation through the invisible world-how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms-spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries-which move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come. James Hollis is the most lucid thinker I know about the complexities and complexes that interfere with living a full life. . . . He is one of our great teachers and healers.-Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Hollis, PhD, is a co-founder of the C. G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia and Saybrook University's Jungian Studies program, director emeritus of the Jung Center of Houston, vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, and an adjunct professor at Saybrook University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He resides in Houston, Texas, where he conducts an analytic practice.

Slattery has inspired generations of students and readers with a warm-hearted, probing, and productive intelligence that seems to relish the sharing of insights and the dialectical conversation that rises from speaking, listening, and interrogating the meta-conversation that emerges. -From the foreword by James Hollis

There are many different kinds of knowing.
The lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
Learn from the lame goat,
and lead the herd home. (Rumi)

Dennis Patrick Slattery's hope is that Becoming Stories offers a variety of expressions to lead the reader home.

Join a Veteran Depth Psychologist and Philosopher on the Search for Paths to Deeper Meaning, Purpose, and Fulfillment

How did we get to this crossroads in history? And how will we make it through--individually and as a species? We all assumed that learning, rationality, and good intentions would be enough to bring us to the promised land, says Dr. James Hollis. But they haven't and won't. Yet what we also do not recognize is that the human animal is equipped for survival. In time, we grow large enough to contain what threatened to destroy us.

In Living Between Worlds, the renowned Jungian broadens his lens to encompass the relationship between our inner struggles and the rapidly shifting realities of modern human existence. Here, you will invoke the tools of depth psychology, classical literature, philosophy, dreamwork, and myth to gain access to the resources that supported our ancestors through their darkest hours.

Though our current challenges may be unique, finding a way forward has always come through our measureless capacity for creativity, wisdom, and connection to a reality larger than ourselves. In Living Between Worlds, you won't find easy answers or pat reassurances--but you will discover always-available sources of hope and support.

Prisms: Reflections on the Journey We Call Life summarizes a lifetime of observing, engaging, and exploring why we are here, in service to what, and what life asks of us. These eleven essays, all written recently, examine how we understand ourselves, and often we have to reframe that understanding, the nature and gift of comedy, the imagination, desire, as well as our encounters with narcissism, and aging.

James Hollis, Ph.D., a Jungian Analyst in Washington, D.C., explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.

What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries which move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come.