Growing your podcast is an internal battle just as much as it is an external one. So understanding self, shadow and what our dreaming subconscious does to balance our awake psyche can be key to developing confidence in your brand and amplifying your truths. This episode dives into the journey of three inspired individuals who share their knowledge of Jungian Psychology and wisdom of life through intimate conversation.
In this episode of Be On Air, I interview two of three hosts from This Jungian Life podcast, Joseph R. Lee and Lisa Marchiano. We explore dream interpretation, shadow work, and some of the frustrating facets of growing a podcast for the first time.
Joseph R. Lee is an LCSW certified Jungian analyst and licensed clinical social worker. He works with adults and teens, and is the president of the Philadelphia association of Jungian analysts which provides a public seminar and trains Jungian analysts.
Lisa Marchiano is also an LCSW certified Jungian analyst, a writer, and licensed clinical social worker. She has presented on Jungian topics across the U S as well as in Europe, Lisa’s book Motherhood Facing and Finding Yourself, explores motherhood as a catalyst for personal growth and will be published in the spring of 2021.
Interested in This Jungian Life or want to submit one of your dreams? Check it out!
Learn More about Joseph R. Lee
Find Lisa Marchiano’s New Book
Want to talk about your podcast? Connect with K.Lee and Podcast Farm
Book a free strategy session to talk about your podcast:
Join the podcast farmers FB group and grow your show!
[00:30] – Intro
[03:03] – The inspiration for This Jungian Life.
[06:30] – Launch and growth of the show
[09:40] – Why Dream Interpretation?
[11:19] – The model for Jungian dream interpretation
[16:39] – What transformation would someone expect by tuning in to their dream world?
[20:28] – What is shadow?
[27:01] – How Jungian Psychology can assist with men’s work?
[33:27] – Inner transformation through relationships and children and how it can reveal your shadow?
[37:31] – Generating Ideas for the Podcast
[41:08] – In person vs virtual
[45:05] – Tips for new podcasters
Don’t compare journeys. Your journey is your specific journey and you will be guided to the best way to catch you where, where you go. I believe that right now is a great opportunity to leverage the power of voice. David Copperfield is a billionaire, not a millionaire. He’s a billionaire. And how did he become this?
He tapped into something profound, which is the art of storytelling Be On Air. Powered by Podcast Farm.
K.Lee Marks: [00:00:30] Welcome back to another episode of beyond air today is exciting. This is my first episode where I’m interviewing two hosts and these are two of three. Host of an incredible podcast I’ve been listening to for a long time. Now today’s guests are Joseph R. Lee and Lisa Marchiano, they’re both certified Jungian analysts and two of three co-hosts of this Jungian life podcast, where they engage in lively, sometimes irreverent conversations about a wide range of topics, such as cultural currents, family dynamics, personal issues, and more, and share what it’s like to see the world through the depth psychological lens provided by Carl Jung.
Half of each episode. And this is one of my favorite parts is spent discussing a dream submitted by a listener. I’m really excited to speak with these two experts. Joseph R. Lee LCSW certified Jungian analyst is a certified analyst and licensed clinical social worker in private practice in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
His website depthpsychotherapy.net is where you can find out more about that. I’ll put links in the show notes. He works with adults and teens, and is the president of the Philadelphia association of Jungian analysts, which provides a public seminar and trains Jungian analysts. He is accredited by the IAAP and received his diploma and analytical psychology from the inter-regional society of young analysts. He lectures nationally on the Hermetic Qabalah with a focus on its re-interpretation through modern idioms. Also with us Lisa Marchiano, LCSW certified Jungian analyst. Is a writer, licensed clinical social worker and a certified Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
She received her MSW from New York university and completed analytic training at the inter-regional society of Jungian analysts. Lisa is on the faculty of the Philadelphia Jungian Institute. Her writings have appeared in Colette, the journal of psychological perspectives and Aereo magazine.
She has presented on Jungian topics across the U S as well as in Europe, Lisa’s book motherhood facing and finding yourself, explores motherhood as a catalyst for personal growth. It will be published in the spring of 2021. I’m so excited to have you both on, and I’m excited about what we’re going to talk about.
Thank you for making time to come onto the show.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:02:46] thank you for having us.
Joseph Lee: [00:02:48] It’s great to meet you.
K.Lee Marks: [00:02:50] So this is one of those interviews. I’m excited about all my interviews, but I was specifically excited about this one because I’ve been a fan of the show for a long time and you all have put together such a, a unique.
Such a unique format. You have three hosts. You do half where you’re, you’ll talk about like a bigger topic. And then the second half you interpret a dream. There’s just so much going on in each episode, so much value. So could you share a little bit about how the podcast started, you know, who started it? How did it start? How did it grow?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:03:21] Well, I guess I’ll take that one because it, uh, sort of initiated with, with me. Um, I had been interviewed on a podcast in, uh, I think it was 2017 and I enjoyed the process and I watched what the host did. It was women in depth with Lordis Fiato it was a great experience.
And I just found myself thinking, Hm, I wonder what that would, what it would be like to have a podcast. So I kind of cooked it for a little while. I poked around. I took some notes, but I just didn’t have enough energy to do it by myself. And I, um, thought how tremendously fun it would be to do it with Deb and Joseph.
The three of us had been in training together and so we had this friendship and, it had been so wonderful being in training because we were sort of. Shoulder to shoulder in this endeavor. And then when you leave training, you know, you’re still friends, but you don’t have the same glue connecting you because you’re not involved in this common enterprise.
So I kind of thought the podcast would be this great way to reinvigorate, our connection. And, um, so I asked them, it was, it was really fun because I, I pulled them aside. We were all at a meeting together. I pulled them aside. I said, would you guys want to do a podcast with me? And they both went, YES! Oh, this is great.
Um, and, and I, I just kind of came up with a format, honestly. I was, I saw that most podcasts were interviews, but I was concerned that that would take a ton of prep time. And I just thought that the topic, uh, the, just picking a topic would be a way to allow us to have these wide ranging conversations without, um, burdening us with the need to do a lot of background research on a particular guest or anything like that.
So it was kind of, um, expediency and then I thought it would be fun to do the dreams, um, because that would be a way of drawing people into the show because they’d have an investment in us because we, they would hear their dream. So it just sort of, uh, landed in and my intuition as a, a fun way to do it.
And when we started it, I mean, I don’t know about you Joseph, but I just, I just thought it was going to be fun. We said we try it for a year and see how it went and, and we just haven’t looked back.
Joseph Lee: [00:05:49] Yeah, Lisa brought the idea forward and it had such a kind of clean, optimistic vitality to it that I think Deb and I were immediately gobsmacked by the idea.
And of course always impressed by Lisa’s clarity. Um, Lisa has this wonderful. Way of communicating confidence, confidence in other people and confidence in, in ideas. So when she came forward with it, it just seemed totally that we could do this. Although we had absolutely no experience, we didn’t know anything.
It was, it was a totally audacious undertaking.
K.Lee Marks: [00:06:30] Yeah. I mean, it’s really fun to see you guys pass around topics and, you know, you’re, you’re in a way you’re interviewing each other, but I get this feeling of like you’re building, you’re building the centerpiece of whatever the topic is and you’re all putting in ideas and, and just that flow, it models a really interesting communication style that I’ve personally gotten a lot from.
And y’all three, just have such great chemistry together talking about things and. Um, yeah. And so it’s, it’s really interesting. I’m curious, like, what was your growth like in the, in the, in that first year? What did that look like when you launched and, you know, at the end of the year?
Joseph Lee: [00:07:05] Well, it looked like we didn’t know how to make a podcast.
We had to consult with people to even know what microphones to order. I mean, we, we really had absolutely no background, but had, um, a willingness to learn and a willingness to ask for help. And, and those qualities carried us and still carry us as the project is developing because we often don’t know what we don’t know until we kind of stubbed our toe on something. And then there’s a whole new learning cycle happens. So it’s confidence in the capacity to adapt.
K.Lee Marks: [00:07:44] Yeah.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:07:44] When we first started, I mean, I’d have to go back and look at it now, but I think like our, our numbers were like, sort of surprisingly decent. I remember checking the stats like every day. Um, but it really picked up.
Because we actually got, we actually, co-authored a piece, the three of us for Colette, maybe after the podcasts had been live for like six weeks or something. And, and that kind of bumped it up a little bit, although it was growing each week, we saw growth every week and I think it was just very organic. I, I had someone asked me, well, you know, how’d you do it?
Did she, you know, advertising and algorithm? I was like, no, I think it was just word of mouth. Um, and then I remember there was this one moment, uh, when the podcast had been up for about maybe four or five months, our episode on creative depression. I remember that day, it just took off. Still don’t really know why maybe it was Facebook.
Um, we were certainly, you know, posting stuff on Facebook and Twitter, but it, it, it was the first time that there was this really kind of significant bump. And I remember how exciting that was and it’s just, it’s pretty, it’s grown pretty consistently month over month. We’ve done some things to help get it in the public eye a little bit more, but in general, it’s just. I think been quite organic.
K.Lee Marks: [00:09:09] Yeah. And that seems to be a, like an indicator of the value of the content. What I hear echoed from many podcast hosts is to prioritize, providing as much value through the content and, and increase the quality of the content and just focus on that and not worry about the numbers or, or really like advertising and all this stuff is like, if we can just serve the audience we have through word of mouth, it’ll end up growing.
And so that’s kind of a cool. Uh, experience that you shared there, um, with the, with the dream interpretation in particular, you, you all have a course, is that correct?
Joseph Lee: [00:09:47] We do as an extension of the podcast. Again, an idea that Lisa had pioneered that we could begin to develop an educational platform. And since the dream interpretation seemed to be the most interesting, uh, part of the podcast, we thought.
You know, people would probably jump in the water for that. And so far, we’ve had a really great first year with the dream school and hope the more people will discover it.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:10:16] Yeah. It’s a, it’s a 12 month self-paced program where you, we basically teach you how to work with your own dreams. The way that we work with dreams on the podcast and dreams of course are huge part of Jungian work and Jungian analytic work and Jung’s theories. And so we’ve been able to package that to make, I think, pretty meaningful experience for people.
Joseph Lee: [00:10:41] And I think dreamwork is so compelling because everybody dreams and the idea that this magical content is being generated by your own psyche, that could in fact, be both curative and supportive and illuminating is a really compelling idea.
K.Lee Marks: [00:11:04] I love this. So this is, this is really where I’m the most excited to dig in and, you know, the podcasting details and the, and the business side of things is really valuable, uh, for, for the listeners as well. Uh, and I think that, that your work is even more valuable. So for those who may not be that familiar with Carl Jung, uh, and Jungian analysis, would you be able to give us an overview of, of his model?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:11:32] Joseph, do you want to take that one
Joseph Lee: [00:11:34] Sure, Jung spent his whole professional life writing, investigating and reinvestigating the nature of the human psyche. So his Canon of literature is tremendous. So, what I’d like to parse out for us is just talking about his model for dream and dream work and how that figures in clinically.
So the first thing that he lets us know is that the human psyche, which is our psychological life is a landscape. It can be imaged that way. And the landscape is populated with all kinds of figures. We encounter these figures in our dream life, and those figures are often an amalgam of potent lived experiences and memories, which we call complexes. The ego or the waking personality is only one figure on the landscape.
And that part of living a life is encountering and being influenced by all these other dimensions on the psychic landscape. I think modern psychology often limits itself to the functioning of the ego or the waking personality and building strategies for getting what it thinks it wants. But the older analysts really understood that we are contending with all kinds of other forces, insides of us.
And we have to have a model. To imagine that because what is not imagined still exists, it just works behind the scenes, creating all kinds of symptoms and stressors. So the landscape inside of us needs to maintain a kind of balance so that things don’t. Become like our current political situation in United States, so that we’re not in a constant war, you know, inside of ourselves, there’s gotta be some kind of balancing process.
And the primary balance is between the waking personality and all the other unconscious dimensions in the inner landscape, some wise center inside of us, which we call the self. Each night crafts, a perfectly designed piece of theater in order to help the ego tilt its attitudes into a more balanced way.
So for instance, you know, if I. I have a personality that overly indulges in anger. It’s not unlikely that I may have a dream that night that fills me with compassion or even fills me with peace to make sure that the other parts of my personality that are not exclusively angry, have some kind of breathing room inside of my psychic life and Jung called that the compensatory nature of dreams.
I like to think of dreams as a kind of medicine so that each team is delivering a curative moment, a curative attitude, or a corrective emotional experience. And that’s often a lens that I use. What would you say, Lisa?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:15:06] Well, I think that’s a great overview. I mean, I would, I would just add that one of Jung’s great insights picking up on what you said, Joseph is that our conscious personality has to contend both with outer reality, but also the inner world as well.
And we need to have a functioning relationship with our inner world. And that doesn’t mean just giving into it doesn’t mean that the unconscious is all wise and all knowing, but it does mean that we need to be able to take a stance and have a confrontation with forces in the inner world. And dreamwork is one of the ways that we do this.
So, you know, Joseph’s right. This is just kind of a tiny portion of what Jung said about the psyche, but it does kind of give us a partial way in.
K.Lee Marks: [00:16:02] This, that is a amazing overview. Thank you for laying that out for us. Um, the, the image of a landscape with these different figures on it and the, the psyche trying to balance itself by creating these, these dream symbols, this dream theater for us is such a amazing way to look at it. And you know, I think some people will think that the dream is just some random noise in the middle of the night, and there’s no reason to pay attention to it. What, what kinds of transformations does an individual go through when they start to.
To spend time with their dreams, whether it’s writing it down and contemplating it or working with an analyst. What’s what is some of the transformation that someone could expect by actually tuning in to their dream world?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:16:52] Wow, what a great question. I had someone that I worked with a while ago who, uh, seemingly was pretty impaired.
Um, this young man suffered from a mental illness. And I had always kind of assumed that he would be, you know, sort of marginally functional in life and, uh, very, very brilliant person, but just some, you know, more severe kind of symptoms that made it difficult for him to function well. And we’d been working together for a while and he started attending to his dreams.
And when he started to attend to his dreams, there was a dramatic change. I mean, first of all, the dreams were just unbelievable. Um, and, and what they showed. There are clarity and, and, and just the poignancy of the images, they were really striking.
But I also saw this immediate kind of quickening of his personality and he went from living in his parents’ basement, literally. And kind of thinking that that was going to be it, um, to moving out and getting a job. It wasn’t seamless. Um, it was, you know, difficult at times for sure. But this was, um, I think there was something about him really taking himself seriously. And also turning toward the unconscious and seeing the rich inner resources there.
And the dreams were saying, you, you know, in essence, you know, you don’t have to live in your parents’ basement that you have so much more. And, and that is indeed what we found because he was able to operationalize that.
K.Lee Marks: [00:18:46] Yeah. When you said that, it reminds me, so he, he was taking it, it helped him to take himself seriously. And it reminds me of this, poem from Hafiz where he says everything is sacred and it’s like, When we acknowledged that this, you know, the, , compensatory nature of dreams is happening for, for our balance and for our wholeness, there’s this portal that we can go through into the next, the next developmental phase of, you know, wherever we’re at is what it sounds like.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:19:16] That’s great. Yeah. I like that. Everything is sacred and, and we are sacred and our life is sacred and we can take it seriously.
K.Lee Marks: [00:19:27] Yes. Yeah. It’s so, you know, this world that we’re in right now, we have. All of these devices around us. We have this, we have like the psyche of the world is buzzing with so many voices, so much chatter, so many differing opinions.
I get that image of the landscape again. Um, it seems like there’s never been a better time to start to. Do take ourselves seriously and to do this inner work, which hopefully has, as you’ve shown with the transformation of, of your, of the person you were mentioning, uh, it has an effect on the outer world. With the term shadow work is something, you know, people have talked about shadow doing shadow work.
Um, could you help create a definition. My personal, my guide and mentor in this realm who actually shared your podcast, Melissa Meader with the Synchrosoma podcast, a great podcast on somatic shadow work, um, was the first person that really helped me understand something about it. I’d be so curious what you think, you know, like what is shadow?
What is that phenomenon and, and what is like a layman’s way to begin to work with that matter and that material, that unconscious material?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:20:40] Well, Jung once said that shadow is everything that we don’t want to be. Uh, so it’s, um, those parts of ourselves that we like to think that we’re not it’s things that we learned as we were growing up are inappropriate or, uh, unsavory somehow.
And so we kind of tuck them away and we pretend that we don’t have those aspects and it might be something like, you know, Greediness or, um, aggression for some people. I mean, it depends in part on our culture and our parents, what, what we kind of cut ourselves off from and disavow. But the truth is that these contents that we’ve pushed away from ourselves also contain a lot of authenticity, integrity, and energy.
And so as we get older, it can be really important to reconnect with these. And it’s, you know, Jung said, I have to have a shadow if I’m going to be whole, I can’t just be all light. So it’s important to our sense of wholeness to become aware of shadow and to try to integrate it. Not that these contents aren’t sometimes genuinely problematic.
Because they can be my quick way. And Joseph I’ll turn it over to you and see what you have to say next. But what I’ll sometimes tell people is, you know, who is the person who really annoys you, who really gets under your skin. And oftentimes there’s a person that, yeah. Everyone would objectively say, yeah, that person’s kind of obnoxious, but for you, it’s just like nails on a chalkboard.
You can’t stand the person. So it’s kind of an outsized reaction to the person. That’s interesting to me. And then, and then I want to know what about that person bothers you the most. So for example, um, I was working with someone who had this really strong feeling that this person who was in her graduate program.
And I said, you know , what’s the most annoying thing about her? And she said, Oh, she just thinks she’s such a big deal. You know, she just thinks she’s so great. And this was in the shadow for her because she’d really grown up to be very, um, humble and accommodating and not take up too much space.
And so this person who just felt very entitled to be big was a shadow figure for her. And it was important for her to have a relationship with that and maybe even reclaim some of that. So, Joseph, what would you say?
Joseph Lee: [00:23:05] What I was thinking is that. Shadow making has to do with the first, you know, 10 – 18 years of life. That we are born as a very whole, but instinctive creature.
And in order to survive, we have to accommodate the culture and the systems and subsystems that we’re born into. So right from birth, there’s all kinds of subtle and gross communications about what’s the right behavior. And what are the things that have to be cordoned off and suppressed? That’s essential.
That’s not pathologic. We need to fit into our culture. And Jung felt that the first half of life really involved keeping that shadow element, reasonably quiet and kind of serving the tasks of getting established. At some point when the ego is strong enough, ideally people begin to have dreams and sometimes nightmares that things are pursuing them.
Stuff is knocking on the door. And we really want shadow to come up later in life, just as Lisa had said so that we can have a kind of ethical stance when we discover the ways in which we are somewhat dark. The difficulty with shadow, if it stays in the unconscious too long, is that it devolves? So for instance, if you’re in a home where, you know, expressing any form of anger is, um, met with a blizzard of problems, you might stuff all of your anger.
And when we stuff, things it’s as if we’ve banished it into a forest, And anything that lives in the forest for 30 or 40 years becomes more and more wild so that when it finally comes back to you, it shows up with twigs and its hair and a wild look in it’s eyes and it’s roaring at the door and there’s nothing really elegant about it.
It hasn’t had the benefit of civilized society. So sometimes when shadow shows up, we feel frightened by it. But just like that fairy tale, beauty and the beast. If we can invite our beasts to the table, if we can set some rules for them, little by little, just living with us. Begins to lift the curse of them being banished.
And then all of a sudden we realized that our aggression is incredibly helpful and it can help us advocate for a raise or our sexuality can come back and revive our marriage or our ability to claim what we feel we are worth in the world in who allows us to really take some risks and have a bigger life.
K.Lee Marks: [00:25:56] Hmm. Mm. I love I. So the so many amazing terms, you all are sharing that are helping kind of lock in these concepts. Uh, one thing I got from what Lisa was saying is it’s, it’s not that the, that my trigger around someone’s, you know, feeling like they’re all that is that I also am like that. So it’s not like a direct opposite reflection.
It’s like an unclaimed part of myself that haven’t yet, yet manifest. Is that, is that right?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:26:25] It’s an inner potential, actually, that you’ve banished because you were taught it wasn’t okay. So it appears really obnoxious and another person, but it is an inner potential that can, as Joseph was saying, can add a lot, if you can.
Integrate it and come into conscious relationship with that. Okay. Yeah. And Joseph, you were talking about setting rules for the beasts as we sit them at the table. And I love this image of the forest being, you know, banishing parts of ourself to the forest. They become wild and maybe rabid. Um, and, and this leads into maybe my next question.
Um, I think that this would go across the board for all human beings. Um, Particularly, I’m interested in men’s work. And I’m curious how Jungian psychology and myths and symbols, you know, in an age with so little Rite of passage for young men, um, what, what are some ways that men can start to work with their shadow and, use myths, symbols, Jungian psychology to assist them with that?
What a great question. I’m going to let you take this one, Joseph.
Joseph Lee: [00:27:32] I think that’s a really broad, wonderful inquiry, but Jung’s work has a lot to offer the men’s movement. And particularly men who are emerging into their power, you know, as they’re moving into their professional lives or our new fathers, I think that shadow very importantly can be problematic, but there’s also golden shadow.
So for instance, a young man may not be in touch with his tenderness or may be raised in a home where that’s considered inappropriate. So it might be with the birth of the first child, but all of a sudden tenderness has returned to him, which at first he might resist thinking somehow weakens him, but then he finds that, that allows him to have a whole other dimension of relationship to his young son.
I find more with men who are in their twenties and thirties right now that there is a. Loss of connection with the pre-Christian images of the masculine. God, I think that masculine sexuality has become demonized and men are being characterized as dangerous because they are desirous beings. And a lot of our religious upbringing and also a lot of wounds that exist in the culture seem to reinforce that.
So we, how have an entire generation or two of men who think of their instincts as inherently dangerous and have to be hidden and suppressed. And that kind of makes people a little crazy and at the very least makes them. Psycho spiritually flacid.
I think if we can look to the more ancient archetypes of the phallic, God, there was a time when the phallus was a universal symbol of urgency and potential and the capacity to arouse, to fill with ideas and fertility. If we can go back to the beginnings, I think young men can reclaim the nobility, the integrity, the passion of being male and cast off some of the cultural confusions that are rising up.
I’m saying that in a rather facile way, the work to find that. And to push away. A lot of the cultural programming is substantial.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:30:29] Well, Joseph, I think you’re, you know, you express it really beautifully. It’s really about, you know, K.Lee, you said, well, what does Jung have to say about this young talked all the time about the importance of the instincts?
In fact, he said a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways that most of our. Uh, pathology, if you will, our suffering is because we’ve been cut off from our instincts. And Joseph you’re really talking about going back and reclaiming these instincts, you know, in, in this, these masculine instincts and rather than, um, denigrating them or being ashamed of them or being cut off from them, you know, um, championing them really in an appropriate way.
And this also was part of what the myth of poetic men’s movement did. And that was active back in mostly I think the eighties and there’s just some beautiful stuff. That’s been written very much inspired by young. There’s a wonderful book called iron John by the poet, Robert Bly. Michael Meade is a mythologist who’s written extensively on these topics. And, and so I would love to see the mythopoetic men’s movement come back a little bit because I think you’re right, Joseph, I think there’s now been a couple of generations of men who’ve grown up without any way to see the masculine portrayed, um, as, um, As potent and fiery and, um, kind of appropriate rather than just sort of demonized and cut off from its core strength or something.
And beautiful that there is a beauty in the masculine spirit and that all these things have to be redeemed from the shadow, by the way.
K.Lee Marks: [00:32:17] and there’s a trust that comes, uh, from doing that work and discovering those parts and coming into contact it’s I think that men become more trustable. The more we become aware of those, rather than letting it kind of fly in the unconscious, um, and potentially cause pain and confusion around us.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:32:39] Exactly. I mean, I think what you’re, what you’re getting at there, K.Lee is that if we pretend we don’t have shadowy qualities, I am never greedy. Not, not me. I’m never greedy then of course I’m greedy sometimes. Right. And human. And, and so if I split off from that, then it’s in the unconscious and it’s like, what Joseph was talking about before it just gets Wilder and it kind of runs out of control.
So the stuff about say masculine instincts. Well, yeah, sometimes those things can be a problem, but they don’t become less of a problem if we say, well, I don’t have that. I’m, I’m never. You know, I’m, I’m never lust lusty, you know, of course, of course you are, you know, we all are. Um, but, but claiming it and forging a conscious relationship with it really enables that to be like Joseph was saying beautiful.
K.Lee Marks: [00:33:27] And, you know, as, as we’re getting towards the end of the interview, um, this is a perfect transition because I think that relationship is such a powerful. Mechanism to, or like a crucible to do that work and to, uh, to come into contact with those parts. Right. It’s like a such a quick way to figure out what I’m unconscious about is to have my partner or like a dear friend, someone I’m close to share that back with me. So at least I know you have a book as well called motherhood facing and finding yourself, which explores motherhood as a catalyst for personal growth. And, you know, uh, I’m really interested in attachment theory and that, you know, the first two years of a child’s life and how impactful that is.
And it seems like while the romantic relationship is so transformational and important, there’s this whole other boss level of having a child. And so could you talk a little bit about your book, what it explores, what that means for mothers and, and yes spend some time then.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:34:26] Yeah. So, I mean, it’s, it’s interesting you mentioned relationships, our colleague, um, Jim Hollis, a very well-known Jungian analyst who’s written tons of really wonderful books. He will sometimes say, if you don’t know what your shadow is, ask your spouse, it’s really true. We do meet our shadow in relationships. And part of that thesis of my book is that we also meet it when we’re mothering or even just parenting because, you know, First of all, you know, parenting there’s the extremes required, you know, the physical exhaustion, the emotional intensity.
You love this person so much, but they can be so exasperating, for example, the it’s going to bring up your shadow. I mean, most. Most parents don’t like to admit it. But if you, if you said to parent, you know, when, when have you been at your ugliest? Probably most of us would say, Oh, it was with my kid. You know, I just lost it with my kid, but we also sometimes see our children carrying shadow qualities. So things that we would never permit in ourselves. For example, maybe it’s something that our child winds up living out for us in this sense of kind of golden shadow, but the relationship with the child might allow us to reclaim that. So part of the thesis of my book is the experience of being a parent is an incredible opportunity to meet yourself.
And to learn about yourself. And some of that will be because you go to some dark places, but if, if the purpose of life is to get to know ourselves better and be as fully human as we can be, then, uh, boy Parenthood is a really good Avenue for doing that.
K.Lee Marks: [00:36:14] I love that. I love that, that, so, um, that’s coming out in spring. Is that right?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:36:19] Yeah. It’s coming out May 25th actually. And it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon and it’s being published by Sounds True.
Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. And you have some episodes on parenting I’m sure right? On This Jungian Life?
Well, we definitely have one early one on motherhood, but we haven’t addressed it much specifically have Joseph?
Joseph Lee: [00:36:41] Other than that episode, we’ve talked about father and mother archetypes and complexes, but in terms of for instance parenting skills, Um, things like that. That’s an area for us to put on the list.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:36:57] Yeah. I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of topics.
Joseph Lee: [00:37:00] We thought we would in the beginning. And sometimes when we’re with our colleagues, um, other Jungian analysts that we meet with, they’re surprised that there’s always something for us to talk about.
I don’t know if that’s a product of our own chat-ability or whether or not there were that many interesting things in the world, but the list does continue to grow.
K.Lee Marks: [00:37:22] How do you, how do you all work together to generate? Uh, maybe, maybe this is a great transition real quick to talk about the three host experience in managing a podcast with multiple people.
How do you guys generate ideas and, and kind of, you know, decide we’re going to do this one?
Joseph Lee: [00:37:37] We do it in conversation, um, that, that has made the podcast so fertile. Sometimes one of us will simply be enlivened by an idea and we’ll just ask for the support of the other two to say, you know, just help me bring this up for a podcast.
Sometimes we’ll just put a button basket of things, you know, in the center of the conversation. And then as we, you know, rifle through them, all three of us, we’ll just agree. This sounds, it sounds like a good idea. And this sounds like something, we might have a couple of things to say about. I think that what’s unique about our podcast compared to other Jungian podcasts is we are having a live developing conversation on the air and we don’t script ourselves.
So there is a place for a lot of erudite Jungian lectures, which are showing up on the web, but they’re not conversational. Um, and they’re not necessarily developing in the psychesof the three of us. And we learn from each other. Um, when I think about certain ideas I’ve had in the beginning of our project and how my own ideas have evolved by having a frame to listen to Lisa and Deb comment on a variety of things, that’s part of the alchemy of there being three of us.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:38:59] Yeah, I’ve learned so much in dialogue with Deb and Joseph and the truth. The wonderful thing is it really is a continuation of training because we would sit around and training and talk about ideas and talk about cases. And I learned so much from Deb and Joseph in training, and now I guess I just get to continue learning from them, which is great, but we, Joseph is right.
We just, we just talk about things sometimes I will say that, um, I. I spend a good deal of time on our social media and someone will just pipe in on Twitter or send a message on Instagram or something. I’m like, I’d love to hear this topic and, and, you know, all sort of put, add it to the list and, uh, you know, Or sometimes there’ll be something that happens in one of our consulting rooms.
Like this issue came up this week and I thought it was really, really interesting and, you know, we sort of throw it out there and, and uh, and then we wait to see like, who has energy for it. So like, I want to talk about this, but I can just feel it falls flat. You know, and then maybe three weeks later, I bring it back.
What about, what about this? Can we talk about this this week? And like finally, like, okay, we can talk about the hero’s journey.
K.Lee Marks: [00:40:05] It has to like, shift to the collective consciousness before you,
Lisa Marchiano: [00:40:09] we all have to, I mean, we’re all similar typologically and we all, we all need to feel like there’s a little energy there for us. Um, so, so it is, it is really, um, fun. Joseph is right. It’s not scripted. So there is this kind of quality where we’re genuinely playing off each other. And that obviously happens, you know, when we hit record, but it’s happening off air too.
Joseph Lee: [00:40:35] And because we have. Such intimate friendships with each other, we’re also deeply effected by what each of us says. So we don’t record them visually, but it’s not uncommon as we’re talking to for one of us to well up with tears or one of us flush red with, you know, anger about something. There’s a lot of really live emotion that’s bouncing around in the conversations, which I guess may or may not be overly clear in the podcast, but there’s a lot of life in the room.
K.Lee Marks: [00:41:08] Wow. So you all do it in person?
Joseph Lee: [00:41:12] We started that way, thinking that the alchemy could only happen if we were in the same room. Then we began to experiment because that was difficult with being in Cape Cod, Lisa in Philly, and me in Southern Virginia. We started experimenting with using squadcast as a recording platform, and we found that first several weeks, it did feel dry.
And then something began to happen. This kind of mysterious connection that people can still have at a distance began to strengthen and foster an alchemy that was fairly similar to what it was when we were together in the room. So we seem to be able to reproduce it.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:42:00] Yeah. W so we like squadcasts because there’s, um, a visual image. We can see each other while we’re recording, which helps a lot. Um, we do still like to record in person when we can manage it. We just like being together. But, uh, you know, this, the magic of technology makes, uh, a weekly virtual get-together possible.
K.Lee Marks: [00:42:22] Yeah, it sounds like you, you figured out a solution to, uh, when you can get together great. When you can’t, at least you can still provide your audience with the content that they love and, and help push these ideas forward, you know, we’re, we’re getting here towards the end. I wanted to. I have one more question at the end, but I wanted to open up this space a little bit for both of you to share any, anything new you’re working on.
You know, I know we talked about your book, uh, anything about the podcast that you, you know, how could people get in touch? What would be the next step that you’d like listeners to take, to learn more about each of your work in the podcast?
Joseph Lee: [00:42:56] Well, if they go to our website, thisjungianlife.com and Jungian is spelled J U N G.
Um, they’ll be able to find each of our individual pages so they can reach out to us that way they can find a link to dream school. And then we also have the patreon page. So if people like the podcast and we have managed to not have to bring on corporate advertisers in order to fund it, so patreon allows us to cover some of our basic expenses and we appreciate the support coming in that way.
But people can find out about us just by going to the central website.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:43:38] And of course there’s a podcast page where all of our backup episodes are, and you can also find the podcast, you know, and all nature podcast aggragators. . Um, so, you know, we love making the podcast. We love the fact that it’s available widely for, for any and all we’re on Instagram.
We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook and, um, you can, we always post our episodes on all three places each week. And, uh, you know, we’re, we’re there to chat to as much as we’re able. So, um, we love interacting with people and people write in all the time and say what they thought about the episode. And we love that.
So we, we welcome the engagement and, um, We hope to hear from you.
K.Lee Marks: [00:44:25] People can submit their dreams too. Is that right?
Lisa Marchiano: [00:44:27] Oh yes, of course. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, we, um, we do spend a time every week interpreting a listener’s dream. Um, there’s a place to do that on the website. Again, it’s thisjungianlife.com since the podcast started in April, 2018, we’ve had, I believe it’s over 1500 dream submissions.
And, uh, you know, we just go to the top of the pile and I try to pick one that’s come in recently. So, um, you know, submit your dream and maybe you’ll hear us discuss it on the podcast.
K.Lee Marks: [00:45:05] That’s awesome. And, you know, uh, just as a final little gem for the listeners, um, would you each be willing to share one tip that you would, you would share with a newer podcaster or as they’re embarking on their journey, uh, of the road ahead and just, you know, , something from, from each of you about, you know, what, something you could give them to help them on their journey.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:45:29] You know what I want to say, oddly is, um,
I love our podcast square and I love our theme music. And we were helped in choosing these with pod fly, who does our production. And, um, and I just, I love our brand, you know, just visually and, and, and the, uh, the music for it. And that. Just feeling so proud of it and feeling really good about it, I think has really helped me feel confident putting it forward. So I would, I would say, make sure you love how you’ve branded yourself.
Joseph Lee: [00:46:10] I think what I would say is to be bold and to trust that. This is going to be an evolving project. When I look at, you know, the first 10 podcasts we did, they’re really very different from the podcasts we do now. And. I don’t, we’ve resisted the temptation to rerecord things or just like take them down, just leave artifacts of our early stumblings, you know, out there on the web.
But that that’s okay. That when you first release your podcast, you’re not going to have a lot of listeners. So it’s not like anything terrible is going to happen. If you sneeze into the microphone or, you know, something isn’t edited as smoothly as you’d like, but if you stay in the process and particularly.
That you post episodes fairly frequently. That seems to be a real key, that you’ll become more accomplished. And at a certain point, people will just begin to notice. So the product doesn’t have to be finished and all put together exactly perfectly at the beginning. So be bold. Start give it a shot, listen to your own podcasts and think critically. About it and make small improvements. It’s a, it’s an eminently doable thing.
K.Lee Marks: [00:47:33] Wonderful wisdom from masters and experts. Thank you both so much for your time. I could talk to you for hours and hours about so many things, but this was, this was a great quick dive into the world of dream symbols, Jungnian psychology and podcasting.
Thank you both so much for your time. And I hope to get to speak again in the future.
Lisa Marchiano: [00:47:55] Yeah. Yeah. Thanks a lot for having us on bye-bye take care.
