As I gather the pieces of this collective newsletter, I am impressed anew with the scope of programs for the year to come. You will find inside a roster of fascinating lectures, workshops, small groups, and salons. You will also see an extensive "Help Wanted" section! Over the past year, a great deal of time and energy was given by a relatively small group of generous souls. Some of them are relinquishing their roles. If you don't have a job in the Society, or if you would like a different one, we hope you will consider adopting one of those listed in Help Wanted. There's great satisfaction in doing a job that matches one's own temperament.

    My own temperament requires me to ask, when I sit down to a job such as this, a job that requires many hours of my precious life, what is the point? What does it mean? Is this the highest and best use of the resources for which I am responsible? The point and meaning of this issue of Q is to communicate to you, members and friends, both what the Society offers to you and needs from you

    The heart of what the Society offers this year is support and witness to each of our individuation processes. BUT we would like to attract new people. And new people may not be familiar with terms such as "individuation."

    In all humility, simply because we've said we want to introduce Jung to more people, I offer an answer to a question posed to me this week, "What is individuation, exactly?"

Individuation is Self realization.

     The Self is paradoxically both the center and the sum of the psyche, both sun and solar system.

     The orbit of the outermost ring of the psyche, the persona, encloses the orbit of the ego. Heading toward the center of the system that is the Self, we enter the orbit of Shadow. The journey grows more uncomfortable and even dangerous, not to be undertaken alone. Aided by analyst or trusted witness, the pilgrim claims the Shadow and unlocks libido, which can fuel a deeper journey into the orbit of Anima/ Animus. This territory and the Self beyond, less well known because fewer people delve that deep, awaits us. And yet, Jung wrote,

The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime." [Collected Works 16. p.400]

That is, traveling the path of individuation is enough. The imagined endpoint is only a navigational star. Each time we encounter an insurmountable obstacle, we also receive an insurmountable opportunity.

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. [CW 13: 18]

And how do we manage that? Jung translates the outgrowing to signify a higher or wider level of consciousness:

. . . the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. . . . This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it. [CW13: 17]

See you on the paths,

Lea Hall