Friends, The gold is in the shit. A handful of times over the years, I heard the Jungian analyst Ron Schenk say those six words in our classrooms. Ron minces no words and suffers no fools. Aside from whatever joy he got from cursing in formal settings—a joy I sometimes share—Ron was also succinctly framing a paradox at the core of our lives. Jung told us that we do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Those are abstractions—not easy to pass off as inspirational self-help, but still a bit distant from the truth of the process. We find soul by digging in the shit: in the awful, the decaying, the offensive, the last places we want to touch. Like it or not, this is the work. It doesn't mean wallowing in what's worst about us, but rather in understanding that the stuff of growth comes out of our decaying waste, the vitality we have lost or shed, the illusions that kept us from seeing reality. In her poem "Compost," Brigid McNeill captures this psychological truth eloquently:  Rot is not surrender. It is participation. The slow alchemy of apple cores, heartbreak, old selves and half-remembered dreams each softened by rain, each broken open by time. Humus, the richly fertile product of the decay of organic matter, is the end point of the process of composting. It is also etymologically tied to our words humility and humiliation. Many of my ideals, and my idealized sense of self, are in a season of humiliation. We are in the midst of disturbing, seismic social changes. We have launched a war that makes no sense, with unclear goals, no plan to achieve them, and ferociously expanding damage to the global economic and social order. In the last year, the federal funding that provided the most basic support to our arts, culture, medical research, and social service infrastructures have been ripped out by the roots. The Jung Center doesn't receive federal funding, but the effect of removing not-nearly-sufficient resources for our common good means already limited private philanthropic resources are overwhelmed, deeply wounding the entire nonprofit sector and stripping lifesaving services from our most vulnerable people. We are deep in the shit. We can't escape it. The dynamics of transformation require us to stay with the decay. We can't magically skip ahead to the golden future. The path to humility involves humiliation. In his fall lecture at The Jung Center, Fr. Richard Rohr laughed about the daily humiliations he faces—he welcomes them, knows them to be part of the alchemical process of spiritual growth. We are so unused to accepting endings, to acknowledging death, that we miss their inextricability from the work of living, which always, always depends on the fracturing and decomposing of illusory ideals and identities. Moments like this can be sacred. Making them so – finding the gold that is also always present – involves reflecting consciously on our humiliations, by ourselves and with each other. They are never just our own, and the sacredness and growth aren’t either. Warmly, Sean Fitzpatrick Executive Director PS. Our spring semester is in full swing, and you will hear more from us very soon about our rich summer programming. Stay tuned.

In my professional life, I am the Director of Counseling for Alief ISD, one of the most culturally diverse districts in Texas, with our students speaking over 85 languages. In my personal life, however, I am like many of you—a spouse, a parent and grandparent, a sibling, a daughter, and, always, a champion for mental health. During the height of the pandemic, all of those roles were stressed, strained, and stretched. In my professional life, I was feeling those same pressures, especially as I led our District Crisis Response Team (DCRT), which is deployed throughout our district when there is a death of a staff member or student. Last school year, when I had the great fortune to become more acquainted with The Jung Center through the generous support of H-E-B, our DCRT was being requested more and more frequently to support issues of death, grief, and loss. I became increasingly concerned that my team of amazingly dedicated counseling professionals may begin to give way to compassion fatigue and burnout. I shared my concerns with The Jung Center team, and Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick and Dr. Alejandro Chaoul created a dynamic two-day training for our team. I vividly remember that before the first day ended, there were already members of my team in tears as they expressed in small groups some of the collective toll of trying to balance work and home, and how it was impacting their emotional wellness. Over those two days, The Jung Center provided us space and understanding as they walked us through self-care versus community care, how to combat burnout, and mindfulness techniques among other tools, reminding us to navigate life in healthy ways. And if that was not enough, The Jung Center returned to present a full-day workshop to over 100 of our amazing school and district nurses, who, at the time, had conducted more than 25,000 COVID tests over nearly a two-year period, always with a warm smile—while understanding that every interaction could have put them at personal risk. During their “Day of Care for the Caregivers,” as we coined it, the nursing staff kept coming up to me and saying, “I can’t believe someone did this for us. Someone did this just for us.” Since then, The Jung Center has sought and received funding from The Junior League to return to Alief. This year, Jasmine Shah and Dr. Fitzpatrick led two workshops for our counseling team as well as a full-day workshop for our district and school nurses. So, when I think about the impact The Jung Center had in Alief ISD, I think about the thoughtful support and stellar resources that The Jung Center provided for our counseling and nursing staff to ensure that we were emotionally healthy while we cared for ourselves and others. For that, we, along with the over 40,000 students that we serve, say, “Thank you!”