Thea Euryphaessa
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theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
Thea Euryphaessa
@theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
790 followers 14 following 1.7K posts
Writer 📚 | Quotes | Depth/Jungian Psychology | Hero's Journey | Author of 'Running into Myself' and follow-up, 'Growing into MySelf'

Long press the hashtag #MyBookShelf on app/click on desktop to search my posts for books I've shared.
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Thea Euryphaessa @theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social · Nov 19
I've decided Bluesky is where I'll share my favourite books, starting with this: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘤 𝘛𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘵 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and astrologer and Jungian, Liz Greene. This is actually a box set which includes cards with characters from Greek myth.

A rich, educative tarot deck.

#mybookshelf #booksky
Thea's hand holding up a copy of 'The Mythic Tarot' box set by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene, in front of a bookshelf with flowers and fairy lights.
theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
A sobering read from James Hollis on anger.
We must recognise that just as there is a pool of sadness in everyone, so there is a mountain of anger. Anger is a legitimate reaction of the soul to its wounding. We may keep it unconscious precisely because its expression today reactivates the peril its expression once risked. We may turn it upon ourselves by somatising, depressing or damaging ourselves through our contaminated decisions. Or we may transfer this anger to others, thereby wounding those who are the silent surrogates for those we could not confront in the past. Anger, then, is a reflexive response to the constriction of the soul. As such, it is not only part of the defence system of the psyche, it is a vital intimation which, when tracked, may lead to the soul's healing. When transformed by consciousness, anger becomes vital energy which is available not only for healing but also for furthering the desires of the soul. As long as we are wound-identified, we remain stuck in our victimage, up to our ears in the sour soup of wrath. James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul
February 6, 2026 at 4:19 PM
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Rilke—forever sublime.
Only in our doing can we grasp you. Only with our hands can we illumine you. The mind is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world. Each mind fabricates itself. We sense its limits, for we have made them. And just when we would flee them, you come and make of yourself an offering. I don't want to think a place for you. Speak to me from everywhere. Your Gospel can be comprehended without looking for its source. When I go toward you it is with my whole life. — Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Book 1, 51
February 5, 2026 at 3:54 PM
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Jolande Jacobi from, 'The Psychology of C. G. Jung'.
Jung knows too much about the harmful consequences of 'force-fed' doctrines accepted without reflection; he knows too well that only what has grown organically, not what has been tacked on, can be truly alive and effective, to exempt those who trust themselves to his guidance from the need for making their own decisions and accepting their own responsibilities. He refuses to facilitate the task by telling them what attitude to take. For in experiencing the profound symbolic contents of his psyche, the believer will encounter the eternal principles which confirm the workings of God within him and reinforce his belief that God created man in his own image, while the unbeliever, the man who does not want to believe or who yearns for faith but whom no effort of the will or intellect can help to achieve it, will be led at least to a true experience of the eternal foundations of his being and in this way perhaps will attain, at the end of his struggle, to the charisma of faith. — Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung
February 3, 2026 at 3:39 PM
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Evergreen wisdom from Marie-Louise von Franz.
Every content of the unconscious with which one is not properly related tends to obsess one for it gets at us from behind. If you can talk to it you get into relationship with it. You can either be possessed by a content constellated in the unconscious, or you can have a relationship to it. The more one suppresses it, the more one is affected by it. If we don't actively offer the unconscious a means of expression, it comes out in destructive, undermining, involuntary fantasy material. People who are possessed and spun up in a cocoon about the people they ought to relate to are caught in the most amazing assumptions, which they neither doubt nor make quite clear to themselves because they seem to be completely evident. 1/2 They are sure of everything and never say, "Why do I assume such a thing?" The obsession becomes a complete semi-conscious conviction. That happens when fantasy material has found a wrong mode of expression, e.g., in accusations against neighbours and friends, and it is never checked. It skulks at the back of the mind of such a person and amplifies itself. Little irrelevant instances are picked up and built into a paranoic system and every item adds a bit more–e.g., the Swiss Government has decided so and so, or the postman's ring means this or that—everything is one more sign. Even the minds of so-called normal people are filled with unchecked assumptions which are not related to conscious reality. If you ask them about this you will meet a completely erratic block and discover a crazy idea. — Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales 2/2
February 1, 2026 at 1:58 PM
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The more I see the heavily Botoxed, animal-frozen-in-the-headlights look now so prevalent in our culture, the more I'm reminded of Jungian, Marion Woodman's words from her book, 'Addiction to Perfection'.
The chief sign of the pursuit of perfection is obsession. Obsession occurs when all the psychic energy, which ought to be distributed among the various parts of the personality in an attempt to harmonise them, is focused on one area of the personality to the exclusion of everything else. Obsession is always a fixation—a freezing-over of the personality so that it becomes not a living being but something fixed, like a piece of sculpture, locked into a complex. There is always something catatonic about it, behind which is fear that can accelerate into blind terror so that the person may become like a wild animal caught in the glare of headlights, unable to move. 1/2 Perfection is something very like that when applied to human life. . . . Addiction to perfection is at root a suicidal addiction. The addict is simulating not life but death. Almost inevitably a woman addicted to perfection will view herself as a work of art, and her real terror is that the work of art, being so absolutely precious, may in one instant be destroyed. She has to treat herself as a rare piece of Ming porcelain or what Keats described as a "still unravished bride of quietness", a "foster-child of silence and slow time". — Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection 2/2
January 31, 2026 at 1:32 PM
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Marie-Louise von Franz with some practical advice on how not to be overwhelmed by the unconscious.
If you are overwhelmed by an unconscious content and cannot speak of it, then do not try to talk about it in the outer world but let it first express itself to you. Then you are not overwhelmed by unknown emotion, which is always a dynamic fact flowing towards something. The primitive unconscious impulse would be to follow that secret tendency of the emotion where it wants to lead. If it is hate, it carries you involuntarily towards the hated object; if it is love, it is the same thing, to mention only two common emotions. If you try to express the emotion first toward its object, there is great danger of being overwhelmed. Say someone is furious but intends to express the fact decently, yet with one word comes the flow, and though one may have determined to say little, the whole avalanche descends! In the moment of affect one says much more and gets more and more involved, and in the end one believes what one doubted at the beginning. — Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales
January 29, 2026 at 2:26 PM
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Jungian, Marie-Louise von Franz with an excellent passage on the unconscious.
No one has seen what the unconscious is; it is a concept, not an ectoplasmic reality somewhere in space. If something comes into my mind from my unconscious, a moment later it can fall below the threshold of consciousness: I know the man is Mr. So-and-So, a minute later I have forgotten the name, and afterwards I may remember it again. Therefore, one can assume that what is unconscious is that which is not associated with ego consciousness. If you observe a content which then disappears for a short time into the unconscious, it is not altered when it comes up again, but if you forget something for a long time, it does not return in the same form; it autonomously evolves or regresses in the other sphere, and therefore one can speak of the unconscious as being a sphere, or entity, in itself. 1/2 It is really something like a liquid in which the contents are transformed; you can even see when a content comes up in bad shape and can tell how long it has been repressed and therefore become suspect. Severe repressions may appear in a dream as an evil-smelling corpse in a cemetery, one which has had to be dug up. Something has been repressed for so long that it has disintegrated and decayed in the earth. Indirectly, therefore, you can say that the unconscious psyche is a reality of its own. By Marie-Louise von Franz from, 'The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales'. 2/2
January 27, 2026 at 9:10 PM
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On why the intellect should sometimes take a back seat in our approach to relationships.
If I am constantly thinking about a relationship, I can inhibit the possibility of a feeling realisation, and therefore the intellect sometimes has to detach and to let other forms of life come up. For the divine mystery one has to give up the narrow wish of only intellectual understanding, and where other forms of realisation should come about in the soul the intellect should take a back place for a while and keep to its own realm of operation. By Marie-Louise von Franz from, 'The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales'.
January 27, 2026 at 11:21 AM
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On the importance, to personal transformation, of asking questions
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation—in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open. . . . Those who would readily develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murked window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
January 25, 2026 at 11:35 AM
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Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

— D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix
Illustration of the mythical phoenix bird rising from the ashes.
January 23, 2026 at 4:20 PM
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On therapy.
Therapy has usurped the once-primary place of poetry. We need therapy when we cannot sing, dance, or make art an integral part of our everyday life. In earlier time it was poetry that was the terpnos logos, the healing speech. The sick called not the physician—known then as those of 'silent tongue'—but the poet, those of 'willing tongue'! The fact that art, song, movement, dance, and poetry have all become 'therapies' is a testament to the reversal that our culture of intellect and power has achieved. What was the source of the very binding together of culture has been so unravelled that it all must now be imported as therapy. So in therapy we are trying to sew back together huge tears in the fabric of the spontaneous life of psyche. And it is in principally these things that psyche now finds its nourishment. By Russell Lockhart from his book, 'Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World'.
January 22, 2026 at 2:55 PM
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Jungian, Marion Woodman on life's cycles.
It goes in cycles. You move into that new life, and it's tremendously exciting for years. Then all of a sudden it isn't the least bit interesting. I think a lot of people get burned out for this reason. They try to do the thing that was interesting to them twelve years ago. They start running faster and faster, thinking that surely it will be interesting but it's not. They're running like plastic dolls. I've seen dreams where the Great Mother comes in, holds up her hand, and the energy from her hand zaps the doll. The image disintegrates. Then the ego has to find out what the new life is. That can cost you your marriage, it can cost you your job, it can cost you your church. It's terrifying, but it's the only way to grow. Sometimes you have to give all to find all. It sounds simple. T.S. Eliot says it's "A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)." By Jungian, Marion Woodman from her book, 'Conscious Femininity'.
January 19, 2026 at 3:01 PM
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Jungian, John Perkins on what it means to seriously honour the feminine.
Taking the feminine principle seriously means acknowledging the dignity and integrity of nature, including our own. It means becoming spontaneously engaged in human relations but not lost in them. It means respecting and enjoying the body with its impulses, desires, needs, and limitations, but not selfishly or addictively. It means living one's life with patient compassion for oneself and others. It means allowing time to simply be as well as to do. Honouring the feminine means a certain amount of acceрtance and toleration of things as they are, without incessantly demanding progress and perfection. It means experiencing and appreciating life in its small as well as its great moments. 1/2 It means elevating play to an equal footing with work. It means living incarnationally with one's best feeling and intuition, and not abstractly. Honouring the feminine means making self-reflective experience the acid test of authority and dogma, replacing fault by responsibility, and favouring innocence over sophistication. It means allowing our impulses for action—what we genuinely feel like doing or not doing—to inform our thinking, and permitting the heart to advise the mind. It means practising love as acknowledgment, devotion, and celebration, and not as addictive codependence. Taking the feminine seriously means never trying to fathom the meaning of existence until we have tasted the bittersweet rapture of being alive. By Jungian psychotherapist, John Perkins from his book, 'The Forbidden Self'. 2/2
January 18, 2026 at 12:53 PM
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On Jung.
Jung provides us with a psychology of the sacred, with a new and modern rationale for adopting a fundamentally religious attitude toward our life and to the world at large. The religious attitude is above all sacramental and sacrificial. It understands the importance of sacrifice, and the need to subordinate the mortal and limited life to the guidance and direction of the larger life. Jung's work calls us to the path of wholeness, sanctity and the common good, but this pathway readily gets contaminated by darkness and overwhelmed by instinctual forces that subvert the entire process. By David Tacey from his book, 'Jung and the New Age'.
January 15, 2026 at 9:29 PM
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Collective thinking and feeling and collective effort are far less of a strain than individual functioning and effort; hence there is always a great temptation to allow collective functioning to take the place of individual differentiation of the personality.

— Carl G. Jung, Collected Works 7
January 10, 2026 at 3:04 PM
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Jungian, John Perkins on men who fail to establish a conscious relationship with their inner feminine and its impact on their relationships with women.
A certain kind of man seems destined never to achieve a satisfactory relation to a woman. Every woman who enters his orbit is expected to carry the whole load of feminine experience for him. He tries to live the whole erotic-feeling side of existence through her. An actual woman will be invested with unrealistically sublime qualities—she will have to be either the protective mother, the nubile maiden, the virginal saint, or the earthy whore for him. He will be unable to acknowledge her as the complete and ordinary human being she really is, with her particular interests, assets, and limitations. If a man has not become consciously allied to his inner feminine side, he will prove incapable of sharing equitable partnership with a flesh-and-blood woman. If he does not withdraw completely from erotic relations and fall into despondent melancholy, he will be continually 'on the make', searching for the next ideal woman, who is sure to be 'Ms. Right' this time. By John Perkins from his book, 'The Forbidden Self: Symbolic Incest and the Journey Within'.
January 8, 2026 at 7:00 PM
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Bessel van der Kolk on ignoring/distorting the body's messages.
The price for ignoring or distorting the body's messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you and, just as bad, what is safe or nourishing. Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation—from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others. By Bessel van der Kolk from, 'The Body Keeps the Score'.
January 6, 2026 at 7:04 PM
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Excellent quote.
The media bleats its message that a substantial life is one viewed by thirty million, and when we don't receive that, the only conclusion is that we don't deserve it. And so begins the inelegant contortion of trying to fit in. Every layered numbness, every cryptic cloak disguising honest speech, is a step towards thinned-out ghoulishness and, ultimately, deep lostness. That's where despair lives. There comes a point when a society in this kind of trance will consciously unwitness anyone that behaves differently. They will stare through you. Try to make you the ghost that they themselves are becoming. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Martin Shaw, Scatterlings
January 4, 2026 at 1:16 PM
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On how the earliest religious mysteries or rites of the feminine revolved around the central elements of woman's life.
We can discern sources of the medial woman's knowledge in the earliest mysteries or rites of the feminine, which revolved around the central elements of woman's life: birth, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, and death. These elements of feminine existence were first identified with the wondrous metamorphoses of nature: kernel to corn, night to dawn, winter to spring, and then with the miracle of conversion of spirit from depression to animation, stasis to ecstasy. All great religious traditions hold out this essentially feminine promise of the possibility of rebirth. The work of woman is transformation: making something out of nothing: giving form to formless energy. By Nor Hall from, 'The Moon and the Virgin'.
January 3, 2026 at 3:42 PM
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On disappointment.
Disappointment is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life. The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world. — David Whyte, Consolations
January 2, 2026 at 2:06 PM
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Anything psychic is Janus-faced—it looks both backwards and forwards. Because it is so evolving, it is also preparing the future. Were this not so, intentions, aims, plans, calculations, predictions, and premonitions would be psychological impossibilities.

— Carl G. Jung, Collected Works 6
Statue of Janus, the two-faced god.
January 1, 2026 at 3:43 PM
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As we pause to reflect at the threshold of the New Year, here's Joseph Campbell on releasing the old to make way for the new.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up. The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. If we are hanging onto the form now, we're not going to have the form next. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Destruction before creation. By Joseph Campbell from, 'Reflections on the Art of Living'.
December 29, 2025 at 9:38 PM
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A passage to heed as we head into the New Year.
Remember that your soul image lives as a fiery and vital energy within you and it longs for expression. If you do not live it, it may turn inward and manifest as depression, anger, lethargy, or other psychological or physical symptoms. Your soul will not be satisfied with mere thoughts and prayers. Soul is your essential life energy and you must move with it. You must become willing to risk your ego significance for something greater. This is a lifelong journey, calling for the courage and faith to continually act on what you received during your encounters with soul. By Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
December 28, 2025 at 11:48 AM
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On the importance of consciously engaging with the psyche's archetypal symbols and images.
The unconscious is forever revealing itself through the release of archetypal symbols that rise to the surface of our conscious awareness. As we continue to engage the totality of our conscious and unconscious being in the process of a discipline of internal realisation, the symbols will enter our field of vision with ever-greater regularity and increasing power. Detachment from the extroverted pursuits of unenlightened living, and an increasing liveliness of the unconscious archetypes, will not result in neurosis. Quite to the contrary, it will establish a safety valve for the forces below the threshold of consciousness, so that by expressing themselves in a constructive manner, they will lose their menacing potential. By Stephan A. Hoeller from, 'The Fool's Pilgrimage: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tarot'.
December 27, 2025 at 1:03 PM
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On the battle for autonomy.
The emergence of individuality involves not only leaving childhood behind, but also facing and battling with those forces in the world and within ourselves that are regressive, destructive, stagnant and unwilling to cope with the limits of earthly life. This battle for autonomy is a rite of passage which every young person faces and it may have to be fought many times on many different levels, from the teens through the thirties, before we feel confident, real and worthwhile enough to express who we are in the most positive, creative way. There is no cheating with this rite of passage. It may be subtle, taking forms which are not immediately recognised as a battleground. But if we try to avoid the challenge of autonomy, we remain forever fragile, immature and vulnerable to having our brittle defenses shattered by the slightest of life's disappointments. By Liz Greene and Juliet Sharman-Burke from, 'The Mythic Journey: The Meaning of Myth as a Guide for Life'.
December 25, 2025 at 1:19 PM