Please join us on July 8th, at 5:00 PST for Waking Up in the American Dream with Rebecca Armstrong.
The United States will celebrate its 245th birthday this July 4 and as we approach the milestone of a quarter of a millennium it seems right that we should accept our eldering as a nation and do some soulful house cleaning.
The hyper-individualism of the Western attitude sometimes makes it hard to recognize the collective archetype within which this experiment-in-democracy is playing out. But if the Greeks' intuition was right - that every nation is born under the spirit of its own daimon - then it is as imperative for us to know the myth we are living under collectively, as it is for each of us to find the myth we are living individually - and the relationship between them.
By revisiting some of the iconic stories, characters, and images that influenced the formative years of our young country - George Washington with his little hatchett, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, Gen. George Armstrong Custer who 'died for our sins', Walt Whitman's ecstatic vision of our shadow-erasing libido, Jung's fascination with The Song of Hiawatha and its shaping effect on the American psyche - we may come away from this birthday sadder but a little wiser. And if that's not the birthday present we want, it may be the birthday present we need.
Rebecca Armstrong is a member of the Armstrong family that is featured in the Joseph Campbell biography, A Fire in the Mind. (Stephen and Robin Larsen, 1991). In 1991 Rebecca started the first Mythological Roundtable in Chicago, IL and went on to be the International Outreach Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation for 12 years. She has been teaching myth, religion and ethics at university for the past decade and has degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School and Chicago Theological Seminary. She does mythic life coaching for individuals and continues to offer lectures and seminars worldwide.
coaching: www.story-medicine.com
blog: www.in-spires.net
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