"It’s no accident that we all lie nestled together in the curves of the universe. We are tugged by the forces of celestial tides. Time folds in on itself and outward again in gladness as we spin around, each of us an utter miracle in a sea of tiny white stars."
-Jamien E. Morehouse
About
Jennifer Jones Embry is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst who enjoys working with individuals at the intersections of psyche & soma and creativity & spirituality. I'm deeply curious, being an explorer and student of life, approaching it from both the right and left brain. I am keenly interested in how we, individually and together, affect collective consciousness.
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While attending an Episcopal girl’s high school, I learned the values of questioning to understanding, critical thinking and collaboration. These priorities led me through a BA from the University of Virginia in Foreign Affairs, an MBA from the Wharton School in Finance and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute with a thesis entitled, “Moviechurch: A Mirror and Bridge to Becoming.”
My career path began as a legal secretary in Washington, D.C. and moved to Houston, Texas, being a landman for an independent oil company and a Vice President at Bank United in commercial real estate. These 16+ years working in corporate jobs honed my capacity to absorb divergent information from different sources, to organize it in layers and to distill it into understood numbers and concepts. After practicing as a therapist, teaching and beginning an expressive arts curriculum at a homeless women’s center for three years, I studied trauma from a Freudian lens and opened a private practice in 2005, seeing adults, facilitating dream circles and co-facilitating a psychodynamic group.
Big dreams led me to both Pacifica and to study at the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnatch, Switzerland, graduating in 2014. The title of my thesis was “Resonance: Eros of Body, Soul and Spirit.” During the same time, I completed BodySoul leadership training in 2013 which provided a deep immersion into community, dreams, energetic art, masks and movement. I lecture in the U.S. and abroad, teach, facilitate and supervise dream circle trainings, consult with individuals and groups. I am inspired by the power of sound as an ancient medicine for dualities and the play of music to hold the tension of opposing energies simultaneously to promote healing. I find balance in relationships, film, poetry, art, song and nature.
"A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,
it sings because it has a song."
-Dr. Maya Angelou
Dream Circles
“Treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play around it, and talk about it with other people.”
-Jung, CW 10, para. 320
What are dream circles?
Dr. Jung saw dreams as a natural process of “listening in” to psychic intelligence. The facilitator creates a temenos, a sacred container, into which the dreamer shares his/her/their dream. The others present listen deeply with their third and fourth ears. The facilitator and dreamer begin to unpack the symbols in the dream sorting through the emotions, images and drama presented. Emotional patterns and numinosity emerge which adds to the dreamer’s previous knowing. Listeners offer questions of amplification and association to the dreamer. Special attention is paid to Jung’s process of active imagination as a way to keep the dream alive as it more fully reveals itself over time. A depth community is created.
Consulting Services
Orient your internal compass of being to your Center by motion, tracking the complex to its archetypal core, the “living entities which cause the preformation of numinous ideas or dominant representations."
-Jung, CW 18, para. 1272
I offer traditional analytic sessions with a body orientation for 50 or 75 minutes. Here, we explore individual unconscious material through outer world events and inner world manifestations through dreams, creativity, previously unknown behavior and what one is attracted to and repulsed by. Active imagination plays an important role. Synchronicity, numinous encounters and intense or avoidant emotional responses lead us to complexed energy which, when released bit by bit, offers energy for one’s “wild and precious life.” (from Mary Oliver)
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In listening to many clients over the past 20+ years, I have a working hypothesis that the emotions of our life histories may pool into two emotions or states that may seem to be opposing. For example, your emotional poles/processes/states might be grief and joy, or loyalty and freedom or pain and pleasure or integrity and disappointment, and many more. Having this emotional intelligence about oneself allows for greater flexibility and emotional freedom, enhancing one’s zest for life.
Of particular interest to me is working with artistic visionaries as they listen and feel intently into unmanifested energies of the collective unconscious to find their own voice and truth. I hold a container and witness the artist’s process, sometimes offering words as guideposts for their psychic experience.
For those who have created a piece of art, I ask questions that help the artist tie back their creation to their own emotional lived experience to create psychological meaning.
“The Imaginal World is the origin of myths and stories, songs and all human ingenuity. But humankind is itself an expression of a larger creativity. What we call ’nature’ is actually the invisible expression of the art-making impulse of the universe.”
-Toko-Pa Turner
Music
“I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. This reaches the deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients. This is more remarkable."
-Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 275
Throughout millenia, religions have understood the power of chanting, or repeating words or vowel sounds that seem irrational and yet have a soothing effect on the nervous system and/or the heart, activating a body wisdom from within the participant. A pathway may be opened beyond time and space. When activated, this flow state serves the manifestation of the listener’s voice and truth.
Through the musical soul of my work, I co-create with alchemical sonic artists to offer acoustic archetypal Incantations which can be sung, hummed or danced to create energetic flow. This is an ongoing experiment which currently includes the words of C.G. Jung transformed into mantra and chant (lullaby and InDwelling) and depth experiments with sounds of alchemical crystal bowls.
Get in Touch
Based out of Houston, Texas and New Orleans, Lousiana