Category: Category
The Symbolic Life of the Body
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2026-03-12 20:07:23
When psychic experience cannot be symbolized, the body often becomes the stage upon which the psyche expresses itself. What cannot yet be spoken, imagined, or consciously held may be carried somatically. In this sense, the body manifests what the psyche cannot yet symbolize.
The Rain Queen - Embodiment of Feminine
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2026-02-17 19:55:12
The Rain Queen (Modjadji) of the Balobedu people in the Limpopo region offers one of Southern Africa’s most potent living images of the feminine principle. In a worldview where rain is not merely weather but the condition for life itself, the Rain Queen is revered as custodian of fertility, renewal, and balance. Her power is not symbolic in a modern psychological sense; it is imaginal, ecological, and ancestral - a sacred authority rooted in relationship with land, lineage, and the invisible.
Sophia - Wisdom personified
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2026-01-27 19:41:58
Sophia, Wisdom personified, emerges as one of the most enduring figures of the archetypal feminine - not as an abstraction, but as living image. She represents a mode of knowing that is imaginal, relational, and reflexive; wisdom that arises from depth rather than dominance, attunement rather than control.
The Cassandra complex - Denial of the body's truth
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-11-20 17:51:00
The body as a vessel of silenced truth finds a potent metaphor in the Greek myth of Cassandra, the prophetess whose true visions were condemned to disbelief. Her story mirrors the tension between inner knowing and outer invalidation, when intuitive or embodied insight is dismissed by consciousness or the collective.
You are a living library
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-11-06 19:44:15
Your body a source of wisdom beyond your wildest imagination. Your DNA carries the stories of all your ancestors; as well as the potential of your descendants. In your cellular memory lies the answers to all your questions. The body expresses what the psyche cannot articulate - through somatic sensations, symptoms, or affective states.
Archetype of the Healer
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-10-07 18:11:51
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Deeply embedded in human consciousness is the archetype of the Healer. Its expressions differ across cultures, but a common thread remains: a desire to alleviate human suffering and restore balance to the dis-eased individual.
The Numinous
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-09-18 18:45:08
The numinous, a term first articulated by Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige, describes the quality of direct encounter with the sacred - the wholly other, carrying awe, mystery, terror, and fascination. Carl Jung broadened Otto’s insight, locating the numinous in the archetypal depths of the psyche. For Jung, it erupts from the unconscious with a force that seizes the ego, alters consciousness, and leaves the individual irrevocably changed.
Earth has a Soul
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-08-05 18:56:54
Philosopher Plato once imagined the cosmos as “a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence. Animistic traditions recognise that the Earth is not passive terrain, but a living being with whom we share an interconnected consciousness.
The Symbolic Life - A cure for disenchantment
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-07-10 19:02:29
In today’s technocratic and performance-driven culture, many find themselves plagued by anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a sense of alienation. The collapse of shared mythic frameworks created a void quickly filled by consumerism and external success—stimulating but ultimately hollow substitutes that fail to nourish the soul.
The Handless Maiden - the pattern of initiation and descent
Author: Denise Grobbelaar
Date Published: 2025-06-24 19:12:31
In The Handless Maiden, a Brothers Grimm tale, a poor miller is approached by the devil-in-disguise who offers wealth in exchange for “what stands behind your mill.” Believing it to be an apple tree, the man agrees, only to discover that his daughter was standing there.