Lisa Marchiano, LCSW: When You Need to Be Shrewd and Ruthless: Finding Your Vital Spark

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February 20, 2024

Lisa Marchiano, LCSW: When You Need to Be Shrewd and Ruthless: Finding Your Vital Spark

Lisa Marchiano February 20, 2024

Women across every age and culture have struggled with the pain of repressing essential aspects of themselves. There may be no misery greater than when we bury our vital spark beneath a dense layer of niceness that society insists upon. With her book The Vital Spark, Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst, author, and podcaster, offers readers a breakthrough guide filled with insights, practices, tales, and teachings to unleash your “sizzling spirit” and live life to the fullest. 

Get ready to reclaim your “outlaw energies” in this powerful podcast on: transformation through fierce feminine initiations; the protective quality of shrewdness and ruthlessness; breaking out of an “innocence complex”; allowing ourselves to know what we know; why “too much kindness defangs us”; discernment; the metaphor of the central fire within us; Carl Jung’s teaching on the unlived life and the “glowing coals under gray ashes”; the vehicle of story and fairy tales to convey wisdom; the tale of “Fitcher’s Bird”; squinting and symbolism; the unsentimental quality in nature; the story of Lilith; the role of greed and selfishness in the quest for wholeness; growing confidence; cultivating the qualities that help us stay connected with ourselves; and more.

Lisa Marchiano, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst, author, and podcaster. Her writings have appeared in many publications. She is the cohost and cocreator of the popular depth psychology podcast This Jungian Life and is the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself and The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire. Lisa is on the faculty of C. G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia, and she lectures and teaches widely. For more, visit lisamarchiano.com.

Author photo © Ashley Smith

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Lisa Marchiano, LCSW: When You Need to Be Shrewd and R...

Women across every age and culture have struggled with the pain of repressing essential aspects of themselves. There may be no misery greater than when we bury our vital spark beneath a dense layer of niceness that society insists upon. With her book The Vital Spark, Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst, author, and podcaster, offers readers a breakthrough guide filled with insights, practices, tales, and teachings to unleash your “sizzling spirit” and live life to the fullest. 

Get ready to reclaim your “outlaw energies” in this powerful podcast on: transformation through fierce feminine initiations; the protective quality of shrewdness and ruthlessness; breaking out of an “innocence complex”; allowing ourselves to know what we know; why “too much kindness defangs us”; discernment; the metaphor of the central fire within us; Carl Jung’s teaching on the unlived life and the “glowing coals under gray ashes”; the vehicle of story and fairy tales to convey wisdom; the tale of “Fitcher’s Bird”; squinting and symbolism; the unsentimental quality in nature; the story of Lilith; the role of greed and selfishness in the quest for wholeness; growing confidence; cultivating the qualities that help us stay connected with ourselves; and more.

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Lisa Marchiano is a clinical social worker, a certified Jungian analyst, and a nationally certified psychoanalyst. She cohosts This Jungian Life, a podcast devoted to exploring current topics through the lens of depth psychology. With Sounds True, Lisa has written a new book titled Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, which presents a collection of myths, fables, and fairy tales to evoke the spiritual arc of raising a child from infancy through adulthood. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks to Lisa about what drew her to Jungian psychology and how Jung’s teachings have helped guide her journey through motherhood and life. They also discuss: the Jungian notion of individuation, a perpetual process of self-discovery and psychological growth; bringing the “taboos” of motherhood into the light; the complicated relationship between motherhood and creativity; Jungian dream analysis; and why the suffering we experience as parents and as individuals grants us a special opportunity to “encounter soul.”

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