The Numinous encounter is one that overwhelms us with awe, mystery and, often, dread. It challenges the complacency of our daily life and alters the perspective of our awareness. In its original sense it could be inspired by powerful experiences of the natural world.

For Jung the numinous resides in the unconscious realm of archetype and symbol where modern man has confined it through the new religion of ‘Reason’. Now that we are sure in our conquest of nature the “helpful numina”, he says, have “fled from the woods, rivers and mountains” to become mere relics of the past.

Given our dawning realisation at this point in the human story that perhaps we do not, in fact, govern the natural world with unquestionable supremacy, is there a way that we might call on these contents of the deep unconscious to re-approach the natural world in a spirit of reverence and wonder?

GILL BROWN, our CJC Chair, is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and Ecopsychologist. With a background in Jungian Analytical Psychology, Ecotherapy and Healing, she works from an integrative, holistic perspective. She is currently researching how our experience of the natural world is internalised in the Psyche.

(photograph by Lorna McNeur)