You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist, an educator of Jungian psychology, and the author of Quarterlife. She’s been on the podcast a few times—I’ll link those episodes in the show notes. If you’ve heard us talk before, you know that Satya is also a friend of mine, and that we both grew up together in Missoula, Montana, although Satya is a bit younger than me.

I initially asked Satya to come on the podcast today to talk about the ego, and the Jungian perspective on it. I think the ego is incredibly important and it gets a bad rap, which I don’t think it necessarily earns. We need a balanced ego—to me it represents the boundary between yourself and the world, and it helps us to be in relationship with other people.

So this is where Satya and I start. But then we go deeper into Satya’s thoughts on the unconscious, joining the human with the God, and why so many of us are waiting on approval. We also talk about our culture’s ascension myth, and why we have a tendency to misinterpret a lot of Jungian psychology, overemphasizing individuation, and the drive to transcend.

And then Satya shares something really poignant about how life, for her, stays beautiful and bountiful, even in the extreme difficulty of things.

If you’d like to take classes with Satya, she’s now offering a course on Jungian psychology—one for clinicians and one for the general public.

Satya’s School: The Salome Institute (for clinicians and citizens)

Satya’s Substack:

Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood

On Pulling the Thread:

ELISE: