Jungian Coaching Room Podcast EP5 – Living a Symbolic Life

Written by Dana Kabaila

In this episode, I speak with Jungian analyst (Diploma Candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute Switzerland), counsellor, naturopathic medicine practitioner and philosopher, Kane Parsons.

Kane shares his vocational and personal journey with the humility involved in carving and re-carving your path again. As a young person, Kane felt in touch with the imaginal realm and eager to search for enlightenment. He read “Autobiography of a Yogi” in his mid-teens and, following secondary school, entered naturopathy studies. Kane distinctly remembers discovering Jung’s writings and getting so excited that he transferred to psychology. Unfortunately, what met him there was the “rats and stats” behavioural psychology studies with “zero Jung to be found”. He describes running away screaming after 6 months. Dr. Suzanne Cremen in “From Career to Calling” describes Australian universities as drawing on a British tradition of reductive materialism or “at best, to forms of humanism that exclude the visionary dimension”.

Luckily, Kane attended a weekend retreat on Jñāna yoga (path of knowledge) with a visiting teacher, just a few streets from his home in Boorloo (Perth). This teacher invited Kane to his academy in India, and he embarked on a three-year residential program. This was a plan his friends and father couldn’t make sense of. Still, Kane recalls the luxury of time to focus on the Eastern Danta philosophy, yoga, meditation – a structured environment dedicated to inner work. Despite the value of this time, Kane knew he did not want to stay and become a monk. In a moment of synchronicity (the inner voice and outer world colliding), a newspaper page blew across his path as he walked from his hostel at mid-morning, the headline read “Do you want to die young?” For Kane, this spoke to his concern about encouraging the destruction of one’s Ego that he had observed caused detrimental damage to some fellow students studying.

Jungian approaches value the Ego as the centre of consciousness – a subjective personal inner reality, our sense of purpose and identity. Not something to destroy. But it is not all there is; the conscious mind grows from the wilderness of the unconscious. This differs from the Freudian notion that the repressed contents of the conscious mind form the unconscious. Kane offers the image of a healthy cell with a robust membrane with channels in and out. This cell is constantly balancing internal and external pressures – adapting to the flow of life, again and again, a self-regulating principle. This offers the warning not to allow the membrane to get too rigid, or we risk getting stuck in our own self-evident attitudes. And as we later discuss, the unconscious will send all of us messages, whether we respond with curiosity or try to dodge the messages, that tend to get ever louder. “Amor Fati – love your fate, which is in fact your life” Nietzsche. In the opposite direction, it may be the conscious mind that is hard to hold on to – when symbols flood in, we can feel unmoored and unwieldy. We need to balance the channel by grounding them back in our reality, using our sense-making functions. Kane recalls Jung’s experience of being flooded by the unconscious, his Ego feeling like a small boat overwhelmed, and how he employed yogic breathing to help him find balance.

Jung’s ideas feel refreshing and knowable – a respect for unconscious elements being resonant with folks outside of traditional therapeutic spaces – in creativity, ancestry, the body, anthropology, all the humanities. We see this in popular culture, musicians read Jung (e.g. Tanya Stark writes about David Bowie and Jung https://tanjastark.com/2015/06/22/crashing-out-with-sylvian-david-bowie-carl-jung-and-the-unconscious/), Jung is featured in TV show plots (e.g. Star Trek https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Carl_Jung) and video games (e.g. Jung’s labyrinth https://store.steampowered.com/app/709710/Jungs_Labyrinth/). An openness to those outside therapy fields is evident in the Certificate of Further Education at the Jung Institute in Switzerland (https://junginstitut.ch/en/Training/Further-Education-in-Analytical-Psychology), which welcomes applicants across disciplines. The full analytical training, which Kane has embarked on, requires extensive time, funding and travel to Switzerland.

In this interview, we also get to play and freely associate with freshly generated symbols. Start with a colour – Kane connects with effervescent, sparkly emerald and jade green in liquid form, and I am visited by a mauve purple that seems to shift into magenta. We examine how these colours sit at opposite ends of the colour wheel and are both secondary colours. When Kane describes the feeling tone of the colours, he has a sense of nature and the flow of life (removing impediments and a harmony of the libido). Guiding back into the physical senses, Kane accesses that this green tastes sweet and ripe, like a dewy melon and feels slimy when rubbed onto the skin. The label on the bottle reads “consume with care” with the skull and crossbones danger symbol – a vital and natural medicine to be taken in the right dose, not too much or too little. Splitting the colours by their primary origins, there is a blue that is cool and calm, mixed with an energised and vibrant yellow. I add my own emerging images of an add message in a green glass bottle. Then, when I learn the green is in liquid form, I think of absinthe (the green fairy) and the current Australian season of Spring. When Kane shares that he lives in the Margaret River region, my association is with the wineries of the region, and this brings the green and purple together in the form of the grapes. To Noongar people, Margaret River is known as Wooditchup after the magic man, Wooditch, who created the river in the Nyitting (Dreaming) (https://www.noongarculture.org.au/margaret-river/).

This location also guides us to Cape Naturaliste, the lands of the Wadandi people, and the magical occurrence at this time of year Humpbacks, Southern White and Blue Whales dancing in the bay, while the wildflowers beyond the shores. Navigating the geomagnetic fields to congregate at the tip of the Cape and then move off in differing directions. Listening back, the previous image of the message in a bottle returns and the colours blue and yellow shift to being the sea and the sand. With the Cape Naturalist lighthouse as a symbol, Kane ventures out– starting from the personal experience (the lighthouse as the light of consciousness) – venturing into the unknown (ocean). And my mind travels in from the sea, seeing the lighthouse as guiding people home from an unpredictable sea. The human and more-than-human ways of finding our way home.

For a time, we also chatted about the possible intersections of Jungian principles and narrative therapy (Dulwich Centre – https://dulwichcentre.com.au/). I need narrative therapy principles of social justice and lived experience knowledge that counter dominant pathologising discourses, to strengthen and shape my symbolic work. Kane also connected with narrative therapy in his counselling studies, highlighting the use of getting near and particular with what is disturbing us. Kane describes the opposite – the distant and global – in Jungian terms of a defence in the form of circumambulation of the feeling formed complex. To which, I respond “oooo” because I love both the simple terminology of “near and particular” that includes people and brings them in, and the big words that offer a richness and complexity of meaning. Narrative therapy focuses on externalising problems (the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem), and symbols could be seen as arriving pre-externalised. I mention the article “Daydreams as entry points to counter stories” by Hong-Ru Liang (https://dulwichcentre.com.au/product/daydreams-as-entry-points-to-counter-stories/), which applies narrative principles through connecting with daydreaming.

We round out with recommended readings to which Kane suggests:

As for how to read Jung, Kane offers permission to skip any paragraphs you find incredibly tough to understand. This is consistent with my approach to the early lectures I attended at the C.G. Jung Society of Melbourne, whereby words would wash over me, with occasional resonances – constantly intriguing but often befuddling. Kane validates that if you engage with the work, there will be sympathetic resonance somewhere and from there, you can expand out or down – the depth of the work reflecting the depths of our own souls and psyches.

Please share, like and subscribe. I invite you to email me with any questions or reflections at dana.kabaila@iajcc.org. This concludes our first season of the podcast. We thank our listeners and readers for their time and attention. We look forward to returning with Season 2 of the podcast in 2026!

ABOUT DANA KABAILA

Dana Kabaila is a Counsellor and Jungian Coach (registered with ACCA & IAJCC) in Naarm (Melbourne) and online. She is passionate about depth, meaning, authentic expression, and well-being. Her specialty areas include high masking, late-identified neurodivergent individuals, transgenerational trauma, wounded healers, and wounded high achievers.

Dana is also an allied health mentor and speech pathologist with 14 years of clinical experience. She also holds a Graduate Diploma in Infant Mental Health and is completing her Masters of Narrative Therapy & Community Work (Dulwich Centre).

A lifelong word enthusiast, Dana is fascinated by the evolving meanings of words and the exploration of symbols. She enjoys reading, writing, dancing, painting, surfing, practicing yoga, and spending time in nature. Deeply connected to her ancestry, she has a strong appreciation for Lithuanian folklore and mythology.

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