Sand, Water, Silence - The Embodiment of Spirit: Explorations in Matter and Psyche

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Summary: Sandplay Therapy and Sources of Symbolic Healing
Review: Mary Jane Markell has written an important book that helps elucidate why imaginal work in healing modalities such as sandplay therapy holds such transformational power. Sandplay therapists long have needed an in depth review and elaboration of what Dora Kalff taught about the transformational process in sandplay therapy as it affects the body. Kalff believed that working imaginatively with the elements of sand and water had the possibility of engaging a person in a transformative experience at a cellular level that touched upon the deepest sources of healing. This occurs at a non-verbal, symbolic level that has analogies in the ancient mystery religions. Markell writes "The logical conclusion of this process is the self as shaman, and it is in this area that the greatest changes in Western scientific and medical thought are now occurring." Jung intuitively knew about the unconscious connection between body and psyche at what he called the "psychoid" level, and it was Kalffian sandplay that demonstrated and offered the experience of this connection. Mary Jane Markell's book offers extensive amplification of this wisdom.

Sand, Water, Silence-The Embodiment of Spirit provides a container for the author's considerable creative and intellectual energies that focus on distilling and uniting a wide array of traditions and viewpoints. These include Eastern and Western, scientific and spiritual, spatial and temporal, body and mind. She draws on and integrates ancient and modern ideas and wisdom from such diverse sources as quantum physics, Mesopotamian myths, Taoism and Buddhism, and Jungian depth psychology. She points the reader towards an integrative view that she thinks is already happening in the human collective consciousness of a transcendent state of non-duality in the reunion of the mind-body disharmony that has plagued modern man. She believes that with the conscious balancing and reconciliation of opposing traditions and perspectives into a unitive world-view a deepening understanding of the cosmos as well as a personal, individual unfolding will evolve.

Mary Jane Markell has written a book that emerged from the currents of her own individuation journey that had one beginning in her relationship to Dora Kalff and her sandplay therapy process. In the years that followed, her connection to natural and internal landscapes as well as to the world of ideas incubated. Mary Jane Markell's inspiration springs from her own internal alchemy that began in the water and earth and in the "woods and valley" of her life experiences. These provided the foundations that led to writing this book. She integrates her intuitive connections that come directly out of her with objective learning from studies and reading that she shares extensively. This is a book both to savor and enjoy.