About The Presentation

We all encounter hassles (the car breaks, the plumbing leaks, we catch a cold) on a regular basis and generally manage to cope; however, catastrophes are beyond our coping skills. Experiences we cannot readily fix or control challenge us in fundamental ways, indelibly changing our lives—disrupting identity, career, relationships, meaning, hope for the future, our highest god image, and our personal narratives. Using lecture, discussion, and exercises, we will explore experiences of tragic events (both personal and collective), ways to provide self-care and assistance to others, and how to be a help rather than a nuisance.

About the Presenter

Jerry M. Ruhl, PhD, is a psychologist, teacher, and author living in Colorado. He served for six years as Executive Director of The Jung Center in Houston. He lectures nationally and maintains a private therapy practice in Boulder. He also provides depth coaching via the internet, and is the co-author with Robert A. Johnson of three books: Living Your Unlived Life, Contentment: A Way to True Happiness, and, Balancing Heaven and Earth.

Additional Resources

Website:  JerryRuhl.com

Books:
Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Explores the essential developmental task for achieving true maturity—rectifying the loss of abandoned dreams and unrealized potentials to achieve our full potential. It is a profound and important guide to the psychological tasks of our mature years when we are beckoned to grow beyond the requirements of family and society, to navigate transitions, and to secure our own relationship to wholeness.

Contentment: A Way to True Happiness
Most of us believe we’ll somehow achieve contentment just as soon as we get a better job, find a new partner, buy a bigger house, retire, or attain some other goal. Our society conditions us to think this way. But with this approach to life, contentment forever eludes us. Contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is. Honoring ‘what is’ is just the opposite of living out of a ‘just as soon as’ mentality … contentment is about the dance between what you want what reality presents. Contentment is a way of being at home with yourself and a way of affirming the reality of your life.

Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams and Realizations.
A moving and instructive memoir in the tradition of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Balancing Heaven and Earth is filled with the wisdom of a lifetime devoted to balancing the inner and the outer, the masculine and the feminine, the eternal and the everyday.

Listen to KGNU.org fm radio 9/18/19 interview: