Night Libri GmbH Night Sea Journey: A Memoir Paperback

Night Sea Journey is an illustrated memoir of descent and return - the story of how painter and depth psychotherapist Jill Ansell moved through profound grief and trauma toward healing, guided by images, dreams, and synchronicities.Drawn, in a season of deep sorrow, to an image of Green Tara - the Buddhist embodiment of compassion and fearless, liberating action - Ansell began a lifelong journey of transformation through symbol and story. The book takes its title from the archetypal "night sea journey" of myth and depth psychology: the passage down into darkness that must be entered before light and renewal can be found. In Rumi's words, which the book takes as its touchstone, the wound is the place where the light enters.Weaving together Jungian depth psychology and Vajrayana Buddhist practice, and illustrated throughout with the author's own luminous paintings, the memoir unfolds in four movements. It begins with the Grail - the wounded search for meaning and wholeness. It moves through the influential people and teachers who shaped her path, among them C. G. Jung, whose work gave her ballast, and her Buddhist teachers the Dalai Lama, Lati Rinpoche, and Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen. It turns to Buddhism and the deepening of her Vajrayana practice, sustained for more than twenty-five years. And it arrives, finally, at the Interior - the inner ground where psyche and spirit meet.Along the way, Ansell writes of a life lived close to both suffering and beauty: ten years as an artist-in-residence in California's maximum-security prisons, where she learned, in her own words, to love unconditionally; decades of clinical work with dreams and creativity; and a sustained devotion to painting as a form of prayer and inquiry. Her images - of deities and dancers, crucifixion and redemption, family and the sacred - are not illustrations of the text so much as its living companions, each one a station on the journey.At once a personal account of survival and a map for the reader's own inner descent, Night Sea Journey is an invitation: to meet grief without turning away, to trust the images that rise from the depths, and to discover that the darkest passage is also the birthplace of the light.