Let the Pendulum Swing!

Dear friends,

I’ve just spent an incredible month in San Francisco, and something has been clarifying itself - something I want to share with you as we step into this new year together.

I believe the work of life is about holding seeming opposites and making room for it all. The part of us that wants freedom and the part that wants security. The part that craves expansion and the part that needs containment. The impulse toward lightness and the pull toward depth. We may experience these as internal conflicts. We can feel stuck between them, believing we must choose one or the other.

But what if the work isn’t choosing? What if it’s allowing the pendulum to swing?

Here’s what I’ve been learning - to let the pendulum swing! When we have internal permission, relational support, and the capacity to experiment - to actually move and try things - a profound life alchemy happens. The movement creates transformation. Not resolution. Not one or the other. When we have the freedom to inhabit different poles and we let ourselves need seemingly opposite things, we discover something new - something that emerges in the movement between those polarities.

This is deeply Jungian territory. Jung wrote extensively about the alchemical process - and the alchemists weren’t trying to eliminate base metals. They were transforming them through process. The heat, the dissolution, the recombination. The work was in the vessel, in the holding, in allowing change to happen.

Jung’s concept of the transcendent function speaks directly to this - it’s the psyche’s remarkable capacity to hold opposing forces and create something new from their union. Something new is born, not from either/or but from both/and. From the willingness to swing, mix and experiment. Hilma af Klint painted this understanding in her series “The Ten Largest” - in Childhood and Youth, we see spirals of color swirling and moving, never static, each stage of life holding its own pendulum swing between expansion and containment, lightness and depth. I’ve included two of my favourites here, above and below. When I saw them in person at the Tate modern a few years ago, it was an incredible experience. Nothing prepares you for the size, the vibrant colour and the impact of these pieces.

Spirit and Soul: My Geography

A literal example of all this from my life is England and America.

I grew up moving. When I was a child, I wasn’t empowered with choice - I moved when my family moved. I couldn’t listen to my inner promptings, to my desire to feel the spirit of the American south-west or the deep green soul of English soil. It was one or the other - and the opposite polarity often felt lost to me.

Now I can listen and I can move more freely. This freedom has been profoundly healing and has been preparing me for this next chapter of my life.

Through a conversation with my mother recently, we discovered we both feel the American Southwest holds the element of spirit. There’s a lightness there. The big skies open you to possibilities. Inspiration lives there. Imagination expands.

For both of us, we feel England hold the soul.; the depth, ancestry and heart.

Spirit and Soul feel different - one explores imagination, the other heart. One reaches outward, the other reaches inward. Both feel so essential to me..

The freedom to move between them, to let the pendulum swing, has been opening something in me. The false binary is dissolving - I’m discovering I’m more spacious than the either/or mind told me. And in that allowing, something is becoming possible that I couldn’t have accessed from either place alone.

The Permission We’ve Been Denied:

As women, we’re often taught to fear the pendulum swing. We’re told our “mood swings” are evidence of instability, that changing our minds makes us untrustworthy, that moving between different needs or desires means we’re flaky, selfish or scattered.

The patriarchal script insists we be consistent, predictable and always available - that our value lies in our steadiness as caregivers and our ability to focus on others. But Jung understood that the Self cannot develop without honoring the shadow - all the parts we’ve been taught to exile. For women, this often includes our changeability, our need for solitude alongside connection, our right to say “I needed this yesterday but I need something different today.” The pendulum swing doens't make us "hysterical women" or emotionally unstable - it’s the psyche’s natural movement toward wholeness.

When we prioritize connecting with ourselves, we’re not abandoning our capacity to care for others. We’re refusing to collapse into the role of eternal caregiver and claiming our full humanity. The false binary dissolves: we can be deeply relational and deeply sovereign. Both. The swing between them isn’t a flaw to be corrected, it's the very movement that keeps us alive, whole and true.

What Jung Knew About the Swing:

Jung understood enantiodromia - the principle that things transform into their opposites when pushed to extremes. The pendulum naturally swings. For instance, try to stay only in spirit, only in expansion, only in possibility - and eventually you’ll crave ground, embodiment, the weight of soul. Stay only in soul, only in depth, only in feeling - and you’ll hunger for air, for horizon, for the spaciousness of spirit.

The work isn’t preventing the swing. It’s allowing it. Having the internal permission and the relational support to say “I need the other pole now” and trust that you’re not abandoning anything - you’re completing the circuit.

Jung’s alchemical marriage, the coniunctio, is about the union of opposites that creates something new. Not compromise. Not the flattening of both into a lukewarm middle ground. It's a genuine third thing that holds the full charge of both poles.

The angel gracing the Temperance card keeps pouring water from one vessel to another, endlessly mixing, blending, finding balance not through force but through flow. This is the image that’s been with me - transformation through movement, through the willingness to let things pour and mix and change. For me, it's about trusting the process rather than controlling the outcome.

So as we begin this year together, I’m holding these truths:

That wholeness includes both poles
That I’m more spacious than the either/or mind tells me
That movement itself can be healing
That different places, relationships, modalities, ways of being can be alchemical vessels for becoming
That the cage of either/or was never locked

I experimenting with:

Moving beyond the tyranny of either/or thinking in whatever area I feel stuck
Giving myself permission to need seemingly opposite things
Finding and deepening the relational support that aids this experimentation
Identifying where I’ve been trying to “resolve” tensions that might instead want to be held and moved between
Letting the false binaries dissolve

Perhaps you relate.

This is the work I love to do - whether in therapy, coaching, or collaborative tarot sessions. Creating the vessel where the pendulum can swing safely. Witnessing the alchemy that happens when you discover and allow the wholeness of who you are.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to explore it with you.

With love,
Hannah Green MFT

Hannah practices depth psychology in Cornwall and San Francisco, working with individuals and couples through the lens of Jungian analysis, attachment theory, and psychospiritual development. She offers therapy, coaching for healing professionals, and collaborative tarot sessions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A Special Winter Dream

"Hare Under The Moon" by Deva Evans

Dear friends,

As winter deepens and we move toward the darkest days of the year, I find myself dreaming more and remembering my dreams. Many of these dreams feel more lucid and magical than usual. 

In my garden and in surrounding fields near my home live many lovely creatures - bunnies, badgers, weasels, all kinds of birds and wild, fleet-footed, moon-touched hares. A few weeks ago, I had a dream. A hare appeared, larger than human, decidedly of the underworld - not dark in a fearful way, but deep, chthonic, ancient. To hear what this being wanted to tell me, I had to tune myself like a tuning fork, adjusting my frequency to meet theirs. When I finally attuned, the message came with surprising gentleness from the hare's mouth, in a woman's voice: "We choose you. We want you for this quest." The voice was beautiful and otherworldly and was filled with a kind of love that stayed with me long after waking.

In Celtic tradition, hares are threshold creatures. They don't burrow underground like rabbits but rest in shallow forms on the open earth, neither belonging fully to the wild below nor the cultivated above. They're associated with the moon, with shapeshifting, with messages between worlds. Medieval churches across Cornwall and Devon bear the mysterious "three hares" motif - three hares running in an eternal circle, sharing three ears between them, each appearing whole yet part of an impossible, sacred geometry.

"Three Hares" motif by Vikki Yeates

The hare doesn't hibernate. It endures winter's darkness, remaining visible and vital when so much else has gone to ground. There's something profound in that - a reminder that the dark season isn't about disappearing but about a different kind of presence, a quieter, slower quality of aliveness.

As we approach Christmas and the winter solstice, these ancient markers of light returning in the longest dark, I'm struck by how the old Celtic wisdom, Christian mystery and Jungian perspective aren't so different at their heart. Both honor the profound truth that new life comes through descent, that we must go down into the dark before we can truly encounter what wants to be born. The Celtic year's dark half, the waiting of Advent, the solstice's promise - all speak to this necessary passage through winter's underworld.

Jung understood this. He wrote about the Self often appearing in numinous, larger-than-human forms, sometimes as animals that carry messages the ego can't yet speak in its own voice. The hare in my dream wasn't asking me to understand intellectually but to tune myself, to become receptive to a frequency beyond my usual range. This feels like the invitation of the season itself - not to force light or manufacture cheer, but to attune ourselves to what's already present in the dark, to what's choosing us even as we think we're choosing our own path forward.

The quest the hare spoke of - I think it's the same one many of us can relate to. The quest to listen more deeply. To allow ourselves to be transformed by what we hear. To trust the love that comes from unexpected places, in unexpected forms. To persist like the winter hare, present and alive even when the landscape seems barren.

This year has been one of profound transition for me - living between two countries, grounding my practice in new soil, learning what it means to be shaped by the land and community that holds me. You have been part of that shaping. By meeting me here, in the sacred space that therapy creates, you've taught me about courage, about showing up for the hard work of becoming whole, about the tenderness possible when we stop performing and start being real with each other.

Your willingness to trust me with your depths, your shadows, your longings - it changes me. Every session, every sharing, every moment you've chosen to stay present with what's difficult, vulnerable or mysterious rather than flee - these have been gifts. You've walked this path with me as much as I've walked it with you, and I'm grateful in ways that are hard to put into words.

As we move into the new year, I'm holding space for what wants to emerge - in my work, in our lives, in the collective journey we're all on. If you're feeling called to deepen your therapeutic work, to begin again, or to explore what might be asking for attention in your inner life, I'd be honored to share that space with you. I have some availability opening in January, both for ongoing work and for new clients ready to begin. I would love to see you in the Mission January 17th for the workshop and gathering I am hosting, there is a link below to learn more and register. 

However this season finds you - in celebration or in quiet, in company or in solitude, in joy or in necessary grief - may you feel held. May you notice what's choosing you. May you find yourself able to tune, even just for a moment, to the frequency of your own deepest knowing.

With love and gratitude,
Hannah Green MFT

Temperance - the card I never associated with sobriety

Temperance Card Rider Waite Smith Tarot Deck

Welcome to Heartsnacks!

I’m Hannah Green MFT and depth psychotherapist, and this is my newsletter. We’ll be exploring relationships, art, and personal alchemy as I share impressions from work and life with you - my community of friends, clients, and colleagues.

I'm glad you're here!

Dear friends,

Yesterday I had hand surgery, and today I'm in that particular stillness that follows a hospital visit or procedure. The kind where your body insists you stop and listen. My bedroom is warm and cozy. The candles are lit and my partner has made my favorite - a huge pot of chicken soup. I've been spending these restful hours with Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. He also wrote Cold Mountain, which I've listened to many times over the years. These stories of the American west always capture my imagination and there's something about his voice as he reads aloud, the rhythm of his sentences, that matches this moment of necessary quietude perfectly.

In the opening chapters, Frazier writes about the Temperance Movement - a 19th and early 20th century social and political campaign that advocated for no alcohol consumption. Something shifted in me as I listened. I found myself thinking about the Temperance card in the Tarot, about the angel mixing water between two vessels, about the alchemical marriage of opposites. And then, surprisingly, after all my years with the cards, I realized I had never connected this card with sobriety.

This astonished me. This elusive and magical card has always been one of my favorites and sobriety is such a profound part of my life. Treating addiction is central to my work in depth therapy. And yet somehow I had kept these two things separate: the Temperance card with its gentle angel and flowing water, and the practice of recovery that so many of my clients and I know intimately.

The Angel's Work

In Jungian terms, Temperance represents what he called the transcendent function, which I keep writing about and is the focus of my January workshop in San Francisco. It is the psyche's remarkable capacity to hold opposing forces and create something new from their union. The card doesn't show restriction or denial. It shows integration. The angel pours water from one cup to another, endlessly mixing, blending, finding balance not through force but through flow.

This is nothing like the white knuckled or forced abstinence we sometimes imagine when we think of "temperance" through the lens of the old Temperance Movement. This is something else entirely. This is the slow, steady work of finding your true path, the one that isn't about restricting but about discovering what serves your deepest becoming.

The Long Unfolding

Working with people in recovery has taught me that this process is rarely linear. There are twists and turns, setbacks and breakthroughs, moments of clarity and long stretches in the fog. The work isn't to become "fixed" or "cured." The work is to keep showing up to the mixing, to the integration, to the slow discovery of what balance actually feels like in your body, in your own lived experience.

Jung understood that true transformation doesn't come from transcending our struggles but from making them conscious, from bringing what's been hidden into the light and learning to hold it alongside everything else we are. 

In my practice, I watch people slowly find this third way. Someone who has learned to hold both their vulnerability and their strength, their desire and their boundaries, their shadow and their light in the same open hands.

The Fertile Ground

Recovery, like all deep psychological work, asks us to tolerate enormous amounts of uncertainty. To keep showing up even when we can't see the outcome. To trust that something is working in us even when progress feels invisible, perhaps like an achey hand wrapped in a cast.

The Temperance card reminds us that this mixing, this blending, this patient work of integration never really ends. Life keeps offering us new opposites to reconcile, new edges to meet, new versions of ourselves to discover. The angel keeps pouring, keeps mixing, keeps finding balance in the eternal flow between what was and what wants to emerge.

As I rest here after surgery, my hand healing in its own mysterious timeline, I'm grateful for my loved ones and for all the doctors and nurses that did their jobs so well. For seeing how the Temperance card has been teaching me all along what my clients in recovery already know: that wholeness is found in the willingness to keep showing up to the mixing, in trusting the slow alchemy of our own transformation, in believing that we are becoming something we cannot yet fully see.

With love,

Hannah Green MFT

P.S. If you're feeling called to explore the Tarot more deeply, I offer psycho-spiritual coaching sessions centered around the Tarot. These sessions are different from psychotherapy and yet seek to support you at your depths. Come and see me for a New Years reading!

This month's recommendations: Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Caravaggio (film) The music of Celia Hollander and Mary Latimore

The Fertile Ground of Not Knowing

Hello friends,

As we settle into November and the year begins its quiet descent, I've been thinking about patience. About the difference between resolving and remaining open to what wants to emerge. Above is a photo of the little Shepards hut I have fixed up on the land, a place to rest and retreat, a place that can remind me to slow down. 

When I was an early clinician, I felt it viscerally: that powerful urge to fix. People came to me wanting relief from their pain, their conflict, their confusion. And I wanted so badly to give it to them. To resolve their struggles. To smooth the wrinkled fabric of their lives and hand it back to them, clean and whole.

But my clients taught me something different. They taught me, slowly and sometimes painfully, to relax into the process. To stop grasping for resolution and instead learn to stay curious, to stay open. To let things breathe and unfold according to their own mysterious intelligence.

As I look toward next year, I find myself preparing to dive even deeper into this practice. I'll be connecting with my intuition through art in the Porthmeor program at St Ives School of Painting and studying with some local Jungian analysts and teachers who understand this work of staying open to what wants to emerge. And my partner and I will be planting a garden, something entirely new to me that will initiate me into a completely different pace and way of being. The garden doesn't respond to urgency or impatience. It teaches only one thing: trust the process, tend what's before you, and wait.

Two Practices, One Teaching

Both psychotherapy and art practice offer us profound training grounds for this essential skill. In the therapy room and at the easel, we face the same fundamental question: Can we tolerate not knowing? Can we resist the compulsion to resolve prematurely and instead remain present to what is unfolding, like watching a watercolor bloom across wet paper, like waiting for dreams to reveal their meaning, like sitting with a client's tears without rushing to make them stop?

From a Jungian perspective, this is the work of psychological maturity. Jung understood that the psyche doesn't want to be "fixed." It wants to be witnessed, to be held, to unfold according to its own deep knowing. He spoke of the tension of opposites, the holding of paradox, the willingness to sit in what he called the "temenos," that sacred container where transformation happens not through force but through patient attention. The way alchemists understood that transformation requires time and heat. The way love teaches us that true intimacy cannot be forced.

The immature ego demands certainty. It wants answers now, wants the story to resolve before the final page, wants to know how things will turn out before committing to the journey. It cannot bear the tension of the unknown. But emotional maturity, true psychological development, requires that we learn to meet our edge differently. That we develop the capacity to dwell in what I've come to think of as "the open growth place," that liminal space between question and answer, between wound and healing, between who we were and who we're becoming.

Turner "Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)" All swirling, indeterminate, refusing to resolve into clear forms - pure atmospheric presence.

Learning to Tolerate This Together

In my early years of practice, I didn't understand this. But my clients and I learned it together, the way travelers learn a foreign landscape: slowly, with stumbles and discoveries, with moments of grace that arrived only because we'd gotten lost first. We learned to tolerate the discomfort of not having immediate answers. We discovered that the urge to resolve, while understandable, even noble in its origins, often cuts short the very process that wants to lead us somewhere deeper, truer, more alive.

This isn't about resignation or passivity. It's about tilling the soil. It's about creating fertile ground to meet life's constant mysteries, unknowns, and frustrations. Because here's the truth, spoken plainly: they never stop coming. Life keeps presenting us with uncertainty, with complexity, with questions that have no simple answers. The river keeps flowing, whether we stand on the bank demanding it be still or finally step into the current and learn to swim.

I'm learning to orient myself around this reality. To open to an examined life rich with compassion, not as a martyr or saint, but as a gardener who knows that growth happens in the dark soil long before it reaches toward the light.

The Way of Curiosity

What does this actually look like in practice? It means learning to emotionally regulate ourselves through the body: through conscious breath, through grounding, through self-compassion. When we can anchor ourselves in the present moment, when we can turn toward ourselves with kindness rather than judgment, something shifts. We discover we can stay present with discomfort without needing to immediately resolve it. We find we are more spacious than we knew, more capable of holding paradox.

This is how we move beyond the compulsion to fix. This is how we stay in the fertile place where real growth happens.

Jung spoke of individuation, the lifelong process of becoming more fully ourselves. Not the resolved and finished version we imagine is waiting at the end of enough therapy sessions, but the self that is always unfolding, always in process. This process asks us to trust that something is working in us and through us, even when we cannot see the outcome. To trust the intelligence of our own unfolding.

An Invitation

Where in your life might you be rushing toward resolution? What if the not-knowing itself is the teacher?

I love exploring this work through individual therapy, couples therapy, and psycho-spiritual coaching sessions centered around the tarot. Sometimes we need a companion for the journey into the fertile ground, someone to hold space while we learn to stay open, to help us find our breath when the urge to resolve becomes overwhelming, to remind us that the not-knowing is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

This is the practice. This is the art. This is how we learn to meet our edge and remain in the open growth place, where life continues to surprise us, challenge us, and shape us into who we are becoming, who we have always been becoming, one breath at a time.

With love,

Hannah Green MFT

The Swans of Becoming

Dear friends,

There is something about Hilma af Klint’s swans that arrests us mid-breath.

In The Swan, No. 17 (or perhaps another from her series, each one a meditation on union), we see it: the intertwining of black and white, shadow and light, held within a single form. Not opposing forces locked in battle, but lovers in an eternal embrace. The swan becomes a vessel for what Jung called the coniunctio oppositorum - the sacred marriage of opposites that marks every genuine spiritual awakening.

Hilma painted these swans between 1914 and 1915, during her own profound opening to what she called “the temple.” She understood that transformation doesn’t come from transcending our darkness but from finally, courageously, including it. The black swan and white swan are not two swans - they are one being, whole and undivided, their necks forming a heart, their bodies creating a circle with no beginning and no end.

Lately, these swans have been appearing in my sessions. One of my brilliant clients homed in on this image, and it has stayed with me these last few weeks, teaching me something I’m still learning to articulate. I find myself learning to love, in my core, in my bones, the nature of this reality, which always includes the dark and the light. It’s inescapable. And isn’t this exactly what the swans teach? That wholeness is not a destination but a practice of return. A daily choosing to stop splitting ourselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts, into the persona we show the world and the shadow we hide even from ourselves.

Perhaps it’s no accident that these swans have found me now, as we cross the threshold into November - into the season of darkness. In the Celtic tradition, this is Samhain, the turning of the year when the veil grows thin and we’re asked to turn inward, to tend the inner flame as the outer world retreats into shadow. The ancient ones understood something: that darkness is not the absence of light, but its necessary companion. That we keep the light alive by honoring the darkness, not by denying it.

Jung wrote: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

I often feel guilty for my shortcomings. I feel I’m not doing enough. I feel I am not emotionally mature, not giving, and supportive enough of those I love. I still feel shame around my shadow sides which feel young, wild, reactive, and sometimes overwhelmed and confused. Very slowly I’m learning to love and open to these parts. I know it sounds trite - what a million therapists before me have said - but the depth of this truth dawns on me daily and deepens with every passing season.

These young, wild, reactive parts - the ones that feel overwhelmed and confused - these are not obstacles to spiritual maturity. They are the work itself. They are the black swan asking to be held with the same tenderness as the white. Every impulse to push them away, to shame them into silence, is a rejection of the wholeness I’m learning to embody.

Living here in Cornwall is teaching me what the city couldn’t because it refuses to let me escape the cycles. The tide doesn’t apologize for receding. The garden doesn’t feel guilty for its dormant season. Nature simply is - dark and light, growth and decay, wildness and rest - and it asks nothing of us but our witness. As the days grow shorter and the light fades earlier each evening, the land itself is teaching me about the sacred necessity of descent, of turning inward, of letting things die back so they can be reborn.

And being a caregiver to three children - what better initiators into the mysteries? They will not let me maintain the fiction of the “good mother” who never feels rage, exhaustion, or the desperate wish to run away. They crack me open daily, asking me to meet them (and myself) in the full catastrophe of aliveness.

This is the dance I’m learning: not the performance of spiritual bypassing where we exile the shadow in pursuit of perpetual light, but the integration - the trembling, imperfect practice of making room for it all. The joy and the pain. The passion and the mundane. The moments I feel flooded with love and the moments I feel despairingly alone.

Hilma’s swans show us that the sacred is found not in choosing one over the other, but in the union itself — in the point where opposites meet and discover they were never truly separate. The heart-shaped space between them is where life actually happens. Where we actually live.

I truly am a whole person, and those I love are truly whole. My relationships are whole, and in that wholeness they hold the light and the dark, the joy and the pain, the passion and the mundane. Any tension, depression, and anxiety has a root in my resistance to this fact. It separates me from the deepest love I know is possible.

This tension - this depression, this anxiety - these aren’t evidence of failure. They’re the tension of a soul learning to hold more than it once thought possible. Jung called this the *transcendent function* - the psyche’s capacity to create a third thing from the conflict between opposites, something greater than either pole alone.

We are all becoming that third thing. Not light, not dark, but whole. Not perfect, but real. Not without shadow, but finally, bravely willing to dance with it.

The swans have found me for a reason, and perhaps they’ve found us at this threshold moment - as the wheel turns toward winter, as we’re invited to descend into our own depths and discover what light we can tend there. The Celtic peoples knew that this season asks us to become like the swans: to hold both the darkness and the light within the same body, the same heart, the same breath.

I’m letting them keep teaching me what they taught Hilma: to recognize ourselves as the place where light and dark have always been lovers. There is no shortcoming in this becoming. There is only the eternal return to wholeness, and the courage to keep opening when every instinct says to close. May this season of darkness teach us all to keep the inner flame alive — not by banishing the shadow, but by finally, tenderly, welcoming it home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

With love,

Hannah Green MFT