top of page
In loving memory of
John Raven Mosher
Leticia Nieto PsyD, LMFT, TEP
"John Mosher" by Leticia Nieto,TEP
Digital painting using iPad and Procreate®
"During the Fall of 2020 I had the opportunity to have several phone calls with John. We reviewed our story as Mentor and Trainee going back to 1988. After the first of the calls, I began making this digital painting." October 2020
"All creators are alone until their love of creating forms a world around them". J.L. Moreno
Videos for John Mosher
John chose this reading as an example of a Rite of Transformation.
How Raven Stole the Sun, which is a piece of a puzzle, here is one rendition of the Native story
Blue Sky Training Institute Logo is a combination of a Mayan sun sign and a Celtic knot called the thread of life.
In perpetuity John Raven Mosher lives on in us and in his book, Cycles of Healing, Creating Our Paths to Wholeness; 498 pages of craft, complexity, and care. I go back to it for inspiration and understanding. It is both wide open and very specific. It allows us to connect with him and to meet him in the places he most cherished: myth, complexity and chaos theory, developmental healing, shamanism, psychodrama; the dynamics and tricky business of healing the whole spiraling circle of human complexity, duplicity and longing. He writes that the life of the healing circle model “awaited emergence at the edge between the order and chaos of my life”. It begins…
This book had its birth in the death of my mother when I was seven years old. I asked “Why?” and I have never stopped asking.
Years later, I proposed a workshop marrying the consuming interests, myth and healing, of my two careers, teaching literature and practicing psychotherapy, to the program committee of the 1986 Conference of the Federation of Trainers and Training Programs in Psychodrama, sociometry and Group Psychotherapy. Little did I know that their acceptance of my presentation, called “Myth Takes: Psychodrama as a Ritualized Enactment of Personal Mythology,” would initiate a journey to my Irish roots and The Work of my life. ..
Many people have helped me on my way. The tip of the iceberg: James Macdonald, Northrup Frye, Christopher and Travis Mosher, Rusty Steele, Pat Jarvis, Leon Fine, Michael Harner, Shirley Barclay, Patsy Stanley, Zerka Moreno, Willard Foolbull, Cathy and Reginald Littlebrave, Stanley Krippner, Dale Richard Buchanan, Claudia Brigid Yukman Mosher; my clients and trainees (whose efforts to grow taught me so much about the interaction of personal mythology, rituals, and the healing of the soul that I believe psychotherapy is all about); the spirits of Eric Berne, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Jacob L. Moreno; and the collective Unconscious, which touched me with the archetype of the soul and changed the direction of my life.
I cannot say whether I know or want to know why yet, but my Mother’s death means so much more to me than when I began. And without her passing, I would not have written his book.
John is bequeathing Cycles of Healing, Creating Our Paths to Wholeness to all of mankind. It’s a give away. Share it. Let it inform and warm. Let it inspire long after his physical body is gone. His heart and soul are in this.
CLICK ON DRUM FOR FREE LINK TO BOOK
John is survived by his five adopted children, his daughter Siri Wood, and three sons, Chris and Travis Mosher and Chalen Wood. His Native adopted daughter Brenda proceeded him in death.
Marianne Sharpiro MFA, LMHC, TEP
A mythic structure
Psychodrama in the sky
Raven flies back home
Haiku for Raven
Jack Raymond Shupe, ND, FASGPP, TEP
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
— Albert Einstein
The great challenge of our time is to find metaphors
that include rather than exclude.
— Harvey Arden and Steve Wall
Travels in a Stone Canoe (1998)
The seed of a mountain pine contains the whole future tree in latent form; but each seed falls at a certain time onto a particular place, in which there are a number of special factors, such as
the quality of the soil and the stones, the slope of the land, and its exposure to sun and wind. The latent totality of the pine in
the seed reacts to these circumstances by avoiding the stones and inclining toward the sun, with the result that the tree’s
growth is shaped. Thus an individual pine slowly comes into existence, constituting the fulfillment of its totality, its emergence
into the realm of reality. Without the living tree the image of the pine is only a possibility or an abstract idea . . . The realization of this uniqueness in the individual is the goal of the process of individuation.
—C. G. Jung, Man and his Symbols
The equal–ended cross, surrounded by a circle, a pattern found in many countries, is taken as the oldest symbol of consciousness, of integration. Our consciousness splits life into qualities, and so we know the tension of opposites, the basic differentiation. But the opposites are also the cross and you; if steadfast enough we may feel the stillness at the centre, and if acceptance is possible, our own arms encircle us and we contain our pain.
—Florida Scott–Maxwell,
Jungian analyst
The Measure of My Days (1968)
Story Water
A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet, and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread to bring it.
The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal the light that’s blazing inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them, and enjoy this being washed with a secret we sometimes know, and then not.
—Rumi
bottom of page