Ever Widening Circles & Mystical Moments by Jean Shinoda Bolen: Excerpt
We are delighted to feature an excerpt from Ever Widening Circles & Mystical Moments by Jean Shinoda Bolen(Chiron Publications | March 4, 2025), the long-awaited memoir by 89-year-old activist, author, psychiatrist, and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, endorsed by Gloria Steinem and Isabelle Allende.
While Jean Shinoda Bolen is an internationally renowned Jungian analyst, psychiatrist, speaker, and activist for women’s empowerment and the author of thirteen acclaimed books on psychology and spirituality translated into fourteen languages worldwide, few people know of her journey from which she draws her profound wisdom.
In Ever Widening Circles & Mystical Moments, Dr. Bolen shares her deeply personal life experiences during her nearly ninety years, from her childhood facing Japanese American racism during World War II, her inspiring activism and caregiving, and her lifelong work to help us to become our most authentic selves and heal our world. Ever Widening Circles & Mystical Moments conveys Dr. Bolen’s warm intelligence, intuitive nature, positive attitude, sense of justice, heart connection with mystical moments, and innate passion for following the soul’s purpose with the support of ever-widening circles of trusted companions to provide wise, actionable guidance for our collective global future.
– Gloria Steinem, Feminist Activist, Author, and Co-Founder of Ms. Magazine
Every Widening Circles & Mystical Moments by Jean Shinoda BolenPreface
I was a child whose life was dramatically affected by historical events. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and the United States entered World War II, all people of Japanese ancestry on the west coast of the United States were to be rounded up and imprisoned behind barbed wire in remote relocation camps. It did not matter that we were American citizens. To avoid this, my family became, in the language of the United Nations, “internally displaced refugees” for a short time. I was in kindergarten when we left Los Angeles for central California, while my father went to Sacramento to get papers that would allow us to leave the state. Once we crossed the state boundary, we were free American citizens again. This was the beginning of many moves during the war years, in which I went to four elementary schools in a variety of places.
Until I wrote this book, I’ve said very little about my personal life while speaking and teaching nationally and internationally. My public and professional persona is as an author, an advocate for women’s rights, a psychiatrist, and a Jungian analyst. I am breaking two major taboos by telling personal stories about my family and myself. There is my family of origin, with hundreds of years of Japanese tradition of maintaining appearance, which means that writing about my impaired younger brother is revealing a family secret.
Then there was the Freudian psychoanalytic training in my psychiatric residency, which taught me to be a neutral blank screen and to volunteer no personal information. Instead, I listen with compassion, feel with, care about, and want the best outcome for the individuals who work with me (patients, analysands by professional definition).
Dreams reveal, in the language of metaphors and memories, what it is that we have tried to forget, need to forgive, or no longer suppress in order to remember and be ourselves now. I listen with empathy as I hear their experiences and feelings. I respond from my heart and mind with words that can lead to insights as well as healing. Trust grows as bottled-up grief and shame as well as joy comes and is shared with me.
Memoirs are retrospective. In life, significant events may not always seem so until later: “We had the experience but missed the meaning / And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.” These are words from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—and how true they are! This is what I found out when I returned to long ago experiences in this memoir. The poem recalls and reflects upon ineffable personal moments, with references to history and to places, which I found myself also doing.
The second half of the title of my memoir is “and Mystical Moments.” Mystical, spiritual, subjective soul experiences are threshold or liminal perceptions, where visible and invisible worlds merge, where ordinary time and eternal time overlap, when “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts” (words from Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” by T.S. Eliot). In childhood, late adolescence, and as an adult, mystical moments and insights gave me a sense of coming into this world with meaning and purpose about what I could do with my life.
I also pay attention to synchronicity, which was the subject of my first book, The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self. At the time, “synchronicity” (a word coined by C. G. Jung for “meaningful coincidences”) was considered too esoteric a word to be in the title. Many significant, life-changing meetings and many personally transformative spontaneous events came about through synchronicity and could not be explained by cause and effect. Such moments, large and small events that can’t be explained, are like miracles of significant timing, or opportunities that evoke gratitude and wonder.
Once we know how and what affects us deeply, and remember how we adapted in order to be acceptable (and may still do so), there is still time and timing (as long as we are still here) to know ourselves. There is still time to learn how we can help and why we are still here. How and what can we learn, how can we help, and will we discover that there are reasons to still be here?
In this memoir, I am making “rounds” on my own life, as I share my stories and insights. Maybe you will find some pearls of information here, words that bring back memory, a definition of something of importance that you didn’t have words for before, a metaphor that fits, or the clarity of a psychological insight or a Jungian concept expressed in ordinary English.
While young adults often struggle to do or become whatever it is that matters to them, so does accomplishment and position on retirement become an obstacle for elders. It gets in the way of doing and learning something new that could be meaningful or creative. Fear of looking foolish is a major obstacle when a spouse or grown children reflect this back, just as failure at relationships or work is also often an obstacle to a young or midlife adult. It takes insight and time, as well as courage, intention, choice, and synchronicity to choose to do what is meaningful personally and to make a commitment to follow through.
My personal insights and commentary are meant to illuminate the lives of those who read my memoir and find themselves remembering their own childhood and years since. There are the personality patterns with which we came into the world, that show up in infancy as extraverted energy and movement or introverted quiet, as well as the deeper aspects: archetypes or talents with which we were born. Depending on what gender, what culture, what family we were born into, they are aspects in us that were either valued and developed or ridiculed and suppressed.
As I looked back on the path my life has taken, I see that my personal journey resembles a series of circles that resemble a widening spiral. What was inwardly meaningful and touched my soul fit the concept of “circumambulating the self,” Jung’s description of the journey of individuation, the Self being the archetype of meaning (divinity by whatever name, within and outside of us).
Historical events, gender, ethnicity, religion, and family circumstances indirectly—sometimes directly—shaped and limited many of the decisions I made.
When I was a child, I had some profound experiences.
That were purely subjective knowing, a deep comfort.
Though few and far between.
As I grew older
I felt them as mystical moments.
Looking back with retrospective insight, I know
These soul encounters with the sacred shaped my life. Gave my life meaning, defines me now.
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Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, is an ac4vist, psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, an interna4onally known inspira4onal speaker and author of thirteen influen4al books in over one hundred foreign edi4ons: The Tao of Psychology, Goddesses in Everywoman, Gods in Everyman, Ring of Power, Crossing to Avalon, Close to the Bone, Goddesses in Older Women, Crones Don’t Whine, The Millionth Circle, Like A Tree, Urgent Message From Mother, Moving Toward the Millionth Circle, and Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman. She is a Dis4nguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Associa4on, a past Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, a former board member of the Ms. Founda4on for Women, the Associa4on for Transpersonal Psychology, the C.G. Jung Ins4tute of San Francisco, and is a 2020-21 Life4me Achievement Award honoree from Marquis Who’s Who. For more informa4on, please visit www.jeanbolen.com.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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