HORÓ Counselling - Aleksandra Staneva, PhD

26/07/2025

In therapy, there comes a moment when something shifts: the client begins to feel things about the therapist that don’t quite belong to the present moment. Maybe it’s admiration, resentment, longing, anger or even love. This is called transference. Transference is not a detour. It’s the royal road. As Jung put it in a conversation with Freud during their first meeting- it’s the alpha and omega of the analytic method....

In therapy, there comes a moment when something shifts: the client begins to feel things about the therapist that don’t quite belong to the present moment. Maybe it’s admiration, resentment, longin…

23/07/2025

From emotional depth to mindful living, clients name the benefits of therapy that standard measures often ignore.

21/07/2025

Psychotherapy as a Bitter Pill

Alchemy (the ancient practice of transformation) speaks of the 🖤nigredo🖤phase. The stage where everything turns black, where fantasy collides with reality, and illusions burn away. No transformation begins without it.

In therapy this looks like this: You arrive thinking you will fix something external. Then, slowly, the mirror turns. You start seeing yourself. The excuses unravel. The patterns reveal their cost. It stings.

This is where most people quit. They call it “not the right time” or “not the right therapist” but the truth is they have reached the bitterness that always comes before change. Transference comes alive. The therapist becomes the unwanted mirror.

In alchemy, the blackening meant the work had finally begun. In therapy, bitterness is not the end. It is the doorway.

☕️ Bitter is the taste of growth starting to happen. The only way out is through ☕️

Don’t give up! Be excited when it starts to sting as transformation is cracking down old ways. And this is why you came in the first place, isn’t it?

Your steady vessel of transformation,
Aleksandra

17/07/2025

🤎🤍

To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.

— Jean Shinoda Bolen

Art: Veil by Suzanna Schlemm

12/07/2025

Reflections from my visit to the Jungian Institute in Zurich
(From my blog - aleksandrastaneva.com)

This week, I walked the path back to the source, training at the C.G. Jung Institute and visiting Jung’s home in Küsnacht.
To sit where he sat, to study where the language of symbols was born, was way more than professional for me, it was somewhat devotional.

Jung’s home sits at the Zurich lake (absolutely breathtaking) and only 10 mins away from the Institute so my time was spent attending lectures and visits to his home.

The CG Jung Institute was an impressive building at the lake, with rose gardens and a stunning sculpture of a female goddess, access to the water for breaks and reflection. I walked the lake each morning. Took my time to arrive.

Lectures were held at a spacious sun-lit room that was bathed in the sounds of the lake, swans and duck and children, very much alive. Or that was its impact on me.

Jung along with his wife Emma lived in this lake house for over 50 years, where they raised 5 children and where he saw his patients. He eventually built another home (The Bollingen tower) where he spent long stretches of time completely alone, writing and creating. When he had visitors there, he would often ask them to stay for a day or two in a close by village before seeing him, to shake off their “city vibes and energy” (imagine!, I have things to say about this but that’s for another piece).

Fascinating details about his life, work, and what always interests me – his process of being an analyst and going about his life, is what I am taking with me.

Cont. here: https://aleksandrastaneva.com/2025/07/01/cg-jung-in-zurich-stepping-deeper-into-the-roots-of-depth-psychology/

30/06/2025

This week, I walked the path back to the source, training at the C.G. Jung Institute and visiting Jung’s home in Küsnacht. To sit where he sat, to study where the language of symbols was born, was way more than professional for me, it was somewhat devotional. Jung’s home sits at the Zurich lake (absolutely breathtaking) and only 10 mins away from the Institute so my time was spent attending lectures and visits to his home....

This week, I walked the path back to the source, training at the C.G. Jung Institute and visiting Jung’s home in Küsnacht. To sit where he sat, to study where the language of symbols was born, was …

28/06/2025

“We must learn to bear the pleasures as we have borne the pains.” ~ Nikki Giovanni

12/06/2025

05/06/2025

🎯

What we want is quick, clever fixes. What we need is quite different: the ability to tolerate intolerable feelings, to sustainably change and grow

01/06/2025

My love for him has broken me in so many pieces. My body feels like crackling shards of glass.
It also opened all the untapped grief and all the half-sat-with losses.
I am now at the mercy of grief and all I can do now is to open up like a starfish on this ocean of sorrow and let the waves carry me back and forth, back and forth…
back and forth…

I haven’t risen
I haven’t made some grand sense of it
I haven’t come up with anything poetic or beautiful or inspiring as a result of this loss

All I know is I held you

I didn’t run away when Death and I stared at each other
When she grazed my fingers while I held your soft heavy head

I stayed.

The little girl in me, who has been terrified of Her, watched from under the bed, and also saw me Not leaving

Because love was so much bigger than my fear

And I knew where and how I was supposed to be.

It’s so hard. Especially at sunrise. Because now the new day brings light to all the missing places where you are not.

My dad used to say with perplexed voice “How could you possibly love animals more than humans?” I had my reasons.

I miss you endlessly. I miss you forever. ♾️

26/05/2025

21/05/2025

Many years ago, during a Kundalini yoga class, I had an experience I can only describe now as a form of awakening.

Not to sound lofty or grand - but it quietly shifted the entire trajectory of my life. Actually it was grand. So let it be lofty.

Maybe it was a culmination of years of inner exploration, devotion to an inner process, daily archeological excavations of my dreams, longing.
Maybe it was grace.
Maybe it was the Self reaching through.

I didn’t have the proper language back then. Only the certainty that something in me had cracked open - something ancient, quiet, and real.

Since then, I’ve learned that these moments - glimpses of wholeness - aren’t destinations. They’re invitations for opening, widening, deepening.

And they ask something of us: to stay with the work, to ground spirit into psyche, to make the unconscious conscious, and to tend the layers that get stirred when light floods in.

That’s why spiritual practices matter.
That’s why psychological integration matters just as much.
Without both, we risk bypassing or getting lost in the glow.

This is the work I’ve devoted myself to - personally and professionally. A life of inner practice, and a practice of walking alongside others who are ready to meet themselves more deeply.

If you’re in that place - called inward, uncertain what’s next, but unwilling to stay asleep - this space is for you.

🌹 Aleksandra 🌹