Not what they made
On Saturday, I said goodbye to my DP2 students. They had just graduated and most of them are leaving not only our college but this country, and of course this chapter of their lives. It is easy to assume that this must be hard, but watching them graduate and saying a final farewell as the cars and buses departed, I didn’t feel sad. I felt something closer to a deep and settled joy because I could see who they had become.
There is a particular quality that develops in students who have spent real time in genuine encounter with their own inner life. It isn’t confidence in the way we usually mean it; it isn’t performance, or polish, or the ability to say clever things about their work. It is something more substantial than that. A knowing, a capacity to stand inside uncertainty without needing to resolve it. Not because they have answers but because they have learned to trust the thread, even when they can’t yet see where it leads.
That quality is not the absence of uncertainty. It is certainty within uncertainty. Those are completely different things. One is resolution; the other is ground.
The harder work
This ground was not found by abandoning rigour, but through it. My students did not arrive here by letting anything come out, or by moving fast, or by treating intuition as an excuse to avoid the difficult work. They arrived here by slowing down, by learning that working from the inside is actually harder than working from the outside, because it asks more, not less.
What I see again and again in the studio is students discovering that intuitive working is slow-working. The student who stays with a mark for ten minutes before making the next one is not stuck. They are in the deepest kind of attention. And technical skill, the capacity of the hand to do what the inner image requires, is not separate from this process; it is what allows the depth to become visible. If the hand cannot yet meet what the imagination is reaching for, that gap becomes a ceiling. Skill and inquiry are not in opposition: skill is what makes inquiry manifest.
Held, not determined
None of this happened in open space. It happened inside a container; a framework that held the work without determining it. Structure is not the opposite of freedom; it is what makes freedom possible. Without it, the imagination either floods or freezes. The container gives it somewhere to play, somewhere to push against, somewhere to return to when the work becomes disorienting. In Jungian terms this is the temenos, the bounded sacred space. In classroom terms it is teaching that is clear enough to hold and open enough to allow.
The moment of crossing
There is an image I keep returning to when I think about what happened on Saturday: the threshold. In its most literal form, a threshold demarcates outer and inner: you must cross it to enter or leave. But it has always carried a deeper meaning. Crossing a threshold signals a transition from one state of being to another. It is, as the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) describes it, “intimately related to rites of passage.” Sacred thresholds require something of us before we can cross: a particular act, a particular quality of attention. What is on the other side is not simply a different place. It is a different self.
That is what I watched on Saturday. Not students finishing a course. Students crossing a threshold. Two years of genuine inner work had prepared them for it; not by making the crossing easy, but by making them someone who could cross, and they left carrying that with them, into whatever comes next.
Art is not the goal. Art is the access point. Details from the DP2 Final Exhibition, 2026.
She is certain anyway
The day after my students left, I attended session 7 of a course I have been following for eighteen months through the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies; a course that asks as much of me between sessions as during them, and that I trust completely in terms of timing. I arrive when I am ready, even when I don’t know I am.
This session brought Goethe’s fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and something in me recognised it immediately. The snake does not become the bridge by building something. She becomes the bridge by dissolving, by giving herself so completely to the process that she is transformed into the very thing the crossing requires. She doesn’t know, going in, what she will become, but she is certain anyway.
My own somatic work has been teaching me something similar: slow, careful, bodily work that cannot be arrived at through thinking alone: that certainty doesn’t come from knowing what will happen. It comes from trusting what you are inside the not-knowing.
Trusting what you are
Reading Goethe’s fairytale, I saw it clearly: my students are the snake. They came into this process not knowing where it would take them. They gave themselves to it anyway: to the discomfort, to the questions that had no answers, to the work that kept asking things of them they weren’t sure they could give. They did not abandon craft; they deepened it. They did not abandon structure; they learned to inhabit it. Somewhere inside all of that, something transformed. Not into something I designed, but into something that was always theirs to become.
That is what I was witnessing on Saturday when I should have been sad and wasn’t. Not an ending, but evidence of two years of young people learning to be certain inside uncertainty, and then walking out the door carrying that with them, into whatever comes next.
The work doesn’t end when they leave. It goes with them. That’s why there was nothing to grieve.
For the teacher reading this
Several members have asked me what questions I ask in my studio-classroom. I am sharing them here, but with something I need to say first, because without it the questions risk becoming just another technique.
My belief is that the teacher must be doing their own inner work to be able to fully inhabit this. Not as a prerequisite you complete before you begin, but as an ongoing practice that runs alongside the teaching. Without it, these questions can still be asked, but they will be felt by students as a method rather than a genuine invitation. And students know the difference. They always know the difference.
ARAS describes the teacher as someone who can be “anything that penetrates our ignorance or indifference and wakes us.” Socrates questioned, challenged and provoked his students: his method was to get people to think for themselves, to know themselves. Jung put it plainly: the teacher “must not be satisfied with merely pounding the curriculum into the child; he must also influence him through his personality” (CW 17, 107).
That is a different kind of teaching. And it requires something different of the teacher.
Two things also need to be in place before any of this is possible in your classroom.
The first is a container: a framework clear enough that students know where they are and what is being asked of them, even when the work itself is open. Without it, invitation becomes anxiety, and freedom becomes freeze.
The second is rigour: not in the sense of a fixed outcome, but in the sense of sustained, slow attention. Working intuitively does not mean working fast, and it does not mean anything goes. It means going deeper, which is harder, and students need to understand that from the beginning.
So take these as a way in to thinking, not as a script. And if they prompt something in you as much as in your students, that is exactly the point.
Be open and curious with the questions: towards your students, and towards yourself. The quality you are trying to grow in them begins with you practising it first.
That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, everything.
ARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) is a collection of around 18,000 archetypal symbols with scholarly commentary, available to members at aras.org.