Disability as The Human Experience
Socially Relevant Salon Series
with Charles Hall and Jenny Montgomery
hosted by Satya Doyle Byock
Saturday, February 11, 2023
10 - 11:30am PST | 1- 2:30pm EST
All events are hosted online. Recordings are provided to all registrants.
Community Subscribers are registered automatically for this salon as part of their subscription.
“Organ inferiority [i.e. disability] is the human condition, our liability to be bruised at the heel, our mortality. The ego is weak because it is mortal, with its specific lacuna or privations, deprived of ideal and abstract good by its complexes. These complexes keep us continually wounded, that is continually limited to our inferiority, our mortal condition. Every wound is a mortal wound, the realization of mortality. The crippling is indispensable for the puer, who, had he the gift without the wound, would be all together inhuman. His handicap compensates his omnipotence, making his archetypal structure viable for human existence. His viability lies just in his vulnerability. The wound brings the Senex virtue of limitation to an unlimited reach.”
The Salome Institute is deeply honored to host Charles Hall and Jenny Montgomery to explore “Disability as the Human Experience” in this installment of our Socially Relevant Salon Series.
Longtime Salome community members, Charles and Jenny, are two people for whom disability has been a lived, personal experience, as well as an area of rich academic study and creativity, influenced by mythology, dreams, symbols, the unconscious, and Jungian psychology.
Charles Hall was born in 1960 in Dallas, Texas, with multiple congenital disabilities. He has no arms below the elbows, facial anomalies (80% paralysis), and speech issues classified as Moebius Syndrome. His parents insisted that he be mainstreamed during the 1960s, giving him a much more normal childhood before it was the standard for disabled children. His life has been filled with remarkable encounters, synchronicities, deep relationships, and transformative insights into the human experience through the lens of a disabled person in an able-bodied society. Charles’s stories and wisdom hold tremendous space for learning and self-reflection for people from all backgrounds.
A journalist, classicist, and astrologer by training, Jenny Montgomery is also mother to a middle school aged son, Heath, who is a wheelchair user. She and Heath are active with advocacy groups supporting the independence and civil rights of people with disabilities, and she is currently at work on a graphic memoir about parenting and disability titled The Outlaws, informed by an early disability community that used fairy tale, myth, and depth psychology in their work.
In this salon, Charles and Jenny will be in dialogue with one another about their experiences and will present some of their independent creative work, as well as share insights on various mythic and archetypal themes related to disability as a lens to understanding the whole of the human experience.
As always, we will hold space at the end of their presentation for community Q&A and conversation.
Recording: If you are unable to join us live or would like to watch this on your own time, a recording will be sent to all registrants within 24 hours of the live event.
About the Presenters
Jenny Montgomery, Ph.D. has been a practicing astrologer for over twenty-five years. Her Ph.D. studies at Columbia University focused on the history of esoteric sciences in the medieval Greco-Arab world. Her practice is influenced by Jungian psychology, emphasizing the archetypal and unconscious realms. Concurrent with her astrological practice, she has pursued creative work as a writer and cartoonist. Her journalism, comics, and poetry have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Sensitive Skin, A Gathering of the Tribes, Tar River Poetry, Calyx, the Cairo Times, and others. She loves to travel and has lived in New York City, Cairo, Malta, and Missoula, Montana, where her husband, Ryan, and she own a small whiskey distillery. Their son Heath is a middle schooler and a wheelchair user. She and her son are active with advocacy groups supporting the independence and civil rights of people with disabilities. She is currently at work on a graphic memoir about parenting and disability titled The Outlaws.
Charles Hall was born in 1960 in Dallas, Texas, with multiple congenital disabilities. He has no arms below the elbows, facial anomalies (80% paralysis), and speech issues classified as Moebius Syndrome. His parents insisted that he be mainstreamed during the 1960s, giving him a much more normal childhood before it was the standard for disabled children. In High School, Charles was in a unique class called “Man and His Environment,” where he attended a three-hour-a-day class in the Humanities, introducing him to the works of Carl Jung, Margaret Mead, and more. He attended a small college in East Texas, majoring in the Humanities. After college, with no prospect for a job, Charles founded a nonprofit working with disabled individuals, their families, and caregivers. At 30, he returned to school and did post-graduate work in Accounting and Finance. It took his mentor three years and an offer for a money-back guarantee for Charles to get his first job. Within six years, he was working at Intel. After ten years in corporate life, Charles had proved he could survive in the “real world” of corporate America and decided to quit. For the last eighteen years, he has been living in Mexico, helping his family’s business to integrate disabled individuals into the workplace. Charles’s passion is the issue of Disabilities about which he speaks, consults, and writes. “What It Means to be Disabled.” His work is highly influenced by Jungian, Archetypal, and Depth Psychology, and Family Systems Theory.
Moderated by Satya Doyle Byock, MA, LPC
Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon, the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022), and the founding director of The Salome Institute. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Times of London, and her writing has been published in Literary Hub, Psychological Perspectives, The Utne Reader, Goop, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and elsewhere. Satya has lectured at Jung groups in the US and UK, and has been interviewed for her work on many podcasts. She is the co-host of Carl Jung’s Red Book Podcast and has twenty years of practice with The I Ching and dreamwork.
Register:
Online Attendance: a link for Zoom will be sent to all registrants via email in advance of this salon.
Recording: A recording will be made available to all registered participants following the live event.
Scholarships & Discounts: Please send us an email if you are unable to pay the full price. We don’t require explanation, just an email.
Subscribers: If you are a subscriber to the Salome Community, you do not need to register for this salon. You will automatically receive an email with login information in advance, as well as the recording following the event.