Chance Encounters: When Life Calls Us to a New Path
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chance encounters can change the whole direction of our lives. A casual chat with a stranger at the bank, a book that beckons to you from the shelf, or a last-minute lunch invitation might lead to transformative consequences.
This week, join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano, Joseph Lee and Deborah Stewart as we circumambulate the phenomenon of the chance encounter.
For Jungians, these moments are more than happy accidents. They may be understood as encounters with the deeper ordering principle Jung called the Self, which disrupts the ego’s plans and invites us toward something larger.
Fairy tales often feature animal visitors offering the main character a surprising and unexpected choice. These stories can be powerful guides for recognizing the potential of chance encounters and making the most of them.
We also discuss how, in an age of overstimulation, you can be receptive to the possibilities of the chance encounter. These moments usually speak softly and quietly rather than arriving with a trumpet sounding from the hills. They are visitations, not tools for self-improvement, and we must be open to allowing them in.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If I can bring in another quote from Jung, which does reference this idea of a chance encounter, |
| 0:06.4 | and I think amplifies what you've just said really beautifully, Joseph. |
| 0:10.3 | To this day, God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, |
| 0:19.7 | all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions, |
| 0:23.8 | and change the course of my life for better or worse. So these chance encounters that change |
| 0:31.3 | our life, Jung's word for that is God. Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:39.8 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:45.2 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological |
| 0:50.3 | perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:54.9 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:58.9 | I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 1:03.9 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. |
| 1:07.5 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. |
| 1:25.1 | Today we're going to explore life-changing chance encounters. |
| 1:32.7 | A chance encounter changes a life because it changes our governing fiction, |
| 1:39.9 | the story we tell about ourselves. From an ego level, we have a sense that we live in a kind of continuous narrative of our own intentions. And when an encounter reveals a whole other world |
| 1:48.2 | of openings and interruptions, calls, persons, animals, who in a sense were always there, |
| 1:57.7 | it challenges us that the meaning is not always comfortable, |
| 2:02.8 | and it brings us to a moment where we discover that the soul is autonomous |
| 2:09.0 | and it offers a complication or a demand, |
| 2:13.8 | that we have to meet with a new perspective, |
| 2:18.5 | which often in the remembering |
... |
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