about us

Anima Mundi School is a place of learning, re-discovery and reclaiming of the deep feminine & our innate connection to the Anima Mundi—the World Soul. Our school is strongly rooted on the works of Carl G. Jung, yet it works with the emergence of the ancient teachings of the sacred feminine, as experienced and recovered by women today. As a feminine path of individuation can be different than a masculine one, our center is a place to explore this path, with the contemporary tools of depth-psychology while being immersed in the mythic imagination.

Our long-term courses are held within the framework of our research center. We are a growing community (of mostly women) that is individually dedicated to uncovering their roots, place and creativity in the world while reconnecting in the attitude of service to the Anima Mundi. Collectively, we listen, witness and research classic mythology and new emerging stories and motifs that arise from the spirit of the depths in our work with the mythic imagination and its connection to the larger ecology of which we are part. In our practices and course-work, we try to impose and project as little as possible and distance ourselves from the colonial gaze of entitlement and extraction. Rather, we practice kinship through submersion in the imagination, deep ecology and mythology we engage and weave ourselves into a reciprocal relationship of listening and creative participation.

core team

Farânak Mirjalili  || founder & teacher

Farânak Mirjalili (ReMA) a Jungian analytical therapist trained and based in The Netherlands. She is a Candidate at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland (IAAP) for her second round of analytical training. Her current work and research revolve around connecting individual psychology to collective patterns in mythology and how working with myths within a ritual group context can help both the individual as well as the objective psyche transform during the therapeutic process. She is passionate about the post-Jungian thought of helping free the psyche from the traditional therapy room and giving it back to the World Soul, while respecting the importance for a sealed therapeutic container.
She recently earned a Research Masters degree the University of Amsterdam where she did groundbreaking fieldwork research on the intersection of Jungian psycho-spiritual alchemy and laboratory alchemy—the title of her thesis is: “Rediscovering Alchemy Between Lab & Psyche: The Analysis and Synthesis of Body, Soul and Spirit.”
Together with Gauri Raje, she runs the 3 year program Ecologies of the Imagination.

Roots: Farânak is of Iranian heritage, with ancestry from the southern desert-city Yazd and the lush green lands of Gilan in northern Iran. Her mother-lineage is of the ancient Iranian Zoroastrians, the gabr people—better known in the West as magi. Her spiritual heritage is rooted in Sufism and early Zoroastrianism.

Gauri Raje || storyteller & anthropologist

Gauri Raje (PhD) is a storyteller and anthropologist working with adolescents and adults from multilingual, multicultural and disadvantaged backgrounds. She works with different genres: folk tales, fairy tales, epics and myths, mainly from non-European regions, and autobiographical storytelling. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.

Roots: Gauri is of Indian heritage. Her mother’s ancestry is from the regions of Saurashtra and central Gujarat. Her father’s lineage is from a fishing, warrior & bardic traditions of the Dakhan (Deccan) region in India.

Laura Krusemark || artist & art-teacher

Laura Krusemark is a visionary artist who shares the beauty and mystery of both inner and outer worlds through her paintings and her love for the piano. She holds B.F.A in Fine Arts - Oil Painting and Piano Performance as well as a BA in Fashion Design.
Many of her current artworks focus on the female archetypes, symbols and emerging images of the feminine. Laura's creative life is influenced by her passion to work and be in close relationship to the land and the elemental world, something that she learned from an early age while growing up on a farm. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2019. Her work at the School includes a close collaboration with founding member Faranak Mirjalili in weaving together new images that constellate in the collective psyche during the School's research programs. This work is not public (yet) and is archived in the image-library of the School.

Roots: Laura is born and raised in Kansas, USA and her ancestry stretches back to old Germany (Prussia).

Catalina Scotti || artist

Catalina Scotti (BA) is an artist and graphic designer. Her work as a graphic designer has been focused on the digital world and in her paintings she works on topics related to the world of the unconscious and dreams. How images flourish creating imaginary worlds that connect her with the inner and outer world. She has been studying Jung's theories and the unconscious since 2017. She started studying with Anima Mundi School in 2021 and now she is a guest-artist in the course of Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine and the creation of the school’s archive of images and motifs emerging from the depths. She is currently a Fine Arts student at the Royal Academy of the Art in the Netherlands.

Roots: Catalina was born and raised in Viña del Mar, Chile. Her paternal ancestors are from the North of Italy (Turin) and her maternal line is from Spain. From both lines Catalina has Mapuches indigenous roots from the central valley of Aconcagua Chile.

The Anima Mundi School is an independent educational organisation with a small number of people behind the scenes including senior Jungian Analysts and former students and contributors of the Anima Mundi School.