Jaff Frank, PhD

Jaffa is an archetypal mythologist, a teacher, writer, and licensed mental health counselor. Her passion is listening for the deeper meanings resonant in our individual and collective stories as echoes of the anima mundi. She cultivates a psycho-mythic, embodied, relational understanding of experience that engages the creative imagination, and the storehouse of collective wisdom found in myth to mediate meaning-making. Her commitment to deep listening includes opening to the archetypal, imaginal realms and the natural world and attending to grief. She is dedicated to the cultivation of presence, love, kindness, and connection and the transformative power of beautiful language, art, theater, music, and landscape.

Jaffa earned her BA in marketing from the University of New Mexico and worked in advertising. After a life-threatening medical crisis resulted in profound personal loss and a near-death experience, she was called to myth and Jungian psychology ultimately completing an MA in Counseling with an emphasis in Grief, Loss, and Trauma Therapy from Southwestern College and a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Interdisciplinary Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology. Her doctoral studies explored trauma and loss as portals to transformation and a process she calls embodied mythopoesis as a psychologically healing response to living with endometriosis, a chronic, debilitating disease. Jaffa’s published works include Eyes of the Gorgon: Endometriosis, Mythic Embodiment, and Freedom, Mandorla Books, 2019, and “Loving Medusa, Redeeming Athena: Restorying Female Blood, Sovereignty, and Agency,” which appears in Maternal Thinking: Gifts, Mother’s Bodies, and Earth, Women & Myth Press, 2023. She has presented on a range of topics including: “Objective Relatedness, Radical Empathy, and Letting Go: An exploration of mother grief through the myth of Ereshkigal/Innana” (Association for the Study of Women and Mythology Annual Conference in Boston 2016); “Loving Medusa, Redeeming Athene: A mythopoesis of female blood, embodiment, and sovereignty” (Joseph Campbell Foundation Round Table of OPUS, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2020); and “A Woman’s Body & the Healing Power of Mythological Archetypes” (Women Seeking Wholeness Podcast, Episode 048, 2019). Jaffa has further training and expertise in dream work, Jungian active imagination, Sandplay Therapy, mindfulness, thanatology, ritual, shamanic journeying, art practice, attachment, somatics, and interpersonal neurobiology. She has trained in wilderness-based healing with the School of Lost Borders and Dr. Carol Parker at Southwestern College. Jaffa has served as an adjunct faculty at Southwestern College since 2018. She has taught courses in Consciousness and currently serves as a faculty assistant for the annual Wilderness Fast offered as part of the Ecotherapy Certificate. She is a founding curriculum developer for the PhD in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership. In her work as a therapist, Jaffa served as a hospice bereavement counselor.