Analytical Psychology · Jungian Analyst in Training · Zurich
Laura Darlene Purdy
Tending dreams, depth, and the patterns that shape a life.
What I Offer
What I can offer is a space held with integrity, discipline, and real reverence for what's witnessed there — and from that ground, room for genuine freedom, curiosity, and even joy.
Both the seriousness of this work and its wonder are necessary. I've lived that paradox myself, and I hold it open-handed, alongside anyone walking their own path.
Much of our work begins with dreams. I stay close to the image — its textures, its creatures, its particular feeling — and we stay curious together, amplifying what it offers without rushing to explain it away. From there we might move into active imagination, in any of its forms, and into the body, where so much of what matters is actually held. My training as an embodiment guide lives quietly underneath all of it: an attention to the nervous system, to rooting down, to what wants to be met rather than only talked about.
My training is in classical Jungian analysis — its archetypes, its symbolic vocabulary, its long tradition. With and beyond that framework, my deepest aim is to stay present with what's actually here, and to trust that the deeper patterns will show themselves in their own time. What I keep returning to, underneath the language, is the sense of a Self that organizes itself from within, vast and emergent, felt more than explained — and the field that forms between two people in this work, which becomes its own third thing, something neither of us could reach alone.
What This Asks
Again and again, this work seems to find people at thresholds — in grief, in transition, in the search for their own authority inside something complex, or not yet resolved. I can companion you through that. But the deeper movement is always yours; my place is alongside you, not ahead of you, trusting what's already trying to happen within you to find its form.
So there is something this work asks in return for what it offers — simply a willingness to carry it out into the wider world. To let what surfaces between us travel with you into daily life, into embodied action, into the small disciplined practices that, over time, change something real. That reciprocity is the work. It's where the third thing between us begins to live.
Contact
An initial conversation
If something here resonates, I'd welcome hearing from you.
If you'd like to explore working together, the place to start is an initial conversation — 20 to 40 minutes, in person, at no cost — simply to talk, answer your questions, and sense whether this work feels right. There's no obligation beyond curiosity.
In-person sessions at ISAPZurich, Zurich — in English
About
A path toward depth, arrived at sideways
I used to joke that I went into veterinary medicine because I hated people and loved animals. What actually happened, over more than a decade of working with every kind of animal and the people who loved them, was that I fell in love with humans by accident — through the animals who brought us together.
Veterinary school gave me a rigorous education in anatomy and physiology, and a quieter one in something else: how to be present at thresholds. Birth. Sickness. Death. I spent years working in low-income clinics and high-volume rescue, then found my way into end-of-life care — going into people's homes at the hardest moment of their lives, holding space for grief that was, for many, the deepest they had ever known.
When the world shut down in 2020, I was a new practice owner answering a ringing phone alone, sewing together protective gear so I could still kneel beside dying animals in people's living rooms. I learned, fast and irreversibly, how little I actually control.
What followed was burnout, and underneath it, a body that had been asking for attention for years — unexplained pain that sent me through Western medicine and out the other side, into somatic therapy, into a two-year training as a women's embodiment guide. I learned to trust what I already knew internally to be true, rather than only what I'd been told was normal.
Alongside this, I built a long, quiet relationship with meditation and mysticism — Buddhism, Tantra, Stoicism — and eventually found my way into a Sufi lineage I still practice today, one that grounds me in ways I couldn't have predicted.
In the depths of burnout, searching for something to meet my exhaustion, I began dreaming again — vividly, mythically — for the first time since childhood. A guide asked if I'd heard of Carl Jung. Soon after, a book left in a waiting room found its way into my hands and spoke to something I didn't yet have words for. I began my own analysis, and recognized, underneath it, the same systems-thinking I'd always brought to animals and the people who loved them — only now turned inward.
I've lived enough of my own life outside conventional structures — in relationship, in work, in how I move through the world — to hold space without needing things to look a particular way. I've never stopped dancing, in one form or another, since long before I had language for any of this. And the animals are still here. They come to me, and to the people I work with, in dreams and waking life alike — a wealth of knowledge I take as seriously now as I ever did in clinical practice.
Background
- Doctor of Veterinary MedicineOver a decade in clinical practice, rescue medicine, end-of-life care, and practice ownership
- Jungian Analyst-in-TrainingDiploma Candidate, International School of Analytical Psychology, Zurich (ISAPZurich)
- Women's Embodiment GuideTwo-year certification in nervous system regulation and somatic practice
- LanguageSessions offered in English
- LocationIn-person sessions at ISAPZurich practice spaces, Zurich
