Breakfast with Jung: The Essential Collection

Exploring Carl Jung's concepts through poetry and music

What if your morning coffee was actually communion with eternity? This collection brings together nineteen songs that transform Carl Jung's profound psychological concepts into intimate musical experiences. From the collective unconscious to the shadow, from projection to the authentic Self—these tracks explore the architecture of the human psyche through poetry that refused to stay on the page.
Each song began as a poem, part of a nine-year journey that started on the Camino de Santiago and continued across the hills of Waiheke Island, New Zealand. Written by a theatre educator with forty years of experience in acting, directing, writing and Playback Theatre, these verses eventually found their voice through an unexpected collaboration between human creativity and AI music generation—what I call "The Hollins Method™" for crystal-clear vocal delivery.

From the transcendent aerial perspective of "Whispers from a Moonlit World" to the sensual vulnerability of "The Kiss," from the social consciousness of "Growing the Brand" to the self-discovery of "Faces of the Self"—these nineteen tracks trace a map of human consciousness itself. They ask: Who are we beneath our masks? What dwells in our shadows? How do we become whole?
This is more than a music album. It's an invitation to explore your inner landscape over morning tea, to meet the archetypes that shape your life, to recognize yourself in myths as old as humanity.
Jung believed the unconscious speaks in symbols, dreams, and images. These songs are that language made audible.

Welcome to breakfast. The conversation begins now.
This Essential Collection draws from the complete "Breakfast with Jung" manuscript—a 400+ page book featuring 135 poems across nine chapters, each exploring a different aspect of Jungian psychology. Future releases will present these chapters as individual albums, creating a complete musical-literary journey through the human psyche.

— Stephen Francis Hollins
Waiheke Island, New Zealand

"BREAKFAST with JUNG"                               -The Essential Collection

Sometimes grief can be so overwhelming, this tragedy of wanting to turn back time, especially to the lost of a great love. This is a sad song about wanting the impossible to happen. 

Oxygen

I looked down at my sister her face was yellow
She had been lying on the porch for the first part of spring
I was to pour milk over her eyes put mushrooms into her ears
And sprinkle pine dust over her body

Mother and I picked up her body which was lying on a door
So it would not fall apart
Father turned on Mozart and sunshine floated backwards toward
The chickens who danced very slowly in perfect rhythm

The phone rang and Magpies descended down upon the house
We love you we love you come back
You are alive
Wake wake wake wake wake wake wake wake

I gave a half nod and picked up my sister who started to fall apart in my arms
Shit it's not working but it was too late
Pink lambs leaped across the field into the yard
Surrounding the shit of a mess that was my sister

Give Her Back I screamed
But to no avail as I gasped my last breath
Of Oxygen

Oxygen

A love letter from an plane describing the beauty of below. How beautiful this world is ...we need to be reminded over and over...Transcendent Perspective: How aerial consciousness reveals the Self's wholeness - seeing all aspects of existence as interconnected and beautiful. From my upcoming book "Breakfast with Jung" Chapter 8 The Self

Whispers from a Moonlit World

Darling, I'm on the Cessna one seven two Skyhawk
It's noisy inside the cabin, so I'll write this down
We are descending from the heavens
Below a landscape of white smooth as a baby's bottom
Snow-covered hills roll like frozen waves
Pine trees and forests stand silent
Branches laden with crystalline jewels, crystalline jewels

Icy rivers meander through the terrain
Carving paths like veins on a white canvas
They glisten beneath the moon's glow
Guiding a path through the frigid forest
A full moon rises on the horizon
She's a luminous orb casting her spell on the night
The sky's a magician wearing a deep black velvet
Cloak that wraps the globe

Wow, there among the frosted pines
Honeymoon haven from twenty years back
That little wooden log and stone cabin, walls still strong
Windows aglow beaconing eyes of amber
Looks like Mini Mouse from here
Family of deer, such ginger steps
Hooves sink into the soft, powdery snow
Their breath a misty cloud in the frozen air
They graze, the only sound
Crunching of snow beneath their feet

Snowflakes drift like a whisper
Moon's silver beams bathe the landscape
Shadows dance and intertwine with the light
Slow lovemaking between sheets of darkness and illumination
Under a blanket of lace, a blanket of lace
The vast expanse of snow becomes an ocean
A sea of shimmering ice and cold
Hills islands of praying monks
In a world of silence and beauty

Frozen waterfalls hang like crystal curtains
Falling torrents now suspended in time
Glinting icy spectacle
Can you see the solitude of the full moon's night
And can you surrender and lose yourself
In this hushed lullaby
Of a slumbering world, a slumbering world

Whispers from a Moonlit World

Creative Anima: The feminine aspect of the psyche as creative muse and gateway to the unconscious. Depicts creative inspiration as feminine presence that steals us from ordinary consciousness into realms of artistic possibility and imaginative transformation. From my new book Breakfast with Jung -  Chapter Five - Anima and Animus

Drunk on Metaphor and Music

In the velvet dark of two AM
She slips between my ribs
Like moonlight through venetian blinds
Her breath against my neck
Carries the scent of jasmine

Through dream-swept hours she moves
Each gesture fluid as rain down glass
Her bare feet silent on wooden floors
Her fingers trace lavender on my skin
While her hair spills ink-dark stories across my pillowcase

And her laugh scatters wild birds
Across my bedroom ceiling
Even my tongue learns to speak in green
Tasting wild honey and sea-salt

She feeds me red wine and midnight
Dances me through territories
Unmapped by cartographers of reason
Until my bones forget their old addresses

Time itself grows drunk on her presence
Each moment an eternity of wanting

When dawn breaks like a china cup
I find only scattered pages by my bed
Wine glass stained with her thumb-prints

And realize
It was Poetry all along
Who stole through night's borders
Left me drunk on metaphor and music

Dancing barefoot through language's wild gardens
Forever speaking the music of her silver tongue
She feeds me red wine and midnight
Until my bones forget their old addresses

Forever speaking
The music of her silver tongue
Dancing barefoot
Through language's wild gardens
Poetry all along

Drunk on Metaphor and Music

Evocative language and sensual imagery, weave together nature, desire, and memory in the simple act of the Kiss. This tender and timeless act, vulnerablity of giving and receiving. 


The Kiss

BREAKFAST WITH JUNG - When Morning Becomes Portal

What if your morning coffee ritual was actually communion with eternity?

At dawn's ragged edge, an ordinary kitchen transforms into a temple where the Collective Unconscious speaks through steam rising from tea, through faces rippling in chrome, through your grandmother's hands weaving histories into your cup.

This is Jung's most profound insight made tangible: we are never truly
alone. "In this kitchen, we are all time travellers, breaking bread with
our unborn children, while the dead pour tea with trembling hands." The ancestors lean in, hungry for one more taste of morning. The tui's song harmonizes with languages lost when Eden's gates swung shut. Even the sugar bowl holds crystals of compressed eternities.

The Collective Unconscious isn't abstract theory—it's the moment when time pools honey-thick between dreaming and day, when you realize every breakfast is simultaneously the first and the last, when eternity reveals itself as simply this: a kitchen full of ghosts at morning, passing cream across time's borders.

The beautiful female folk voice carries both depth and lightness,
making the mystical feel utterly domestic—the sacred hiding in the ordinary, the eternal folded into a cup of tea.

Tell me then, you who breakfast alone—do you see them in your morning mirror? All the faces time has worn and will wear, gathering like moths around your light?

"The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of
mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual."
- Carl Jung 





Breakfast with Jung   ( Lyrics )

At dawn’s ragged edge, my kitchen becomes
A temple of ordinary prophecies
Coffee grounds like black diviner’s sand
Messages from the dead burned into toast

My grandmother’s hands emerge from steam
Weaving histories into my cup, while outside
Bougainvillaea bleeds its crimson alphabet
Across windows thin as memory’s skin

In the toaster’s chrome, faces ripple:
Great-aunts with eyes of burning coal,
Cousins carrying unborn stars in their teeth,
Children who might bloom from my bones.

Their reflections overlap like hungry ghosts,
All pressing against morning’s fragile glass.
The kettle screams with a thousand voices—
Every cup of tea ever poured flowing backwards

Through time’s copper throat. Even Jung himself
Pauses mid-bite, startled by its prophecy.
A tui splits the sky’s yolk with her song,
Harmonising with languages lost when

Eden’s gates swung shut. Her notes scatter
Like black pearls across my breakfast plate.
Time pools honey-thick in this hour
Between dreaming and day, sweet

With the marrow of memory. My spoon
Stirs ripples in the universe’s coffee cup.
The morning news bleeds through dimensions—
Every headline ever printed rising like smoke

From my coffee: wars, loves, births, extinctions
Spiral into one eternal moment of toast and tea.
Through the window, the bougainvillea
Drops petals red as birth-blood, each one

Carrying messages from the collective heart—
Semaphores from gardens of remembered light.
Watch now—as my ancestors lean in, hungry
For one more taste of morning, their shadows

Drinking light from my cup. Even the sugar bowl
Holds crystals of compressed eternities.
In this kitchen, we are all time travellers,
Breaking bread with our unborn children,

While the dead pour tea with trembling hands
And tomorrow whispers in our marrow.
Tell me then, you who breakfast alone,
Do you see them in your morning mirror—

All the faces time has worn and will wear,
Gathering like moths around your light?
Here at dawn’s clean slate,
Where every breakfast is the last breakfast,

And also the first, we drink our coffee
Black as memory, sweet as prophecy,
While Jung smiles from the doorway,
Knowing that eternity was always this:

A kitchen full of ghosts at morning,
Passing cream across time’s borders.
 
By Stephen Francis Hollins

11/October 2025

Breakfast with Jung


A meditation on the Self as both creator and destroyer, told through the image of citrus fruit falling from a backyard lemon tree. The tree represents Jung's concept of the Self—the totality of the psyche that encompasses both life-giving potential and inevitable loss. As "citrus suns dangle and dream of distant love," we see the Self's creative capacity, while "one by one they thud into the silent earth" reveals the Self's acceptance of all cycles, including endings. The sparse musical arrangement mirrors the spaciousness required for Self-realization—creating room for both beauty and grief to coexist without resistance. From my upcoming book "Breakfast with Jung" Chapter 8 -The Self



THE LEMON TREE ( Lyrics)

In my back garden
Inside a sea of glossy leaves (Glossy leaves)
Citrus suns dangle and dream
Of distant love
Citrus suns dangle and dream
Of distant love (Of distant love)

Mmm-mmm-mmmm
Ahh-ahh-ahhh
Ooh-ooh-mmm, ooh-ooh
Mmm-ahh-ohhh
Ahhh, mmm, ahhh, ahh, ahh
Ooh-mmm-ahh

One by one they thud
Into the silent earth (Silent earth)
One by one they thud
Into the silent earth (Silent earth)

The Lemon Tree

S F H music Auckland, New Zealand

Poet • Performer • Lyricist • Composer

Stephen Hollins is a New Zealand-born Renaissance artist whose four-decade career spans many genres of theatre, opera, improvisation, performance, poetry, writing and music. He transforms his poetry into songs blending psychology, performance, innovation and technology to create emotionally resonant and meaningful music.

His latest project, "Breakfast with Jung," is a groundbreaking multimedia collection exploring Carl Jung's psychological concepts through poetry and music—transforming a 400-page manuscript of 135 poems into a nine-album/chapter series that makes depth psychology accessible through an intimate musical and poetical journey toward the authentic Self that mirrors Jung's work.
"Support my music: https://sfhmusic.bandcamp.com"