A little madness

We all need a little divine or earthly ‘madness’. One of the problems of our increasingly straightlaced culture is that true soul expression often comes out in such a way as to be deemed ‘madness’. Carolyn Myss did a wonderful tape on this subject called Spiritual Madness which spoke about how many mystics gave voice to this kind of quality with all they expressed and went through in their inner journeys. These days people tend to have what are considered emotional ‘breakdowns’ although the emotional aspect is so often hidden when such things are considered to be all ‘mental’ (not considering the repressed energies and feelings that may be trying to press forward for liberation or integration).

Anyway one of my absolutely favourite recovery writers is Tian Dayton and she has this to say on the subject of a little madness.

We need a little madness. We need for a moment to be able to spurn the good opinion of others to allow our innermost selves to come out. if we edit every thought or feeling, trim it around the edges, box it and shrink wrap it to make it presentable, we will not be able to let our creative juices flow. Growth is messy. Real self expression is spontaneous. Bind it and we bind our soul along with it. Set it free and we give our spirit this opportunity to take flight. Implicit in this is a kind of honesty. Allowing hidden parts of us to come to the fore before we change them into what we would like the to be requires us to sit with and look at all of who we are. This deepens our humanness, our ability to accept our humanness and our ability to embrace the humanness of others.

We need to seek out actively situations that encourage this expression of soul to find somewhere to be crazy, to access the demons we fear within us so that we can bring them forth for a moment into the arena of self and integrate them. When we cast them out, the out they are thrown into is our own uncosnciosu When we pretend that they are not there we cannot integrate them…into the concept of who we are (and then) they dictate our actions without our knowing it. WE pas them on in insidious ways to those around us. We take rigid locked positions hoping that if we are immovable, they will not leak out or penetrate our beings. Alas they do.

Without a little madness, those aspects we have that are incongruous with and an insult to our good self image are too painful to accept. Perhaps it is a little madness that will allow us to have parts of ourself that are far from perfect. Not all of what we wish they were, but part of us nevertheless. When we can allow them to be a part of us and integrate them into our self concept, they lose their destructive power.

A little madness allows us to take a flying leap into our souls, to dare to believe that there is a force of soul with which we are, and can be in beautiful alignment, to risk seeing soul in all that surrounds us. Perhaps it is mad to think that the world is fundamentally the stuff of soul, but is there a good enough reason to think otherwise?

Extract from : The Quiet Voice of the Soul : How to Find Meaning in Ordinary Life.