Sometimes when I speak to my sister my heart just breaks, its a breaking open to love and at times I don’t now how to meet her in that dark heavy place I sense in her. I thought of her so much last night after watching the Donald Kalsched video talk on the inner child and the divine child. I read a little more of his book last night on the Rapunzel fairy tale about the self protective forces inside us which block us from love and from a true loving deep connection with our inner soul child. My sis told me her son bought the two oldest grandkids to see her yesterday they could not talk because the kids took up all the space, which kind of made me sad and I pointed out gently her own troubled relationship to the inner child. I used to get the stare of disapproval for dancing, or expressing grief, or being angry when those were the true feelings called for in the situation. Yet I was made to feel ‘bad’ for having them. Oh and she told me the family friend who was so shaming to me a few months back rolled her car yesterday which made me sad. I see the troubled relationship this person has to her own inner child too but how she struggles to be there for my sister. There is some goodness in even those who hurt us through their own emotional defences.
I hate that heavy dark energy though in my sister. It makes me stumble for my words. I was going to offer to take her out again but a family friend is picking her up later on and I was relieved in one way to be free while I will miss seeing her too. I just feel that heavy dark energy as a blanket of steel at times between us. I do have compassion though, I feel sad at times for the way I pushed my sister away but she was also for a long time stuck in very rigid, critical defences that made a deeper relationship impossible.
I had a good sleep last night and it was late before I got to sleep. I was thinking more and more of the inner child and Jung and of how his journey always resonated with me from the time my first ever serious boyfriend, Simon gave me a copy of his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections back in 1985 when we were living and working in London. I felt sad last night for my first aborted Jungian therapy in Cambridge with Wendi. I thought of how family pulled me back and of the dream that heralded that ‘regression’ where I had a shot of energy hit me up the spine in the dream as I found myself on a spiral staircase with one couple going up and the other dream, I equate the staircase to Mercury and the caduceus and the trickster is mentioned by Kalsched in relation to those inner psychic forces which speak to us and affect our journey to the Self. The dream then shifted to me being squeezed between two walls and finding it hard to breathe, that to me represented Saturnian forces in my ancestral inheritance pulling me home and Saturn was opposite Pluto then. I aborted the psychological astrology course but one day I will pick up my studies again, they have never ended because when it comes to astrology and psychic forces we never stop learning.
I started to get panic attacks when I didn’t go forward to my life in the UK with Jonathan. I tried to go back but got smashed up again and pulled back home, maybe my connection to the maternal and unconscious was too strong before then. I feel in many ways when we bought this house at auction I was trapped in a kind of alembic or chrysalis. I am still there but as I said in another post I do feel my wings forming. The chrysalis is often spoken about in adult child Al Anon writings too. I was looking at my maternal great great grandfather’s chart for the loss of his first child Eliza Jane and it had key tie ups to my own. He and his wife lost two baby Eliza Janes before my maternal great grandmother was born and she was the adult child of the alcoholic whose grief was buried so deep. I see all the tie ups and know I am onto something with my ancestral astrology. I don’t care if others think it is bunkum I find so much in astrology to love because the forces live in us, in the deep psyche in such a profound way.
I know I have a gift to give the world out of all of my trials, my blog is part of it and my journey is not isolated but deeply human, everything I feel and have felt others feel and have felt too because I am part of the human race. I am just another piece of starlight in a universal constellation of stars that are the human galaxy of celestial light. I truly believe that. Our birth often brings a forgetting of where we truly come from as here we undergo the heavy burden of trials but id do believe darkness falls as part of a profound process of re-awakening. When we can bear to see the dark, to sit in the dark and allow the dark maybe our fear lessens, perhaps I can take this more loving approach towards my sister’s own darkness. I think of how heavy medication can dull the sparkle and staying still in the morass leaves us more weighted down by depression and yet at times we have to stay there until it percolates or transforms. But most of all, as I see it we have to find a way to build a path to our soul and embody that for it contains our spirit which only becomes dull if we fail to acknowledge the full truth and depth and ecstasy and agony of who we really are and where we fit into the universal scheme of things. We are here for a reason and to my mind that reason is love.
Emerging From The Dark Night 