Getting back in touch with what makes our hearts happy, what restores as sense of connection value and meaning to our lives is one way we can learn to turn our lives around in the midst of difficult, challenging or painful circumstances. Possibly this may be easier once we come to terms with, express and begin to make our peace with the things and situations or people that hurt us.. This often requires time, inner work and distance.. I do not think I could have healed and undergone as much inner transformation as I did if I had stayed in certain relationships that ended. And as painful as it was to have breaks forced on me, perhaps in the end every single one was all for the best. This came to me in the shower today as my higher power recommended I start saying the following affirmation to myself.
I accept all that happened to me as part of my growing, knowing it had to happen that way.
There is, in the end, not much point going on being angry about the past if we do not take that energy of boundary or inner hurt and turn it around to express and grow to move forward in a new direction.. This often involves seeing where our own personal power lies and where we may have surrendered it in victim hood.
It is interesting as a moment ago I was reading in the book The Tao of Jung about Jung’s break with Freud and his descent into the unconscious.. this began in December 1913 on the brink of the outbreak of World War One in Europe.. When Freud and Jung first connected their exchange was intense and inspiring for both, but problems soon arose due to the way Freud wanted to hold onto his power and kind of superior position to Jung, whose ideas on the psyche varied widely from his.
At one point Freud told Jung “we must make a dogma… (a) bulwark of the sexual theory” when Jung asked Freud “a bulwark from what”, Freud replied “against the black tide of mud” which to Freud’s mind was occultism but what Jung understood to represent “virtually everything philosophy and religion had learned about the psyche.” After further conflict when their relationship broke and Freud once again tried to assert his fatherly power and the supremacy of his theories, Jung underwent a breakdown where dreams of his revealed the powerful underground levels of both the collective as well as his personal psyche..
Jung’s psychology is understood to concern much about our need to die to the false self or selves we have to assume in order to fit in, and be ‘civilized’ or ‘socialized’ Through his own breakdown and descent into the ‘darkness filled with light’ parts of his own false personality ‘died’ while deeper truer ones were birthed.. Eventually he came into contact with his own inner child who he gave free reign to play, dream, sculpt in clay and explore.. In one pivotal dream he tells of around the time of his break with Freud, the ground beneath his feet gave way as he plunged into the darkness of inner depths, landing on his feet in a sticky mess, where upon he followed the twilight into the open mouth of a cave, squeezing past a leathery dwarf who seemed mummified. In the dream/vision he then entered an icy body of water wading through it to the other end of the cave where he saw a glowing red crystal. As he grasped this crystal/rock another running body of water appeared which contained the floating body of young blond man with a bullet wound, followed by a gigantic black scarab and a red, new born Sun, rising out of its depths.. As Jung tried to replace the crystal/stone a huge spurt of blood flew out and began to spurt for a long time, where upon the dream/vision ended.
In the book The Tao of Jung : The Way of Integrity David Rosen equates the young blond man shot in the head to the dying of of Jung’s false self that initially wanted to bond with Freud but could not support his ideas (thus the shot in the head). Rosen equates the blood pouring out in the dream to a kind of ego or spiritual death rebirth that Jung was then set to undergo for many years.. I could not help but think though of that rising blood red sun being in some way related to the degree of bloodshed that Europe would begin to be bathed in in the following year, 1914 when the war began. It seems to be that as a person who had a close connection to the collective unconscious Jung could have, at this time, been picked up on rising tide of collective energies. I believe, like his mother, Jung was quite psychic.
It gives me comfort to return to these stories of Jung’s life as I think of my own dark night of the soul. I was also thinking a great deal about my living sister after reading through all of this as well as other portions on this subject in another book my Jungian James Hollis. Often this midlife period sees those of us still living in a false self coming unstuck in some ways, often encountering a profound period of depression, reversal of life energy, a disorientation, soul loss or confusion..I must check the astrology of this period in Jung’s life but I do know he was born with the Sun in Leo square to natal Neptune in Taurus and am pretty sure this period saw the transit of Neptune pass over his Sun (dissolution of ego self) and in square to his natal Neptune which is a transit all of us undergo (the later one) some time in our 40s and may often bring sweeping changes and dissolutions or endings that leave us feeling all at sea.. But this may also herald a period where we might find great rewards both by turning inward as well as by understanding how our own inner journey is at odds with or challenged by external collective standards or expectations.
Relating this back to where I found myself today in terms of accepting all that happened in my past as necessary in some way and making peace with it, the orientation of feeling ‘blessed’ can then arise.. Today I count these things as my blessings :
Emotional recovery : a day at a time I have stayed sober 28 years now
A safe peaceful beautiful place to live surrounded by trees.
Comfort and joy from friendships past and present as well as the trusty companionship of my beloved dog, Jasper
Nourishing foods and the creative gift of being able to plan and prepare nutritious meals.
An active and intelligent mind that can open to learning something new on any day as well as the gift of my precious books.
WordPress as a platform of self expression and connection with other beautiful souls I admire and appreciate.
My physical health and ability to move despite daily panic attacks and neurological storms due to my head injury.. gratefully I have the use of my limbs and am not immobilised or paralysed.
There are just so many blessings I am counting today.
Too often it seems to me that we can rail against the particular fate that we have been born into, that we have to work our way through and come to terms with.. Reading that section of Clementine Ford’s book earlier in the week where she struggled to come to terms with her mother developing cancer, she had broken down crying with her Mum in the chapel saying how unfair it was, but as she comforted her daughter, Clementine’s Mum reframed the plea ‘why me (us)?’ to : ‘well why NOT me?’ This profoundly echoed a message I had read in another reading in my Al Anon book a week before that.
Embracing our challenges, turning them into learning, wisdom, insight, gifts or even blessings must, of necessity involve us accepting them as on some level having needed to come to pass. Once we turn to embrace such things with open arm and hearts full of ‘radical acceptance’ then a kind of conscious death or sacrifice may be necessary on one level in order that we can shed old skins or beliefs or paths not chosen for us by destiny. This is not a process that can be intellectualized although using our minds to grasp and understand it is very necessary.. It is a path that may lead us to a lot of inner grief work that we cannot always expect to be validated.
Part of having immature beliefs may involve the hope that others will see and get and validate us in this process, when, it seems to be the opposite is so often true.. At times we will not be able to find validation for the process and may, of necessity, have to go through intense and at times painful separations or disappointments in this regard and yet that is all a part of our path.
Just a moment ago, as I was writing this, the emotional journey of Jesus came into my mind and that long dark night he spent it the garden of Gethsemane, knowing that on the following day his life would be sacrificed. This, in some way, seems to me a kind of archetypal metaphor for our own journey of endings, ego death and sacrifice. We may not always see that the price of growth and rebirth may demand of us some kind of willing surrender, ego death or death of younger more immature or less wise selves but it always does. And the truth is we will suffer as we go through it and yet we must never lose faith that indeed all of this, is, actually happening for a reason and that out on the other side a new, red sun is slowly rising out of those dark and primal depths we could not avoid on the path to soul rebirth and transformation.
The Master leads
by emptying people’s minds
and filling their cores
by weakening their ambition
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire.
(the) eternal void (is)
filled up with possibilities.
Hold onto the center.
Lao Tzu
Emerging From The Dark Night 