Bud Harris's Blog, page 10

Captives of Normalcy (Part 1)

Dear Readers, During the month of May I will be sending you a 4-part excerpt from Chapter 1 of Sacred Selfishness, Captives of Normalcy. Captives of Normalcy For certain societies that people today like to call primitive, the dominating trait …
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Reclaiming the Feminine: A Reader’s Response and Personal Story – Part Three

One of the most rewarding aspects of being authors of books like INTO THE HEART OF THE FEMININE are the responses we get from readers. These responses encourage us, energize our work and fill us with awe and humility. The …
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Reclaiming the Feminine: Celebrating Change – Part Two

Have you ever been afraid of what people are going to think about you…how they are going to respond to you? We were feeling that way…after we finished our manuscript, Into the Heart of the Feminine. Over many years, we …
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Reclaiming the Feminine: A Mission Renewed – Part One

  Anxiety, hypersensitivity, and a loss of hope and faith in life lurk in the shadows, beneath the surface of our “too busy” lives for many of us. After a year of hearing from our readers and members of study …
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Sacred Selfishness: Self-Loving vs. Self-Serving (Part 3)

Have you ever thought about how strongly we have been indoctrinated into the idea: “Don’t be selfish?” When I think back about the southern culture I was raised in, I remember very clearly being told, “Don’t be selfish,” again and …
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Sacred Selfishness: Self-Loving vs. Self-Serving (Part 3)

Have you ever thought about how strongly we have been indoctrinated into the idea: “Don’t be selfish?” When I think back about the southern culture I was raised in, I remember very clearly being told, “Don’t be selfish,” again and again. Before too long, whenever the word “selfish” was mentioned, I immediately thought of the Golden Rule or that I should be devoting myself to loving my neighbor. These responses had become conditioned in me in stronger ways than Pavlov could have dreamed of.

And then, somewhere around midlife, I faintly began to hear the idea that if you don’t or can’t love yourself, what you do for your neighbor may not turn out to be all that great. That idea left me perplexed. I always thought I loved myself until I realized that I couldn’t love someone I didn’t really know.

Oh, I knew my likes and dislikes, or at least, I thought so. I knew my job, the entertainment I liked, and had a favorite beer. But I didn’t know the complicated landscape of my heart, the home of my deepest needs. Nor did I know that seeking out my real needs could become one of the most thrilling and worthwhile endeavors in my whole life. This is the path of true Sacred Selfishness, in contrast to sickly selfishness which is oriented toward self-serving ends.

Sacred Selfishness means making the commitment to knowing ourselves, to valuing ourselves and our lives…to become people of depth and substance, people who are filled with gold – who aren’t hollow or filled with lead. It’s the commitment to building the foundation within ourselves that will support our growing capacity to give and receive love.

In Chapter Four of my book Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance in the “Befriending Our Needs” section, I share the following personal experience I had, and some of my reflections about it:

Not long ago I was asked to give a class on some of the topics we’ve been discussing at a local church. When I asked the people in the class to think about why it’s important to be carefully aware of our needs and what we might be missing if we aren’t, they found these questions initially difficult.

Maybe they found these questions more troubling because we were in a religious setting. On the one hand our religious institutions generally try to teach us to think of other people and not ourselves. On the other hand our culture teaches us we should think of ourselves on a material level.

I then broke the class members into small groups and had them look at these questions, and talk about them for a while. When we all reassembled as one group, sharing our answers, I was pleased by their thoughtful responses:

• We can’t know ourselves if we don’t know what we need.

• Our real needs can show us what our lives are about.

• If we don’t know our needs, no one else can really know us.

• If we don’t know our needs, they are unlikely to get met.

• If we don’t know our needs, we’ll expect other people to know them.

• If we don’t know our needs, we may become more demanding than we realize.

• If we don’t know our needs, we’ll live like sheep.

• Being aware of our needs makes life more personal and real.

• If I own my needs, I actually lessen my demands on others because I’m living honestly.

Questioning ourselves in ways like this can help us overcome old cultural mind-sets that keep us from thinking about and figuring out what our needs are, what they’re telling us about our lives, and how we need to pay attention to them. If we aren’t aware of them they’ll be down in our shadows, stirring up our unconscious energy and coming out in ways we don’t intend them to.

We have all known someone who puts on the facade of being self-sacrificing while actually being controlling and demanding attention. Or, we’ve found ourselves volunteering or being pressured to serve on some committee or in a campaign and then ending up feeling full of resentments.

A few years ago a woman told me that she tried to ignore her needs because she thought that made it easier to be happy. Walling ourselves off to our needs doesn’t make it easier to be happy. Before I figured out that I was repeating my father’s patterns of not showing needs, I found myself resentful every year at my birthday about how thoughtless I felt my children were. I’d numbed my needs but not the hurt of feeling alone and unknown to the people closest to me.

Our needs, especially our need for love and for people to love, have nothing to do with being selfish or self-indulgent. They have everything to do with being human. Listening to our hearts, our minds, our bodies, and our unconscious helps us realize our full humanity and its potentials. If we don’t, we will be following the machine model of living and creating a wasteland in our souls and relationships.

Most of us are brought up to believe that showing our emotions is embarrassing. Learning to hide them almost always means learning not to act on them. To become passionate whether it’s from love, desire, suffering, or anger is a call to action and action can upset the sense of order on our islands.

Acting on our emotions can sometimes bring shame or the appearance of being naive, out of control, or irrational. Many people in our culture, especially men, have become so used to hiding their emotions they’re rarely sure of what they feel…

Childhood wounds also surprise us by recycling themselves every time we move into a new stage of growth. I was devastated when my mother died in my early teens. Within a few years I thought I’d dealt with the experience. But its vibrations come up every time I go into a new phase of change that affects the way I perceive myself or life.

In some ways this early experience left a wound that was slower to heal than I could imagine, living deep within and making it difficult for me to trust life and relationships. But its effects over time have also toughened me, and given me a more refined sensitivity toward suffering.

Everyone has something from childhood that recycles. Fifty years later a friend of mine vividly remembers a third grade teacher who shamed him in front of his classmates. A woman I know still recalls the acute loneliness and feelings of inferiority she felt when she was sent to an exclusive boarding school at an early age. She’s told me how quickly that old feeling can return if she isn’t careful when entering new situations.

Robert, a man I once worked with, like many of us, constructed a protective wall around his feelings because he was afraid of them. Over this wall he’d put on an illusion of feelings, a “person” of appropriate emotions who he’d come to believe was real. He thought he should feel happy so he put on a cheery act. He bought into the assumption that if we achieve the model of success in our society we should feel happy.

But as he became more honest about how he felt he openly expressed his grief about life’s difficult times and only acted happy when the feeling was genuine. Several things are indicators when Robert or any of us have walled off our feelings:

• Their absence. A lack of feelings, usually a coolness or remoteness, based on the mistaken belief that it’s generally better to be non-emotional and objective.

• Being overly sentimental. An excess of ungrounded or undifferentiated feelings that come unexpectedly or in outbursts.

• Having mood states. Unexplainably going from high to low, or dropping into touchiness, sulkiness, criticism, self-criticism, or vulnerability.

But Robert learned, as I have, that mining our deepest feelings, our deepest needs opens us to a life that can become richer than we ever imagined.

photo by Pasquale Vitiello

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Sacred Selfishness: From Self-Judgement to Self-Acceptance (Part 2)

When we paralyze ourselves with self-critical, judgmental attitudes, the life energy that is supposed to be sustaining our growth becomes regressive, stagnant, and deadly. Soon we become bonded to fear, the fear of losing what we have attained or the fear of making our lives more difficult.

Anxiety causes us to develop a mentality of scarcity and to shrink ourselves into cramped versions of our possibilities and into a life too small and too anxiety-ridden to fulfill us. One of our most basic needs is to learn how to quit judging ourselves and to open the door to the cage we have been living in.

In earlier blogs, I have shared excerpts from the section “Befriending Our Needs” from my book Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance. I would now like to share excerpts from the next section in my book: “From Self-Judgment to Self- Acceptance” because it addresses how our self-critical attitudes are primary blocks to our ability to “know” our needs.

From Self-Judgment to Self-Acceptance

Understanding the ways in which we form our adult identities, and how we’re influenced by the values of society and the traits it structures into our personalities, makes it easier to see how self-alienation is built into our existence. It begins as soon as we leave the womb and are launched into a process of being weighed and measured.

Measurement in some form now accompanies almost every aspect of modern life. Ostensibly, measurement is supposed to be for our “own good” to monitor our health, growth, and capacities. Today, as we grow and enter school it tells us how well we’re doing, where we fall on the “growth chart,” whether we have “potential,” and if we’re “living up” to that potential from the perspective of society’s values.

Almost before we realize it the emphasis on measurement is connected to our appearance, our performance, our behavior, and has been internalized into a personal mind-set. As we grow into adulthood everything from our sex lives to our credit ratings is evaluated from this perspective. We’re taught to judge ourselves relentlessly.

The author and physician Naomi Remen observes that our vitality is diminished more by judgment than by disease. She goes on to explain that approval is just as damaging as a form of judgment as

criticism. While positive judgment initially hurts less than criticism, it triggers a constant striving for more. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value.

Approval and disapproval spawn a compulsion to critically evaluate ourselves all the time. For example Judith won’t go out for an evening with her husband and friends without spending an hour and a half putting on makeup. Harry can’t do enough favors for everyone he tries to become friends with. And Matthew remains quiet and shy, preferring to be seen as a loner rather than to risk being rejected.

In a society that thrives on consumerism, we have become increasingly vulnerable. Advertising takes advantage of our obsession with self-judgment and desire for approval while holding out the promise that if we buy the right clothes, use the right makeup, follow the right diet, have the right appliances, yard tools, vacations, and so on, we can become happy and admired.

Even the self-help industry has joined the caravan of marketing with books, tapes, videos, and workshops offering “quick fixes” to what’s wrong with our lives rather than challenging us to look deeper into ourselves. The marketing people are clever and know how to exploit our hopes and fears. Our social engine runs on performance and consumption. But we can face and change ourselves by developing enough self-knowledge to reclaim our lives, take initiative, have a viewpoint, love ourselves, and live in the world without being victimized by it.

After we’d been working together for a few months, Janice was reflecting on how she used to feel standing in front of that magazine rack in the drugstore. It was a pivotal moment for her. She said, “All of those self-improvement articles and advertisements make you feel you aren’t good enough. That you’re incomplete, inferior, inadequate. And what’s supposed to make you feel better? Buying the magazine and buying the products. Now that’s self-empowerment for you. Now that I’ve opened my eyes it seems like our whole culture is geared toward making you hate yourself and believing that buying more is the only thing that can help. It’s like ‘fix it, charge it.’ But all you’re really doing is keeping the system going.”

Janice is right. We’re all born with an inner longing to live a meaningful life, to love and be loved. Advertisers have become skilled at redirecting these longings toward consumer goods, trying to convince us that inner needs can be satisfied with external things. They manipulate our needs to keep us off balance, anxious, and fearful of social isolation and loneliness. It is the modern equivalent of tribal banishment. The system that drives our society promises that life can be good. But if we rely on the values of that system without growing beyond it into our own conscious awareness, all it will deliver is self-alienation.

To know that we are human is to know that life includes loss, darkness, and confusion, as well as magic and beauty. To become a mature, wise person requires that we come to know ourselves deeply

and learn to navigate life’s waters skillfully. Our growth depends upon our awareness of the reality we’re experiencing. In turn, as this awareness grows, it will open us to further growth.

Knowing ourselves more fully, learning how to cultivate our inner resources and love ourselves in a substantial manner heals self-alienation and gives a firm foundation for letting the tides of culture flow around us without threatening us. Additionally, as we work on ourselves we must work on our society so that for future generations the term culture will return to its more substantial meaning of supporting enlightenment—the development of intellectual, moral, and artistic potentials—in a manner that can offer guidance to our children and grandchildren.

Painting above: Cage aux Lions, Gilles Aillaud

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Sacred Selfishness: Honoring Your Own Needs in the Quest for Authenticity (Part 1)

 

Imagine living a life free from fear…Imagine getting past anxieties imposed by our culture…and becoming truly successful on our own genuine terms. These are the goals I suggested for us in my last blog about facing the demon of fear that often haunts us.

In describing the bane of our consumer-driven society, the 20th century philosopher Eric Hoffer got to the heart of the problem by asserting “we can’t get enough of what we don’t really need.” To be free of fear and to have peace of mind, we must go beneath the surface of all the things that our culture indoctrinates us into thinking we should want and need. To do this we have to invest our own personal energy in discovering our authentic needs, and be willing to not be embarrassed or ashamed of acknowledging them. Peace of mind comes when we actively begin developing an inner sense of freedom from fear and anxiety by acknowledging our own true needs for our well-being.

This is the first of three blogs on “Honoring Your Own Needs” that comes from my book Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance. It took me many years of investing in my own inner journey to understand how to get beyond what I “idealized” about the things of this culture and what I thought I wanted or needed. I was then able to discover my actual, authentic needs.

What I found out was that simply knowing these needs and acknowledging them to myself began the process of bringing me peace of mind and freedom from fear and anxiety. I would like to begin sharing these thoughts with you from my book Sacred Selfishness:

The wasteland in T. S. Eliot’s poem as well as in The Quest for the Holy Grail is a metaphor for our state of being when we’re not living our lives from our hearts. When Knight Parsifal, who is seeking the Grail, first encounters the wounded king of the wasteland, he’s moved by compassion and wants to ask the monarch why he’s suffering. But, having been trained that knights don’t ask unnecessary and intrusive questions, he stifles his spontaneity and compassion and at this point his quest fails. It takes him an additional five years of struggle and failure to make his way back to the Grail Castle and to ask the questions that come from his heart rather than follow the rules of decorum for knights.

Knowing the right questions reflects the maturity Parsifal has gained through the committed struggles of his quest and begins the healing of the wasteland. It is a paradox that if we cannot open our hearts to ourselves then we have no foundation for dealing with other people lovingly and compassionately. And, like Parsifal we’ve been trained not to ask loving and compassionate questions of ourselves, not to question our depressions and heart attacks deeply and lovingly because to do so might upset the value systems we and our society live by. Instead, the system teaches us to go to the refrigerator, buy something, go to the movies or out to eat if we are feeling lonely, anxious, or distressed. But feeling bad and going to the kitchen sets up a cycle that cannot be eased or healed by diet plans, willpower, or medication. Our real needs are deeper than what these palliatives can help. We have to pay better attention to ourselves.

Yes, in spite of our interests in exercise, fitness, and nutrition, we still deny many of our bodies’ needs. We work out to improve them, but too often we are treating the body like an “it” rather than the seat of our souls. We judge our bodies harshly against media ideals and frequently seem to disassociate from them. We rarely give them enough sleep, rest, and sensual rewards to keep them calm and relaxed, and sooner or later our bodies are going to teach us we’re human. Heart attacks, depression, obesity, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia are but a few of the ways our bodies do this and insist that attention be paid.

In many of these circumstances we act as if our bodies have betrayed us, when actually they are more often our friends warning us when we are endangering ourselves. For instance our bodies know when we’ve inadvisably ingested bad or tainted food and reflectively expel what they must. Similarly our bodies issue “warnings” in the form of scares, those small reality episodes that are meant to wake us up to the changes we need to make. And, sometimes our bodies give us important signals about our emotions when we’re hungry for love, personal fulfillment, or vitality.

When Janice who was (doing sessions with me) started crying at work and couldn’t stop, her body had taken over. It quit functioning like a machine that day at school. It’s ironic that she would say she despised her body, that she felt it was her enemy because it fell short of what our ideals for women’s bodies should be, and yet it was this body that began turning her life around.

The hurried pace of our lives discourages us from actively reflecting upon our needs and looking deeper than the material level. When we fail to understand them for ourselves and to share them, we cannot live from our hearts. The point here is that we then live by other people’s concepts, calculations, assumptions, or inclinations- right for them but maybe not for us. By probing our own inner lives, we give our relationships a better chance to succeed. Intimacy is about sharing. It is reciprocal. And when we relinquish or lose touch with our hearts’ desire, we leave ourselves in danger of being dissatisfied with life without realizing why.

 

Painting above: The Knight of the Holy Grail, Frederick Judd Waugh

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Anxiety: Hypnotized By A Personal Demon

Anxiety is the kind of fear that isnʼt based on an actual threat. It is a deeper fear, a fear that can haunt us. It is a fear of life…of worries about the future and of our abilities to handle the life we are living.

Our fear may come from experiences in injured early childhoods. In our book Into the Heart of the Feminine, Massimilla and I both describe how in our own childhoods, we were each prevented from internalizing the needed trust that life would support us and that we could trust ourselves to face life.

When any of us are caught in stressful jobs, relationships, or other events that we can see no end or resolution to, our anxiety may actually be “eating us up.” Our most severe anxiety/fear may be taking hold in our unconscious when we live in a manner that is taking us farther away from our true potentials and from the person we are meant to be.

I write about these aspects of anxiety in the section, “Driven by Fear” in my book, Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance and I would like to share these thoughts with you:

Fear is a dragon we have to face and a question we have to answer again and again during a life thatʼs being lived wholeheartedly. Just as we find that other strong feelings, or even illnesses, are the seeds for our future growth, the same is true of fear. Itʼs something we should pay attention to, listen to, question, and reflect upon because our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge.

When Boss in Zorba the Greek was attracted to the dark-eyed widow and she returned his glances, Zorba urged him to pursue her. Boss demurred, saying he was afraid he would start trouble with the other men whom sheʼd refused. Zorba replied, “Life is trouble, Boss,” and urged him on.

In mythological language, the woman symbolizes life and if Boss failed to pursue her he would be failing to become alive. The truth of myths applies to all of us, men and women alike. We must choose life. And there will be trouble. That is life, though we often have the mistaken belief that a good life is a trouble-free life.

But neither God nor Buddha or any other great spiritual leader or tradition guarantees or even encourages a trouble-free life. Instead the great spiritual figures inspire us to grow through our painful experiences by seeking to understand their lessons.

We often feel itʼs safer to avoid trouble than to seek it. But when we do, trouble finds us anyway. I am reminded of a man in his thirties who wanted to avoid a confrontation over his wifeʼs spending sprees. As his inner frustration grew, it began to show up as stomach pains. And when another woman in her early forties decided it was safer not to confront her partnerʼs drinking, she found herself becoming increasingly depressed.

In another situation a man continued absorbing his bossʼs belittling remarks out of the fear that if he confronted him he could lose his job. He too became more and more depressed. When we choose safety over self-love, the price we pay will always be higher. Would you rather pay the wholesale price today or the high retail price tomorrow–the amount that has a higher markup in disappointment, shame, and self-loathing?

Fear is seductive. In his lovely novel The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho has a wise old man tell the story of a young man who wanted to travel, challenge himself, discover what his dreams were, and learn what people are capable of doing with their lives. But because he felt insecure he decided he should work for a while and put some money aside.

The young man wondered whether he should become a shepherd or a baker. Then he decided that people thought more highly of bakers and parents would rather see their daughters marry a baker than a shepherd. As time passed he began to think to himself that bakers slept in nice homes while travelers and seekers often had to sleep out in the open.

Soon he became a respected member of the community and what people thought about him as a baker became more important than his dream of living life as a journey and an adventure. His small, practical fear about financial security had put him on a path that taught him to become afraid of how other people evaluated him and of risking the hardships pursuing his dream might have brought. Stepping onto the path of fear has its consequences. The old man concluded by saying, “He never realized that people are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”

If we allow fear to drive us it becomes our Satan and enables us to be seduced by the false gods of security, money, appearances, power, and all they represent. Once we give into fear we lose our control to outer forces–to what other people think, to dysfunctional relationships, to collective values, and to the addictions such as drugs, alcohol, and sex that make up the dark sides of these forces. The voice or face of fear–like the social Satans or cultural Mephistopheles that consume our lives–can hypnotize and leave us unable to think or act with clarity.

Let me give you an interesting example that has to do with fear. John wanted to write a novel but once he began he soon found himself blocked and afraid. When he dialogued with his fear he was surprised to discover that what he feared was not writing but success.

As a deeply introverted person he feared the marketing aspect of publishing, the rituals of selling that would require him to give readings, talks, and appearances at book signings. Of course he also feared failing and being rejected by editors. But more than anything else he feared failing at his dream. He felt that if he failed at his dream he wouldnʼt have anything left to live for. Whichever way it went, the result would be the same. Publish and fail; be rejected and fail.

After listening to the flood of Johnʼs fears I decided to share one of my favorite stories with him. The story is one author Sam Keen tells about himself. Once when he was talking with his friend and mentor Howard Thurman, Thurman asked him what he wanted, what his dream was. Keen, who was a successful professor at the time, answered, “I donʼt have any dreams right now.” “Well, ” Thurman replied, “youʼd better start looking for one.” And that is the straight-ahead answer I gave John. Cut the B.S. and get going after a dream.

Part of self-love is learning how to be tough with ourselves and take the driverʼs seat when we need to break a fearful mood. Most of us have learned very well how to be hard on ourselves. Weʼre really good at being self-critical, resentful, guilty, and self-depreciating–we never fail there. But being hard on ourselves is not the same as being tough with ourselves. There is a difference. Being tough means we are committed, energetic, have high standards, and tenacity. Being hard is to be perfectionistic, self-judging, self-punishing, shaming, and unaccepting of our mistakes and weaknesses. The pursuit of excellence in any domain requires toughness but is defeated by qualities that make us feel insufficient, fraudulent, unacceptable.

If we want to worship fear all our lives it will feed us all we need to keep it as our god. We can fear betrayal, fear not being taken care of, or fear not being loved; we can fear failure, fear being old or broke or in bad health, or fear success. We can fear being abandoned or criticized or looking like a fool. The list is endless. It can fill a life. Your life. Fear feeds off negative acts and negative thoughts, brings about destructive results, and destroys our ability to move confidently in the world. And yet in every life there is a Zorba or a gypsy woman within us who can lead us away from fearʼs embrace and teach us to laugh at failure, to persevere against the odds, to dream and to dance with joy.

The stories of the mythological heroes–Psyche aided by Pan in her search for Eros, Ulysses helped through his journey by Athene, Prometheus who stole fire for humanity freed from his punishment by Heracles, and King Arthur guided by Merlin- teach in every case that once we step beyond the boundaries of accepted conventions, life will support and aid us with inner strength and help, no matter how difficult our journeys become. Our inner work can carry us beyond fear, but if we give into it we may end up hollow and haunted by our unlived potentials.

I remember in an interview that underscores these thoughts, writer Erica Jong reflected, “I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased letting fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, youʼll die if you venture too far.”

Seeking to live and even become successful on our own terms is always scary. It means we canʼt, wonʼt, or donʼt follow the beaten paths–and that we want more out of life than weʼre taught we should be satisfied with. It means other people wonʼt understand us and may not respect us and applaud our success. Fair enough– but we will be happy.

Painting Above: Dragon, M.C. Escher

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Finding Our Voice: Myths and Fairy Tales as a Road Map to Authenticity

For many of us, it is difficult to find our own true voice. In some cases, we may not even be letting ourselves realize that we have lost our voice or that, perhaps, we have never developed our own voice.

Finding ways of truly expressing ourselves with love, passion, strength, and confidence that actually reflect our true feelings can be painfully hard. It is particularly formidable when doing so goes against the habits we have come to adopt in order to fit into our surroundings and to feel safe.

During my life and my years of practice as a Jungian analyst, I’ve seen how this journey into awakening one’s own voice can be so challenging for women and, to my surprise, for men as well.

Chapter Six: Finding Our Voice from our recent book, Into the Heart of the Feminine, explains how and why having our own voice is so important to our own growth and authenticity. The chapter outlines a map of this journey and conveys how this journey towards finding our own voice necessarily calls us into a deep personal transformation.

So I would like to share a few selections from that chapter with you:

Over the years, I have become convinced that seeking transformation is the Divine Way. Transformation is the theme not only in myths and fairy tales but also in all the mystery religions. One of the oldest of these mystery religions was the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece, which became the grandmother of the Western mystery religions and Western mysticism. These mysteries were secret, but they grew out of the myths and tradition of the grain goddess, Demeter; her daughter, Persephone; the descent into darkness; and the returning transformed.

The Greeks believed that going through these mysteries-which consisted, in effect, of enacting and experiencing the myth-would transform them in this life and the next. Jungian psychology sees these stories and myths as rooted in our collective unconscious, where-if we can pay attention to them, experience them, and make them relevant to our lives-they can also transform us. I find it reassuring to remember that transformation is one of the two fundamental aspects of the Great Mother.

Although our journeys into transformation often seem to begin out of feelings of hopelessness, pain, desperation, or rage, we must remember that as we follow them, we will discover that joy, appreciation, and gratitude are just as deeply enfolded in our lives. Joy, appreciation, and gratitude cannot themselves be the goal of our seeking. When they are, they seem to get in their own way and distract us from the deeper purpose we are pursuing. Yet the path of transformation releases these very things to us as we pursue it, and they will support and enrich our efforts.

One of the deepest longings in my early life and young adulthood was to be heard. I wanted to speak and have people listen, pay attention, honor, and understand. As I have worked with women over the years, I have come to believe that one of our greatest longings is to have our own voice. I was surprised to find that young men longed for the same thing-or rather, longed for their anima, their feelings, and their values to have a voice. The Death Mother and the patriarchy have silenced the voice of the feminine so drastically that in far too many cases, we cannot hear it within ourselves. We need to recover our voice first, so that we can hear it and then speak it. (In this chapter, I use the structure of a Venetian fairy tale “Silent for Seven Years” as a symbolic map for this journey.) It became my personal guide as I recovered my voice, and then it became helpful to many of the women and men I have worked with. I believe that you may find it helpful as well.

At first glance, the heroine in our story seems to be faced with an impossible task. If I tried to translate this scene into the everyday language I grew up with, I imagine it would sound something like this: “There is nothing you can do to resolve this problem, because to even try would be so awful and painful.” In my experience, the dominating atmosphere of the Death Mother affects us like quicksand that silently devours anything that moves with life and enthusiasm. It does this in a methodical, strong, unchanging way. But here is the dilemma we often face: Everything looks good on the outside, yet if we look beneath the surface, we are being constantly tortured. And if we take action, we know we must face the fear of an uncertain outcome.

The only thing that can transform the deadly pattern shown here is silent but active determination on our part, being capable of facing the fear that we may lose the life we have become accustomed to. Silence is an important element here, because talking about our deep inner journeys and struggles, unless in the container of an analytic or therapy situation, can work against us; be a distraction; invite other people’s judgment, projections, and interference; and cause us to doubt ourselves. In reality, losing our life in these circumstances is more likely to mean losing our illusions as we transform this deadly pattern into a new life we couldn’t have set as a goal to achieve.

We are all left to wonder if there is an easier or better way than this cruel and brutal manner. It seems that there are no easy paths, no effortless roads to get to a place of authentic and genuine transformation. The process teaches us that if we can have such troubles with our mothers, our families, and ourselves, we need to accept the brutal and cruel realities of life; yet enfolded in this background are our great potentials for creativity, love, and joy. We can arrive at this position through our dedicated inner work. And if we are having trouble believing in ourselves, we must search for a good analyst or therapist, one who is not caught in the patriarchal web of trying to “treat” us or get us back to “normal,” but one who understands transformation can lead to a life beyond normal. It can be difficult to find someone with the psychological wisdom necessary to create a relationship that gives you what you need and helps you find the support within yourself for the next steps.

It is painfully hard to find a way of expressing ourselves that is both feminine and strong but not tainted by harsh characteristics of a negative animus, who is often the “son” of the Death Mother. A man can also have difficulty learning how to integrate and express his anima, his feelings, and his values without having them contaminated by his inner critical witch, fostered by the Death Mother. The course of the next step in our inner development depends upon the continuous choices we make in transforming ourselves. The world we live in pushes us in a direction dominated by one-sided patriarchal values. We must dedicate ourselves to cultivating our inner development like a delicate, beautiful flower and protect it from the surrounding pollution.

This ending of the fairy tale journey is not simply a rosy conclusion in which everybody is happy forever after. It is the well-deserved accomplishment of an inner transformation. The young woman’s hard work brought about an integration of her personality and created a new foundation for her future. This is what the work and the journey to find our own voice is truly about.

One of our greatest longings is to have our own voice, one that speaks of our greatest values with strength, clarity, compassion, and understanding. I want a voice like that and more. I want a voice that can also speak with authority, tenderness, love, joy, sorrow, anger, respect, and humor. I want a voice of my own that expresses the fullness of who I am. And I believe, my husband believes, and the people I have worked with believe that gaining this voice is worth every step in the struggle.

Painting above: The Musician Girl, Osman Hamdi

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