Bud Harris's Blog, page 12

Am I Wrong to Feel this Way About My Parents?

painting by Hannah Dansie

 

A few days ago, a friend brought me a letter that had been sent to “Dear Abby” by someone signed Already Wounded in California. My friend remarked, “Here is one of the best examples of the Death Mother I have ever seen.” Already Wounded in California wrote that during her lifetime, “It has always been about Momʼs needs and not ours.” She also shared that her 85 year-old mother told her that upon her death, she is leaving each of her children a letter expressing to them how much each of them had hurt her throughout the years. Of course, she had never acknowledged how deeply she had hurt her children. Already Wounded told Abby that she planned to put this “final, hurtful arrow” unopened into her motherʼs coffin, at her funeral. Then, she asked Abby, “Am I wrong?” Of course, Abby answered that she wasnʼt wrong.

The letter sent to “Dear Abby” reminded me that as my wife, Massimilla, and I are getting more responses to our recent book, Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity and our discussion of the Death Mother in the book, as well as responses to Massimillaʼs lecture on “Facing the Death Mother” and our book-signing lecture, we are surprised at how many people are asking themselves the same questions about their parents – “Am I wrong? Am I wrong to feel this way?” It might be helpful to remember that the first place we experience the wound to the feminine in our culture is through our mothers, so this journey begins in a very personal way, though it will end up going much further. We are then caught in what seems to be an unfair dilemma between what we feel and what we think we should feel, to be a fair or good person.

In Into the Heart of the Feminine, we emphasized the importance of reclaiming our true and strong emotions and indicated how they are needed to ground us, in becoming authentic individuals. Becoming aware of and accepting these emotions is crucial to becoming whole. But this acceptance of them doesnʼt mean we have to act them out, in foolish or self-destructive ways. In reality, the acceptance of these emotions often means that we actually wonʼt be unconsciously acting them out, or having them affect us in self-destructive ways.

The implicit attitude, alive with strength and power in our society is to “honor thy father and thy mother” whether one is actively religious or not. I am willing to bet that this commandment, deeply embedded in our psyche, is what prompted Already Wounded to doubt the validity of her feelings and ask, “Am I wrong?”

I donʼt think we would be remiss to ask her, “Why didnʼt you tell your mother to go to hell a long time ago?” But from my own upbringing and experience, I think I know the answer to that question. Our cultural attitude causes us to massively repress and detach ourselves from the emotions that would support us in confronting a destructive mother in such a way. And when, after a lifetime of suffering and abuse, Already Wounded begins to take a stand to heal and free herself, she, like most of us, still asks, “Am I wrong?”

Even after decades of being on the inner journey and traveling the same path with many others, Massimilla and I are still surprised at how many women and men, who werenʼt loved enough when they were small, not valued enough, not safe enough, and not encouraged enough, still feel deep in the core of themselves that they are somewhere between not good enough and worthless, or, in some cases, evil. There are other aspects facing these women and men, as well. The first one is that many of them are good people, successful people and, if they have children, they are struggling to be good parents. Behind their positive outlooks and competent personas, though, they are still fighting the darkness of self-doubt, fear, despair, and the urge to beat themselves up over every little perceived mistake or failure. The second surprising aspect that we have noticed is how difficult it is to acknowledge the intense hurt, pain, and anger we have repressed about our childhoods.

When we are haunted by feelings of fear, scarcity, failure, worthlessness, dissatisfaction, or depression, we find it a difficult challenge to accept that we need to face the effects of the Death Mother in our lives and personalities – and that the truth of who we are, began in our early years. No wonder we are afraid of our emotions because if we really face and seek to understand them, we may have to contend with the daunting task of changing our lives. Collectively and individually, we fear the transformative nature of the archetypal feminine principle that wants to live and be honored within us. We view challenges to the way we have “institutionalized” our lives, feelings, value systems, and expectations, with fear and dismay.

So people ask us, “Why do I have to go back into all this old stuff? Canʼt you just help me get on with my life?” My answer to those questions is no. The experiences that make up our early lives are the foundations of who we are, and they are patterned in our brains to be repeated and to control us, until we heal them. Healing begins with restoring those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, and forbidden. It begins, especially, with restoring our ability to cultivate our emotions and our willingness to ask life for things for ourselves.

Developing self-knowledge is more than gathering information about ourselves. One of the most important aspects of tapping into true self-knowledge is to “re-member”: to bring together the parts…and bring together what pain has alienated us from, what fear has separated us from, and what our need for safety has caused us to disdain. Our inner journey into self-knowledge begins with re-membering, restoring, revitalizing, rescuing, reclaiming, and renewing. The very process of the inner journey, described in Into the Heart of the Feminine, transforms us as we live it, and our old self is healed…so that it may break down in order for our new self to emerge, like a phoenix from the ashes.

During this evolution, we are also transforming our history into a history that will support our becoming. In her paper “The Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche,” the Jungian analyst, Toni Wolff, writes that the transformational aspect of the Great Mother archetype instinctually “protects the process of becoming, of what is undeveloped, in need of protection, in danger, or must be tended, cared for and assisted.” In this journey, our nature will support us and we must learn to take a loftier view of our possibilities than we have been encouraged to take.

Book Reading and Discussion: Cracking Open

Zurich-trained Jungian analyst and author Bud Harris, Ph.D. presents his memoir, Cracking Open, at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC on July 12, 2015.

Into the Heart of the Feminine at Malaprop’s Bookstore (video)

Jungian analysts Massimilla Harris, Ph.D. and Bud Harris, Ph.D. introduce their book Into the Heart of the Feminine at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC on March 29, 2015 followed by a question & answer session with the audience.

Nothing Can Spoil a Promising Destiny Quicker Than A Happy Childhood

One of the many popular misconceptions about childhood that rankles people like me is the assumption that if you have a “good” or a “happy” childhood, you will lead a successful and fulfilling adult life. In one of my early analytic sessions with Dr. John Mattern at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1986, he remarked, “…I suppose nothing can spoil a promising destiny quicker than a happy childhood.”

I have loved the truth of this statement since the first time I heard it. I will explain it more completely, but first I would like to share with you more of the context that surrounded the first time I heard it. This conversation that took place in that analytic session is shared in my recent book, Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggles, Passages, and Transformations (p. 118 – 119):

“The second theme I’ve been considering is my childhood. I thought that when I had worked through my 1972 journey in therapy, I would be finished with these issues. To my surprise during our interview, I discovered that all the old figures and experiences could arise and seize me again. But something seemed different that time, perhaps more intense – more intense in some strange manner I don’t quite understand, maybe more mentally intense or imaginally intense. I’m not sure. Instead of feeling possessed, I felt surrounded.”

“That’s why the childhood years are so important,” John interjected. “They’re the pattern from which we grow. They are the first key, though not the only key to the mystery of who we are and who we may become.”

“I think this journey backwards, down the trunk of my life to explore the roots, released the commandments from my past again. All the unlived possibilities of my life that had been killed, lost, or denied jumped out at me like ghosts from a closet. The better selves that I could have become, the happy successful self that could have developed, it seemed like a stab in the heart just to see what could have been.”

“I wouldn’t go too far with that kind of sentimentality,” John admonished. “You could imagine that steel needs to begin its tempering early, and I suppose that nothing can spoil a promising destiny quicker than a happy childhood.“

“Well, he’s definitely not mothering me in this relationship,” I thought to myself, while continuing to say, “I also realized that the images of my parents seem like the stones of some psychic or interior gristmill. Their turning continues, moved by the stream of time, milling me, commanding me, haunting me, and, yes, comforting me. I’m beginning to realize they will never be gone. I don’t want them to be gone; they’ve lived and shaped me far beyond the reality of my actual parents.”

The fact of the matter was that after all of my childhood trauma, I thought for years that I had grown up all wrong. Until some time in mid-life, I believed I had gone to the wrong college, into the wrong line of work, and had gotten married for the wrong reasons. I think the primary, although unconscious, reason I had gotten married was to force myself to grow up, finish college, become responsible, and get into the “adult world.” Actually, that all worked – as far as it went.

For my generation, in terms of “life span” research, Yale researcher Daniel Levinson concluded that in adolescence we should form a “dream” of our adult life that could guide us into it and through it, until mid-life. Well, I didnʼt have such a dream, and most of my friends who did, found themselves in trouble in the shifting world of the late sixties, seventies, and early eighties. I donʼt believe creating such a guiding dream is all that easy today either, in our fast-changing world where companies, jobs, careers, and relationships seem to come and go, almost in the blink of an eye.

During grammar school, high school, and college, I donʼt recall anyone ever mentioning anything like “fulfilling your potential” or “finding your calling.” I thank God for that because those notions miss the point of our developmental tasks as we are growing up. I hadnʼt heard the term “follow your bliss” either, and I wouldnʼt have had the foggiest idea what it meant. In actuality, I still donʼt, since it has become a somewhat shallow cliché.

So how did I get where I am now, in a place I consider successful and fulfilling? The biggest thing I learned from my parents was to tackle life head on, and to be fully engaged. They did this during the Depression, World War II, and during sickness, death, and desperation. In my adolescence, though, I was driven by despair, and the loneliness of abandonment – I was driven. And in my young adult years, I was driven by terror and a fierce desire for a better life for myself and my family. I was a prime example of Jungʼs admonition, “…if you do the wrong thing with all your heart, you will end up at the right place.” Freud, too, was right – to be adults, we must become competent in love and work. A self-responsible adult must be competent enough to sustain his or her self in the world, and be able to live in relationships.

The developmental task to enter adult life is not to find your true calling, to achieve a good life, or to find expressions of your authentic self. It is to become competent in work and relationships. My hard work, my success in business, and starting my own business was not a mistaken path. It helped me develop a “good enough” adult identity. Through these struggles, I learned to have the confidence, courage, and vision that would enable me, as I grew, to face my life and my history, and to begin to transform it into a life of individuation, a life of seeking, and journeying – not one of achieving but of discovering.

My early life was dominated by trauma, as you can see in my Cracking Openmemoir. My wife, Massimillaʼs, was dominated by the personal and cultural influences of the Death Mother. There is a huge difference in the experiences of children who suffer from material deprivation and those who suffer from emotional deprivation. My childhood was tragic, deprived, and ended in abandonment, but love had been present long enough for me to know it had been there. For Massimilla, her childhood looked “good” and “happy” on the outside but love, affirmation, safety, and encouragement were absent on the inside. Yet, she too credits her early suffering, with the help of the Self – the life force within her, as putting her on a special road to love and destiny.

Childhood is difficult, at its best, because growth means so many changes are going on physically and psychologically, all of the time. One reason we need a loving, supportive outer environment in our early years is because so much is trying to evolve in our inner environment. Another reason is that we need to be able to learn by taking risks and by acting in our outer world, and yet feel and be safe. The loving, supportive outer environment helps us internalize a sense of trust in ourselves and life. In a similar way, adolescents still need a containing sense of structure and safety that supports their efforts to become individuals.

Difficulty, trauma, and even being emotionally deprived are very different from the violation of the childʼs soul that takes place in violence, abuse, and the disdainful coldness of the Death Mother we can experience. The journeys of healing in these situations take a long time just to get to the “good enough” adult personality. Sometimes reaching this state is enough for many people, because it is beyond what they originally dared to hope for. Yet, there is even more hope if we want it, because if we can be in contact with our Self, our capacities are always greater than we think they are.

Charleston: The Challenge to Face Reality

How many times will we have to see our children and fellow citizens murdered before we wake up, take responsibility, and face reality? These events stir up a flurry of discussions—about gun control, mental illness, and law enforcement. Unfortunately, the talk too often focuses on the symptoms of the problem, but never gets to the heart of the matter, the deeper virulence in our society of which these murders are the symptom. Most of us respond to these mass killings with shock, tears, and appropriate memorials. Then we seem to slip back into the denial of our everyday busyness as fast as we can.

When will we begin addressing the core of what is occurring in our culture? When will we be willing to see these heinous acts of violence and terror, racially motivated or otherwise, as not just isolated events? How can we begin understanding the profound reality that is challenging us? The first step in taking responsibility for changing our lives and our culture is to acknowledge how a mass murderer is a product of a society that we actively create every day and to see how this is a symptom of the destructive way we are living. To take any effective action, we must come to understand how we ourselves and our culture are creating these murderers.

In the early 1960s, the psychoanalyst and social commentator Eric Fromm broached this subject. In The Heart of Man, Fromm explained that this kind of violence results from feelings of helplessness and impotence that are so strong that they cause a person to attempt to transcend his or her negative state of frustration, neglect, and alienation through violence. The ultimate act of malignant violence is to kill others and/or oneself. It is a kind of violence that attempts to control life by destroying it. A person caught in this kind of alienation is paranoid, frequently hoards weapons, and attempts to build up feelings of power and destructiveness. Fromm thought that modern culture generates feelings of aggression, competitiveness, and scarcity in the workplace, schools, sports, and even in families. Because of the pervasiveness of these negative emotions, such feelings dominate our cultural and personal mentality, resulting in our feelings of anxiety, alienation, and disengagement from ourselves and other people.

In our book Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity, my wife and I describe the source of our culture’s alienation and destructiveness as the repression of two great feminine principles—the heart and soul. When the aspects of the feminine principle are repressed into our unconscious, as they have been in our patriarchal culture, they become part of our collective shadow and this shadow projects itself as a longing, or even a demand, for power. Repressing these values creates an atmosphere for the psychological complex called the Death Mother. When the values of heart and soul are lost, they are replaced by a living atmosphere that is cold, aggressive, violent, and alienating. As Fromm pointed out, these are the conditions that cause emotionally vulnerable people to respond to their own pain by committing acts of violence and terror.

The first step to effectively responding to mass murderers is to acknowledge that we all have a hand in creating a culture that seems to be producing them at an alarming rate. To face this issue, we must revitalize and live by the values of our own hearts and souls before any of our collective responses are going to be effective. We must go beyond gender values and politics and seek our wholeness by exploring how to heal the wound to the feminine principle, the values of the heart and soul in our lives, in order to rekindle our own voices and change our fate. Our purpose is to take the journey into healing the feminine, healing ourselves, healing women and men alike, and healing our culture to transform the core of how we experience life. Then we would have to commit ourselves to learning how to care for the “least among us” – who generally are the living symptoms of the results of our disengagement from the values of our hearts and souls.

Imagine creating a society that prioritized caring about the people in it. Imagine good health care for everyone, good pre- and post-natal care for mothers, and compassionate mental health care. Imagine schools and workplaces that support and respect individual dignity. Imagine schools that are not founded on the disordered emphasis in our society on achievement and competitiveness. It may be time to stop imagining these things and to start building a society that isn’t creating its own destructive dark side.

Common sense tells us we are going to have to respond to these issues collectively as well as personally. In other words, we must also act through our various levels of government. Our reality is that we live in an extraordinarily complex economic, political, and social world. The days of small government and minimal government are long past. We need big government and effective government. In addition we need to ensure our government is “for the people.” And, as the people, we must be willing to make the sacrifices, pay the taxes, and be engaged enough to insist our government is “for the people.”

We might like to think things have to change for the better. But they don’t. Things can get worse. The infection of destructiveness has been spreading all around us. Treating it will not be easy. It will require a major step forward in our personal and collective healing and consciousness. But the destructiveness in our society will continue until we take responsibility for our reality and commit to creating a better future.

Dreams: Guides for Recovering and Recreating Ourselves

From my blog “A Plague of Disengagement” (5/5/15), I received responses that helped me realize how many of us are still yearning for a sense of connectedness to our own selves and to others, and for an experiential sense of soul and spirit – the “bread and wine” of Life – in order to be fully engaged in our lives.

Jung and others saw the need to awaken the world from its dim sleep, and to some extent they have succeeded. But awakening can be a slow struggle, and instead of awakening, we can find ourselves aroused to face a frightening, demanding world that is moving too fast. It seems as if this world we face has a powerful undertow of loneliness, anxiety, and discouragement.

And yet, if we pay attention to our dreams, they will remind us that we can become reconnected to the unseen powers and forces that can support our lives, as well as help us direct and feel at home with them. I devote a chapter in my book, Sacred Selfishness, to “Befriending our Dreams.” I read this chapter over and over again, periodically, to keep me in touch with how I must approach the mysterious depths within myself, with a sense of appreciation and wonder. I would like to share with you a short 2+ minute video that I made for a seminar to share the spirit and meaning of this chapter.

Often I encounter moments in my life where a dream is a turning point for me. In my latest book, Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations, I share about the time in 1994 when I was looking at reflections from my journal and their activation of a very personal story from my past. Then I share how I found myself facing the decision as to whether to share these writings with others or not. These reflections were especially personal and represented experiences that deeply shaped my life and that became expressions of my soul. I felt very shy about exposing these journal entries to the eyes and voices of others, even though I knew they may be helpful. On page 16 of Cracking Open, I write:

…but as you can see, I have decided to share my work, and I made that decision before going to sleep that night. In fact, I recall wondering how my unconscious would respond to my decision.

Shortly after midnight, I awoke from a deeply experienced dream that was filled with symbols of inner tranquility, wisdom, and wholeness. As I sat in the dark, I saw the lake in front of the house where I grew up. There was no wind, and the surface of the lake was still. The image was beautiful and, in a strange way, it seemed to span almost my entire life. At the center of the lake – where the water was deepest and where beneath its surface, springs fed its depth – was an ancient rowboat. Strong and heavy, the boat was made of a dark wood that had weathered many storms. Standing in the boat, as if rooted in it, was an immense monk. His cowl was pushed back, exposing silver hair above serene blue eyes. His countenance, at once, expressed the experience of age, great vitality, and peace. He stood calmly fishing in the deep water.

Physically, the monk resembled me, though my eyes are not blue, and his other facial features were not clear. But certainly he is a part of me, perhaps an image from my own depths, endorsing the closure of my writing project and the decision to share it. Thus ended my internal debate. However, because my work is so personal, it has taken me twenty years to carry out the decision.

As a Jungian analyst, I could have been tempted to interpret the image of the monk as a shadow figure, or perhaps as a symbol of the Self. But I donʼt think that way, because that would have been to objectify it as a symbol – of depth, purpose, or meaning in my life, and thereby I would have become disengaged with it. I wanted him to become something that lived and breathed inside of me, whose presence could be supportive, teaching, challenging, and guiding. So I met him in the dialogues of “active imagination” – a process that I explain in Sacred Selfishness. In the Epilogue of Cracking Open, I share: “He has been and is my companion. I feel he will continue to be with me in this world and beyond. He brings me comfort and direction. He keeps me in touch with the spirituality of the flesh and blood part of myself. And while he honors the thinking side of myself, he keeps that aspect in the back seat, as we travel.”

Our dreams contain the wisdom of the past, and the image and events in our history that need to be healed and redeemed. If we pursue the path of this work, we will also discover our energy for the future and a vision of its meaning and purpose. Our dreams often tell us about our unlived lives, how our psyche is living our lives, and how our shadows are alive, unknown within, yet affecting us. Dreams tell us how our inner story is developing and how our Self wants us to become conscious of the story we are living, or that may be living us.

I always like to wonder: ”Who lives in me? What do my inner landscapes remind me of? What keeps coming back, looking for my attention? What are the animals, places, and concerns that are showing themselves, and wanting to be recognized, accepted, cared for, or confronted and understood?” The final dream in my book, Cracking Open, came after completing part of my personal story with Dr. John Mattern, an analyst conducting my first admission interview at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. It begins on page 117:

I returned to my room emotionally exhausted and quickly fell asleep. Naively, I hoped my dreams would simplify the layers of meaning I had struggled through and arrange them in some sort of helpful order but this wasn’t the case. Or at least I didn’t initially see the dream I had that night as fulfilling this particular hope.

I awoke suddenly with the final scene of the dream still before my eyes. In it, I was lying on a bed, peering through the darkness at a doorway. My sister was standing just beyond the door as flames consumed her. My blood ran cold as my eyes lingered on this apparition. She was speaking to me, saying, ʻDonʼt be afraid. It’s too late to stop now.ʼ

I swung my feet to the floor, flicked on my lamp, and reached for pen and paper. Questions rushed to mind as I fought to retrieve the images of the dream in order to put them together and write them down. Any questions I had would have to wait. I had to write out the dream and relieve myself by giving it birth into the light of consciousness.

I recalled how, in my dream, I was running across sandy soil from one clump of tropical foliage to another. Japanese soldiers, helmets on and bayonets fixed, were pursuing me. As I saw them, I sunk lower in the foliage. Clearly they didn’t know where I was and were searching through the jungle looking for me. Sweat rolled off me. I dashed from one hiding place to another, stopping each time to see if I had been spotted. It must have been during the second World War. The soil was brown and sandy, the foliage a rich green, and the sun was blistering down through humid air. I passed a dirty stream and a murky pond. The soldiers were out of sight; I must have been getting away.

The scene of my dream changed, and I was safely in a small cabin on an island, standing next to my bed. The sun had set and the room flickered in the glow of a kerosene lantern. I heard a small rustle and as I turned toward the door, I saw a beautiful, sultry woman smiling provocatively at me. She was just beyond my bedroom door in the dark house. Raven hair surged over her shoulders, glowing darkly in the flickering light. Slowly, as my eyes devoured her, I realized that her legs seemed to flow in the form of a large snake. Terrified, I flung the lantern at her and stumbled, falling back on my bed. She was doused with kerosene, which burst into orange-blue flames, now the only light in the dark house. She stood there, raven hair ablaze. Suddenly she turned into my sister and was saying, ʻDon’t be afraid. It is too late to stop now.ʼ The flames soared, but she didn’t seem to burn; she simply seemed to melt. I awoke.

The stories I had been telling John represented a remarkable passage in my life. As I pondered the image in my dream, I had the premonition that another passage had begun. In the story of my 1972 journey, I had been compelled to search for something, and, as you will see, I found it. But with this dream, I began to feel that something was searching for me, not a woman (even though this assumption also turned out to be questionable), not an intuition or an idea, but something else that I would later learn that my soul was lacking.

That beautiful, flowing image of a woman was of Melusina – a mythological figure, a nixie, a fairy temptress, and the feminine counterpart of Mercurius. And what a future of creativity she has led me into… Our dreams, as you can see, can lead us into a heightened awareness of the life force and our mysterious nature, that can bring new meaning, determination, and richness into our lives.

Journaling as a Spiritual Practice

Finding our Inner Guidelines for Action

In my last blog, “Opening to Transformations“, I explain that my new book Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations grew out of journaling that I did in my personal process of individuation. I always find it helpful in my own approach to inner work to remind myself that the root of “individuation” comes from the Latin word, individuus, which means “whole,” “undivided,” or, in other words, “not fragmented.” It speaks to me of my own journey into wholeness…beyond my “fragmented” parts.

For most of us, journaling usually begins with simply recording daily events and the feelings they evoke in us. As we become more at home with this process, it generally grows into musing, reflection, and self-examination – into seeking to know ourselves more completely. When we invest in it, the practice of journaling matures, and we discover and reclaim aspects of ourselves that we may have known at some level, and yet were unable to tap into consciously. Or, we may be surprised, as I was in Cracking Open, when I abandoned myself to the process that began with my journaling and let my muse take over. In my book, Sacred Selfishness, I have written a chapter on “Journaling as Inner Exploration.” I would like to share with you a short, 2+ minute video that I had made for a seminar to summarize this chapter.

 

Journaling to Wholeness

 

I have found that committing myself to my journaling practice frees me from my attempt to “master” my life – to take control of my life. Taking control means to me using willpower to restrain my emotions, appearances, and actions to fit someone elseʼs or the cultureʼs ideal for who I should be and how I should live. Note the use of “should” here. In the individuation process, we are searching for our inner guidelines for putting ourselves and life into perspective. I have discovered that when I lighten up on the “power-oriented, take control” approach to life, I am much more able to turn to love and desire for motivation. I speak to this in Sacred Selfishness by writing:

“Self discipline then becomes self-commitment or self-discipleship and is energized by our desire to know and love ourselves and to experience life more fully. Let me give you a brief example of what I mean. If we feel like weʼre overweight, a feeling that often reflects social values, we may decide to go on a diet. In most cases, successful dieting depends on willpower. When we cheat or fail, we feel guilty and weak. A person seeking to know themselves, however, might choose to journal or reflect on what theyʼre feeling whenever they catch themselves wanting to eat. In this way, they may learn to understand the meaning of their eating, and its place in their lives.”

In Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations, I share that my journal entries document key moments and phases in my individuation process. The book opens with some of my journal entries from 1994 where I am recording important moments in my religious and spiritual quests – to find meaning in these experiences. In the “Epilogue: 2015” of Cracking Open, I share:

“When I read over these journal entries today, I am uncomfortable with them. Something about them seems not quite right. Perhaps I feel that they are a little too detached, a bit too oriented from an observerʼs perspective. Maybe I was too one-sided in my approach to religion, too thinking, too conceptual. Maybe I was not honoring our religious urge as one of our great instincts. Iʼm not sure. But over the years, Iʼve found these ideas have been valuable to me. I see the seeds of my book Sacred Selfishness in them. They were nurtured by the monk from my dream, whom I let into my life as a companion, teacher, and mentor through active imagination. I can trace other lectures to these reflections, and even sense new ones evolving.

“In time, journaling, as an ongoing practice, helped me realize that to be alive, our religion, our spirituality, and even Jungian psychology must be lived. Living gives us the opportunity to create and find meaning, and our spiritual quest is to become whole, fully alive, and fully human. God lives in our flesh-and-blood experiences.”

Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations reveals profound moments in my life when it took a breakdown or a breakthrough to initiate my struggles to heal myself and to build the knowledge of who I really am. As the book draws to a close, you can understand how one of the most important functions of an analyst, or a book like this one, is to encourage us to step outside of our conventional, day-to-day mindsets and look carefully and conscientiously, with genuine regard, into all of the aspects of our lives.

Journaling is a profound way to help us find our own voice. It provides the assurance that the creativity, values, and ideals that arise from inside of us are true gifts we can continue to nurture and develop. And when we have found out how to listen to ourselves, we are then able to act with strength and purpose, greet the world with joy, and share our gifts with others.

Opening to Transformations

In this and some of my upcoming blogs, I would like to introduce you to my new book Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations which will be published at the end of this month. This book is a memoir that began with my reflections in my journal in 1994. These journal reflections actually grew into a much greater story of re-membering, restoring, and transformation and became, for me, a deeper way of understanding of my own life. As you read this book, you will discover that my regular journaling changes at a certain point, and my Muse shifts me into writing the story of a major turning point in my adult life in 1972. That itself was a surprise! So, you can imagine my continued amazement when the context of the 1972 story that I was in the midst of writing about shifted yet again, and I found myself back in my admission interviews at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1985 and writing about those experiences – all in this one journal. But I wrote as the story unfolded within me, and as a result, went from journaling about my current thoughts and experiences to writing a much more extensive story with scenes that shift almost like they do in dreams.

In my book, it becomes evident that it has taken me a long time to fully realize that failure and destruction are openings to transformation, even though I knew this in my head. Themes of failure, destruction, and creation underlie our lives. The major turning points in our experiences that are necessary to open us to a truly new future and to living the authentic potentials in our lives, to discover a new self, may depend upon an old self being shattered. And, the creation of one’s destiny may depend upon the world of a child being shattered.

We must go back to knowing ourselves during and through these periods – in our reflections, dreams, and journaling. We must go back and touch moments in our existence when we and life were whole, in kabbalistic lore, before the world-vessel was shattered and the divine sparks scattered. It is in our reflections and re-experiencing of these times that we can re-gather the sparks and move toward a greater sense of wholeness and future beyond the one we could previously have imagined.

In Cracking Open, I am sharing my efforts at recovering some of these sparks, and I will continue talking about these efforts in my next few blogs. In the summer of 1994 when I was writing in my journal, I was engaged in another period of transformation. This one wasn’t a period of crisis, but one of a new kind of opening to self-exploration, as this book reflects. This period in 1994 concluded with a dream that affirmed my decision to share the contents of my journals. Here is an excerpt from my new book, Cracking Open: A Memoir of Struggling, Passages, and Transformations, describing that dream and decision-making:

I had spent an evening rereading my midsummer journal entries and a story they had given birth to. I was debating with myself whether to share these reflections and their ensuing story with others. In other words, I was debating whether I should make them public. These reflections were personal and represented experiences that both shaped and became expressions of my soul. I felt extremely shy about exposing them to the eyes and voices of others, especially those close to me who might misunderstand or criticize them. But, as you can see, I have decided to share my work, and I made that decision before going to sleep that night. In fact, I recall wondering how my unconscious would respond to my decision.

Shortly after midnight, I awoke from a deeply experienced dream that was filled with symbols of inner tranquility, wisdom, and wholeness. As I sat in the dark, I saw the lake in front of the house where I grew up. There was no wind, and the surface of the lake was still. The image was beautiful, and in a strange way, it seemed to span almost my entire life. At the center of the lake—where the water was deepest and where, beneath its surface, springs fed its depth—was an ancient rowboat. Strong and heavy, the boat was made of a dark wood that had weathered many storms. Standing in the boat, as if rooted in it, was an immense monk. His cowl was pushed back, exposing silver hair above serene blue eyes. His countenance expressed at once the experience of age, great vitality, and peace. He stood calmly fishing in the deep water.

I know that I cannot repeat a single moment of my past. As a practicing Jungian analyst, I also know that self-understanding lies deep within the stories of my origins. I see self-knowledge as the key to my health and my ability to renew, or rather to help myself be re-created at critical junctures in my life. My life story, as it has unfolded since the events recorded in my 1994 journal, reflects my ongoing re-creation. In this span of time, my pursuit of life has been as dauntless as life’s pursuit of me, and we are not finished with each other yet.

Knowing and being known are definite needs that we all share. I hope sharing my journal reflections—the directions they led me into, along with the story they birthed—will be of some value to the people close to me. I hope that they will know me better and know themselves better and that we will come to know each other better. I also believe that they will experience a shock or two as well. I certainly did, as I discovered that, after all, it was not just the early traumas that formed the core of my life’s journey.

As I share some of these personal stories from my book with you in the upcoming blogs, I appreciate that you are joining me in this journey.

Into the Heart of the Feminine: Excerpts and Resources

An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity

Chapter 1: Facing the Death Mother (excerpts)

“When we begin to talk about the feminine principle, it is very hard to separate it from our ideas of gender and from the wounds we have all received in our struggles for recognition, empowerment, respect, and equality. This differentiation is so difficult because the feminine principle, as an archetypal part of all of us, also transcends our identities, and yet many of its characteristics are not only discounted but actually ruthlessly denied in our culture… When it’s all said and done, our concept of the feminine principle as one of the two great archetypal foundations in life—whether you call them masculine and feminine, creative and receptive, or yin and yang—is most often associated with the Great Mother.”

“Negative complexes arise from a variety of wounds and experiences. All complexes are combinations of at least three experiences we have. First, they are based on our own personal wounds and experiences of growing up. In addition, our parents and grandparents, through their psychology, pass on to us their wounds, unsolved problems, and unlived lives. Finally, the neuroses—the out-of-balance or one-sided aspects, the conflicts, and the inadequacies—in the social character of our culture affects our experiences as we struggle to form our identity and feel secure in the world. The Death Mother is the foundation of a destructive complex that is both personal and cultural, and it is a special form of the negative mother. With certain complexes, we cut off some of our particular gifts and are unable to live out some of our potentials. But the Death Mother causes us to cut off the essence of life within us.”

Fair Rosamund, John William Waterhouse

“Learning how we are really wounded, how our childhood was lacking, and how we need to be healed and grow is crucially important to living a fulfilled life. If we aren’t able to determine and face the truth of how we were formed, then in our radical achievement- and identity-oriented society we will constantly blame ourselves for what we consider to be our failures and inadequacies.”

Water Years, Susan Coffey

“As we search for our own truth and begin the quest for loving ourselves, so that we can be our own good enough mother to ourselves, we need to keep in mind that birth comes out of darkness. And in the ancient tradition of the alchemists, darkness was a necessary condition for purification and transformation. The reality of the early events in our lives and their powerful emotions that we have tried to keep locked away in the dark, defensive compartments of our souls need to be brought into the light so we can begin refining them through our hearts until compassion can turn them into gold.”

Chapter 2: Where Love Begins (excerpts)

“Our culture’s wounding and belittling of the feminine and its values has led many mothers to mistrust the world and men to a greater extent than ever before, and this mistrust inevitably becomes part of the emotional heritage of our children.”

“In recent history, Harry Potter has been one of the most widely popular series of books around, among adults as well as children. As the series’ first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, opens, Harry is delivered to a home of people who were proud to say they were “perfectly normal, thank you very much.” The family he was delivered to were “Muggles,” people who, as we say in Jungian terms, sleepwalk through life and deny their own potentials for depth, wholeness, and communication with the more profound dimensions of themselves and life. Harry knew that Mr. and Mrs. Dursley would never understand him or value his potentials. They regarded his uniqueness with disdain and housed him in a closet under the stairs. It would be a long time before Harry would learn that he was special. Harry was taught, “Don’t ask questions—that was the first rule for a quiet life with the Dursleys.” The Dursleys often spoke about Harry “as though he wasn’t there—or rather, as though he was something very nasty that couldn’t understand them, like a slug.” The home of the Dursleys could have been my home, or Margaret’s. Margaret, as you may recall, came from an affluent family in which everything “looked good,” but her parents were cold and distant, seeming to value social appearances above all else. This is a home dominated by the Death Mother, and our culture, too, is dominated by her.

“In fact, when he was young, “Harry dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take him away.” In many ways I was like Harry when I was a small child. I was convinced that my mother could not be my biological mother. Many of us dream, wish, or hope that somewhere out there our “real” parents exist or that if we wait long enough and try hard enough, the parents we have will turn into real parents, “good enough” parents. Meanwhile, we live and grow up in a hidden world, often one of reading, filled with fantasies and magic. Like Harry’s other world, the realm of our imagination protects us from being emotionally demolished. This world is our refuge until we develop the power to find or redeem our true parents, the archetypal positive mother and father within our own psyche. Like Harry found Hogwarts, we must find within ourselves a safe and nurturing place, the elemental feminine, or we will be in a never-ending losing conflict with the Muggles, the “normal” people who sleepwalk through life. I am convinced that these scenarios and what they touch in all of us are why these kinds of childhood books are immensely popular among both adults and children. They represent the secret feelings and longings in us. When such stories are really worthwhile, they use the words and images of our times to bring to life many of the timeless themes in fairy tales.

“Harry Potter, Margaret, and I spent much of our early lives longing for the presence of the positive, nurturing feminine. Something deep inside of Harry, in the world of magic, knew he was special, and people meeting secretly in the depths of his unconscious were drinking a toast, “To Harry Potter—the boy who lived.” That is the part of ourselves that we long to get in touch with—the part that finds joy in the fact that we are alive. This is the inner good enough mother, an important component of the archetypal feminine. The inner good enough mother values and respects us, sees and listens to us, and accepts that our thoughts, desires, and feelings are real and legitimate. Yet the wound to the archetypal feminine denies us all of these things. It is this wound and how we suffer from it without giving it the healing attention that it needs that fuel the fury of the Death Mother. An untended psychological wound becomes driven by its need for healing and transformation, a need that should now bring us to a turning point.”

Chapter 3: Turning Points (excerpts)

Poem of the Soul, Louis Janmot

“As we are touched by the feminine and are able to step outside of our traps of rationality, efficiency, and ‘things that have to be done,’ we become more open to our innate wisdom. An awareness of our innate wisdom helps us understand the language of love, the mystical, art and poetry—the language of symbolism, metaphor, meaning, eternity, and, most of all, the real language of stories.”

Barche, Antonino Leto

“The complexes that will most affect our lives have to do with relationships, because the way others respond to us as we grow up shapes our view of ourselves and of the world. Once we awaken to a complex, we face a task, a journey. Yet this journey isn’t one that will take us “back to normal,” for in Jungian terms, there is also a promise. The promise of the journey is to have an enlarged life of increased empowerment and authenticity. It is to free ourselves of the complexes that have been sapping our energy like remoras.”

Chapter 4: From Paralysis to Full Vitality/The Myth of Medusa (excerpts)

Perseus and Pegasus, Baldassare Peruzzi

“The myth of Medusa is an extraordinary mythic story from our collective past. What it can tell us today is as sacred as any religious parable. This myth is a symbolic story of how the patriarchy has abused and banished the feminine, how it can be redeemed, and the tremendous healing and instinctual power that can be freed in this process. As you will see, the bridge enabling us to make this great story relevant to our own healing, growth, and freedom is the Jungian perspective. The Jungian point of view is that our most troublesome complexes, which result from the wounds that shaped us, also hold a promise. Jung considered complexes to be the “royal road” to our unconscious and the architect of symptoms, dreams, and a transformed life. A myth like this one will show us what has been wounded, how the wound occurred, and the suffering such a wound inflicts. And we will then see what must be healed within ourselves by dying and being transformed and, finally, what new potentials we must live.”

Despair, Sandro Botticelli

“When a man loses his relationship to his anima and a society loses its relationship to the feminine, he and we lose our real relationship to life, to love, and to our sources of purpose and meaning. Consequently, we ignore our deep human longing for love and for meaning.”

Chapter 5: Power, Reality, the Feminine, and Projections (excerpts)

The Paradise, Salvatore Di Giovanna

“We have all experienced the destructive effects of the projections onto the feminine in Western societies. These projections trace their origins to the joining of the patriarchy with institutionalized monotheism. The patriarchy grew out of the middle ages into the Age of Reason, and this movement birthed a cultural mentality that became rational, verbal, and literal. This new mindset rejected the mythological and symbolic values in our religious writings, which had nurtured and guided people’s lives for centuries. Today, because we have lost these values and are allowing information to replace knowledge, we no longer realize that symbols and images carry a deeper reality than words. Part of our devaluation of the feminine results from our loss of the art of thinking symbolically. To lose this art is to lose the kind of grounding that enables us to experience the beautiful depths of love and the Divine presence that is potentially within our capacities…

“As analysts, one of the hardest things that we have to do is help people overcome their hidden contempt for the feminine as they begin their inner work. People in our society are easily swallowed up by busyness, productivity, and their crammed schedules. The modern technology that promised easy free time has brought, instead, tension, anxiety, and a compulsion to get more of the same. To escape this cycle, we have to learn to sacrifice some of the values and activities in this driven approach. This entails giving new appreciation and respect to taking time for silence and reflection as well as being receptive to and nurturing our inner lives. This necessity is as urgent for men as it is for women, and it lies in the heart of the archetypal feminine: relatedness, receptivity, and valuing the nonrational. Until we make this shift in how we value ourselves and life, our ability to respond with intense interest and love to each other and to ideas will be fettered. Our deepest creativity needs a transformed atmosphere in which to flourish.”

Apple Tree 1,Gustav Klimt

“Let’s consider the story of Eve and the snake, which has been used to denigrate women for centuries. The biblical tradition of this story, as it is interpreted in a literal and shallow way, is that nature as we know it, especially human nature, is corrupt, and woman as temptress is a corrupter of men and social values. I believe that anyone who thinks this tradition has not affected women at a deep level or the way men fear the feminine within themselves hasn’t been paying attention to how we feel about ourselves. When Bud has answered questions about this story during his lectures on mysticism, he refers to it as the story of our fall out of naïve unconsciousness and into the opposites that define the struggles and potentials of life. By reflecting on the opposites of life and death, sickness and health, joy and sorrow, consciousness and unconsciousness, we learn that growth results from repeating processes of transformation, life, death, and rebirth experiences. We must struggle for a life of consciousness, and this consciousness, when gained, increases our capacity for love and for experiencing the Divine.”

Chapter 6: The Reality of Medusa’s Myth (excerpts)

Odysseus and Nausicaa, Salvatore Rosa

“Every myth represents a treasure-house of wisdom regarding the world and our personality. On the other hand, the way to these treasures is difficult and tangled. All too often when it seems like the mythic map is clear, we suddenly discover that there is a whole new level of the myth before us. Myths are meant to take us beyond ourselves, beyond the ways we have looked at life and particularly at our difficulties and struggles. For example in the Odyssey, we find two levels in the story. The first is the quest of Telemachus to find his father. The second is the quest of Odysseus to return home to his wife. In mythic terms, Telemachus is searching for his own inner authority and Odysseus is trying to return home through a journey haunted by his encounters with feminine figures. Both quests come together as Odysseus completes the symbolic masculine search for the inner feminine. Myths are about the realization of different aspects of our wholeness, and they are not about gender roles. They reflect how the archetypal patterns of the masculine and feminine live and intertwine in all of us. And they describe what happens when such patterns become one-sided: Nature sets the stage to redirect them through journeys of transformation.

“When the feminine and our vitality become lost to power drives and life becomes a wasteland, the stage is set for the mythic world to give rise to a hero to transform and revitalize the situation. The mythic hero is a metaphor for our struggle to transform our consciousness and bring new life to ourselves.”

Chapter 7: Women Turned to Stone: Confronting Fear (excerpts)

“…over the years, I have worked with woman after woman who was intelligent, capable, even professionally trained, and yet was still paralyzed when it came to pursuing her life with a sense of authenticity and security, grounded in her own ability. I am even more saddened to see how our ability to love and be loved and to be whole people in relationships has been frozen by the Death Mother’s influence in our families and in our society. Not only have I seen this in the people I work with, but I have experienced it myself. I have questioned my own ability to believe in myself, in my potentials, and in my own success, not for years, but for decades. And I have wondered if I would ever really know what love is and if I would ever really experience it.

“The effect of this paralysis is, therefore, very potent and very frightening. It has the ability to numb our capabilities to be productive, energetic, creative, and independent without our becoming fully aware of it. I have worked with women who were unable to finish college or graduate school because they were “paralyzed,” and with women who had chosen to get married, not out of love, but because they were “paralyzed” and couldn’t figure out what else to do. Moreover, the Death Mother limits our capacities to trust love and friendships as well as life. And all too often we, both men and women, unconsciously try to heal ourselves by seeking a good enough mother in our spouses, lovers, or partners.”

Integrity, William Bouguereau

“It encourages me and sustains me on my journey to remember that although snakes inspire fear in us, they also can inspire awe. They symbolize primal instincts and feelings that are demanding to be transformed. When they are transformed, they become a source of life, like the power of the kundalini serpent, the healing they represent on the caduceus, and transformation they symbolized as they shed their skin. So, I remember that while this journey must be careful, it will be filled with awe at times, not just fear, rage, and grief. And the outcome will be one of love, in its largest sense.”

Chapter 8: Men Turned to Stone: Confronting Shame (excerpts)

Nude with Calla Lillies, Diego Rivera

“Our way of life today—with its emphasis on appearances, identity, happiness, and security coupled with its distrust of emotions and the inner life—has repressed our urge to heal and grow to our full capacities. But this urge is still within us. If it is nurtured, if like a seed it can find its place in the fertile ground of the healing feminine, growth and a new life will bloom.”

“Jung writes, ‘Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.’ Where the Death Mother lives, ‘love is lacking,’ and in fact, an understanding of love is rarely even present. Yet ‘love is lacking’ describes the denied conditions of our collective world. The presence of this force in our lives robs us of the great feminine values we need to live, both within and outside of ourselves. The Death Mother crushes the ability to love, nurture, and affirm ourselves and new life; the ability to foster transformation of ourselves, life, and culture by being emotionally engaged in life and devoted to it; and the ability to make Eros, the feminine principle of love and relatedness, a central value we live by. These are the potentials for healing and a renewed future that make undertaking our journey, as Perseus did, worthwhile.”

A Plague of Disengagement

Jennifer Percy immediately caught my attention when she pointed out that America is suffering from a “plague of disengagement” in the New York Times Book Review (2/22/15). Jennifer describes our attitude towards our war veterans saying we don’t listen to them, how they were hurt; and we don’t want to understand them, she concludes. Of course this is a tragedy. But while reading her article and clenching my teeth in sadness and frustration, I was also thinking, “Are we any different with our prisoners, our poor, our mentally ill, or our addicts? Or what about our chronically ill, our children, our alienated teenagers?” We don’t want to understand the wounded, and in Jungian terms, the shadow parts of our society. And, if we are going to pay attention to Jung, isn’t the heart of this problem centered in our unwillingness to seek to understand the wounded and shadow sides of ourselves? Jung is pretty clear when he writes, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”

What impresses me, however, are the number of people my wife and I are encountering in our practices and presentations that are interested in knowing and transforming their lives. They are beginning to become engaged with the deeper significance of their lives and what it means to be human. But what really scares me is how many other people are adamantly defending their positions of disengagement. Perhaps I shouldn’t be all that surprised because Jung warned us (C.W. Vol. 13, par. 25) that if we sincerely set out on this journey to become fully engaged and to know ourselves, it wouldn’t be easy. The entire conventional shadow of our culture would oppose us, including its practical, intellectual, moral, and religious components. On the outside, we may be looked at as weird, different, self-centered, selfish, and so on. Internally, we may be wondering the same thing or hearing that voice that tells us we are not really worth all of the attention we are giving ourselves, that our investment of time and effort in being engaged isn’t really worth it.

It may help us to remember another well-known quotation from Jung in his BBC interview when he passionately says, “…the world hangs by a slender thread, and that thread is the consciousness of man…We are the greater danger…What if something goes wrong with the psyche?…But we know nothing about it.” And, he continues, that it seems “…if we are well fed and clothed, we have little urge to learn about ourselves – and that is our greatest mistake of all.” In this case, we easily slide into a self-satisfied mediocrity of awareness and sensitivity that leaves us living with indifference to the deepest meaning of life.

In the face of this danger, real self-care only begins when we start the inner journey into self-knowledge and individuation. To avoid or refuse this inward journey causes our energies and our potentials to back up into our shadows and, what we are learning to call, our “unlived lives.” Eventually, the repressed energies in our unlived lives turn sour and even dark. As the avoidance of this process continues, we may become more rigid, ;emotionally defensive, afraid of risks, and begin to see life as threatening, and the future as lacking promise. At this point, we are beginning to lose our soul…to become soul-sick, and we may find ourselves getting physically sick as well.

When we are listening to the news or other people, we may wonder why the advocates of different factions in our society seem so angry, so fanatic, and so threatened, that they are actually nullifying life while claiming to be promoting our best interests. Fanaticism, self-righteousness, and the anger, fear, and aggressiveness that accompany them are the symptoms of our soul-sickness whether it is on the political right or left, in the center or on the fringes. As Massimilla and I wrote the section on “Facing the Death Mother” in our recent book, Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity, our understanding of our “plague of disengagement” as a consequence of the wounded and repressed feminine in our lives, became increasingly clear. We quote Marion Woodman as she writes, “…the Death Mother wields a cold, fierce, violent, and corrosive power. She is rampant in our society right now.” This is the face our society turns toward our war veterans, people who have lost their jobs, poor mothers, the poor in general, the chronically ill, prisoners, and others. This is the face we have learned to turn toward our own struggles, failures, vulnerabilities, disappointments, fading dreams, and other challenges. Through fear and self-criticism, we learn from the Death Mother to live too conservatively, too defensively, to not take risks and that, if we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into life, we may end up looking ridiculous, or losing everything. Our book, Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity, reflects much of our own journeys of, step-by-step, seeking to become fully engaged in our lives.

As we have lived with my daughter and her experiences of progressive multiple sclerosis since 2006, we have had to relearn how cold our country’s health care system is in failing to even want to understand the financial and emotional costs of being in such a condition. Nor, as a culture, do we want to understand any of the other struggling aspects of being human that I have mentioned or, as Jung said, to understand ourselves, as long as we are well fed and clothed. But even though, as a culture, we reflect coldness and disengagement, my daughter has found a very caring and supportive community of family and friends. And we have found people in our practices, lectures, workshops, and the groups we speak to, who are looking for ways to become engaged, to open their hearts, and to return the strength, love, and creativity of the feminine to our lives.

So, in spite of our “plague of disengagement,” Massimilla and I have hope. We also are hopeful that our book will help people open their hearts and reclaim their lives – as living into the book’s creation helped us. Seeing people willing to open themselves and change their lives strengthens our hope that together we can shake our society out of its willful amnesia – its denial of the greater aspects of being human, the beauty and the horror of the life we all live.