Bud Harris's Blog, page 13
April 21, 2015
Meeting an Angel
While traveling home from a pilgrimage that hadnʼt renewed him, Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone was lost in thought, when suddenly his horse jerked to a stop. Standing in front of him was a leper. During that instant, an encounter began that was to initiate Giovanniʼs journey into one of becoming Saint Francis.
There are special moments in our lives when events seem to conspire to reconnect us to our deepest Self. Generally, we know ourselves through what we see – in our lives, our dreams, and in our reflections. But there are moments when something special happens that connects us to our source.
Palm Sunday was going to be one of those days for my wife, Massimilla, and me. When we entered Malapropʼs Bookstore, it was a bright, chilly afternoon. We love Malapropʼs, Ashevilleʼs favorite Indie bookstore, that is always filled with the dynamic energy of people who love books as much as their staff does. We were there to give a book signing & reading from our new book Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity, followed by a discussion.
We were about an hour early in order to do some sound checks, and to have the video equipment set up. (We will share this event with you via youtube, and through our newsletter and website.) People began arriving early and we were busy chatting and signing books until our start time at three oʼclock. The bookstore seating area was filled and the café closed, the background music was turned off, and Massimilla began our talk. The audience followed our presentation intently. As we looked out at them, we saw smiling faces, turning serious at times, and heads nodding in agreement, or occasional surprise.
When we finished our reading, and opened ourselves to questions, there was a long period of silence while everyone was still processing what they had just heard. Then the questions began. The depth of the questions was moving, as was the deep personal interest people were showing in our topic of healing, restoring the feminine in our lives and culture, and what that revitalization of the archetypal feminine could mean to the lives, hearts, and souls of all of us.
After about half an hour, we had to draw this animated conversation to a close. We spent another half an hour or so signing books and talking with people. As we were finishing and putting on our coats, we felt this had been a very rewarding afternoon. When we were approaching the door to leave, a woman stepped in front of us. She seemed to be in her mid-fifties, and looked very serious. She said,
“I left, but then I got my courage up and decided to come back. My parents were both alcoholics, and I was a very abused child, by both of them. I was talking with some people after your presentation who were Catholic. I donʼt have a faith. Iʼve never had a faith. I wasnʼt brought up that way. I donʼt know how to have a faith. But I think that if I had a faith, I could finally be healed. Can you help me?”
My words came from somewhere deep inside, certainly not from my head.
“I donʼt know,” I replied, “but I can tell you my childhood was torn by trauma, my family demolished, and I came out of that hating God. Then, as I got older, I began the journey we have been talking about today.”
“Iʼm in therapy,” she said, “and I know my wounded, inner child. I talk to her. I think faith would heal me. How did you find it?”
“I donʼt think of faith as believing in something,” I responded. “Belief didnʼt work for me, it failed me early in my life. But as I have been on this journey, Iʼve realized that from where I began, I could have ended up an alcoholic, in a mental institution, or crippled by depression for my entire life. But I didnʼt end up that way. I slowly gained the sense that something had supported my life, my survival and my growth. That was the beginning of faith for me. Thatʼs the foundation. The right kind of religion can nourish this faith, but this is the important faith for me.”
“This helps,” she sighed.
“When we feel crushed by our pain, it is helpful to look at it in a different way,” Massimilla shared. “An old friend of ours in constant pain from spinal disease said that she assigned a musical note to each level of her pain and that this transformed her pain into a melody, music that God was sending her. Sometimes she understood the music, and sometimes she didnʼt.”
“This helps, this makes sense,” she responded, nodding her head. “Iʼm glad I came back. Thank you so much.”
“What is your name?” Massimilla asked.
“Christy (not her real name),” she replied.
“We will pray for you, Christy,” Massimilla said.
* * * * *
In Jungian psychology, we use the word psychopomp to describe a figure that guides our souls during times of transformation and between the worlds of the sacred and the everyday. It also acts as a go-between connecting and re-connecting our ego – our familiar personality and the Self – our center and the home of the Divine within us. In religion, our word for this guide is an angel. In the Jungian tradition, the archetypal images of Hermes or the wise old man or the wise old woman are thought of as psychopomps.
But my own experiences never seem that lofty. Usually, the figures that penetrate my daily life and connect me to the Divine places in my Self are more along the lines of the poor, the enemy, the beggar, or even Medusa. St. Francis began his journey by meeting a leper. It only seems to be the suffering ones or the enraged ones that instantly break through the walls of habit, practicality, and comfort – that seem to be perpetually rebuilding themselves around me. When I meet an angel, I am reminded of the depth of my journey and the meaning of the force that has guided my life through its loneliness, struggles, sufferings, and ambitions. It is the experience of this force that enabled me to answer Christyʼs questions in the way I did.
Thank you, Christy. You are an angel reminding me of where my life is anchored and that I still hunger for more life, more wholeness, and an ever-deepening realization of what we are and what this life is for.
April 7, 2015
Empowering Our Ego Part Five: Learning the Art and Craft of Loving Ourselves
During my twenties and thirties, if you had asked me if I loved myself, I would not have really understood the question. Deep inside, I had little idea that I only felt loved and respected for my accomplishments and how well I could fulfill the needs and expectations of other people. In my early years of self-reflection, I was shocked to discover how much of myself I had hidden to please others and to create a safe place for myself in the world. The paradox was that even if I had thought I loved myself at that time, I would have been naïve, because what I believed I loved would have been a fantasy of who I thought I was. This fact is true simply because I didn’t know those hidden parts of myself that contained some of my best potentials, as well as things I didn’t like about myself – repressed fears, desires, and complexes that drove my behavior.
When I first began to look into my heart, my mind, and my history and tried to figure out why I had a “good life” and yet was depressed, some of the people closest to me accused me of becoming self-absorbed, selfish, and neglectful of my obligations and responsibilities. But I needed to discover the roots of the obligations and responsibilities that I was living by, that were defining who I was, and seemed to be slowly swallowing my life. And then I had to free how I thought of myself apart from other people’s expectations, needs, and desires. This struggle became one of life or death – a struggle I needed to go through before I could understand the meaning of “loving myself.”
At this point in my journey, I had to be very careful. It is easy to get the wrong idea – which is that loving myself and having an empowered ego would lead me to handle life efficiently and would allow me to move through it with competence and confidence. Actually, the reverse was closer to the truth. Instead of losing my awkwardness, I needed to learn to accept it with grace. Instead of becoming invulnerable, I needed to learn to accept my vulnerability with self-compassion. I needed to learn that I must risk again and again for growth, and for love. And I needed to come to understand that my vulnerability would open the door to my authenticity and a greater experience of Life.
Empowering my ego does not mean constructing a platform for achieving the “good life,” triumphant accomplishments, or “enlightened” living. It is the foundation for living a more profound life where love and meaning, joy and sorrow, are always two sides of the same coin. It took a depression for me to come to this understanding, and all too often it takes something similar or a tragedy to break the domination and suffocation that exists in our lives and relationships to open us to the need to love ourselves. In the chapter on “Learning to Love Ourselves” in my book Sacred Selfishness, I explain that learning to love ourselves is a process that can only grow as we learn more about ourselves. And loving ourselves is a challenge of the heart to rediscover the feelings and the vitality we were forced to repress in order to form our identities and begin our social development. In my second blog in this series, “Emotions: The Royal Messengers of the Unconscious,” I explained that our capacity to love in any form depends upon our emotional awareness. Our feelings do more, however, than connect us to life. They hold the key to living a life of depth – full of imagination, animation, and an awareness of being close to all life and to loving ourselves.
In my Sacred Selfishness Workbook which is free on my website, I offer a path for opening the door to self-love one step at a time.
Remember, Love is difficult, the poet Rilke explains, in contrast to the sentimental way we like to think about it. Review your thoughts about love. Do you think it should just bring happiness, ease, or at least, security? Do explosions, struggles, and failure make you think love has failed? Life isn’t easy and love can’t be easy either.
Cultivating self-love is an odyssey with moments of difficulty and joy. It’s an excursion into knowing ourselves, of asking whether what we are doing is adding to or diminishing how we feel about ourselves.
Self-love challenges the boundaries of how we have fenced ourselves into practicality, conventional wisdom, and other people’s perspectives. We must gently ask ourselves whose voice are we really hearing in our head? Is it the voice of our heart or of our true self? Is it the voice of our heart? Is it the voice of our Self?
Self-love isn’t self-indulgent, it isn’t shopping sprees, outlandish vacations, sneaking sweets, or pouting moods. It is the commitment to growing in self-knowledge and in our capacity to love. Remembering to take the time for reflection isn’t egocentric, it is the key to having the kind of vitality that overflows.
Self-love is the foundation that determines how strongly we can give and receive love. Without it, our relationships will crumble under the slightest storm. Take the responsibility for understanding your fears and needs, and facing them in a loving way.
Self-love rests on self-forgiveness, being able to understand who we were when we failed ourselves, and what needs, hurts, fears, and deprivations were driving us. Only then may we meet ourselves with compassion and kindness. This is why our growth in self-understanding brings healing and reconciliation with our essential selves.
Self-love is learning how to be tough with ourselves and take the driver’s seat in our life when we need to break a destructive mood or habit. We must remember that being tough with ourselves means being committed, energetic, having high standards, and tenacity. Being tough with ourselves is the opposite of being hard on ourselves, which means being perfectionistic, self-critical, self-punishing, and unaccepting of our mistakes and weaknesses.
It takes an empowered ego to face the journey, the commitment, the struggles, and sacrifices we will encounter in the subsequent steps in our individuation process. It also takes an empowered ego to realize the joy and gratitude in this process, and to stay grounded and centered without becoming inflated or caught in illusions of power that can cause us to fly too close to the sun, and then crash.
As new steps unfold for helping to empower our ego, one of the first things we encounter is confronting our shadow. (As mentioned in my first blog, to find out more about the term shadow, refer to my book, Knowing the Questions, Living the Answers: A Jungian Guide through the Paradoxes of Peace, Conflict, and Love that Mark a Lifetime.) However, we often avoid confronting our shadow by hiding behind our conventional definitions of ourselves, our responsibilities, our obligations, and the busyness that they impose. This is actually a defense against facing ourselves. Initially, this kind of avoidance was my first line of defense against facing my Self and developing an ongoing, deep inner conversation with myself. So then, I had to gather the fortitude to stand up and find the true strength hidden in my shadow and stop being swallowed by my own life.
As my journey continued, I had to learn how to meet the poor, the beggars, the prisoners, and the wounded within myself, again and again, in order to enter the places I had previously desired to be immune to. These were the parts of my shadow and my anima (or your animus if you are a woman) that are the gateways to one’s authenticity, integrity, and the foundation for a full life.
Finally, I had to have the strength to encounter the Self – the greater Wisdom center, image of the Divine, and carrier of all the potentials of my life, which Jung noted was initially a defeat for the ego. This encounter, too, occurs over and over, once we have realized this point. It is a defeat for our ego – which actually must be strong enough to sacrifice itself to the Self, as it learns to stop seeking power over our lives and learns to seek a different kind of power, the power of love through our experience of life.
(Read Part One: The Ground of Individuation)
(Read Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messenger of the Unconscious)
(Read Part Three: Emotions: The Groundwork for Becoming Self-Reliant)
(Read Part Four: The Need for Developing a New Value System)
March 17, 2015
Empowering Our Ego Part Four: The Need for Developing a New Value System
As we grow up, we need guiding principles to help structure the development of our identities and define who we are and how we can fit into the world. For better or worse, these principles become the value system that supports our development. But the truth is, we begin to assimilate our values at such an early age that unless we undertake an inner journey of questioning and exploration, this structure and our assumptions about it will remain unconscious and we will simply think of it as part of who we are.
The need for a value structure is one of the deepest instinctual needs that we have. That is why every group of people, every family, every clan, every culture and subculture, down to children in school and youth gangs in the street, instinctively create a value structure that defines them, their ethics, and their sense of morality. This need is an archetypal need and is essentially the same, even though its expressions may take many forms.
As we investigate our deep impulse for developing consciousness, we see that it pushes us to pursue self-awareness and an empowered ego in support of our pursuit of individuation. This pursuit will lead us into a level of consciousness beyond our original value systems. As this journey progresses, we learn that the simple value structure from our earlier life no longer captures the complexity and paradoxes in the life we are experiencing. At this point, we may end up in a state of inner conflict between our old values and the new ones we are struggling to help evolve.
I address this kind of personal crisis in Chapter 1, “Captives of Normalcy” in my book Sacred Selfishness. More often than I would have imagined, I hear someone in my office say, “I just want to be normal and happy” – and that’s a very human desire in our society. I say “in our society,” because that is the way we have been conditioned to think and feel. I don’t think people in the Western world were very concerned with “normalcy” or “happiness” until the modern age, when the focus on “material happiness” became prevalent. Our great teachers and religious leaders in the past were primarily seeking a more comprehensive vision of life, a vision of living with meaning and purpose, and the full experience of being human. In general, they considered happiness as an incidental state or as a by-product, and not something to be devoted to seeking.
Most of us are aware that we haven’t gotten out from under the early influences in our lives as much as we would like to think we have. There is a good reason for the intransigence of these old values. They affected us and we adopted them before our cognitive abilities were developed enough to be aware of what we were learning, and to question it. In particular, we used them to help us secure our developing identities. The “big people” in our lives, when we were small, inculcated us with their values as we sought to make decisions and behave in ways that met their approval. Adopting these values also kept us feeling as safe as possible.
So as we grow up, we end up developing a value system that is founded on the value systems in our families, religious institutions, and schools. Also along the way, we may learn to devalue aggression and conflict, as well as speaking out and standing up for ourselves. We are often taught to hide our feelings. Injunctions like: “Don’t talk back”; “Don’t bother me, I’m busy”; “Turn the other cheek”; and “Honor your Father and your Mother” teach us to form a value structure that simultaneously devalues our own selves and overvalues other people. The values that are structured into our personalities while we are too young to evaluate them affect us on every level of our lives.
The expectations and values we grow up with can be insidious, and even the negative ones are often seductive. How many of us try to chase away our restless dissatisfaction, despite our nice homes, jobs, and families, by asking ourselves, “What have I got to complain about? How can I complain when so many other people are less fortunate?” Our ability to face dissatisfactions is complicated even further if we have reached a level of education and success beyond that of our families of origin. It’s very scary for us to outgrow our families psychologically, and realizing we are doing so, may leave us feeling terribly guilty and even ashamed of ourselves. It can also leave us feeling like exiles, without a home, or roots, or people who care about us and understand us on a familiar level.
Today we are facing an even more complex problem. The value structure that seemed solid in the mid-twentieth century has become contradictory and confusing as our cultural values have been caught in constant change and deterioration. This loss of societal grounding has its good and bad elements, but it leaves many of us and our children vulnerable to being overly influenced by the values of marketing, the media, and now, social networking. In recent years, our values have become driven by economic and commercial pressures for higher, materialistic standards of living in a way that seems involuntary and irrational, even though it often appears practical and conventional. The real solution to the problems that these conflicting, often hollow value systems present is found at the personal and psychological level of being. It requires the inner journey to become aware of and dissolve the hardened structure of values we have been, and are being, indoctrinated into and to search out the deeper, more meaningful values and potentials within ourselves.
As we pursue individuation, our journey into wholeness, the continuous development of consciousness, living in a new way, and listening to our greater Self, our values must shift. Our orientation toward our highest values can no longer be for “perfection,” “success,” “the good life,” or whatever value system is conventional or outside of ourselves. The orientation for highest values must be toward wholeness and true reality. This means we must face and deal with our unwelcome humanness and the unpleasant aspects of ourselves and the rest of the world. As we intentionally allow our new value system to evolve, it is important for it to include a new valuing of our own worth. Doing this may bring us into a crisis of conflict between the old and the new within ourselves, as well as with the people around us who are clinging to the old or conventional systems.
But we need to have the courage to free ourselves from being the captives of the “normalcy” we have known and its pursuit of ways of life that are not authentic for us. If we hesitate in this quest, our freed up emotions and our, thus far, empowered ego will begin to fade away. We must help ourselves find a richer, deeper personal set of values that gives our lives special meaning, a unique purpose, and an openness to love.
(Read Part One: The Ground of Individuation)
(Read Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messenger of the Unconscious)
(Read Part Three: Emotions: The Groundwork for Becoming Self-Reliant)
March 3, 2015
Empowering Our Ego Part Three: The Groundwork for Becoming Self-Reliant
As we grow up and develop our ego – an identity – that will help us learn the skills and attitudes that will facilitate our taking a place in society, the necessities of this journey cause us to become disconnected, disassociated, and to some extent alienated from parts of ourselves. In other words, as we form our identities, we also create our shadows. These dissonances can be large or small, depending upon the environment in which we grew up. They often produce emotions that scare us but, in reality, are calling us to heal these splits. As I shared in my last blog, the beginning of becoming rooted in our own internal reality starts with learning how to be open to our emotions, instead of looking for how to change, repress, and deny them. Our emotions lead the way for us to remain connected with ourselves, in spite of what is going on in our inner and outer worlds. What this means is that our emotional awareness becomes the guide to helping us to reconnect with the “split-off” aspects of ourselves, the wounded parts of ourselves and to nurture our ability to revitalize and transform ourselves.
Yet, for reconnection and revitalization to maintain its course, it is important to continue to empower our ego, in order to give it the strength and breadth for the development of our whole personality. The next step in empowering our ego is to understand the four basic archetypal foundation stones that support our personality. We need to heal and develop these support systems before we can go on in our individuation process and forge an authentic life, in connection with our greater Self. These four archetypal foundation stones are the conduits of powerful, instinctual energies (by instinctual energies, I mean energies that are inherent in our nature.) They are:
The Mother Instinct
The Father Instinct
The Power Instinct and
The Eros Instinct.
These four cornerstones in our personality are frequently either diminished or wounded as we grow up. Empowering our ego means we must heal, recover, and renew these parts of ourselves, and doing this is a vital aspect of our analytic work.
The Mother Instinct is the principal archetypal foundation in our personality, and it reflects the positive side of the Great Mother archetype. This image reflects our need for self-care and the capacity within ourselves to provide that care. In the positive sense, the word “mother” represents someone who is able to bring forth life and is committed to nourishing and supporting it. From the psychological standpoint, we have an inherent need to be able to nourish ourselves, nurture ourselves, support and heal ourselves and to honor, respect and effectively take care of ourselves. If our Mother Instinct is damaged or undeveloped, we wonʼt know how to nurture and sustain ourselves, and end up turning all kinds of destructive negativity towards our selves that will diminish and block our capacity to live vital lives. Our book, Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity gives us a roadmap to healing that part of ourselves and, in essence, to learning how to mother ourselves and our potentials. Though it may be hidden deep inside, we all have the capacity to like, nourish, and take loving care of ourselves.
The Father Instinct is another powerful source of energy and direction within us. In its positive sense as the Great Father archetype, it reflects our need to become self-reliant, autonomous, independent, and to initiate our lives with a spirit of creativity. It nourishes courage and, with the Great Mother archetype, helps us face the ordeals and suffering in being human. When this part of us is wounded, we find ourselves caught in self-criticism, lethargy, and a state of feeling victimized. It is through the Father Instinct that commitment and accomplishments help us to build a strong, stable ego. This Instinct helps us envision goals, initiate a journey towards them, and then work to achieve them.
It fortifies our resistance against natureʼs pull to want “to be taken care of” and to stay safely away from growth and change. If our Father Instinct has been wounded or is unrealized, its negative form can push us toward inflated, non-achievable goals and paralyze us with its own form of self-criticism, undermining every shred of our self-respect.
Both our Mother Instinct and our Father Instinct have been wounded in our culture for over a hundred years. Such cultural wounds become internalized as personal wounds that we all have to confront and heal. My book, The Father Quest: Rediscovering an Elemental Force, can be an important guide in understanding and healing this important aspect of ourselves.
The Power Instinct is part of our selves that we often think of as negative. But we all have the power instinct as an essential part of our personalities. This is the instinct and archetypal pattern that gives us the ability to experience ourselves as having value because we are able to face life successfully and achieve certain goals. This instinct helps us gain a certain measure of control over our lives and their direction. Without the support of the Power Instinct, we find it difficult to form a conscious identity and independence from our dependency needs. It is important for us to learn how to have goals from our mothers and fathers. As soon as our ego has a goal, we need for the Power Instinct to become activated and released, to flow into the ego to help it achieve that goal. The more comfortable our ego becomes with this process, the more we gain a sense of confidence and self-respect.
Only experiences of accomplishment can free us from a compulsive need to prove ourselves, ceaselessly. A deep feeling of inferiority can force us into a destructive identification with our power instinct that will leave us enmeshed in desires for power and control. It is essential for us not to repress our power instinct, but to healthily nurture it, to “mother” it. It is also just as important to “father” it, to direct its use in a positive way to help us become self-confident and self-reliant. When we learn that we have the ability to do real and meaningful things, we are better able to relax and enjoy life. Then we no longer have “to prove ourselves” and live in the constant tension of self-criticism and performance anxiety.
The Eros Instinct moves us to want to relate to the world, other people, and ourselves. In the Jungian sense, Eros generally means an interest in personal relatedness and the capacity to work for conciliation and reconciliation. The Eros Instinct evokes self-integration, subjectivity, and the concerns of individuals. In our world of driven activity, it protects us by standing for earthly qualities like stillness, reflection, being, and openness. It is the motivational force behind our emotional attachments that range from sexuality to friendships. It also supports our love of life and our involvements with our hobbies, professions, art, and other fulfilling activities. When our Eros Instinct is wounded, we may become alienated from ourselves and others. Our relationships may be built on power and we will be compelled to try to maneuver others into being what we think we want or need. Our intimate lives may be characterized as impersonal or based on emotional fusion and our feeling for life in general will become dried up and depressed. We may feel like we are just “turning the crank” until our time runs out, or we may be saying to ourselves, “If this is it, itʼs not worth living.”
“Know thyself” is a term that is as old as western civilization. It often seems selfish in our culture to prioritize our connections to our inner selves and reality, but actually, the reverse is true. Unless we understand what is happening within ourselves and can take responsibility for it and heal the wound to our Eros Instinct – we cannot appreciate other people as themselves. Healthy relationships can only come when we know ourselves, our inner reality and stand grounded in ourselves and accept others as the people they are.
As I explained in Part One and Part Two, we call individuation ʻa journey into wholenessʼ because it means the continuous, conscious development of “knowing oneself”…and the growing awareness of our need to know the greater Self. So, individuation really begins when we can recognize our wounds in these four fundamental parts of ourselves and seek out the help we need to heal them.
Our urge toward wholeness and unity within ourselves calls for us to turn inwards and forge authentic, compassionate, and responsible ways to reconnect to these four archetypal conduits of our life energy. Healing and wholeness begin here and give us the foundation for developing a vital connection with our greater Self, and the divine energy and destiny that is held within us.
(Read Part One: The Ground of Individuation)
(Read Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messenger of the Unconscious)
(Read Part Four: The Need for Developing a New Value System)
Empowering Our Ego: Part Three
As we grow up and develop our ego – an identity – that will help us learn the skills and attitudes that will facilitate our taking a place in society, the necessities of this journey cause us to become disconnected, disassociated, and to some extent alienated from parts of ourselves. In other words, as we form our identities, we also create our shadows. These dissonances can be large or small, depending upon the environment in which we grew up. They often produce emotions that scare us but, in reality, are calling us to heal these splits. As I shared in my last blog, the beginning of becoming rooted in our own internal reality starts with learning how to be open to our emotions, instead of looking for how to change, repress, and deny them. Our emotions lead the way for us to remain connected with ourselves, in spite of what is going on in our inner and outer worlds. What this means is that our emotional awareness becomes the guide to helping us to reconnect with the “split-off” aspects of ourselves, the wounded parts of ourselves and to nurture our ability to revitalize and transform ourselves.
Yet, for reconnection and revitalization to maintain its course, it is important to continue to empower our ego, in order to give it the strength and breadth for the development of our whole personality. The next step in empowering our ego is to understand the four basic archetypal foundation stones that support our personality. We need to heal and develop these support systems before we can go on in our individuation process and forge an authentic life, in connection with our greater Self. These four archetypal foundation stones are the conduits of powerful, instinctual energies (by instinctual energies, I mean energies that are inherent in our nature.) They are:
The Mother Instinct
The Father Instinct
The Power Instinct and
The Eros Instinct.
These four cornerstones in our personality are frequently either diminished or wounded as we grow up. Empowering our ego means we must heal, recover, and renew these parts of ourselves, and doing this is a vital aspect of our analytic work.
The Mother Instinct is the principal archetypal foundation in our personality, and it reflects the positive side of the Great Mother archetype. This image reflects our need for self-care and the capacity within ourselves to provide that care. In the positive sense, the word “mother” represents someone who is able to bring forth life and is committed to nourishing and supporting it. From the psychological standpoint, we have an inherent need to be able to nourish ourselves, nurture ourselves, support and heal ourselves and to honor, respect and effectively take care of ourselves. If our Mother Instinct is damaged or undeveloped, we wonʼt know how to nurture and sustain ourselves, and end up turning all kinds of destructive negativity towards our selves that will diminish and block our capacity to live vital lives. Our book, Into the Heart of the Feminine: An Archetypal Journey to Renew Strength, Love, and Creativity gives us a roadmap to healing that part of ourselves and, in essence, to learning how to mother ourselves and our potentials. Though it may be hidden deep inside, we all have the capacity to like, nourish, and take loving care of ourselves.
The Father Instinct is another powerful source of energy and direction within us. In its positive sense as the Great Father archetype, it reflects our need to become self-reliant, autonomous, independent, and to initiate our lives with a spirit of creativity. It nourishes courage and, with the Great Mother archetype, helps us face the ordeals and suffering in being human. When this part of us is wounded, we find ourselves caught in self-criticism, lethargy, and a state of feeling victimized. It is through the Father Instinct that commitment and accomplishments help us to build a strong, stable ego. This Instinct helps us envision goals, initiate a journey towards them, and then work to achieve them.
It fortifies our resistance against natureʼs pull to want “to be taken care of” and to stay safely away from growth and change. If our Father Instinct has been wounded or is unrealized, its negative form can push us toward inflated, non-achievable goals and paralyze us with its own form of self-criticism, undermining every shred of our self-respect.
Both our Mother Instinct and our Father Instinct have been wounded in our culture for over a hundred years. Such cultural wounds become internalized as personal wounds that we all have to confront and heal. My book, The Father Quest: Rediscovering an Elemental Force, can be an important guide in understanding and healing this important aspect of ourselves.
The Power Instinct is part of our selves that we often think of as negative. But we all have the power instinct as an essential part of our personalities. This is the instinct and archetypal pattern that gives us the ability to experience ourselves as having value because we are able to face life successfully and achieve certain goals. This instinct helps us gain a certain measure of control over our lives and their direction. Without the support of the Power Instinct, we find it difficult to form a conscious identity and independence from our dependency needs. It is important for us to learn how to have goals from our mothers and fathers. As soon as our ego has a goal, we need for the Power Instinct to become activated and released, to flow into the ego to help it achieve that goal. The more comfortable our ego becomes with this process, the more we gain a sense of confidence and self-respect.
Only experiences of accomplishment can free us from a compulsive need to prove ourselves, ceaselessly. A deep feeling of inferiority can force us into a destructive identification with our power instinct that will leave us enmeshed in desires for power and control. It is essential for us not to repress our power instinct, but to healthily nurture it, to “mother” it. It is also just as important to “father” it, to direct its use in a positive way to help us become self-confident and self-reliant. When we learn that we have the ability to do real and meaningful things, we are better able to relax and enjoy life. Then we no longer have “to prove ourselves” and live in the constant tension of self-criticism and performance anxiety.
The Eros Instinct moves us to want to relate to the world, other people, and ourselves. In the Jungian sense, Eros generally means an interest in personal relatedness and the capacity to work for conciliation and reconciliation. The Eros Instinct evokes self-integration, subjectivity, and the concerns of individuals. In our world of driven activity, it protects us by standing for earthly qualities like stillness, reflection, being, and openness. It is the motivational force behind our emotional attachments that range from sexuality to friendships. It also supports our love of life and our involvements with our hobbies, professions, art, and other fulfilling activities. When our Eros Instinct is wounded, we may become alienated from ourselves and others. Our relationships may be built on power and we will be compelled to try to maneuver others into being what we think we want or need. Our intimate lives may be characterized as impersonal or based on emotional fusion and our feeling for life in general will become dried up and depressed. We may feel like we are just “turning the crank” until our time runs out, or we may be saying to ourselves, “If this is it, itʼs not worth living.”
“Know thyself” is a term that is as old as western civilization. It often seems selfish in our culture to prioritize our connections to our inner selves and reality, but actually, the reverse is true. Unless we understand what is happening within ourselves and can take responsibility for it and heal the wound to our Eros Instinct – we cannot appreciate other people as themselves. Healthy relationships can only come when we know ourselves, our inner reality and stand grounded in ourselves and accept others as the people they are.
As I explained in Part One and Part Two, we call individuation ʻa journey into wholenessʼ because it means the continuous, conscious development of “knowing oneself”…and the growing awareness of our need to know the greater Self. So, individuation really begins when we can recognize our wounds in these four fundamental parts of ourselves and seek out the help we need to heal them.
Our urge toward wholeness and unity within ourselves calls for us to turn inwards and forge authentic, compassionate, and responsible ways to reconnect to these four archetypal conduits of our life energy. Healing and wholeness begin here and give us the foundation for developing a vital connection with our greater Self, and the divine energy and destiny that is held within us.
(Read Part One: The Ground of Individuation)
(Read Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messenger of the Unconscious)
February 18, 2015
Empowering Our Ego, Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messengers of the Unconscious
The first step in empowering our ego, the center of our conscious life and identity, is understanding that it is our emotions that connect us directly to the vibrancy of life. Unless we are fully in touch with our emotions and anchored in the heart of who we truly are, our personality is like a tree without roots and does not have access to the deep inner energy that can strengthen and nourish us. In the process of individuation, this inner rootedness becomes the source that revitalizes our permanent journey of growth and transformation. Tapping into and acknowledging these roots of our emotions provide the key to living a life of depth, imagination, and passion.
Emotions are powerful, highly significant forces that can reveal problems, threaten us, paralyze us, and turn us into stone. They can also offer deep experiences of truthfulness, lift us up, animate us, and bring us into love and ecstasy. During major emotional and physical upheavals in my life, I have often been surprised and, at times, even frightened by the flood of feelings erupting in me. “Where do they come from?” I wonder, “And what do they mean? What kind of messengers are they?” As we begin to look at these essential questions, I would like to share a story with you from my book, Sacred Selfishness:
“Several years ago, Gary, a mild-mannered minister, came to see me. Gary was recovering from a heart attack and bypass surgery. I was surprised when he opened our meeting by saying, ʻI want to stop being a spectator of life.ʼ When I asked him if he could explain a little more about what he meant he replied, ʻThe terror of almost dying and being cut open may be the first time Iʼve felt really alive in years. It woke me up. I realized that I think everyone else is living but Iʼve just been watching and going through the motions. For years Iʼve just gotten up and done what needed to be done without thinking too much about it. Love, fear, excitement, enthusiasm, bitterness, illness, pain – those were all things I saw in other peopleʼs lives.ʼ Gary had come to understand that without feelings our lives seem more like a movie weʼre watching than a process weʼre fully involved in.”
Before his surgery, Gary said he had actually considered himself a “feeling” person. He thought he loved the people close to him, cared about his work, and added that sometimes he even cried at movies. He also admitted he had a bit of an anger problem, with occasional outbursts and moments of road rage. He didnʼt really see himself as emotionally inhibited nor did he consider that there might be an accumulation of unconscious anger behind the anger that would sometimes burst into his consciousness. So Gary was surprised when his wife and a couple of people close to him told him that he seemed angry all of the time. They also attested that he often seemed to remain passive in situations when he should have acted on legitimate feelings of anger, and also in situations where he was being put down.
Garyʼs wife, Cynthia, also considered herself a “feeling” person and in touch with her own emotions. But she confessed that she was often uncomfortable or paralyzed by the emotions she regarded as taboo. She shared that when she was growing up, she had been taught there were “good” emotions like joy and sympathy and “bad” emotions like anger, fear, and depression. She was also taught that “bad” emotions were characteristics of a weak or dysfunctional person. So, as a result of her early teachings, she found that it threatened her self-esteem when she would experience or admit to experiencing these “bad” emotions.
Many of us, to a greater or lesser extent, were taught, or indoctrinated, into developing a repressive style like Gary or Cynthia, when facing any of our strong emotions. We were not encouraged to try to understand them, their origins, and their meaning. Being emotionally overwhelmed was often treated as a source of shame and embarrassment. And if it was compounded by tendencies towards being a perfectionist, an accommodator, sensitive, or feeling compelled to be good, then the experience was exacerbated by feelings of losing control, being rejected, and even of being attacked and humiliated, by our own inner critic, if no one else. We found out, early on, that being angry, expressing disappointment, withdrawing in sadness, and other deeply felt expressions were considered childish and immature. So we adapted by attempting to avoid conflict, to keep the peace, and to shun “wasting energy” by being emotional. Because of this adaptation, we often became anesthetized and passive, with a paralysis of consciousness, in a state of defensive, intellectual lethargy.
For the most part, though, we are often so unaware of these defenses against our emotions and our style of repressing them that, like Gary before his heart attack, we donʼt even notice our real feelings or distinguish them from our thoughts. In this pragmatic world we live in, the wisdom of our emotions is usually discounted and we are instructed to avoid our emotions whenever we are making important decisions. Repressing our emotions then causes us to develop an inauthentic, false persona as well as a distorted value system. Being determined to control our emotions and our bodies also diminishes the connection to our heart and isolates us in our heads.
Whether occurring from a recent event, or from our childhood, repressed emotions live on, and it takes more and more energy to keep them under control. There is no timeline in our unconscious; emotions that have been repressed stay as alive as they were when they happened. It is no wonder then, that passion, love, and purpose are not readily available to us, and that somewhere deep inside, our rebellious feelings continue to tell us that we are somehow betraying our true selves.
The way to strengthen our self, our ego, is to learn how to truly experience our emotions. Pursuing self-knowledge and awareness then become the cornerstones for cultivating our relationship with our emotions. The emotions that we have repressed and that have been regarded as dark, irrational, threatening, and undesirable must now be brought into the light of our awareness, and be recognized and accepted for the truthfulness they reveal. Tucked behind these denied feelings are our wounds that need to be healed and our shadows, the parts of ourselves we have exiled, in order to become acceptable and safe. These emotions that are struggling to break into our awareness through many kinds of symptoms are actually messengers telling us that there are aspects of ourselves longing to be found…longing to be recognized and to become active parts of who we are.
It is important to be willing to conscientiously pursue these feelings by reflecting upon our experiences and our emotional history. We must look for the emotions that are trying to become known, the ones we feel in our bodies, the ones in our dreams, and the ones that slip into our minds when we are half asleep, ruminating in our beds. This is the winding path to integrating our true feelings and to learning how they can expand and inform us. The ambiance of our lives and the richness of our relationships as well as our capacity to be passionate, loving, creative, and authentic as we move through life ALL depend upon our ability to listen to and support our emotional wellbeing.
Being able to feel deeply and to know why we actually feel a particular way is our key to understanding how engaged in life we really are. Our feelings help us to gauge how much we like or donʼt like something, how much we value or donʼt value something, whether something is congruent with who we really are, whether something diminishes us or supports and affirms us, and whether something or someone is violating our boundaries, or affirming and respecting our personhood. Listening to and understanding our emotions help us stop mishandling our needs and those of the people we care about. It allows our “feeling function” (a Jungian term), or our emotional intelligence, to provide “messages” so we can pay attention to our relationships and cultivate personal values that emphasize our whole being – head, heart, and hands – not just the pragmatic and conventional aspects. Tremendous energy then becomes available to us – that can daily strengthen and nourish us, and help us feel safely rooted within ourselves.
(Read Part One: The Ground of Individuation)
(Read Part Three: The Groundwork for Becoming Self-Reliant)
(Read Part Four: The Need for Developing a New Value System)
Empowering Our Ego: Part Two
The first step in empowering our ego, the center of our conscious life and identity, is understanding that it is our emotions that connect us directly to the vibrancy of life. Unless we are fully in touch with our emotions and anchored in the heart of who we truly are, our personality is like a tree without roots and does not have access to the deep inner energy that can strengthen and nourish us. In the process of individuation, this inner rootedness becomes the source that revitalizes our permanent journey of growth and transformation. Tapping into and acknowledging these roots of our emotions provide the key to living a life of depth, imagination, and passion.
Emotions are powerful, highly significant forces that can reveal problems, threaten us, paralyze us, and turn us into stone. They can also offer deep experiences of truthfulness, lift us up, animate us, and bring us into love and ecstasy. During major emotional and physical upheavals in my life, I have often been surprised and, at times, even frightened by the flood of feelings erupting in me. “Where do they come from?” I wonder, “And what do they mean? What kind of messengers are they?” As we begin to look at these essential questions, I would like to share a story with you from my book, Sacred Selfishness:
“Several years ago, Gary, a mild-mannered minister, came to see me. Gary was recovering from a heart attack and bypass surgery. I was surprised when he opened our meeting by saying, ʻI want to stop being a spectator of life.ʼ When I asked him if he could explain a little more about what he meant he replied, ʻThe terror of almost dying and being cut open may be the first time Iʼve felt really alive in years. It woke me up. I realized that I think everyone else is living but Iʼve just been watching and going through the motions. For years Iʼve just gotten up and done what needed to be done without thinking too much about it. Love, fear, excitement, enthusiasm, bitterness, illness, pain – those were all things I saw in other peopleʼs lives.ʼ Gary had come to understand that without feelings our lives seem more like a movie weʼre watching than a process weʼre fully involved in.”
Before his surgery, Gary said he had actually considered himself a “feeling” person. He thought he loved the people close to him, cared about his work, and added that sometimes he even cried at movies. He also admitted he had a bit of an anger problem, with occasional outbursts and moments of road rage. He didnʼt really see himself as emotionally inhibited nor did he consider that there might be an accumulation of unconscious anger behind the anger that would sometimes burst into his consciousness. So Gary was surprised when his wife and a couple of people close to him told him that he seemed angry all of the time. They also attested that he often seemed to remain passive in situations when he should have acted on legitimate feelings of anger, and also in situations where he was being put down.
Garyʼs wife, Cynthia, also considered herself a “feeling” person and in touch with her own emotions. But she confessed that she was often uncomfortable or paralyzed by the emotions she regarded as taboo. She shared that when she was growing up, she had been taught there were “good” emotions like joy and sympathy and “bad” emotions like anger, fear, and depression. She was also taught that “bad” emotions were characteristics of a weak or dysfunctional person. So, as a result of her early teachings, she found that it threatened her self-esteem when she would experience or admit to experiencing these “bad” emotions.
Many of us, to a greater or lesser extent, were taught, or indoctrinated, into developing a repressive style like Gary or Cynthia, when facing any of our strong emotions. We were not encouraged to try to understand them, their origins, and their meaning. Being emotionally overwhelmed was often treated as a source of shame and embarrassment. And if it was compounded by tendencies towards being a perfectionist, an accommodator, sensitive, or feeling compelled to be good, then the experience was exacerbated by feelings of losing control, being rejected, and even of being attacked and humiliated, by our own inner critic, if no one else. We found out, early on, that being angry, expressing disappointment, withdrawing in sadness, and other deeply felt expressions were considered childish and immature. So we adapted by attempting to avoid conflict, to keep the peace, and to shun “wasting energy” by being emotional. Because of this adaptation, we often became anesthetized and passive, with a paralysis of consciousness, in a state of defensive, intellectual lethargy.
For the most part, though, we are often so unaware of these defenses against our emotions and our style of repressing them that, like Gary before his heart attack, we donʼt even notice our real feelings or distinguish them from our thoughts. In this pragmatic world we live in, the wisdom of our emotions is usually discounted and we are instructed to avoid our emotions whenever we are making important decisions. Repressing our emotions then causes us to develop an inauthentic, false persona as well as a distorted value system. Being determined to control our emotions and our bodies also diminishes the connection to our heart and isolates us in our heads.
Whether occurring from a recent event, or from our childhood, repressed emotions live on, and it takes more and more energy to keep them under control. There is no timeline in our unconscious; emotions that have been repressed stay as alive as they were when they happened. It is no wonder then, that passion, love, and purpose are not readily available to us, and that somewhere deep inside, our rebellious feelings continue to tell us that we are somehow betraying our true selves.
The way to strengthen our self, our ego, is to learn how to truly experience our emotions. Pursuing self-knowledge and awareness then become the cornerstones for cultivating our relationship with our emotions. The emotions that we have repressed and that have been regarded as dark, irrational, threatening, and undesirable must now be brought into the light of our awareness, and be recognized and accepted for the truthfulness they reveal. Tucked behind these denied feelings are our wounds that need to be healed and our shadows, the parts of ourselves we have exiled, in order to become acceptable and safe. These emotions that are struggling to break into our awareness through many kinds of symptoms are actually messengers telling us that there are aspects of ourselves longing to be found…longing to be recognized and to become active parts of who we are.
It is important to be willing to conscientiously pursue these feelings by reflecting upon our experiences and our emotional history. We must look for the emotions that are trying to become known, the ones we feel in our bodies, the ones in our dreams, and the ones that slip into our minds when we are half asleep, ruminating in our beds. This is the winding path to integrating our true feelings and to learning how they can expand and inform us. The ambiance of our lives and the richness of our relationships as well as our capacity to be passionate, loving, creative, and authentic as we move through life ALL depend upon our ability to listen to and support our emotional wellbeing.
Being able to feel deeply and to know why we actually feel a particular way is our key to understanding how engaged in life we really are. Our feelings help us to gauge how much we like or donʼt like something, how much we value or donʼt value something, whether something is congruent with who we really are, whether something diminishes us or supports and affirms us, and whether something or someone is violating our boundaries, or affirming and respecting our personhood. Listening to and understanding our emotions help us stop mishandling our needs and those of the people we care about. It allows our “feeling function” (a Jungian term), or our emotional intelligence, to provide “messages” so we can pay attention to our relationships and cultivate personal values that emphasize our whole being – head, heart, and hands – not just the pragmatic and conventional aspects. Tremendous energy then becomes available to us – that can daily strengthen and nourish us, and help us feel safely rooted within ourselves.
February 13, 2015
Facing the Death Mother Lecture Video
A lecture by Dr. Massimilla Harris, Ph.D., Zurich-trained Jungian Analyst and Author
On October 28-29, 2011, Massimilla led her lecture and workshop titled “Facing the Death Mother.” The response for this event was great, and we are pleased to announce that a recording of the lecture is now available for you to watch.
Renewing the wounding of the feminine on a personal and societal level is one of the most important challenges for men and women today. Yet, due to the wounding of this great archetypal force we continue to experience the deadly influence of the Death Mother which entraps us, kills our initiative, spirits, creativity and vitality.
This journey will focus on the very human and psychological dimensions of how the Death Mother in our culture, the wounded mothering we experienced and the results we internalized captures our lives. This healing path is based on the classic myth of Medusa, enriched with personal experiences and psychological insights that open our direction toward healing and renewed personal consciousness. It will help us examine our assumptions about ourselves and our lives in order to move from paralysis to full vitality and creativity — and most of all to a deeper love of ourselves, others and life.
The material from this lecture is the basis of Massimilla’s and Bud’s forthcoming book Into the Heart of the Feminine. Through the end of February 2015, this new book is available to preorder at a 20% discount through Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville. Purchase your copy today and receive it in early March at http://www.malaprops.com/heart-feminine-signed-copy.
January 26, 2015
Empowering Our Ego Part One: The Ground of Individuation
by Bud Harris, Ph.D.
Imagine how it would feel…
to have the strength to quietly assert yourself…to have the ambition to want to discover new talents and abilities…to find a new sense of confidence, self-respect and self-esteem… and what this could do for your life.
The renewal of hope in difficult times, making significant changes in our lives, developing the will to live with purpose and love – including loving Life itself, begins with empowering our ego. Our ego gets a bad rap in our everyday culture and is identified as being egocentric, as housing our distracted “monkey mind,” as based on superficial appearances, and other negative characteristics.
We seem to think that our religious, spiritual paths and philosophies are either telling us to get rid of or to transcend our egos. But when we are narcissistic, anxious, preoccupied, feeling shame or guilt, and so on, it isnʼt our egoʼs fault. From a perspective based on the work of Carl Jung, our ego has been taken over by a psychological complex. (For more information on complexes and Dr. Jungʼs approach, listen to my lecture, “A Lifetime of Promise: A Jungian Guide to Discovering the Transforming Power in Complexes” and download the lecture handouts from my website, www.budharris.com).
The answer to these problems is to work through our complexes, which will actually expand and strengthen our true ego. Our ego, Jung writes, is that part of our psyche that we think of as our “I.” Until we begin the inner journey in earnest, though, we generally think of our ego as our entire personality. In daily life, it is regarded as our conscious intelligence, our everyday brain that thinks, plans, organizes, and runs the activities of our lives. It is also the part of us that is vulnerable to our complexes, to shame, to guilt, and to a variety of fears. As long as the ego is considered “alone” in our personality and not connected to our center, the Self, it continues to long for safety, security, and control over life and events.
The Self, Jung has informed us, is a greater entity than we realize, and that it contains our ego. The Self, he says, incorporates our personal and collective unconscious and is the home of the archetypes within us. The Self is the creating principle within us, the operating force behind our growth, and the regulating and shaping principle. It contains the pattern or blueprint for our development and is the goal of our personal journey into wholeness and uniqueness. In Jungian circles, we have often heard that the pattern in the Self is like the potential pattern of an oak tree in an acorn. What we have not heard about as much, is the acorn also contains the force to make the tree grow, even in dry and rocky soil.
It is of great benefit to us if we can become open to this force within us to grow, to heal, and to become whole by fulfilling our inner pattern. It takes courage to have this kind of openness, and this courage frequently arises during times when we are unhappy or desperate. Unfortunately, if we are relatively well fed and clothed, many of us are very reluctant to open up to the inner quest for a more conscious realization of our potentials. Yet, somewhere deep inside, we all know that such openness, imagination, and the journey-quest are at the heart of every well-lived life. But it is normal for many of us to keep our teeth clenched or to put on a positive, cheerful, or even seemingly mature face in our efforts to maintain the status quo – and to refuse to change even one little bit.
So, while “hanging on” to our self-image as hard as we can, we also have the capacity to fool even ourselves and claim vociferously that we are open and flexible. That is how afraid we can be of ourselves, our unknown potentials, and of the true realities of life. Real life has a tendency to try to push us to confront our shadows, to question our dearly held values, and the belief systems that have guided our lives. (To find out more about the term shadow, refer to my book, Knowing the Questions, Living the Answers: A Jungian Guide through the Paradoxes of Peace, Conflict, and Love that Mark a Lifetime.)
We call individuation ʻa journey into wholenessʼ because it means the continuous conscious development of “knowing oneself” and the growing awareness of our need to know the greater Self. We come to learn, at a profound level, how to be supported by the Self and how to become the expression of its pattern and potentials in how we live. From these experiences, we learn how to feel at home in life and within ourselves. It also comes to mean that we are concurrently facing the truth about the reality we are living in.
The critical juncture in our individuation process is for our ego to enter into a full relationship with the Self. This relationship means acknowledging that the seat of our conscious personality is actually in the Self. In other words, we need to allow our ego, our small self, to “shift” and be centered in the Self. We must not just make this shift intellectually – we must live it in our active lives. The purpose, values, and direction of our lives that are supporting us now come directly from the Self. This realization of the Self is an acknowledgement there is a power within us that is greater than we are, that has intentions for our lives that may not match our egoʼs goals for success, security, and a “good life.” To deal with this evolving reality takes an empowered ego. In my next blogs, I will outline each of the four psychological areas in which we can take steps to empower our egos and also to heal and tap into the strength in our shadows.
To love our life is to love the pattern and potentials within us that are seeking to be lived. Like any artist, when we devote ourselves to the art of living, we must become empowered to dedicate our lives to it. Our lives then take place in an atmosphere of individuation, and become the context for becoming who and what we truly are. We must then be ready to find all the aspects of human experience through this process of individuation – pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, inspiration, and yes, at times, despair.
Individuation is a call from the soul, a vocation. It is not a self-improvement program to which we try to devote 15 – 30 minutes a day. A vocation – which is an actual “calling” (from the Latin root, “to call”) – is demanding, consuming, and rewarding. And, as you may imagine, it calls us to go into places and directions we fear. In going into the places we fear, however, we will be following Jungʼs map. To navigate this journey requires strength, ambition of a new kind, imagination, and a love of Life. These qualities are within us and within our shadows, and the support for developing these qualities is within our Self. In my next blog, I will begin discussing the first of the four psychological experiences we must cultivate in order to empower our ego for this journey.
(Read Part Two: Emotions: The Royal Messenger of the Unconscious)
(Read Part Three: The Groundwork for Becoming Self-Reliant)
(Read Part Four: The Need for Developing a New Value System)
Empowering Our Ego: Part One
by Bud Harris, Ph.D.
Imagine how it would feel…
to have the strength to quietly assert yourself…to have the ambition to want to discover new talents and abilities…to find a new sense of confidence, self-respect and self-esteem… and what this could do for your life.
The renewal of hope in difficult times, making significant changes in our lives, developing the will to live with purpose and love – including loving Life itself, begins with empowering our ego. Our ego gets a bad rap in our everyday culture and is identified as being egocentric, as housing our distracted “monkey mind,” as based on superficial appearances, and other negative characteristics.
We seem to think that our religious, spiritual paths and philosophies are either telling us to get rid of or to transcend our egos. But when we are narcissistic, anxious, preoccupied, feeling shame or guilt, and so on, it isnʼt our egoʼs fault. From a perspective based on the work of Carl Jung, our ego has been taken over by a psychological complex. (For more information on complexes and Dr. Jungʼs approach, listen to my lecture, “A Lifetime of Promise: A Jungian Guide to Discovering the Transforming Power in Complexes” and download the lecture handouts from my website, www.budharris.com).
The answer to these problems is to work through our complexes, which will actually expand and strengthen our true ego. Our ego, Jung writes, is that part of our psyche that we think of as our “I.” Until we begin the inner journey in earnest, though, we generally think of our ego as our entire personality. In daily life, it is regarded as our conscious intelligence, our everyday brain that thinks, plans, organizes, and runs the activities of our lives. It is also the part of us that is vulnerable to our complexes, to shame, to guilt, and to a variety of fears. As long as the ego is considered “alone” in our personality and not connected to our center, the Self, it continues to long for safety, security, and control over life and events.
The Self, Jung has informed us, is a greater entity than we realize, and that it contains our ego. The Self, he says, incorporates our personal and collective unconscious and is the home of the archetypes within us. The Self is the creating principle within us, the operating force behind our growth, and the regulating and shaping principle. It contains the pattern or blueprint for our development and is the goal of our personal journey into wholeness and uniqueness. In Jungian circles, we have often heard that the pattern in the Self is like the potential pattern of an oak tree in an acorn. What we have not heard about as much, is the acorn also contains the force to make the tree grow, even in dry and rocky soil.
It is of great benefit to us if we can become open to this force within us to grow, to heal, and to become whole by fulfilling our inner pattern. It takes courage to have this kind of openness, and this courage frequently arises during times when we are unhappy or desperate. Unfortunately, if we are relatively well fed and clothed, many of us are very reluctant to open up to the inner quest for a more conscious realization of our potentials. Yet, somewhere deep inside, we all know that such openness, imagination, and the journey-quest are at the heart of every well-lived life. But it is normal for many of us to keep our teeth clenched or to put on a positive, cheerful, or even seemingly mature face in our efforts to maintain the status quo – and to refuse to change even one little bit.
So, while “hanging on” to our self-image as hard as we can, we also have the capacity to fool even ourselves and claim vociferously that we are open and flexible. That is how afraid we can be of ourselves, our unknown potentials, and of the true realities of life. Real life has a tendency to try to push us to confront our shadows, to question our dearly held values, and the belief systems that have guided our lives. (To find out more about the term shadow, refer to my book, Knowing the Questions, Living the Answers: A Jungian Guide through the Paradoxes of Peace, Conflict, and Love that Mark a Lifetime.)
We call individuation ʻa journey into wholenessʼ because it means the continuous conscious development of “knowing oneself” and the growing awareness of our need to know the greater Self. We come to learn, at a profound level, how to be supported by the Self and how to become the expression of its pattern and potentials in how we live. From these experiences, we learn how to feel at home in life and within ourselves. It also comes to mean that we are concurrently facing the truth about the reality we are living in.
The critical juncture in our individuation process is for our ego to enter into a full relationship with the Self. This relationship means acknowledging that the seat of our conscious personality is actually in the Self. In other words, we need to allow our ego, our small self, to “shift” and be centered in the Self. We must not just make this shift intellectually – we must live it in our active lives. The purpose, values, and direction of our lives that are supporting us now come directly from the Self. This realization of the Self is an acknowledgement there is a power within us that is greater than we are, that has intentions for our lives that may not match our egoʼs goals for success, security, and a “good life.” To deal with this evolving reality takes an empowered ego. In my next blogs, I will outline each of the four psychological areas in which we can take steps to empower our egos and also to heal and tap into the strength in our shadows.
To love our life is to love the pattern and potentials within us that are seeking to be lived. Like any artist, when we devote ourselves to the art of living, we must become empowered to dedicate our lives to it. Our lives then take place in an atmosphere of individuation, and become the context for becoming who and what we truly are. We must then be ready to find all the aspects of human experience through this process of individuation – pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, inspiration, and yes, at times, despair.
Individuation is a call from the soul, a vocation. It is not a self-improvement program to which we try to devote 15 – 30 minutes a day. A vocation – which is an actual “calling” (from the Latin root, “to call”) – is demanding, consuming, and rewarding. And, as you may imagine, it calls us to go into places and directions we fear. In going into the places we fear, however, we will be following Jungʼs map. To navigate this journey requires strength, ambition of a new kind, imagination, and a love of Life. These qualities are within us and within our shadows, and the support for developing these qualities is within our Self. In my next blog, I will begin discussing the first of the four psychological experiences we must cultivate in order to empower our ego for this journey.
