A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity

by James Hollis

Carl Jung believed that this life is a short pause between two mysteries.

Questions get us on our journey, and I’ve often said to people in psychoanalysis, “This is not about curing you because you’re not a disease, you’re a process. This is about making your life more interesting to you—a life full of adventure, a life full of daily choices that create and express your values.”

Symptoms often are, in a sense, indications that our psyche is not amused by our choices and so it offers alternatives.

Lifting our unfinished business off of someone else is truly a heroic and loving thing to do.

Little do we realize, until perhaps the consequences pile high, that we are still captive to early formative experiences and are not exercising the powers of the emergent adulthood we in fact possess.

Gaining a sense of worth and recovering personal authority thus becomes the single most important task of the second half of life.

Separating your journey from your history is difficult but essential to a free and fuller life.

That’s why this work is not narcissistic. It’s about finding something worthier of our service than our inherited stories or those adaptive patterns that bind us to a disabling past.

Psychopathology, then, is the autonomous protest of our inner life to the conditions of our outer life, whether from our choices or whether imposed upon us by circumstances or others. So there’s always the invitation to consider: What does the soul want?

Is what I am doing in accord with my vocation? Does it serve the calling of my soul? Or is it in service to the ego under one of its many occupations by my stories or the world’s stories imposed upon me?

When we are in accord with the terrain of our inner life, we experience supportive energy, a feeling of confirmation, and most of all, most elusive but most necessary, a sense of meaning, fulfillment, and purpose.

But for each traveling soul, the summons is to recognize the role fate plays in limiting us and yet to honor destiny seeking to unfold through us.

The fear management systems that we were obliged to organize have now become shadow governments for us. They run our lives, and it’s understandable that taking them on is daunting because we will feel less secure. Perhaps we will feel more agitated, more at risk, more vulnerable, but it’s only through living that risk that we can get a larger life. If we’re walking in shoes too small, what does it mean to step into larger shoes?

The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear. If the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated.

What “neurosis” really means is a conflict between the world around us, our own nature trying to express itself, and of alternatively, all of our adaptive systems trying to work these things out.

You’re here to live your journey, which is by definition a separate one, a different one, but we do belong to a community of exiles. We don’t run for office. We don’t exercise a lot of social power out there, but there are more people like you than you would imagine. You’re not as alone as you imagine.

We swim in the mystery, and we have to track the movement of Divinity through the tangible world, to try to track the role of the unconscious powers—which by definition is something we don’t know—to see them as they manifest in our dreams, our bodies, our patterns; and to realize we are carriers, humble carriers of the life force that has little interest in our comfort or certainties.

Each of us, in our separate way, is challenged to cooperate in the creation of our story, to write it perhaps in a more considered consciousness, even knowing that all the time, someone else, various accumulated spectral presences that we carry in our psyches, will be trying to write it for us.

There’s a deeply coursing connection between the child that we were and the person we’ve become. If we’ve forgotten that link, then we have to re-member it and bring its invisible reality into the tangible world, knowing that our real enemies in this world are not out there. They’re intrapsychic.

Fear says, Life is too much. It’s too big. You can’t manage that. You’re not up to that. Hide out, hang out, stay away. It’s better that way. Lethargy says, Chill out, cool off, have a bonbon, turn on the telly. Tomorrow’s another day.

Our recurrent denial of the summons to a larger life is probably our biggest shadow issue of all.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples? The myths about dragons at the last moment turned into a princess. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible in its deepest being is something helpless that wants help from us.7

“I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardships; but once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then, I will swim.”

Remember his notion: our task is not goodness, for goodness would only prove one-sided and bring forth unexpected darkness sooner or later. Our task is wholeness, a fuller expression of our human possibilities.

One of the biggest projects of the second half of life is to recover a sense of permission. Most people do not feel permission to live their journey.

Despite these spectral presences—the haunting of griefs, betrayals, and blocking agencies—we still have a job in life, and that’s to show up as best we can.

We live in haunted houses and sleep in memory’s unmade bed.

Neurosis is what rises out of the conflict between our instinctual realities and our cultural claims upon us.

Yes, this is still with you, but you also have an enlarged consciousness and capacity to address it today in a way you couldn’t at that point.

One of the questions that can be very helpful to ask ourselves from time to time is, Does this choice, does this juncture in my life, does this relational situation, does this work situation, or is the path I’m on make me a larger person or make me a smaller person? I believe we know the answer to that question. We may not wish to know the answer, we may flee the answer, but we know the answer. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out, we can live in mauvais foi or bonne foi—bad faith or good faith—with our own souls. Something in us knows, always.

Yet if we reflect upon it, we realize that avoidance of the old fears ignores the possibility that there is an adult on the scene who stands by readily available to take life on, who has understandings, ranges of choice not available to the child, and, most of all, depth of resilience that maturation brings. This adult who is our guide and protector is, of course, ourselves.

You know, it’s more important to be honest about this stuck place in me. It’s more important to live this journey as authentically as I can and not be owned by that. Consciousness can help tilt the balance and move us into change and risk, knowing that when we’re doing the right thing, the resources of life are there to support us. Something in nature rises to support us.

As I’ve said to many a client, this is not about curing you. You’re not a disease. This is about making your life more interesting to you. It is an interesting journey, and it continues to unfold in challenging ways. The new mystery is as near as tonight’s dream. I wish you well in exploring that unfolding mystery that wishes its expression in the world through each of us.