The intelligence of 'Trance'.

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone. 

-- Emily Dickinson

There's an incredible book called The Inner World of Trauma by Donald Kalsched.  In the book, Kalsched explores the way self-destructive habits get created in response to early traumas we might experienced.  Essentially, he suggests that these self-destructive habits were ORIGINALLY intelligent because they allowed us to survive what was unbearable at the time.  As we begin find a way to start looking at these painful habits later in life - the gift and burden of consciousness then becomes learning how to forebear what we once could not in order to give up what no longer helps us thrive.

The intelligence of the psyche will not allow us to go there, however, until we feel authentically safe enough to survive this kind of regression into old psychic injuries.  In my work as a therapist, I often realize that the symptomatic 'acting out' that brings people into my office must then be intrinsically linked to an unresolved feeling of danger.  Figuring out how to help people get safe in their bodies, safe in their relationship with me, and safely connected to their own inner reality feels like the heart and soul of what I might hope to achieve with each new person I see.

Lately, I've become convinced that figuring out how to create this safe space for someone else requires a certain reverence for the 'symptoms' themselves.  When we approach our destructive habits with curiosity and compassion, I believe we afford ourselves a chance to learn how to follow their trail into an accurate understanding of their symbolic function.  Once we can see clearly how our own attempts to survive our lives may no longer be helping us to do so, we might be able to forgive ourselves for holding on to what hurts us and begin to let go.  It sounds like somewhat of a paradox, of course, but I truly believe that it's our capacity to honor the original intelligence that created these personal habits that imprison us the most, that then gives us the possibility to begin living beyond them.

Namaste.

Sacred Spaces

Grateful: for ritual, for compassion, for safe spaces to do inner work, for grace, for creativity, for community, and for reminders to approach all of these light-filled qualities with the kind of humility that acknowledges their ever-present shadow.

- CG Jung Institute, 1.6.2013

Today's Solar Eclipse!

I used to pay attention to horoscopes in the newspaper or magazines because I thought they were quirky and fun.  Maybe it also gave me a sense of cosmic connection when they were accurate as well.  Over the years, however, I've had more exposure to some very serious practitioners of the art, and any residual dismissive attitude has been consequently silenced.  According to the author of one particular astrology blog I read, these are the potential gifts of today's solar eclipse in Scorpio:

"Information lives in light.  This information comes from the heart of a Star–a star called the Sun. Our Sun holds information from its Creator (most likely the Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy; the Galactic Center; Hunab Ku)… to Imagine what types of information is encoded within these primordial ancient galactic wave forms is mind bending. And light isn’t just information, it’s also energy. 

When the Moon aligns perfectly between Sun and Earth we experience Solar Eclipses.  Divinely infused New Moons meant to catapult us onto the right path.  It is up to us to be good tricksters in this opportune space.  Nobody is going to do this work for you.  It is up to you.  Be quick, be stealthy, and have an idea of what you are looking for.  Without the light of the Sun, we are “eclipsed” and free to roam in the Shadow of our being for a short time, rewriting aspects of our story we have been hungry to edit. 

What is the Shadow?  The Shadow in Jungian psychology is the unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of personality.  And so, during Eclipses we get to choose what gets released or incinerated in our unconscious dumping grounds.  Only with intent will you experience the stellar magic of these Dragon holes.  Intention and courage will bring you to the moments where you become weightless, carried by Love and nothing else…."

For more moon updates - check out this blog:  Holes To Heaven.

The Intelligence of Play.

"Who knows what makes us play?  The young of very many species, including our own, spontaneously chase, leap, twist, wrestle and cavort, promoting strength and endurance, instinct, social bonding and adaptation.  Complex play with objects and goals is associated with more complex brains.  But playing is also, apparently, just for the sheer pleasure of play.  An aquarium fish will repeatedly leap in and out of a tiny waterfall.  Ravens have been observed sledding on their backs down slopes of snow, and kea parrots toss rocks in the air.  Elephants kneel to equalize play with a smaller playmate.  Cats, dogs and primates, among others, incorporate objects and obstacles in their play and often have favorite toys.  Dolphins invite play with human swimmers.  Play, in fact, is a principal way in which acquaintance is made with another".  -- from The Book of Symbols

Intuitively, we know how important play is for our ongoing development.  We teach children games and give them time to play.  Hopscotch, for example, has it's origins in myths about the soul's journey from earth to heaven through a labyrinth.  I have no idea why we stop valuing this way of learning for our adult selves, but I think it's a grievous error to do so.  As Ramikrishna reminds us, "The divine mother is always sportive.  The universe is her play... her pleasure is in continuing the game".

The Book of Symbols further elaborates: "Psychologically, consciousness and unconscious interact and impact one another in all kinds of play.  The reverie of play unveils feelings, aspirations, impressions, locked up pieces of experience and potentialities.  Play can evoke the affinity and polarity between psychic opposites, and dynamics of exclusion and integration, separation and reunification.  Alchemy described a part of the opus as "child's play" despite the arduous nature of the work of self-understanding, suggesting that psychic process requires an attitude of play and that the imagination was a primary tool of the adept".

Carl Jung played "children's games" of drawing, sand-tray, making models out of clay, and dialoging with unseen figures, all of which are ways of engaging the unconscious energies of the psyche in order to coax them into consciousness.  Physicists, also, play speculative "god-games" with specialized toys that can only be handled safely because of the agreed upon rules of a specific game.  We could conclude, consequently, that play allows for "evolutionary change, self-awareness, scientific discovery, artistic composition, invention, pleasure, good friends of multiple species and the resolution of many questions" (The Book of Symbols).

Do you remember being a young child and enthusiastically ringing someone's doorbell in order to see if they could "come out and play"?  I believe that THIS is a good intention to have with ourselves and each other throughout the entire course of our lives.  Tremendous creativity and learning can come from play in a way that few other practices are able to facilitate so... playfully.  :-)

Restor(y)ing the Body!

"You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls psyche."  -- Carl Jung

My good friend and collaborative partner, Dana, and I have been working together to create a mind + body integrative healing practice, which we have affectionately named 'Restor(y)ing the Body'. Essentially, we work together to explore the unique ways in which our clients carry their own personal stories in their physical bodies.  Much of the work we do reflects the above idea from Carl Jung, as we aim to help people discover the precise places where their ideas about themselves and their physical expressions have become interlocked in symptomatic ways.   In our practice and our workshops, we use a variety of methods to help people explore and transform these constricting patterns that exist in both the body and the mind.  These methods include (but are not limited to!) body work, shamanic techniques, energy and vibrational medicine interventions, guided meditation, and authentic movement exercises.

We also passionately agree with psychologist and spiritual teacher, Judith Blackstone, when she suggests that "our fixed grasp on ourselves and the world is not just mental but also somatic. There are rigid holding patterns throughout the whole body, limiting our capacity for cognition, emotional responsiveness and physical sensation.  Even our sensory perception is limited by the psychologically based constrictions throughout our whole body".  The real thrill for us has been watching people rediscover the magic of who they are, by reconnecting with the wisdom that can be found when the mind and body begin to dialogue at the same point of reference.

We LOVE this work, and are so excited to start sharing it with more individuals and groups of people.  If you or someone you know would be interested in beginning to learn how to re-write their own "story", whether through a private session or a workshop experience with us, please feel free to message us on our Facebook page: Restor(y)ing the Body, or email us at restoryingthebody@gmail.com!

Namaste,
Whitney & Dana

The Art of Therapy

I believe in therapy.  In fact, I believe in it so much that I am both a practitioner and a client of the craft.  Consequently, I've had the tremendous fortune of being initiated into really beautiful processes of transformation from both positions.  My own journey through this somewhat mysterious phenomena has often let me to wonder exactly why therapy "works" when it does.

In light of that confession, I'd like to link you to this lovely little essay about the potential gifts of good psychotherapy:  The Folk Art of Therapy.  This piece gives one of my favorite explanations about why and how therapy can be so powerfully transformational.  If reading it stirs your curiosity at all, I'd like to also recommend another reading assignment:  The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom.  This book does a beautiful job of exploring the subtleties of healing that the therapy relationship aims to facilitate.  If, however, you're a person who needs empirical evidence in order to believe in anything your five senses can't immediately recognize, you might want to look into this book:  The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy.  And if you have the supremely good fortune to live in the beautiful city of Chicago, and want to attend something that guarantees to facilitate a more provocative conversation than any of the above sources combined, then consider attending this lecture:  The Love Cure given through the CG Jung Institute of Chicago in early December of this year.

(Disclaimer: while I enjoy much of what each of these authors posits about the process of therapy, their beliefs about mental health and best practices do not necessarily reflect my own).

The intelligence of opposites.

Fortunately for me, I have had the very good fortune of being psychologically reared within a Jungian framework of human development.  This has allowed me to become increasingly comfortable with what often feels like endless cycles of learning and unlearning and relearning all over again.  Carl Jung calls this "integrating the opposites", and considers this process to be the central principle of individuation.  From a theoretical perspective, he posits that everything we think we know is simply an initial "thesis", which must be psychically balanced out by an initially unknown opposite or "antithesis".  This antithesis is at first constellated in the unconscious, and we are therefore entirely unaware of its presence until we are somehow forced to acknowledge it.

Recognizing and allowing any antithesis into consciousness is rarely a comfortable process for us because it typically threatens our very fragile sense of security.  Since we are creatures who have learned to feel safe in the world by labeling, categorizing, understanding, predicting, and controlling our environment, we can start to feel powerfully threatened when what we've come to rely upon is being questioned in some way.  However, the real creative treasure in all of this can only be found when we are willing to hold both our thesis and its antithesis with a degree of consciousness.  IF we can find the courage to consider not knowing what we think we know, then the stunning miracle of "synthesis" has a chance of occurring!  For example: "I'm right and you're wrong" might have the chance of becoming "I wonder if I could learn something I don't already know from this person who disagrees with my idea".  A completely gorgeous possibility for growth, right?  Unconvinced?  Here's a classic scientific application of this idea: "Turns out, light is both a wave and a particle!".

While musing over this particular psychological process the other day, it occurred to me that this kind of thinking is actually the ironic antithesis of fundamentalist thinking.  That notion made me feel really curious about the psychological principles and patterns that govern fundamentalism.  I appreciate that the term fundamentalism is most often associated with theological and religious identifications, but I think I'd like to extrapolate the term and include rigid political identifications too.  This interests me so much right now because I think we can all appreciate our current political climate of divisive, ineffective chaos.  Yes?  Sure!

I haven't come to any definite conclusions because I'm trying to be a good student of my own philosophy, but I have begun to wonder what happens to someone (psychologically) when they decide that they know anything at all absolutely.  Maybe that's the point at which we risk becoming identified with our own sentiments, and consequently unwilling to look at them critically.  It seems to me that a person in that position would thereby have to expend a lot of energy protecting themselves from anything that contradicts their particular thesis.  Tragically, the above theoretical discussion seems to suggest that the possibility of growth would also come to a screeching halt at that exact point of psychological defense.

I'm not sure how to make this notion of "integrating the opposites" sound less threatening and more appealing for people.  Nonetheless, it seems increasingly insane to think that shouting at each other from our polarized positions will allow anything new to emerge.  Instead, I'd like to imagine a conversation about health care or taxes that didn't start with defensive posturing, but began with curiosity about the opposite of what we think we know.....

Projections

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious prob

lem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

- Carl Gustav Jung