Trusting, even when our energy is low

There seems to be an expectation today that we should always be in good mood, and unhappiness is taken as a sign that something is wrong. Therefore we are continually bombarded in advertising with images of smiling and cheerful people and families.  When we find that the reality of our day-to-day encounters with life involves occasional challenges or simply ordinary routine, we can be tempted to think that something is wrong. The prevailing model has no place for the dips in mood or even depressions that are a normal part of life and which can be seen in the cycles of nature. We have to learn not to fear those moments when we do not feel completely in control or lose our sense of direction for a while. Often our psyches are wise and know when they need to rest.  As Jung states here, the lack of energy is marking a period of transition as the energies needed for growth are stored for the future and  this is felt as a lack of energy in the present. This can happen over a weekend or over months or even years. What I have learned in listening to people on their journey is to hold a space and trust, even though the meaning of what they are going through is not clear just yet.

There are moments in human life when a new page is turned. New interests and tendencies appear which have hitherto received no attention, or there is a sudden change of personality. During the incubation period of such a change we can often observe a loss of conscious energy: the new development has drawn off the energy it needs from consciousness. This lowering of energy can be seen most clearly before the onset of certain psychoses and also in the empty stillness which precedes creative work.

Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16.

How we grow and mature

Healing does not mean that one will reach an end-point where all is clear and conflict free. How could we imagine that the attitudes of one stage of our life would be adequate for subsequent stages and altered realities? While it is the secret hope of the nervous ego to fix the world and make it more predictable and secure, all is in flux. Finding the secret sources of our distress, and being enlarged by the suffering of this conflict, is how we grow and mature. As Jung notes, “Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness”.  Our goal is not happiness, which is evanescent and impossible to sustain; it is meaning which broadens us and carries us toward our destiny

James Holllis, Creating a Life: Finding your Individual Path.

Keeping our life whole

Anything you do to escape the fundamental duality of ego consciousness just kicks more energy into it. Your only choice is to stop. That unsplit, unifying place is found at the fulcrum. This is the holy place, the whole place. The demand for human consciousness to have the “right” thing –  at the exclusion of something else –  just sets the wheel in motion again. There is a kind of consciousness that assists slowing down. If you can honestly assess what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, this is getting closer.

Practically speaking, if we would spend as much time being alert and aware as we do worrying, we would be out of any mess fairly soon. When you stop fighting your situation, you just have the situation but no longer the struggle to cope with. Generally one can endure that. This is to cease wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality —  to stop complaining about what is.

Robert Johnson

Why we get stuck

We all have stuck places, and generally we know them, yet we remain stuck. Why? Does knowledge not make it possible to become unstuck? Yes and no. We remain stuck because beneath the surface our stuckness is wired to a complex. When we approach that stuck place, we activate energies below the visual range, and they in turn fuel the engines of anxiety. This anxiety has the power to flood the ego and shut down alternative choices. We are not aware this internal governance system has just usurped our lives, but we feel immediately more comfortable that it has. This wiring, which connects anxiety with ego, always has its origin in the past, often a disempowered past. This circuitry, which imposes history into the present, is why we stay stuck. By implication, getting unstuck demands that one be willing to bear the anxiety occasioned by the invisible circuitry beneath consciousness.

James Hollis, On this Journey we Call Our Life

Integrating the shadow

As other posts this week have already discussed, true human development comes from relaxing with, accepting and integrating aspects of our personality that make us fearful and insecure. As Jung said, our journey in life is not towards some kind of perfection, but towards wholeness.

If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow.

And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way

in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.

Jung

Making the darkness conscious

Ultimately, any attempt at finding deeper meaning in our life which avoids the messy parts of our personality or our history – or which is afraid of the truth hidden in our deeper emotions – will leave us open to ongoing issues that will sabotage our real contentment. It is not only by ascending that we find greater happiness, but also by descending.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,

but by making the darkness conscious.

Jung