Tag: Life

Repeating

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Two Jungians writing about the fact that we often see people repeating the same story in their lives, over and over again.  Sometimes these repetitions are of a neurotic nature: returning again and again to what Jung called  “the practice and repetition of the original experience” which was laid down in childhood, even though that experience is not necessarily healthy. We see people drawn back to repeat relationships which echo the one they had with wounded parents who could not meet their needs for consistency and care. They create self-sabotaging patterns and repeat these as they are familiar, sometimes,  ironically, believing that they are the opposite of what was happening when they were little.

However, gradually, if awareness is brought to these repetitions,  a second process can take place. A deeper natural energy within us begins to challenge these choices and allows for a healing to take place. God enters through the wound, Jung said, and so if we start to make conscious these patterns, we start to grow. If left outside of awareness they will continue to haunt our lives. Thus often we are learning the same story in our life, being brought back again and again to the place where we most need to grow, where we need to find our deepest meaning. As Jung further said, a neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning, and thus repetitions  are an expression of our desire for healing, and the process by which our real Self comes into being.

The individuation process – the way of development and maturation of the psyche – does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather stadial, consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a “spiral”, the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels.

Jolande Jacobi

The coming of consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing; it is return to that which has always been

Helen Luke

Be struck by life today

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Another lovely poem by Mary Oliver on how we can look at the world – and everything we see today – as a doorway to deeper mysteries and as a place where our heart can grow. Her words reconnect us with all that is around us and with a deep sense of acceptance of our journey here.

As for life, I’m humbled,
I’m without words sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries, beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen—
a tree angel, perhaps, or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.

Mary Oliver, Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond

(Photograph courtesy of Jasmine Trotter  http://killdollphotographies.tumblr.com/)

No ground beneath our feet

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In Tibetan there is an interesting word:  ye tang che.  The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.”  Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out.   It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope.  This is an important point.  This is the beginning of the beginning.  Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be,  we will never relax with where are or who we are.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.  To seek for some lasting security is futile.  To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions.  Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain : one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking.  One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction.  Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there is anywhere to hide.

Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together.  We may still want to hold our trip together.  We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and ground just keeps moving under us.  Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can’t be done.   At every turn we realize once again that it’s completely hopeless – we can’t get any ground under our feet.

Pema Chodron

There is a deep restlessness inside us….and it is ok

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I have written before on how there is a fundamental restlessness at the heart of our being, or a fundamental loneliness, as some writers like to call it. Many are the strategies we use to get away from this, such as over-working,  continually running, throwing ourselves into relationships. staying constantly distracted.   And when those things are working for us, loneliness  does indeed seem absent. However, what we come to see over time is that is that this loneliness, or restlessness,  is something essential to human nature; we may succeed in covering it over for a while but it  can never actually go away.  As we can see in these two quotes from different sources, most wisdom traditions say the same thing: this feeling of restlessness, of having no real ground to stand on,  is part of being human, because there is nothing in existence that can completely fill the human heart. And at the end of the day this shows us the core of our practice, nothing other than learning to stay.

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.

Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it. There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

Henri Nouwen

If we are willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have  the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.  This is the first step on the path.

Pema Chodron

What we can change

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We cannot always change the perplexing conditions of our lives

– but we can change how our minds relate to them.

Tara Bennett-Goleman

Make the most of life:Stay in the present

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A similar idea to yesterday’s one posted about Saint David. We make our future happiness by taking care of the present moment.

The past is gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present. If I can relate to this moment with integrity, and then this moment with integrity, and then this moment with integrity, wakefully, then the sum of that is going to be very different over time, over many moments that stretch out into what we call a life, than a life that is lived mostly on automatic pilot, where we are reacting and being mechanical and are therefore somewhat numb.

Jon Kabat Zinn