In the second half of life, the questions become: 'Who, apart from the roles you play, are you? What does the soul ask of you? Do you have the wherewithal to shift course, to deconstruct your painfully achieved identity, risking failure, marginalization and loss of collective approval?' No small task.
The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.
To experience some healing within yourself, and to contribute healing to the world, you are summoned to wade through the muck from time to time.
How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?
We serve the world by finding out what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gifts with others.
There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.
The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.
Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties never grow.
As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.
The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.
Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.
What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.
We best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.
In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.
The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be 'solved,' then no change will occur.
The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.
We are all meaning-seeking, meaning creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer.
We are not here to fit in. . . we are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. . . we are here to become more and more ourselves.
The purpose of therapy is not to remove suffering but to move through it to an enlarged consciousness that can sustain the polarity of painful opposites.
One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe-the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories, including the Book of Job, painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it.