Wednesday, May 19, 2010

When I was a teenager a woman named Martha Boellner in Roswell, New Mexico, gave me a going-away gift with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that she'd written on a card.  "Hitch your wagon to a star," she wrote in her beautiful hand-writing.  At the time I didn't know fully what that meant, but it resonated with something in me and I never forgot it. 

"Don't settle for a popcorn deal," my dad would tell me as I was growing up.  "Make your life count; do what you can do.  Don't settle."   Later when I was lagging in confidence he would sing, "I have confidence...."  from the movie "The Sound of Music" and tell me that he had confidence in me that I could do whatever I set my mind to do.  I'll never forget the moment when my mother beamed her brown eyes into mine and said with a fierceness I'll never forget, "Don't ever let anyone take your dreams away from you."

So it was that the idea of "stepping into the largeness of my life" was not a new idea for me when I began taking classes under the masterful Jim Hollis.  However, to hear Jim lecture about the moral obligation we have to become who we are intended to be added other dimensions to the idea and responsibility of being who you are meant to be.  Indeed, one of the things that is seared in my mind and heart is Jim's passion for the call of each of us to live the purpose for which we were intended and to dare to take the adventure of individuation in order to become authentic, real and genuine.  To hear Jim lecture is to be challenged and confronted and inspired.   

In the book WHAT MATTERS MOST:  LIVING A MORE CONSIDERED LIFE, Jungian analyst and author James Hollis sets forth thirteen values that he has chosen that matter most.  In this first of a four-part series on Chapter Five, we are considering "That We Step Into Largeness."

In the first line of this chapter Jim quotes Jung who said that we "walk in shoes too small for us."  At other times I have heard Jim talk about how we live with our souls bound like Chinese women of old whose feet were bound to make them small.  Only today I found a quote from one of Jim's lectures at the C. G. Jung Center in Houston:  "You are accountable for the life you live; you are accountable for the life you don't live."   This issue of stepping up to the plate of one's own "wild and precious life" is an enormous issue and for some it is so enormous that they shrink back even from considering where and how and if their souls are bound in roles, external expectations and demands, an image contrived by some external authority, a label you've worn since childhood.  When the bindings we wear have been layered and lacquered onto us within a religious connotation and religious language, the binding is especially hard to escape.

The first paragraphs of this chapter take my breath away.  Jim plunges into the heart of the matter immediately by asserting that "we mostly live through adaptive psychologies rather than being guided by an instinctually driven center that wishes embodiment through us into the world."  He says that "living small is easier than living large" and goes on to say that "Living large is not narcissistic inflation, but rather encountered in the daily summons to risk being who we are."

Wow!  -- And that's just the first paragraph.

When and as I teach or work with individuals in spiritual direction, the mere mention of becoming one's true Self evokes various responses.  (Jung used the capital S in referring to the uniqueness of us, the authentic part, the part of us that is the essence of who we are.)  Often and sadly, persons will reveal that their understanding of the True Self is the negative part, the "part that if others knew, they would reject."  Part of my job as a lecturer and teacher is to open up the possibilities that that True Self also contains the gold and the giftedness of the person.

I don't believe that there is only one way to know oneself, to become authentic or to individuate (the term Jung used to describe the process of becoming authentic), but I do believe what I have learned from Jim Hollis, and that is that without reflection and conscious thought and choice we humans tend to live lives of routine, reaction and habit. It's just easier that way, isnt it?  It's easier, that is, until it becomes too hard to bear.

Without waking up to the possibilities that there is something in us that wants out and something in us that wants to be expressed, we tend to live adapted to the culture in which we grew up and live.

Early on, we learn that we must adapt and conform to the rules and desires of the Big People in order to survive.   In the framework within which Jim teaches and writes, the ego is the central organ of consciousness.   It is what gets us up and keeps us paying our bills and taking care of daily life.  I've heard the ego self also called the small self, the false self, the self we present to the world or "who I think I am"; it  is the part of us that shifts and shrinks and contorts in order to fit in, go along, get along, gain approval, avoid rejection and have a place in your family or your culture. 

The Self, in this formation, is hard to define because it is so vast and mysterious, but it is the essence of who a person is.  I like to say that it is the imago dei, the image of God, that is stamped within every human being.   Ultimately,  the True Self will make itself known, and until and unless it is acknowledged, it will assert itself through depression or dreams, physical symptoms or relational difficulties, restlessness or a crisis of one kind or another, demanding to be heard, honored and lived.

"You're going to have to decide if you are going to keep on people-pleasing or become authentic, Jeanie," I was told on a hot August afternoon many years ago.  "You're going to have to decide if you are going to to keep on lying or start telling the truth, and you're going to have to decide if you are going to die or live, and it is that serious."

I hadn't had things put to me like that before.

I felt as if I had had a bomb go off in my body.  Stunned, speechless, terrified, I knew that I was at one of those turning points of life that, if avoided, would come back to me in another, tougher way.  If I could muster the courage to walk into my fears, face myself and the habits of a lifetime with unvarnished and ruthless honesty, I might live in a whole new way.  If I could dare to allow myself to be carried in the process of depth analysis to a new land, it would be for me like walking out of the darkness of death and into the light of life.  If I could start telling myself the truth I might step into a larger life.

"I feel as if I am Lazarus in the tomb," I said, weakly.  "I can hear Jesus calling out to me to come out, but I need someone to help me unwrap the death wrappings."

I'd never spoken that image before.  I'd never identified with Lazarus before, but in that moment I felt the suffocating death wrappings of a lifetime of meeting others' expectations of me, suppressing and repressing my instinctual, natural and God-created Self and denying my real feelings in service to the various roles of my life.  I knew that the words that had pierced my consciousness were words of profound truth and that I'd better listen to them.

I had no idea where the path of depth analysis would take me; I just knew that I had to take the journey.

Along the way Thomas Merton's prayer from THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE, given to me by my friend Howard Hovde, was a constant source of comfort and strength to me:

   My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

   I do not see the road ahead of me.

   I cannot know for certain where it will end.

   Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I am following your will

     does not mean that I am actually doing so.

   But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

   And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

   I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

   And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.

   Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

   I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

   and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

What about you?  Have you sensed a summons to a larger call, a more expansive mind, a bigger heart, a greater risk?

Can you identify with the Lazarus story, recorded in John 11?  If so, what are your death wrappings?  Naming them is the first step toward shedding them.

How do you feel about opening your mind to a new idea of who you are?

What does it do to you to think about challenging your own fears, your prejudices and biases?

Where do you feel stuck?  trapped?  backed into a corner?   What do you need to do to get yourself moving?

How do you feel about opening your heart to someone different from you?  How do you feel about opening your heart at all?

What if you took a risk to gain something important?

Are you willing to give up your attachment to a label that you've worn since childhood, an addiction, a self-sabotaging habit?

What if you faced your biggest fears and stood up to the monsters in your mind?

Or do you prefer to sit on the porch of your life and watch the world go by?

What's calling to you?  Whose permission do you need to take the first step out into a larger world?

Wherever you are, grace to you--
Jeanie

This is the first in a four week series of reflections based on Chapter Five of the book WHAT MATTERS MOST:  LIVING A MORE CONSIDERED LIFE,  by James Hollis.   You can order Jim's books from here -- http://www.junghouston.org or from http://www.amazon.com.     You can also order CDs of his lecture from this course from the Jung Center in Houston.     Previous posts from this series can be found by clicking "What Matters" on the home page of this website.   I welcome and enjoy your comments, posted here on this website or sent to me by e-mail.

Lectures from a four-week course at the Jung Center by Jungian analyst Pittman McGehee entitled "The Hero's Journey" can also be ordered.   Those lectures, based on Joseph Campbell's work, amplify the theme in this series of blog posts on "stepping into the largeness" of one's life.