Wednesday, June 2, 2010

What if the hokey-pokey is all there is?

What if this is your full potential?

What if this really is all there is?

On a road trip last summer I read an article in a magazine by a writer who, fed up with the bombardment of messages urging him to dream big, claim his best life and reach his full potential argued for accepting mediocrity if that really is the best you can do.  He called for embracing average and yielding to limitations.  "I'm tired of striving," he wrote.  "I just want to watch my shows, stay out of trouble and chill."  While rambling around on the internet the other night I accidentally came upon a website that pokes fun at motivational quotes and posters and encourages despair as one alternative to the constant push to better oneself. The quote, "I feel so much better now that I have given up hope" makes me smile, but it's not a smile of joy.

At first I thought the article was a joke, but as I read I realized the author of it was offering something of a blessed relief to the constant push from the culture to be bigger and better, aim for the top and take it to the next level, whatever the next level is.  There's something to be said for accepting your limitations and for being grateful for what you have, after all!  Not being able to reach the standards of beauty, success or wealth that media personalities seem to have can create feelings of inadequacy and even shame among those of us who walk a simpler path.

The idea explored in Chapter Five of James Hollis' WHAT MATTERS MOST: LIVING A MORE CONSIDERED LIFE, "that we step into largeness" is not about the power of positive thinking or the striving of the ego to add to its inflation.  Instead, it is an invitation to listen to the drumbeat of the authentic Self, beating away from within the depths of your being and live according to the guidance of your own soul.

What Jim writes and teaches is not the expansion of the ego or its symbols of success.  He's not talking about building bigger barns just for the sake of gaining outer world power and notoriety and he isn't talking about the ego-inflation of material gain or status.

I am oriented toward Jim Hollis' way of thinking.  I do believe in the largeness of the soul and I do believe that we are intended to grow and develop, expand our minds and hearts and open up to the grandness of life.   I have noticed that there are people who have everything, by the definitions and standards of American "success", and still be living a small existence, while others who have relatively little that reflects outer-world success live expansive and limitless lives.  There are people who live in large mansions who have very closed minds and there are people who live in simple dwellings who are open to the whole world.

Largeness is a matter of attitude and spirit.  It is an inside job.

Living the largeness of one's own life, as far as I can tell, requires a ruthless honesty about your own life and a willingness to question everything, not so much because you doubt, but because you want to be authentic.

Living the largeness of your own life seems to necessitate walking right straight up to your fears -- your personal ones and not those some radio personality, religious or political  leader or neighbor assigns you --and pushing through them.  Takinig on the wild things and monsters is not just a story-book challenge for children, but an everyday responsibility.

Living into the largeness of your own life calls for a willingness to know what it is you think, what and who you love and what it is you want to do with your abilities and gifts, resources and time.  Living into your own largeness requires consciousness, awareness, alertness and responsibility and rejects passivity, dependency on others to do for you what you should be doing for yourself and laziness.

On some days I have the energy to live that kind of stout courage and on other days I want to regress back into childish dependencies, hoping that someone will come along and take care of me.  On most days I do take responsibility for my life, but on other days I slip back into old patterns I formed before I had enough consciousness to know what I was doing.  On January 1 of every year I resolve to live authentically, and very soon I encounter the resistance within my own self to that challenge.

Every day of my life I am with myself, carrying my tendencies, projections, strengths and weaknesses with me wherever I go.  I want to live from my own internal guidance system and every day I must choose again to do that.

On page 69 of this chapter, Jim writes, "Still, we must admit that there is a part of each of us that is needy, frightened, intimidated and dependent.  Thinking that such an archaic, and therefore autonomous, part is not there and waiting to enlist others in its demands, is simply naive and unconscious.  Trying not to let that part dominate our life is a perpetual challenge, but it remains our chief contribution to others to lift this task off of them and take it on for ourselves."

I know a lot of people who prefer the life described in the magazine article I read last summer.  I understand that some people have had the light of hope extinguished in them.  I know that there are children who never get a chance to tap into their potential at all, much less realize it, and I know that some people die with their songs still in them, unsung.  There are those whose brilliance is burned out in addiction and some there are whose lights go out simply because they never even knew there was a light within them.  These are everyday tragedies that occur all the time.

The sadness of that is that the world doesn't get to benefit from the gifts of those persons and the persons don't get to experience the exhilaration of their own wild and precious lives.

So it is that I return to the questions I need to ask myself:

Where am I thinking small and living small?

In what part of my life have I settled into an attitude of complacency and resignation?

Are they areas of my life in which others' resistance to a larger life is constricting my own life?

In what systems do I participate that enlarge me and encourage an open mind and heart?  Which ones ask me to live small?

Where do I hurt?  What is that hurt about?

Where am I taking the easy way out?

What am I expecting others to do for me that I need to do for myself?

At the end of Jim's lectures on this book, my friends and I would sit for a few moments, trying to take in the enormity of the challenges of living what really matters in everyday life.  At dinner afterwards every week we talked about how we are profoundly grateful for a teacher who holds out the invitation to a larger life of courage and boldness.

And so it is that I ask myself other questions:

To what is life calling me today?

What love and laughter am I being offered?

What desires of my heart need to be honored?

I live knowing that the invitation carries with it a possibility of living from a place of hope instead of despair.

What about you?

Grace to you-

Jeanie

(This is the third 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.)

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

In his lecture on Chapter 5 of his book WHAT MATTERS MOST: LIVING A MORE CONSIDERED LIFE, That We Step Into Largeness,  Jim Hollis begins by asserting that even considering the invitation to step into the largeness of life and of one's own life implies that we are small.  "And we are small," he adds.

We are small against the forces of nature, the choices of others and the various parts of our lives that are unknown to us.  We are small, compared to the whole of human history, and we are small in the scheme of things in the current day, and I'm not sure I like to think about that very much.   We are small against the ravages of illness and catastrophic accidents, and who among us is large enough to conquer death?  Men and women alike spend fortunes attempting to beat the forces of time that etch themselves on every face and weave white hairs or none at all on every head, but ultimately every one of us bows to the aging process.

I prefer those positive bromides that assure me I am the master of my fate, the captain of my ship and that I can, if I believe hard enough and fervently enough, have my best life now, a wonderful life which includes position, privilege and power that go along with my achievements, accomplishments and acquisitions.

For years a small plaque sat on my desk, declaring, "Oh, God, your sea is so big and my boat is so small."   I feel sure that someone who did not want to face the reality of the small boat of his or her life either moved that plaque or took it to home, perhaps for comfort.

Jim does acknowledge the reality of our comparitive smallness to the universe, but he also comes back to the calling, written within the fiber of every human being, to grow and develop.

One of my favorite quotations is from the Talmud:  Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and breathes, grow....grow.

So perhaps that urging from within to step into the largeness of life is prompted by an angel, whispering from within you, "Grow....grow."  In Jungian thought, that prompting would originate from the Self, that essential, authentic part of the human being whose job it is to help that human being grow.

We sometimes quake and pale before our challenges, even as we long to take the risks we need to take.  Sometimes, and gloriously, we are able to move out of our lethargy or fear and reach for that which is intended for us.

On my best days, I believe with all of my heart, mind and soul that when we do step out in response to those urgings from within, what we need for that part of the journey will be there waiting for us.

In my lifetime, I have experienced that reality to be true and trustworthy, but sometimes I regress back to that place of needing for someone to give me permission to take the next step, brave the next adventure, trust the process.

"Just whose permission do you need to be who you really are?"  I asked myself on a day when I was wavering back and forth between living my routine and wanting to break free into new patterns.

"Whose permission would finally give you the push you need to get over yourself and your complexes and move on into the life you say you want?"

"What would that person have to say or do to convince you that it's really O.K. for you to fulfill the purpose for which you were created?"

"Who entombed you in that role that chafes and scratches you, squeezing the lifeforce out of you, and why did you consent to letting that happen?"

"Whose script are you living, anyway?  Whose unlived ilfe are you striving to live?"

"Where are your dependencies?  Where are you asking others to do for you what you must do for yourself?"

"Who is it that is terrifying you into compliance?"

These questions and more hammered like staccato notes in my brain as I walked my walking path on a cool spring morning, and just as I rounded the corner that would lead me home, the truth of it all broke through like the morning sun had broken through the silver and pink clouds:  I was the very one who must give myself permission to live my own one wild and precious life.   I was the new authority in my life.  I was the one to whom I must answer, and if I did not the questions would intensify and deepen even more until the True Self finally had me where she wanted me.  The Self is, after all, ruthless in accomplishing its purposes.

Perhaps the journey of stepping into the largeness of life has to be begun over and over as one stage of life becomes too small and constricting, and then, the next.

And perhaps the journey begins the moment you choose to push through your fears and take the next step indicated.

That's the way it's been for me.  What about you?

Have you ever missed the moment because you were too afraid to step out?   Did you get another chance, or did that one pass you by?

What is the Self pushing you toward now?  What are you afraid of this time?  Whose permission would be the one voice that you think you need?

Take courage!  Your boat may in fact be safe in the harbor, but that's not why boats are made.

Grace to you--

Jeanie

This is the second 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.