A Dream With Meaningful Symbols April 13, 2012

Has it ever happened to you that an ordinary symbol or image from everyday life suddenly feels significant? Perhaps it happens after a synchronicity like falling in love with a painting then finding the same image on the cover of a fascinating new book. Or maybe you have no idea why an image moves you deeply.

Either way, your heightened awareness of a symbol tells you you’ve connected with an unknown aspect of your unconscious self that is bringing more meaning to your life. You can ignore this, which is what most of us do, and life will go on as usual. But if you want to understand yourself better and feel more spiritually connected, you can take these inner awakenings seriously and look into the meaning of the symbols that elicit them. In doing so, you create a new story for yourself: you remyth your life.

Once I got serious about self-knowledge and began to pay attention to my dreams, things like this happened quite often. At first I hid my growing fascination with certain symbols for fear people would think I was weird and make fun of me. But after a few years a special dream gave me more confidence to be myself.

Dream #860: Acquiring the Courage to Be Real. I’m walking through an underground corridor lined with narrow but beautiful rooms decorated with elegant antiques. It is the mansion of an older, reclusive, hardworking woman. I live here too. The doorbell rings, telling me my friend has arrived. The older woman asks me to buy her some lemonade while I’m out. To be polite, she asks if my friend wants to come in. When I say no she is relieved.

I climb the stairs and open the door into a big, dark, dusty warehouse. I follow a narrow path through broken pieces of junk to a door which opens onto the street. It’s opened by my beautiful, young, black-haired friend who wears a white trench coat and is bathed in brilliant white light. We walk through a rundown, weedy front yard onto a busy street. The passersby do not suspect there is an elegant, but somewhat narrow mansion below the ground behind this junky facade.  The older woman is afraid of people knowing she is there or how she lives.

This dream told me I had a fearful shadow (older woman) who was hiding the best parts of herself—my richer, fuller spiritual nature (mansion)—deep inside (underground) behind a neglected persona (warehouse, weeds, front yard). That she wanted some lemon “aid”  (in Judaism the lemon symbolizes the human heart), said that she lacked the compassion to give more of herself and the courage to be real.

It was very heartening to know that my ego had grown enough spiritually (walking up stairs) to step through my barrier of fear (doorway) and enter life in the outer world more fully. And to know that the feminine aspect of the Self (friend, the opposites of black and white, white light) wanted to help me obtain what I needed (lemonade) felt absolutely wonderful. This was when I  finally understood that the sacred feminine is real, that she lives in me, and that she’s a helpful friend!

Understanding the symbols of this breakthrough dream emboldened me to reveal more of my true self to family, friends, and in my writing in a way that nothing else had the power to do. And yes, I am now aware of levels of spiritual meaning in many things I never thought twice about before, including narrow mansions, lemons, doors, stairs, warehouses, white light, and even junky yards!

Remything Our Lives With Our Own Symbols April 10, 2012

The symbols and themes of dreams, legends, fairy tales and myths address realities that the soul understands, even if the conscious mind does not. For example, the legend of King Arthur features a walled city. We might be tempted to think that Camelot’s walls are nothing more than an incidental detail. So what if Camelot was surrounded by walls?  Lots of ancient cities were fortified by walls.  But as I’ve said before: Everything has meaning. Our symbols are clues to sacred mysteries.

If we look at the walled city as an important clue, we find the underlying meaning of Arthur’s story as it applied to the souls of those who lived in the place and time when it was written.  Cirlot’s Dictionary of symbols says, “Jung sees the city as a mother symbol and as a symbol of the feminine principle in general:  that is, he interprets the City as a woman who shelters her inhabitants as if they were her children…”

In the Old Testament of the Bible, cities are often spoken of as women, and in the Middle Ages, a city was one way of representing the Virgin Mary in art and architecture.  The walls that encircled cities were seen to have magical powers to protect the citizens in the same way that a mother’s womb protects her child or the enfolding branches of a tree protect a baby bear.

The walled city is no mere incidental detail in King Arthur’s story, and it ended in the only way it could.  The destruction of Camelot’s protective walls was inevitable given that this story emerged within a culture which, after a few hundred years of Roman rule, had begun to fear and scorn the Great Mother. Here is the symbolic message of this story: Not even the wisest and most benevolent King that any story teller could ever imagine could save a civilization that was systematically demolishing its feminine spiritual roots!

The negative elements of public and private myths speak to negative realities within the collective and individual psyche. What is the antidote to these powerful poisons? In his book The Mythic Imagination, psychotherapist Stephen Larsen says that conscious mythmaking is healthy and healing because it helps our egos relate to unconscious aspects of ourselves.

I think of the Wisewoman archetype as the part of us who knows when old stories that once worked for us have gone on too long, and who sends us new symbols that can ease us through the transition of change. But all the symbols in the world cannot help us if we will not help ourselves. It is up to us to notice symbols and themes that resonate, and to reshape them into new myths that will support and sustain the necessary changes. As theologian Matthew Fox has said: “Healthy people base their lives on healing, authentic stories.  Empowerment comes through the process of telling those stories.”

We cannot live the fullest meaning of our life by basing it on someone else’s story about who we are or what we should be.  Only our experiences, only our choices, only our own imagination and symbols have transforming power for us. To that end you might ask yourself these questions:  What stories have I lived by? How have they had a negative influence on me?  How have they been positive? What new symbols and themes is the Wisewoman sending my way? What emerging strengths would I want to feature in my new myth? What images might best symbolize these strengths?

Whispering Symbols: Dot and Circle March 27, 2012

I am too committed to my psychological and spiritual growth to cling to assumptions that have no practical value for me.  If believing in the connectedness of all life and the meaning in all things did not produce observable healthy change, I would accommodate myself to what did; but the fact is that mythos—the symbolic way of thinking that is sister to masculine logos—has served me exceedingly well in my efforts to become more conscious, whole, and connected.

Mythos is the language of the body, heart, and soul. It is associated with the feminine realm—i.e., all that is mysterious, unconscious, creative, felt, organic, and personally compelling. It whispers to us in feelings, physical symptoms, imagination, fantasy, and dreams that reveal unconscious dimensions of ourselves.

Both logos and mythos contribute to our fullest development. Children use mythos thinking automatically. This is why they respond to everything new with spontaneity, enthusiasm, joy and wonder.  But once the “masculine” phase of external striving begins, logos and the ego tend to dominate our thinking and spirituality, and life begins to lose its savor. Those who never leave mythos behind or who return to it later on discover undeveloped aspects of themselves by following meaningful symbols, powerful emotions, cognitive dissonance, uncomfortable personal dilemmas, and bodily symptoms through the labyrinth of the unconscious.

Symbols unlock doors to hidden chambers of ourselves wherein we discover purpose and meaning. Some symbols only have meaning for certain individuals or groups; others have universal appeal. Take, for example, a dot and a circle.  Why does every culture on the planet use these simple designs in religion, art, architecture, literature, and adornment?  Is this just an amazing coincidence, or is there something profound within each of us to which they speak?

In A Dictionary of Symbols, J.E. Cirlot tells us that a dot is a symbol of unity and the Origin.  A circle suggests infinity, the All.  And a circle with a dot or hole in the center represents the center of infinity, i.e., emanation or first cause. These symbols all speak to the same psychic reality, the Self which contains our predisposition to believe in a sacred realm, shapes our images and ideas about it, and motivates the spiritual search.

We cannot “know” our Source of Being—the eternal essence that we call God, Goddess, Father, Mother, Jahweh, Allah, Great Spirit, or whatever term you prefer—and words alone can never describe all that we intuit.  But the universal symbols of the dot and the circle resonate deeply.

Eastern religions have produced myriad renderings of circular mandalas, each with a center point, upon which devotees may focus their thoughts during meditation.  Similarly,  native peoples throughout the Western world have long created sacred circles in sand paintings and arrangements of stones as aids to worship in religious ceremonies. Jung saw mandalas as symbols of individuation, and his The Red Book contains many of the exquisite images he painted during his most intense time of inner exploration.

These and other symbols—like geometric shapes, abstract designs,  certain kinds of people, activities, animals, plants, elements, imaginary beings or objects—capture our attention with mysterious power because they carry important meaning for us. What symbols and activities attracted your childhood imagination and appeared in your fantasies? Do they still appeal to you today?  What do they say about your passions and journey through life? How can you bring them into your life to create more meaning and fulfillment?

Is Self-Discovery Selfish? March 20, 2012

“The struggle to know who I am, in truth and in spirit, is the spiritual quest.” ~Ravi Ravindra

I know people who find what they call “navel gazing” distasteful because of the apparent emphasis on “me, myself and I.” What they don’t realize is that self-discovery is often a response to problematic relationships that pays off big time by creating healthier ones. As J. Krishnamurti has said, “Self-knowledge is obviously a process, not an end in itself; and to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship.  You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship, in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man…”

We all contain a drive for self-preservation and a drive for species-preservation. Finding satisfaction and pleasure in life is a function of developing both. The drive for self-preservation motivates us to maintain and promote our individuality in ways that make our lives safer and more comfortable. The drive for species-preservation motivates us to care about others and connect with them in ways that maintain and promote the survival, rights, authority, creativity, individuality, well-being, and prospering of others. In essence, it enables us to create and maintain relationships.

Because of women’s ability to give birth and nourish new life, the drive for species-preservation is universally associated with the irresistible and magnetic, yet deeply feared, anima archetype. She is our inner “sacred feminine,” for whom the consummate accomplishment is to become completed through intimate, loving relationships which enable us to experience ecstatic union with otherness.

I believe our failure to bring the sacred value of the anima into collective awareness is the underlying reason for today’s most pressing problems in every institution of society. In families it is the reason for the lack of love, compassion and understanding which typifies difficult relationships. In education it is responsible for our failure to nourish original, creative thinking. In business it explains the prevalence of greed and the lack of integrity and moral conscience in Wall Street, advertising, banking, and many large corporations. In government it is responsible for dominator political systems and divisive polarization. In religion it causes dwindling memberships and global strife.

Self-discovery does not create these problems; it resolves them. As anyone who persists on the spiritual path of self-exploration can tell you, as you learn more about yourself you increasingly experience reconciliation: reconciliation between self and others, between heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, and God the Father and God the Mother.  In short, this path ultimately leads to meaningful and lasting relationships with everyone and everything.

The only danger of a spiritual path that emphasizes self-development is the tendency to isolate ourselves and withdraw from relationships. In essence, this is tantamount to aligning ourselves with the masculine drive and keeping our distance from the feminine. We might be making good progress with accepting our shadows, discovering our passions, healing ourselves, and creating spiritual meaning, but if we are not also actively working to reconcile ourselves with others in healthy, love-filled relationships— especially those others with whom we are most intimate—we have a way to go before we can hope to approach psychological wholeness or spiritual maturity.

Coming Home to Integrated Spirituality March 2, 2012

My dear friends,

This month marks the second birthday of this blog. Writing it has been an extraordinary experience in many ways, but the most meaningful and joyful part has been meeting you. Knowing you are out there has been deeply comforting, and reading your inspiring thoughts and figuring out how to respond has had a powerful impact on my work. I love it that our dialogues have motivated me to clarify my thinking and explore new ideas. Most of all I appreciate how you’ve helped me trust myself and be bolder about sharing my truths, especially concerning religion and spirituality. 

To celebrate this milestone I’m republishing the first post I ever wrote. It’s about the feminine side of my God-image. Initially titled “Coming Home to Feminine Spirituality,” thanks to your influence I’ve changed it to more accurately reflect my fundamental orientation to life: the belief that the healthy evolution of our species hinges on our ability to create partnership between femininity and masculinity.

From the bottom of my heart I thank you for joining me in this journey. Julie, in honor of your birthday I dedicate this post to you.

Jeanie/Mom

I understand that an emerging name for blog is lifestream.  This seems very fitting.  It reminds me of one of the two most important dreams of my life.  This one came in January of 1989.  I had been teaching at a local university for ten years and was growing increasingly dissatisfied.  The previous year I had discovered Carl Jung, joined a Jungian study group, and embarked on a program of serious self-examination and dreamwork.  The insights I was gaining gave me the courage to consider giving up teaching to do something I really loved, but this was a very difficult step for me.  Then I had this BIG dream.

Dream #155:”Going Against the Current.”

I’m walking downstream in a wide, rushing river beside a rocky bank.  People are shooting by on rafts and I wonder how they keep from bashing themselves against the rocks. I decide to go back upstream and walk in water up to my chin.  The bottom is rough and rocky.  I reach up and hold onto some thin, flimsy branches sticking out over the water. This helps a little, but soon there are no more and I have to go on unaided.  As I near the last turn , suddenly there are thousands of people in front of me, all heading downstream.  I’m in the midst of them, trying to make my way back upstream to the place I’m supposed to be – my base camp.  Friendly people press in on every side.  Sometimes I gently touch a head or shoulder to propel myself forward. Finally, I’m at the mouth of the river.  I put my hands together in front of me and gently part the people; this reminds them of Moses parting the Red Sea and they smile indulgently.  Then I’m far out in the ocean in deep water, tired and afraid.  Will I make it?  Suddenly a younger, blond-haired woman is in front of me, only her head showing above the water.  “That was smart of you,” she says.  I know she’s strong and rested and will support me if I need to float for a while.  Together we head slowly to my base, a place I’ve never been but know to be my destination.

For me, walking through the rushing river represented the swift passage of time in my life’s journey.  For most of my life I had been going downstream in the direction of least resistance, believing what I had been told to believe, doing what was expected of me, and ignoring some deep, unfulfilled spiritual yearnings. But the dream confirmed that the time had come to discover and  honor the undiscovered aspects of myself and God. Like the children of Israel when they crossed the Red Sea, I was leaving my slavish allegiance to the conventional wisdom of the dominant culture behind.  Because of this, I was being reunited with the Absolute (the ocean) and my inner spiritual guide (the blond woman).

I cannot overstate the importance of this dream.  I knew “I” didn’t create it;  it came from a profound source of wisdom deep within. I think of this inner wisdom as Sophia, the Divine Mother, partner of the masculine Father God. The part of her that speaks to me in dreams I call Dream Mother. Because I had the courage to listen to her and change the direction of my life I eventually discovered my true passions—the search for self-knowledge, spiritual meaning, and writing—and they have made all the difference.

With the guidance of this feminine wisdom I’ve decided to take my newest plunge: lifestreaming on the internet.  I hope you’ll find something in the outpourings from my base camp that will help you, too, move in the direction of home.

How’s Your God-Image Working For You? December 13, 2011

Our ideas about God come from us. For approximately the last 5,000 years the West and Near East have projected our masculine archetypes onto a male God who is a

1) King: superior, all-powerful and morally judgmental;

2) Warrior: partial to and protective of our particular tribe or culture while rejecting our enemies;

3) Magician/Scholar: supernatural and all-knowing; and

4) Lover: passionately in love with us, His Beloveds.

So what does this say about the status of the psyches and societies that envision God this way? An ego with a purely masculine God-image has rejected the sacred power of femininity because it is afraid of and hostile to the feminine side of the psyche.  Of course, this makes about as much sense as obsessing over the qualities of the left-hemisphere of our brains and repressing the equally valuable “God-given” qualities of the right-hemisphere.

Who in their right mind would deliberately do such a thing? This is the point, of course. The fact is, we’re not in our “right” mind because Western culture has essentially rejected the qualities of the right brain! Since the time of Aristotle, our egos have been so enamored of our left-hemisphere logos ability to process information with clear reason, discrimination of details, and logical, “objective” thinking that we’ve disdained the far more mysterious and uncontrollable processes of the right hemisphere.

The right hemisphere specializes in mythos. This analogical mode of thinking emphasizes seeing the whole picture instead of discriminating between details;  connecting instead of separating;  completing oneself through intimate relationships instead of proving oneself through perfected work;  finding meaning in images, symbols and intuitions instead of only words and provable facts; personal, subjective realities instead of objective ones;  inner events instead of outer ones; values and tender emotions instead of pure reason; and the physical, instinctual realities of our bodies instead of the traditional mental processes associated with intelligence.  As you may have guessed, right-brain attributes are generally associated with femininity.

But why does it have to be either/or for the ego? Why have we rejected these qualities—or at the very least seen them as “inferior” to left-brained qualities—for so long instead of simply accommodating both? It’s really very simple. Like all mammals, humans begin life as helpless, instinctual creatures. But we have egos, and our egos want to control our primitive instincts so we can stay safe and gain more control over the terrifying powers of Mother Nature. After all, if you can’t manage your hunger you’ll eat your entire fall harvest by Christmas; then what will you eat for the rest of the winter?

Poor little egos. We just want to be more conscious and in control so we can feel more safe in a terrifying world. The last thing we want is to fall back (backslide?) into unconsciousness and powerlessness. So we obsess over left-hemisphere (Western?) thinking and disown the more “primitive” right brain. We project masculinity onto a remote, separate, all-powerful spirit and project femininity onto physical women who we strip of as much power as we can. Thus have we created societies run by power-driven leaders who are afraid of their own shadows, can’t get along with each other, and use and abuse women and all who are weak, vulnerable or different from the things our egos identify with.

How conscious is that? How conscious are you? How integrated is your brain? How integrated is your God-image?

How’s Your Religion Working For You? December 9, 2011

As our species grew more aware of itself and its vulnerability in a dangerous world, we noticed we had some uncontrollable emotions, instincts, and behaviors that didn’t jibe with our conscious intentions. Suspecting that some remote, all-powerful forces must have created us and were still influencing us, we told stories about them and devised rituals to gain their favor so they’d protect us and help us thrive.

Our God-images originate in the psyche’s archetypal patterns.  For example, we’re all born with Mother/Queen and Father/King archetypes and every culture has attributed the qualities children associate with their parents to a Great Mother Creatrix and Great Father Creator. While their myths differed from culture to culture, the same characteristics of ultimate power, knowledge and authority always appeared. Likewise, every culture tells stories about Kings and Queens, Warriors and Monsters, Magicians and Wisewomen, Lovers and Beloveds. These show us how we see ourselves, each other, and the mysterious forces of life over which we have no control.

As our forebears acquired more self-awareness their ideas about their deities changed. Religions are still growing and changing. This is to be expected and welcomed, not resisted. A changing God-image does not negate God’s existence. Most of us see our parents very differently from the way we did as children, but this doesn’t mean we invented them, or that we have to keep believing the same things about them we used to, or that we’ve stopped loving them. It just means our perspective has changed with more experience and maturity.

Moreover, since no two individuals are exactly the same, it makes no sense at all to expect everyone to have the same beliefs about God. What is the same, what is archetypal, is that, as Carl Jung realized, we all have a religious instinct, a compulsion to understand ourselves and transcend our destructive unconscious influences so we can be immersed in the great Mystery of Life. Calling the Mystery by different names or denying its existence doesn’t change it. It simply is what it is. As the ancient saying goes, “Called or not called, the God will be present.”

Jung named our religious instinct the Self, or God-image. This central archetype gives rise to all others. Most interesting to me are those which represent our feminine and masculine sides and inspire our ideas about gender. My goal is to differentiate between the gender-associations that are cultural stereotypes versus those which are universally accepted, and therefore archetypes.

Nobody knows the exact nature of the archetypes, but there are many theories based on the clusters of instinctual emotions and behaviors they represent. My system pairs four basic masculine archetypes (King, Warrior, Magician/Scholar, and Lover) with four feminine ones (Queen, Earth Mother, Wisewoman, and Beloved). Every psyche contains all eight and we each express them differently depending on our genetic and cultural inheritance, experiences, and psychological integration. We cannot control them any more than we can control the deities onto which we project them. But we can befriend them, forgive ourselves for being human, and treat others with compassion with the realization that they are struggling as much as we are.

It’s not correct belief, but compassion that makes a genuine spirit person. So how is your religion working for you? Is your caring real or is it a mask you wear in public and take off in private? If you really want to know, take an honest look at your closest relationships. No cheating. Your shadow knows!

A Dream of Venus, the Morning Star October 28, 2011

After years of near-obsessive inner work I’ve given myself permission to relax a bit. Sometimes weeks go by before I record and work on a new dream. But when I do I’m always rewarded with a cornucopia of insights and meaning. Following is the first dream I’ve analyzed since the one about individuation I posted nearly two months ago.

Dream #4338: Venus Rising. I’m holding half of a large clamshell, maybe 5 inches from end-to-end, behind my back. It’s covered with a small square of cloth. I know there’s a baby beneath it. Someone says I should take the baby out. I bring the shell around to the front, lift off the cloth, and see a placenta. The cord is attached and hanging out and down to the left. I start to pull up the baby and “someone” warns me to be careful. Ashamed at forgetting how vulnerable babies are, I pull more gently and there, dangling from the bottom of the cord, is the baby. I cradle it in the palm of my left hand. Tiny, but with adult proportions, it’s softly glowing with a pale, pearl-white aura. I’m grateful it’s okay.

Associations:  My immediate association is to the classical images I’ve seen of the birth of Venus. This one is from a fresco in Pompeii. Click here to see Botticelli’s more famous painting. To me they suggest the emergence of the feminine archetype of beauty and love from the maternal depths of the collective unconscious. In waking life I’ve been trying to honor and empower all four basic feminine archetypes (Queen, Earth Mother, Wisewoman and Beloved) for many years. This dream says that so far my ego has been shielding this one, the Beloved, from the public eye. In other words, I haven’t integrated the qualities she represents into my persona so that others can see and acknowledge her beauty and worth. But something within me — i.e. my intuition, the voice of the feminine side of the Self — knows the time is right to bring her out into the light.

According to the dream I haven’t fully appreciated just how vulnerable this archetype of love, relatedness, delicate beauty and tender feeling is in a world which still glorifies masculine toughness and treats feminine softness so carelessly. That she is still attached to the placenta by the cord suggests her dependence on my physical health. I need to treat my body with more love and care. I need enough rest and exercise, healthier food, less stress.

The warning tells me to be more mindful of my thoughts and behavior. I need to bring more gentleness to every word and action. I need to be kinder to myself. I need to stop striving for perfection, stop judging myself and putting myself down, stop trying to please others while holding the real me back. Like Venus, I need to celebrate the beauty and miracle that is me.

I’ve shared this very personal dream with you for two reasons. First, because it’s a perfect follow-up for my last post about dream symbols of transition and transformation. Second, because the dream itself seems to be urging me to do so. Didn’t the mysterious “someone” tell my dream ego to bring the baby forward and be careful in doing so? I hope I’ve been sufficiently careful in bringing forth the message of this dream, and I hope that regardless of your gender you are inspired to revisit the integration of your own Beloved into your waking life.

As with my previous dream about individuation, I invite your associations and look forward to reading them.

The Mandorla Symbol October 4, 2011

A mandorla is an ancient symbol that is largely unrecognized in the Western world today. The shape, also known as vesica piscis, the Vessel of the Fish, occurs when two circles overlap to form an almond shape in the middle; hence, the name mandorla, which means “almond nut” in Italian. In Hinduism this shape is called the yoni, a stylized vulva used in religious art and as a maternity charm to celebrate and invoke the Great Mother’s creative, life-giving fertility.

Although the mandorla shares the symbolism of the mandala, the Hindu term for a circle, the two also have separate meanings. Whereas the mandala is a soul-symbol used as a meditative aid to encourage the spirit to move forward along its path of evolution from the biological to the spiritual, the mandorla represents the key to bringing this evolution about.

Mandorlas have carried powerful sacred overtones from earliest times. For example, the virgin birth of the god Attis was conceived by a magic almond. Early Christians used the shape as a secret symbol to represent their belief that Jesus was the coming together of heaven and earth. In medieval Christian art it framed the figures of saints, the virgin Mary, and Christ, usually to suggest the aureole of light that surrounds the whole body of holy persons, but sometimes piously (with an unintentional double entendre) interpreted as a gateway to heaven. A twelfth-century panel in the Chartres Cathedral shows “Christ of the Apocalypse” within a mandorla. Alchemists and Christian mystics redefined the mandorla as the arcs of two great circles, the left one for female matter, and the right for male spirit.

As symbols of the interactions and interdependence of opposing worlds and forces, the two separate mandalas which must meet and merge to form the mandorla represent the sacred divide between spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, self and other. The space wherein these apparently irreconcilable opposites overlap is an image of hope for our torn world, a healing place where we can reconcile our struggles with life and each other.

In his article, “Mandorla: Ancient Symbol of Wholeness,” Brien Jensen writes, “The mandorla begins the healing of the split. The overlap generally is very thin at first, only a sliver of a new moon, but it is a beginning. As time passes, the greater the overlap, the greater and more complete is the healing. The mandorla binds together that which was torn apart and made unwhole-unholy. It is considered the most profound religious experience one can have in life.”

The overlapping space between two souls is a place of growing self-awareness, acceptance, connection, and union. It is the communion table where God and human, self and other, ego and Self meet. It is a sanctuary wherein we connect with others to find refuge from the terrors of life. It is a womb of poetry, story and ritual where the boundaries between left-brained logos and right-brained mythos disappear, old life is refreshed, and new life is nurtured and protected. Above all, it is a threshold from which healing new life for ourselves and our world emerges.

The gorgeous art on this post is by my dear friend, Cicero Greathouse. I invite you to visit his site and click on the link “works on paper” to see his magnificent mandorlas. Perhaps you can pick out the one(s) which will grace the cover of my next book, “Healing the Sacred Divide.”

Hera Possession September 27, 2011

When we were in our thirties my husband and I were invited to a party at the home of a couple we’d recently met.  Halfway through the evening I was sitting on the stairs when a man I didn’t know sat beside me. As we made small talk I began to realize he was flirting with me. I’m not great at flirting so I was a bit uncomfortable, but he wasn’t saying anything the least bit offensive or inappropriate so I remained open and friendly.

After a time three women walked to the foot of the stairs, sat in a semicircle on the floor, and stared coldly and silently up at me. The hostility emanating from them was visible. I tried to include them in the conversation, but they simply sat and glared. I felt awful. I realized they must be friends of this man’s wife — perhaps one of them was his wife — who were banding together to intimidate this new female whom they saw as a threat. I had done nothing provocative, yet these women were obviously furious at me for attracting his attention.

This seemed so strange. They were not mad at the man, even though their behavior suggested he might have had an unsavory track record.  They were mad at me, a woman they didn’t even know. It didn’t seem to occur to them that they had probably been in similar situations.  They seemed to feel no kinship with me whatsoever. Our femaleness was not a basis of understanding and compassion, but grounds for suspicion and hatred.

In Greek mythology, Hera, the long-suffering, loyal wife of the powerful, philandering Zeus, was like the women at the foot of the stairs.  When Zeus deceived and seduced the innocent maiden Callisto, Hera in her jealous rage turned Callisto into a Bear which she then plotted to have Callisto’s son kill.  Zeus got off scot-free. This sort of thing happens again and again in the Greek myths. Why? Because Zeus and Hera represent archetypal patterns.

Of the seven major Greek goddesses that represent feminine archetypes, Hera is the one I’ve always liked least. Her fidelity and commitment to her husband were admirable, but she was so darned jealous and spiteful and their relationship was so filled with hostility and tension that they had no real intimacy. Moreover, her single-minded devotion to her role of wife and her power struggle with her more dominant partner in that one-sided relationship blinded her to the innocence of any woman who might unwittingly capture his notice.

“Hera possession” is a shadow of the Queen archetype. Our healthy Queen represents our potential to be sovereign over our own lives, understanding and caring partners, and cultural leaders who nurture healthy growth in others. But as long as our ego’s fragility and outward focus compel us to conform to society’s level of awareness, we will, like Hera, sacrifice everything — including opportunities for growth, relationships with friends and loved ones, and the most precious truths of our souls — to remain in the dark womb of inertia and unknowing where we can maintain our illusion of safety and status.  Like Hera, we may not be very happy there, but we will defend our position to our last breath.

And who will pay for our fearful need to conform?  Whoever happens to be in the line of fire.