I am checking my intention here as I begin to write. I have learned a few good guidelines for communication that help me stay on track when I communicate with others or when I am trying to focus my own thoughts around the work. Be concrete. Stay in the moment. Focus on what I am feeling. If I am not doing this I am apt to ask beguiling questions that have no answers, to generalize, to theorize. I tend to cock my head and stare off in the distance when I am doing this.
On the other hand, when I drop into a feeling place it is also visible. I am often surprised by this. From what people have told me, my face changes, I look in the other person's eyes, I might cry, I get tongue-tied. I enter a journey that I have not already mapped in my mind. I am lost - in a good way, although I don't know it at the time Knowing is controlling, even if what I "know" is BS. When I don't know, the pathology easily convinces me that whatever is coming up or going down is bad. Doubt eventually goes to despair. Without faith I cannot bear the deeper archetypal fear.
So I am sitting here trying to present myself honestly to you. (And also wanting to please myself by doing a good piece of writing here) The ideal would be for me to allow myself to be seen and known by you as God sees and knows me. Totally exposed. I have to let this go and just do my best knowing that pathology will most likely have it's way with me. I'm just another Bozo on the bus... and yet I must try.
Again and again, I encounter the animus and I refuse or resist being with him, recognizing him, being the child with him. I remain in a place of isolation and pride. It is hard for me to reconcile the idea of being in my pride with my objective state. I am broken in many ways. Marriage, home, ability to work or create, finances, emotional health. all wrecked. And yet I still resist going to him.
The walls that I built when I was younger to protect myself have come to look more and more like a prison, and they are crumbling. Fine. Necessary. Extremely painful. With each illusion that is stripped away a new batch of skeletons crawls out of the dungeon. For whatever reason, and I really don't know why, since I was young I have cut myself away from my own tender, passionate core. The life that resulted is full of regrets, failures, loneliness, lost opportunities to love and be loved and real injuries to others. This is remorse, and I have felt a lot of it. For me, feeling this remorse seems to be a necessary passage.
If this was an autobiography, I could go back and tell dozens of stories to illustrate this. I know I am generalizing here, but to go back and try to illustrate how messed up I have been would probably lead to various kinds of manipulative confessions, opportunities to stay in shame and in the past, lies and storytelling. So I'll skip all that. I'll keep it brief. Its the way it feels now. It hurts and it is scary. I have also been in despair. A lot of my work right now pivots around how I interpret this pain and darkness that I feel so much of the time. I have been guided to see that remorse is part of the process. Despair, on the other hand, is nihilism, and nihilism is active resistance. I have a deeply rooted habit of mind which leads me to feel that I am a victim. This comes out as a tale of woe in which I am overwhelmed by forces beyond my control. Mostly, I locate these forces within myself. Depression, Pride, Pathology, Inability to Love or Feel Joy, etc. etc. But also, Bad Luck, Bad Parenting, Fate. I become a closed circle. I seem to cry out for help, but I am impenetrable. Self sufficient in a weird, doom and gloom way. A tough nut to crack.
To see and name despair as willful resistance to the divine is to deny myself the consolation of pitying myself. Instead I have to work to expose the true face of my resistance to myself and to others. It's like giving myself a little tough love. I've done this with my own children when I have declined to protect them, but pushed them toward responsibility for their own choices, and known it to be love. In some deep place in me at every moment I chose to turn to the divine or to turn away and no one - not Kate, or Marc, or NOE or even God can protect me from the consequences of my own free will. Sometimes I stand for a moment in the place where love is given and received, but then the door shuts hard. Sometimes I feel hope that one of these days it will all be better, and then later I feel crushed by a seemingly irresistible weight of darkness.
The work tells me that I can access the deepest place in me and with the help of the divine, change my psyche. There is something that I must die. In the end it seems to be to simply accept the gift of grace. I don't have to do it alone, but I still try to tough it out. Why so hard? The work tells me that within me there is a child who remains pure and innocent and is the part of me that is with God. My essence. I struggle to believe this and I resist.
My present homework is to be the boy and to go into an office with a big man, who is the animus. Maybe I am growing in the work, but mostly I am not there. I think I have a computer problem. I am embarrassed by the idea that "I" have a problem. I am not yet the boy, but I am probably, hopefully, dropping in closer to those feelings. I had a dream in which my psyche took what was otherwise a tender moment, a kiss between a mother and child, and wrapped it in dark material so that what I saw was a winter landscape, two figures wrapped in dark cloth, going into icy water, (and in my imagination the parent was going to leave the child there to die). But without the dark wrapping, this was just a tender moment. I added the doom and gloom. This is a different way to understand the experience of despair. There is no lack of dark material in the world. Hideous cruelties, horrifying private tragedies and global crises that are out of control. There is no reason why any of this should keep me from my own tender core, and yet the pathology uses despair in this way.
Every time I touch this tender core it lasts for a moment only. Then the door shuts, and it seems that I am punished by my own psyche for believing that I could ever give and receive love just as I am. It is very uncomfortable to be seen and known as one who runs from love and intimacy, who has a nasty, aggressive side to his passivity, who tells stories. It is also very uncomfortable to be exposed in my true feelings, the rare good feelings of goofy joy, gratitude, longing and love, as well as the sadness, regret, pain and fear. Helpless, needy, and small. All of this is sitting here in this chair at this time.
What am I feeling right now? The fear of letting go. The fear of being exposed. The fear of the unknown. And just a small precarious hope that fades again and again, like a half remembered dream: that I can learn to let go and be held and loved with utter simplicity in that warm circle of light. To touch that, even for a moment threatens to change everything.