“We have only now, only this single, eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.”  –Jack Kornfield

How do we live “in the moment”?  What does that really mean?  Why does it sound so simple, yet prove so illusive, for so many of us?

This was recently brought home to me in a way I can only describe as transformative. My husband and I met my cousin and his wife in California. My cousin has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He is doing well, on a pre-chemo medication that has fewer side effects, but his energy, hair length, gaze and laughter have changed forever.

And yet.

And yet.

Our goal was to find joy. No one needed to state the obvious: live in the moment.

It was terribly difficult. There seemed no place to behave from – no making light of, no hiding, no detour. The fragility of life pulsed in every moment, even as we extolled the beauty of flowers, trees, birds, each other.

My cousin became our mentor and our guide.  Always a sensitive, artistic, and intelligent person, he crafted the ability to savor every moment, without forcing happiness or soliciting despair.

I learned from him that optimism is not about embracing hope. It is about life itself: lifting a shell from the beach, laughing with the waitress as we order breakfast, allowing our gaze to settle on one another’s eyes.

We were liberated from any speculation about the future, any planning, any philosophizing about the state of the world. For those precious days, we lived outside of Time. Nothing to be accomplished or figured out or mastered. Only a glance at my cousin’s face, a noticing of the slowing of his steps, someone saying, “Shall we sit for awhile?”

My cousin would smile. Not because he was being rescued, but because he was being seen.

We sat at many an outdoor table, a wide umbrella shielding him from the sun. How we noticed the children! A little girl giggling as her father jostled her, a baby reaching tiny fingers to a low hanging palm, pink buds poised for eruption, our collective gaze ever-turning toward each new life form.

We created our own rules of the road. No one had to set limits, or care take or make a disclaimer about what was or was not a “depressing” topic. We moved toward beauty and joy and mischief and silliness and silence, allowing this duel reality to define our little group. What duality, you ask? Life and death, connection and separation; joy and a darkness we cannot know.

Saying goodbye at the airport my cousin wrapped us in his long arms, the four of us, one.

Away from him I hold it still, learning, as he is learning, to greet this eternal moment, opening, unfolding, in the shadow of his eyes.

A review of Mel Mathews’ Menopause Man –Unplugged – The Chronicles of a Wandering Soul: Book Two.  Fisher King Press. 2012  Author blog: melmathews.com

It was – in retrospect – a risky thing to do : read a book written by my publisher. It is fiction, but every writer’s soul and character comes through in their work. What if his book revealed a person different from the one I knew through phone calls and emails? What if I didn’t like it?  All reasonable cautions. But I was curious. As it turns out, so is Malcom Clay, the protagonist. Curious, rebellious, always drawn to the off-center. Well, so was I, starting with the second book in the series, after giving the first, LeRoi, to a friend.

“I loved it,” he said, “A male Eat Prey Love.”

I was intrigued. I learned from reviewing another Fisher King Book, Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending (Male) Narcissism by Ken Kimmel, that a woman can learn a great deal about herself by reading books about men.

I was still nervous. I knew  Mathews’ book wasn’t academic like Kimmel’s. Mel had to be capable of creating a fictional world I was willing to dive into, get lost in, and enjoy, or would I be lost in a quagmire of words and images I couldn’t relate to?

Turns out, my worries were a totally ridiculous spinning out of my own “dark side”. I fell right into this book – a true Page Turner. While it is technically fiction, it reads like the journal of a very real man, with all his quirks, complexities, and goofball humor, falling for the wrong women, drawn to the wrong situations while desperately searching for the light . I don’t know if this was Mathews’ intention, but it reads like a prose version of the goofy guys in movies like Hangover – with a very real quest at its core. He throws in poetic references that belie his superficial kick-back persona, such as a framed copy of The Definitive Journey by Juan Ramon Jimenez, Spain’s great poet and author of one of my favorites, Platero and I.

At the top of this tale, we find Malcom in a self-described midlife crisis. He quits his boring job, and moves to a funky flat in Carmel, writing, dreaming, and struggling to find a woman he can connect with in all the completeness of sexuality, and belonging.  A tall order, in a world where all the women he picks seem to leave him in the dust.

He turns to male friends for illumination, companionship, and contrast. One pal is married and has kids, “ A great marriage,” according to Malcom.  His pal urges Malcom not to ruin it for the rest of the guys on the planet by finding the right woman. His continual mis-fires create a kind of perverse voodoo for all the married guys, “You’re doing it for all mankind,” chirps the married guy.

Funny, but not so funny, for our menopause man struggling to find his anima (Greek for soul) in the exterior women in his life.  This is my Jungian therapist’s interpretation, but I can’t help it. I have sat with many men who spend so much time looking for it “out there” in a woman, when the true relationship they long for is with the archetypal feminine energy buried within their own inner life.

If Malcom were reading this review, he might ask, “Just what is an inner life anyway?” It is as individual as it gets. To one person it is the dawning awareness of their own feelings after years of repressing them. To another, it is a rich life of the imagination in which the anima (the feminine soul in a man) or animus (the masculine soul in a woman) are personified in archetypal characters who come to be as real as people in “real life”. To another, it is an inner dialog with a voice Jung called the “god image”, as distinct from a God as defined by organized religion. Often this inner oracle surfaces when most needed, with wisdom from the depths of the unconscious mind.

Back to Malcom. If we go with the premise that he is searching for his soul in all the wrong women, we find another parallel with Eat, Pray, Love.  In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, in the Pray section, she meets a man who is also suffering and searching. They become friends. In Menopause Man, Malcom has Shiela, a woman with whom he shares so much, a woman with whom he can be totally himself, a sister, a true friend. “I love you,” he tells her, while clarifying to himself that he is not in love with her.  An important distinction, and seen in tandem with Gilbert’s man-friend, it begs the question: in the transition from wrong-way woman to a relationship with his inner anima, is it desired, even necessary, to find a person of the opposite sex to love purely as a person, without the projections and neurosis so often attached to sexual-romantic love?

I suspect the answer is as eccentric and varied as the nature of an inner life. With regards to Malcom, I leave you in suspense. Does he find his true calling, the right woman, a breathtaking connection to his inner anima/muse? Does he turn one day to Shiela and realize he can love a true friend with all the passion and devotion he once reserved for the women in his fantasy life?  Or does he continue the journey into his new book, third in the series, SamSara?

A final tip of the hat to its author who manages to ignite our awareness of these deep psychological themes while spinning a highly entertaining narrative about ordinary people bungling through life. It is also a great treat as a woman to get such an intimate and hilarious window into what men really talk about when there are no women around. I always suspected it, but holy cow, it explains a lot!

Great soul food, for all of us.

Revered American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is known for creating some of the most unique and dynamic structures on the planet. His guiding artistic principle was “Form Follows Function”. He believed that every building grew forth from its intended purpose. His task as a creative artist was to discover the “function” of each building, a marriage of the practical and the imaginative issuing from a source hidden deep within both the art and the artist.

As Spring bursts forth in our world, I am struck with Wright’s principle as it relates to the creative process in all of us.  In my own creative work, and in my observation of others, I am aware of how important it is to let go of preconceived notions of form, and, like Wright, allow the shape and medium of the work to come from within.

This applies to form in the broadest sense of the term. If we are attached to the idea that a creative life means garnering fame or approbation from significant “experts”, it can prove a huge distraction from entering into the process of creative work.

If we believe that to be valuable we have to earn a high degree, or sacrifice our free time to earning more money so we can impress others, we become a slave to form.  If we believe we must be married in order to live a “respectable” life, or bandy about a wedding band our loved one cannot afford, we are missing the forest for the sake of one showy tree. This leads to a hollow sense of self, and the persistent suspicion that the life we are living is not our own.

These are obvious examples. Often our enslavement to form is more subtle. We believe we are creating from our own fire, only to feel devastated and envious when we encounter someone sporting greater exterior wealth. We experience a moment of deflation, a “I’ll never be like him” moment.

Envy can actually be a valuable tool. It lets us know what we want for ourselves. Instead of envying someone else’s success, we can ask, “Whoa – what is this telling me? I should be asking not, ‘How did she get that novel published?’, but ‘Do I have a novel in me?”

Our commitment to building and re-building the fire of our own inner creative source must be renewed every morning, across the span of days. “That’s a lot of work,” you may say. Indeed, but the rewards echo throughout the psyche, into every corner of “ordinary” life. When you are ablaze with your own curiosity, the most mundane task can take on new meaning. Everything becomes fodder for a creative project. A child’s voice in line at the grocery store can become the opening line of a poem.

Mind you, it is not all ebullience and rapture. Working through tough creative problems is precisely that: work. And the rewards are often not monetary or conventional. But those who embrace it come to realize they have no alternative, no matter how long it takes to find all the right timbers to burn in one’s inner fire. Frank Lloyd Wright did his formative work in his golden years, an inspiration to us all.

I close with a passage from Leo Tolstoy from a letter to his wife, Sofya, written May 3, 1897, in his elder years,

“The extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air – all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.” *

My deepest wishes for a resplendent and creative spring.

* Quoted from Tolstoy, A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett

Book review of The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. 2012. Scriber. New York.  Theatrical debut of Toibin’s adaptation of the book opens on Broadway this Spring. Previews begin at the Walter Kerr Theater on March 26, opening April 22. Featuring Irish actress Fiona Shaw as the Virgin Mary.

Whether you are a Christian, a student of archetypal psychology, or a person who is simply curious about un-masking the myth of perfection,  Colm Toibin’s compelling novella is for you. I doubt it is fare for fundamentalists, who would be horrified that this Mary doesn’t believe her son’s claims of divinity, but this seems a tragic irony. The very people who want to be closest to the Virgin Mary, would reject Toibin’s beautiful characterization as “heresy”.

Their loss. Surely, if these folks could hold their breaths, and delve into Toibin’s prose, they would feel their hearts open to the struggles of this older woman looking back on a hard life, alienated from her community, following the years when she lost her son on the cross.

Toibin enters the mind of a mother, and, like any human mom, she has known her son from birth, was skeptical of his self-made ministry, seeing clearly how influenced he was by those who needed him to be the God he is not.

If this has the flavor of the 1960’s Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke, the parallel is accurate. In that gritty tale, the inmates of a Southern chain gang came to idolize Luke, a rebel and a loner, projecting into him a hero status they could not aspire to on their own. In much the same way, Toibin’s Mary sees the apostles maneuvering the young Christ, inflating his ego, spreading tales of his miracles.

And yet, Toibin weaves a complex tale. As the stories of the miracles are told in flashback, Mary has no clear explanation for some of them. In the wedding scene she sees a vat of water which become wine – but was this slight of hand? She sees the “resurrected” Lazarus, but was he truly buried in the first place?  She does what most mothers would do: love her son, tell him home truths, feel despair when he doesn’t listen to her, and struggle to survive his tragic choices she cannot prevent.

The Testament of Mary awakens a new version of the archetype mother goddess, and, for Christians, invites empathy for a woman who did not allow herself to be the victim. Toibin’s Mary sees the world and human nature with a discerning mind. She can have doubts, feel remorse, be cranky about getting old, question authority, and long for the babe she once held in her arms. There is great freedom in realizing you don’t have to be perfect, that your job is to be real and whole and flawed and alive on this earth, as she was.

“The act of acceptance, of acknowledging that change is a natural part of our interaction with others, can play a vital role in our relationships. These transitional periods can become pivotal points where true love can begin to mature and flower. We are now in a position to truly begin to know the other. To see the other as a separate individual, with faults and weaknesses, a human being like ourselves. It is only at this point that we can make a genuine commitment, a commitment to the growth of another human being – an act of love.”  –Howard Cutler quoted in Offerings: Buddhist wisdom for every day by Danielle and Oliver Follmi.

This month, as we are barraged by candy displays, fluffy pink bears, and all manner of Valentine cards, it seems a good time to reflect on the complex and ever-changing nature of intimate relationships. In this regard the popular media has seldom been our friend, ever pandering to that very real part of us that hums, “Someday My Prince Will Come”, longing for a perfect, unconditional love that replicates the infant/parent bond. It may be that we long for this in proportion to the trauma we experienced in early life, literally seeking in a romantic partner what we did not get from our parents.

In his landmark book, Getting the Love You Want , Harville Hendrix proposes just this: we seek what we did not get in childhood in our mates, and it is up to both partners in the relationship to articulate this, and to find this fulfillment in adult life. There is much truth to this, but I find that people also need to develop an independent and self-nurturing capacity, ie, do both: learn to love yourself, and then, out of this love, choose a partner from your own high self-esteem who is just as capable of self-love and intimacy.

A tall order, particularly because so many of our choices of a partner are made on the surface, when we are so young we don’t have a depth of understanding of mature love that Howard Cutler writes about.  We “fall” in love, the very term betraying a plunge from rational consciousness. “Love is blind”: we are motivated out of passion, obsession, desire. Our films and legends are full of this, and no matter how often we see the dark side of love portrayed (From Romeo and Juliet to the beautiful Danish film, A Royal Affair), we continue to “fall” again and again.

The makers of Valentine chocolates and floral displays know this all too well. Ironically, the real Saint Valentine was a rebel priest living under the oppression of the Roman emperor Claudias (Some may remember the marvelous BBC series with Derek Jacobi as the stuttering emperor). Valentine was all about promoting monogamy in a promiscuous society where women had no rights and were predominantly victims of polygamy, slavery, or prostitution. Claudias enacted a decree that prohibited the marriage of young people. He believed that unmarried soldiers fought better than married ones, because married men might be afraid of what would happen to them or their wives and families if they died.

Valentine set about to marry young people in secret, believing not only in the Christian sanctity of marriage and family, but that people needed the sacred bond of intimacy in order to become most fully human. For his conviction and Romantic beliefs, he was imprisoned, and tortured. During his incarceration, he was able to pray with and reportedly, to heal the blind daughter of a magistrate. Ultimately Valentine was assigned to a three part execution of beating, stoning, and decapitation. His last words were an endearing letter to the magistrate’s now-seeing daughter, “from your Valentiine.”

It is fascinating to contemplate how Western society transformed this tragic tale into hearts and flowers. Some would say commerce knows how to manipulate mass psychology. Indeed in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud made a voyage from Vienna to America and met with innovators of the advertising agency. The result, among many other mass manipulations, is “Valentine’s Day”.

Am I a Scrooge about Valentine’s Day? Quite the contrary. Whatever its origins, February 14^th is a marvelous opportunity to express the depth of your love for everyone in your life: partner, children, parents, relations, dear friends. By peering beneath the cardboard heart, we can open ourselves to the complexity and bounty of love. As we love ourselves, so we can deepen our love, enthusiasm, and expression for others.

I close with another quote from Offerings, by psychologist and Buddhist monk, Jack Kornfield: “Our capacity for intimacy is built on deep respect, a presence that allows what is true to express itself, to be discovered. Intimacy can arise at any moment; it is an act of surrender, a gift that excludes nothing.”

And a final tip of the hat to the real Saint Valentine, who had the moral courage and self-esteem to value own judgment above the dictates of a corrupt authority. A healer, who honored the value of women, and the loving heart in all of us.

Book review of FREUD’S SISTER by Goce Smilevski, translated from the Macedonia by Christine E. Krammer. Penguin Books, 2012

Some weeks ago I was talking with a friend who had just read the Joyce Carol Oates review of FREUD’S SISTER in the New York Times. She was shocked and outraged to learn that the factual event embedded in Goce Smilevski’s lyrical novel is Freud’s abandonment of his four sisters in 1938 Vienna. He could have procured a visa for them. Instead, he packed up his nuclear family, his servants and his dog, and fled to London, leaving them to deportation and death in a concentration camp.

“I wonder if they ever forgave him,” I asked.

“I would curse him with my dying breath!” said my friend.

We left it hanging in the air, and yet the conversation returned again and again to the theme of emotional justice.

In his opening artist’s note, Smilevski quotes one of Freud’s letters, referring to the novel’s narrator, Aldofina as “the sweetest and best of my sisters”. Smilevski feel a kinship with her, and states he hopes to “rescue in fiction one of the many lives forgotten by history”.

In doing so he also creates a portrait of Sigmund Freud seen through the eyes of his closest childhood playmate, his confidante, at once placing herself at a distance from him, and longing to return to the closeness of their early childhood, throughout her life.

Aldofina is delightfully unpredictable, in her choices and her colloquy with her bother. She tells him that beauty, not religion, is the greatest comfort in life, yet takes on his atheism as arrogance: “The rest of us will perish, but the great Sigmund Freud will live on, in immortal works”. Indeed, Freud’s high opinion of his immortality is palpable. He  tells a male colleague, “Copernicus taught man that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin taught man that he is descended from apes, and I have taught man that he is not who he thinks he is.”

Yet Aldofina claims this narrative as her own, ever moving toward meaning, passion, love and truth. Being so close to Freud, she is loathe to adopt his theories blindly. His internal anti-Semitism is exposed in her critique of Moses and Monotheism, where he asserts Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jew, fashioning his concept of God to appease the pharaoh. One could speculate that his rejection of Orthodox Jewish faith and identification with all things German may have played into Freud’s abandonment of his sisters, on an unconscious, if not conscious level. The novel wisely lets us do our own speculating, by simply allowing Aldofina to tell her story.

One of her greatest gifts to the reader is to pose implicit questions essential to our modern time, to all time: What is “normal”? What is “madness”? How are we to bear the loss and betrayal inherent in our lives?  And embedded in the circumstances of the story, and in the heartbeat of Aldofina, so beautifully evoked we can almost hear it, as if listening to an audio book: what do we owe to our family? To our fellow our fellow human beings?

It is incumbent upon the reader to provide answers, or, indeed, ask more questions: where are the boundaries of what we owe to our own self-development, and where we owe attention, love, and support to others?

A related question: what is the place in our world for the mentally ill?  In the novel this is graphically etched for us when Aldofina finds respite for her depression at “The Nest”, a home for those identified in Victorian Vienna as “mad”. We enter the corridors of the fascinating souls who live here. Is it horribly bleak? In some ways, of course, but our author also provides a project for the inmates to put on a carnival for the entire community. Costumes are created that evoke the “mad” souls’ greatest fantasies of self-glory, recalling the film of the 1970’s, King of Hearts.

Aldofina’s  brothers pay for her long stay at The Nest. We see evidence daily of what happens in our modern world to the mentally ill who do not have family resources.

FREUD’S SISTER gives us a canvas broad and deep. Can we respond in kind, by allowing its beauty to inspire our own inquiry, contemplation…action?

This holiday season I was honored to attend a potluck at a local yoga studio. Candles encircled the room, the smell of cinnamon and hot spices all around us.  A stranger posed an interesting question, “What is worth doing?”

Many gave answers, or simply sat quietly. The stranger answered that he valued his work, the people he loved, playing the guitar, and doing yoga. “I can let the rest of it go.”

I have thought about this often in the last few days.  We are bombarded with so many distractions, so many ideas about who we should be and how we should behave. How do we plow through the quagmire and come to that place within us that knows what is worth doing, what brings us the most joy and self-respect, and what pulls us into anxiety or self judgment?

Focusing on the “should’s” is often a way to increase self criticism and lower self esteem. –I should lose weight—I should go to law school -I should make more money – I should save the world—

If one looks to the wisdom of the East: yoga, tai chi, the spiritual practices of Tao, Buddhism, Hinduism – the path to Enlightenment is not achieved by frantic conformity to what society dictates. It is achieved by first looking deeply into the concept of “achievement”. What is really possible, given ones life circumstance, talents, limitations? This does not mean being passive or lazy. Quite the opposite. It means taking an inventory of your self, looking at your environment, your reality, and asking, as the stranger asked, “what is worth doing?”  Most precisely, “What is possible for me, given that I desire a full, healthy, joyful life in community with others?”

We must all conform in obvious ways: stop at a red light, go forward on a green one, make enough money to provide food, shelter, education for our families, but this does not preclude our ability choose an attitude of peace, joy, and wisdom, in any given situation. With practice, and commitment to psychological and spiritual growth, we can learn to stand up to the negative energies in our world and ourselves. To choose serenity over anxiety, anger, self-indulgence.

Our world is struggling to overcome tragedy, violence, and pain. We cannot save the world. In our hearts we know this, but many of us desire this, more than anything.

Can we honor this desire by making a New Year’s Resolution to achieve a thriving connection with our deepest inner being? To become closer to the part of us that is strong, vulnerable, ethical? Taking the time to nourish this connection – simple steps, like stopping in the middle of a frantic day to look at a tree out the window, breathe deeply, feel the reality of our inner soul, our anima.  In this and a thousand other ways we can find meaning, and joy in a 2013 worth living.

If someone had a dream of the massacre of children; a mother slain by the son’s own hand who then takes his life, what would it mean?

As the world searches for answers – and perhaps new questions – in the wake of the slaughter in Connecticut, I struggle to imagine what I would do if I were sitting with the author of this dream.

“But this is no dream,” you cry. “This is a horrible reality.”

Yes, but as we search for meaning, exploring multiple dimensions of reality, including images from the unconscious mind, may be instructive.

If the dreamer of such a horrible nightmare came to me, I would begin by listening to the story, in every detail, simply honoring the level of horror.  A Greek tragedy of such epic proportions, Sophocles could never have conceived of it, even in a culture that enslaved and exploited children.

Is this a possible theme: something is not being honored in the sacred child, in American culture, and in other cultures around the world. To honor the sacred in  a child is not to “spoil” her, but to cherish her.

Perhaps I should use the pronoun “him”, since the perpetrators of recent massacres have all been young males. This begs the question:

is there a wound in the infantile masculine that runs so deep, and echoes of such rage, it finds expression in these heinous acts?

And, what do we mean by “the masculine”? Is it about gender, or about the spirit, the animus, the creative drive in all human beings that to flourish, requires the nourishment of the inner life.

Return to the dreamer. Was he or she “assaulted” as a child?  Are the bullets in the dream symbolic of emotional attacks? Does this express the genesis of the dreamer’s profound self-hatred? If so, where does this hatred of the self come from? A boy who could never “fit in”, in a culture where not fitting in feels like emotional death?

Does the inner child of the dreamer still suffer from an undernourished soul? If so, how do we bring more of this nourishment into our relationships, our families, our schools, our art, games and communities?

Can we replace video violence and aggressive games with a new spirit of adventure that truly nourishes the soul? What would look like? It could take many forms, including creative art, rituals, journeys into nature, discovering new or your own neighborhood in the spirit of a life-long odyssey to redeem the Sacred, for our children, and for the child within every adult.

“Naïve”, you say. “Children growing up in poverty don’t have access to these enrichments.” True. But, the massacres did not take place in the inner city. They took place in the community forums of middle-class America: shopping malls, movie theaters, universities, high schools, elementary schools…

And, I may not be a question of shifting the form, ie, children can still play baseball, climb trees and have imaginal play. It is the motivation, the goal, and the content that needs to change, from a focus on prevailing, conquering, or getting esteem at all costs, to nourishing, honoring, and cherishing the growth of inner creative being.

Ironically, at least one of the young victims of the Connecticut massacre, the little girl called Emily, was, according to her Dad,  “a wonderful artist; the kindest person I had ever known.”

Can we take full advantage of this global grief, to take action that goes to the archetypal roots of this slaughter? Yes, enact strict gun control laws! Yes, please, dear God, improve the mental health system!! And yes, address the other level, of reality, moving with power and conviction, to nourish the sacred child soul in us all.

One of the great joys of creative work is unexpected inspiration that comes, as if by magic, from the hidden depths of the imagination. This can take many forms. Mozart walked the streets of Vienna with a terrible headache, finally dashing back to his room to write down a complete symphony.

Recently, in the flow of writing my new play, a character blurted out, “Find yourself outside yourself, as the earth encircles the sun.” I was thrilled! The perfect line for that character, and nothing I could have predicted.

Now, in the holiday season, when we are bombarded with the mandate to Give, I ask myself what that phrase really means.: find yourself outside yourself…

On the surface, it seems to prescribe a life of selfless devotion in service to others, the very mandate that has turned so many people away from organized religion. “Give up myself?” some would say, “but I have been struggling to find my true self for years! “

The word sacrifice comes from the Latin, “sacred” and “to make”: to make sacred.  It can be a sacred discovery to find joy in giving to others.  Charles Dickens immortalized this in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. The ghosts in his dreams hold a mirror to Scrooge’s soul, and he comes to understand himself as never before. He sees how much he has lost by clinging to his small obsessions and desires. With self-knowledge, he can look “outside himself”, and is transformed from a man who lives “inside himself” to one who gives ebulliently to others.

“Making sacred” could also mean that you can “find yourself” by sacrificing your frantic pursuit of self-esteem through the approval of others.  This opens a space in the psyche for the true self, the part of us motivated to manifest our sacred destiny, however eccentric or unconventional that may be. We no longer give away our power to others or over-value their evaluation of us.

We are free.

When we learn to approve of and love ourselves, we can see “outside” with new eyes. The needs and opinions of others take on a different reality. We aren’t dependent on other people to define who we are, so we can reach out to them, celebrate their achievements, learn from them, extend love, curiosity, and forgiveness.

This is a profound journey, and a life long one: to become evermore awake to the dimensions of our whole self.  Then, we can join Scrooge in exuberant generosity, fully able to discern what, and to whom to give our love and energy.

As November approaches, I find myself reflecting on the nature of power: who seeks it, where the desire for power comes from, and what is “personal power”?

What of people who see themselves as “power-less”?

Can we learn to claim a personal power cradled in self-worth that cannot be destroyed by others?

In his legendary work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote of his experience in the Nazi death camps. He discovered that those most likely to survive found a source of spiritual and personal power deep within themselves that even the greatest evil could not destroy

The ancient Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, articulated that value and meaning come into the world as opposites. Our world and our human psyche, are subject to a continual process of fragmentation and restoration.  In the unifying of these forces, healing and goodness emerge.

Carl Jung echoes this theme in his construct of the “tension of the opposites”, for example, Power and Love.  According to the Kabbalah, when these are torn asunder, evil flourishes. Viktor Frankl experienced this in Nazi Germany. We see it anew in Syria, and other places around the world.

In a more intimate arena, we see it every day in our own lives. How often do we succumb to an unconscious moment that splits power and love: when we break in front of someone in a grocery line, putting our own small-ego needs above respect for others; when we yell at a child because we cannot summon the patience to listen to what she really needs; when we refuse to visit a dying relative because it would disrupt our ambitious lives.

Another critical aspect of healing this split is learning to assert your power with others. When you refuse to surrender to the role of a victim, it is an act of self love.  When you appropriately assert your needs, values, or opinions , your inner power unites with self love.

This is a profound journey for many of us. It is especially challenging to learn to love yourself if you were not sufficiently loved as a child.

But, it is possible to achieve the most powerful kingdom: your self.