I hear this a lot: “Isn’t that being selfish?  I once got so frustrated with someone, I said, “Worry about being selfish when you have a self!” This was an overreaction, and I apologized. As with many mistakes, it was regrettable, but led to a very fruitful discussion about the nature of self, and why so many of us, both women and men, often suppress our healthy wants and desires out of fear of selfishness.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines selfish as “concerned chiefly or only with oneself”. This doesn’t quite capture it.  A concrete comparison often helps. A truly selfish person would respond to a crisis with her aging father by saying, “That’s somebody else’s problem.” Such a person would be concerned only with their own comfort or convenience. A person with a strong sense of self might respond with disappointment, especially if it meant getting on an airplane and missing her daughter’s school play, but she would realize that an important aspect of having a deep connection to oneself is honoring the value and needs of others.

You might ask, isn’t the person getting on the plane practicing self-sacrifice? It depends on the circumstances, and on how conscious the person is. Self sacrifice implies martyrdom, and its companion, inflated self-worth.  If a healthy person had the option to delay hopping on that plane in order to attend the school play, she would take it. A martyr would dash out the door, saying to her child, “Sorry I have to miss your play, but I am so desperately needed, things will fall apart without me.”  This is selfish behavior, in the name of self-sacrifice. In this hypothetical case, our person is putting her own need to feel important above the child’s desire to have her mom come to her play. Even more to the point: our martyr is playing out a role she believes  will bring esteem and self worth in the eyes of others. She is not looking deep inside to see what action would be most important and meaningful for her.

These dynamics are complex. As we get psychologically healthier, most of us enter into an ever present dance of becoming more conscious of our own needs and desires, giving ourselves the permission to act on them, and also being aware of the needs of other people.  Ideally this includes recognizing when we stop self-motivated action in response to an old message, often forged in childhood, that we are “blowing our own horn” or “too big for our britches”.

In the process of what Carl Jung called “Individuation”, layers of old defenses rise to the surface. We come to see that many of the things we grew up feeling guilty about, don’t add up on the scale of emotional justice. It is not only okay to act from the center of our own desire, it is the only way to have healthy, balanced, honest relationships.

Sorting this out is often subtle and requires listening to voices deep inside of us. We can’t come up with hard and fast rules in the exchange between self and other in a reality that changes with every heartbeat. In our hypothetical about the woman responding to her father’s health crisis, it may be that she can check in with others attending him, ascertain that it is all right to wait a day so she can see the play, and make the choice to do so. Or, it may be that everyone back home is begging her to come right away, even though the situation is not that critical. Does she “cave” to pressure from her family, or listen to the priorities of her own heart? Or, it may be that everyone is telling her she doesn’t need to come right away, and her daughter is looking at her with hopeful eyes, and yet, a dream comes in the night, and our woman realizes she must go to her father right away. Their emotional bond is too strong, and his condition too unpredictable.

Listening to our dreams, and to that intuitive voice or images that comes to us in waking life, can be our greatest resource for discovering how to proceed in fidelity to our true self. Freud said, “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” Great treasures lie in the unconscious mind, just below our waking awareness.

So, before throwing down the self-demeaning label “selfish”, look closer. Truly selfish people are operating from a split-off psyche. When they reject others, they are rejecting a part of themselves. In our hypothetical story, if our woman had said, “That is someone else’s problem”, she would have been confessing that she feels she is someone else’s problem, a person incapable of seeing the depths of her own complexity, value, and vulnerability.

My hunch is that a vast majority of us are not “selfish” at all, but struggling to find, to own, and to operate from, our own complex and valuable self.

 Psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book of the distinction between “The Spirit of the Times” and “The Spirit of the Depths”. We see this vividly demonstrated when we put Ari Shavit’s acclaimed new book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel  alongside Erel Shalit’s classic work, The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel. The former takes us through the history of the heroic creation of Israel, including the darkest “shadow” behaviors of the Jewish state in the 1948 massacre of the Arabs of Lydda.

In the latter work, Erel Shalit tells us why.

This is no simplistic psychological analysis. The brilliance of this Israeli Jungian analyst is that he offers no easy solutions, plumbing the paradox of the necessary heroic identity of the Jewish state, and yet, around every corner is the shadow of every hero: the beggar, the frightened one, the part of all of us that is dependent on forces outside of our control.

It is also very important to note that Erel Shalit’s book is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of the soul.  On one level Israel is the backdrop for the author to explore how shadow, myth, and projection work in all of us, regardless of our life circumstance, nationality, environment, or history. It even includes a comprehensive glossary of Jungian terms that has some of the best definitions I have ever encountered, and hence a find for readers new to Jung.

And, of course, for people who are fascinated by the scope and depth of the story of Israel, this is a simply great read. It stands alone, but read as a companion to Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land,  Erel Shalit’s Hero and His Shadow gives us The Spirit of the Depths in all its dimension.  We may not be able to resolve the Arab/Israeli conflict, but we can learn many things from this brave, complex Israeli author, that we can apply to healing the inner and outer wars in our own lives.

VIKTOR: I have come to believe that it is death itself that makes life meaningful. All the losses along the way give us the opportunity to learn we can be stronger than we thought, take a new path, try a new skill, love again. We make a friend of our own free will and create a life of beauty from the rubble, like pearls of great price on a golden chain. Nothing is ever lost.

 EDITH: Sentimental tripe, Dr. Frankl. Everything is lost for the Jews.

 VIKTOR: If it takes all night, I will convince you otherwise.

 EDITH: To find meaning —here?

 VIKTOR: Most particularly, here.

—Timeless Night: Viktor Frankl Meets Edith Stein by Elizabeth Clark-Stern

We constitute a most universal club : humans seeking the meaning of why we are here, what is our purpose, what do we really want, how do we transcend suffering, find meaning in injustice, overcome cynicism and self-doubt?  Answers seem illusive, yet we keep asking. Some grow weary of the quest and seek safe harbor in dogma, an understandable choice, and yet, as Bill Moyers once said of the “congregational polity” of his Baptist roots, in true religion, each person must forge their own relationship with God and struggle to make meaning in a world of paradoxical truth.

The breadth and depth of humanity’s meaning seekers never ceases to engage and surprise. As soon as we think we know what it looks like, who belongs to our “tribe”, someone comes along who is an unlikely candidate. A person who seems devil-may-care in all other ways, drops his voice and stares into space, suddenly humbled by a most universal question: “Why did she stop loving me?” This leads to the nature of love itself, the complexity of our need for one another, to the question of an inner life where none of us is alone in psyche. Judgments melt as common denominator is revealed.

In her beautiful book, Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning , Jungian analyst and author Jean Shinoda Bolen writes about the meaning search in one of the most challenging arenas of human experience: confronting the  life-threatening illness in ourselves or those we love. She evokes Viktor Frankl, who observed the full range of choices available to humans in the concentration camps. Some gave up, some took on the role of their captors and oppressed others; some found a deep compassion for others and made sacrifices to keep others, even strangers, alive.

In facing illness and possible death, we know that some are able to face it with assertiveness and courage, while others are passive, hostile, irascible. How are we to make meaning of this? What is the meaning of choice and free will in such a context? How does the existence of death influence our attitude about life?

Dr. Bolen uses story to dramatize this journey. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth learns that her sister, Ereshkigal is suffering and in mourning in the underworld. Inanna is compelled to descend to Great Below, to be a witness. The proud and powerful goddess enters naked and bows low, looking into the baleful eyes of death. She is struck down, her body left to rot on a hook.

The once-powerful Queen is humbled, as we are all humbled by endless cat-scans, x-rays, blood tests, and surgeries that leave us feeling like meat on a hook. Inanna symbolizes the part of us that is successful, ego-satisfied, master of our world. Her sister, Ereshkigal, is the part of us consigned to the underworld of life, not top of the class, smartest, fastest, much adored. She is the bad patient all doctors and nurses dread, whining, fearful, blaming, self-pitying. She is the person in our lives, or the part in ourselves, we most want to avoid. And yet, to find meaning in the mending of our souls, we are called, as Inanna was called, to enter the underworld and make peace with our inner Ereshkigal.

We are aided in this by a third character in the myth, Ninshubur, Inanna’s messenger, warrior, faithful servant, messenger, minister, general and adviser. She accompanies Inanna to the gate of the Great Below, and when she learns of her Queen’s fate, Ninshurber cries her lament loudly, beats her drum in the assemblies and seeks help from the father gods.  The first two gods cannot be bothered, but the third feels compassion for Inanna and acts immediately – in a curious way. He cleans under his fingernails and brings forth the dirt and lint and fashions two small creatures, neither male nor female, small as flies, who can pass through the gates of Hell unnoticed. These tiny flies find Ereshkigal and mirror her very particular woes: “Oh, my back!’ “Oh, my belly!” “Ahh my breast!”. The little fly-creatures respond, empathetically moaning, groaning and sighing with her. Ereskigal feels seen, understood, and cared for. Her petulant, wrathful behavior transforms to gratitude and generosity.  She offers the little fly-like beings riches and jewels. They ask only for the piece of rotting meat hanging on the wall, and thus Inanna, is restored to life, able to ascend from the Great Below to the Great Above.

Each of us must find meaning in our own way.  My search has brought me to the meaning-source himself, Viktor Frankl. Surely the enduring popularity of Man’s Search for Meaning is a testament to the universality of our club, as broad and deep as humanity itself.

I discovered that Viktor Frankl and philosopher/Carmelite nun Edith Stein travelled parallel paths in phenomenology, psychology, philosophy, and human rights.  They were also in the concentration camp at the same time. They could have met…

In my new play, Timeless Night, they are troublemakers tossed into an old storage shed in Auschwitz. They have one night to get to know each other, to tell stories, to learn, to explore, to laugh, to remember, to feel. With the dawn comes liberation or extermination. They don’t know which, but have opinions and theories about that, and everything else.

A teacher once told me, “All death scenes are life scenes.”

Nothing is lost.

And so the journey continues.

Review of two collections: The Dream and Its Amplification, edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Swift Furlotti, Fisher King Press. 2013. And Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, edited by Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lowinski, Fisher King Press 2012.

The ebullient cover art serves as the gateway to The Dream and Its Amplification. Howard Fox’s painting “A Giant Dream” draws us into a sumptuous, archetypal world of mountains, gargoyle-laden temples, to a bridge with a naked, giant sleeping with his head upon a fire truck. In the canal below, a man treads water as a mermaid speeds toward him in a motorboat.

Speculation abounds.  Who is the man in the water? Is the sleeping figure on the bridge a giant or a god? Who are the people lurking in the shadows of the temple – or is it a castle?

Surely this book cannot live up to such a cover. And yet, in essay after essay from Jungian analysts across the globe, it does, offering a hologram of perspectives, even as any given dream, if tended from different angles, can yield multiple meanings.

And meaning is very much at the core of this work.  We follow Ken Kimmel into the world of the Maya Shaman, Ronald Schenk opens us to Gnostic myth, Gilda Frantz traverses the interplay of dreams and death itself. The latter brought me a great sense of understanding a peace, as she writes about the dreams that prepared her for the time when death would “call” upon a loved one.

Erel Shalit evokes an Israeli man’s dream of a handless Arab child. Beside the child, the Earth herself extends four hands severed from their limbs up through the asphalt, as if crying to all of us: when will we grow the hands –and the arms–we need to grasp each other across the barriers of ancient conflict?

This cry of the archetypal Feminine echoes throughout.  I found myself returning to the mermaid on the cover in the speed boat (or is she a mermaid? We cannot see the end of her green body…a tail or a bit of clothing??) She hurries through the water to this drowning man…or is he simply out for a swim in the canal, and it is we ourselves who make crisis of it, rush to rescue, when perhaps what is needed is for us to stop the motor and allow ourselves to drift for awhile in our own reverie…?

I was familiar with Nancy Qualls-Corbett from her seminal work, The Sacred Prostitute (Inner City Books, 1988). How lovely to encounter her again in Redeeming the Feminine: Eros and the World Soul.   She shares the dreams of a patient, a very hard-working, high-functioning woman, who, like so many of us, grew up with a mother who could not give the depth of love she needed in childhood.  Her dreams are a descent into an ancient archetypal world that guides her, ultimately, to the discovery of her buried feminine nature. This opens in her a state of being that allows a new masculine energy to emerge and join with the conscious feminine.  Qualls-Corbett goes on to weave the strands of individual healing into the wounded feminine of the great Mama to us all: the Earth.

Similar stories of transformation abound in what I consider a companion work, Marked by Fire, Stories of the Jungian Way.  Though these volumes were published a year apart, I found them deliciously complimentary.

On this cover we encounter  Barbara McCauley’s painting, Flight Into Egypt, a dream-like scene of a woman in a bright pink pants-suit sitting sideways on a grazing white horse. Behind her, in the mist, an enormous ghostly figure (a god? a man? a monster?). The woman looks directly out at us, seemingly unaware of the looming presence behind her.  In her eyes, a curiosity, a searching, even as her body rests in contemplation on a motionless steed.

Once again, the imagination soars: who is she? What is the looming vision behind her? Why doesn’t she turn around? What is that tall shape in the foreground – a giant flower? A pillar? A sign-post?…..

Again, the work lives up to its cover, nourishing us with essays by some of the same Jungian analysts who grace the pages of The Dream and Its Amplification, and many new ones, each offering riches.

I will close with a sampler. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s Drunk with Fire is a fluid journey of poetry and prose that begins with Ms. Lowinsky’s frustrations with her mentor, C.G. Jung. This frustration is gloriously resolved with the publication of The Red Book. She writes, “He ‘outed’ himself as a poet and painter. He writes directly out of his vulnerability, working out his relationship with his soul in the depths of the mythopoetic imagination, just as I do.”

She proceeds to share an Active Imagination that is as entertaining as it is enlightening: a dialogue with C.G. Jung himself. At one point Jung takes on the energy of the trickster, morphing into Groucho Marx!

The humor is balanced with the profundity of the journey. Here is a soul’s awakening in the fullness of the human dimension. The poetry – inspired by dreams or images of waking life – shows us how the creative process can be endemic in making the soul whole.

I commend both of these beautiful books to you, as gifts for thoughtful friends, or an offering to yourself. They stand alone, but taken together, grace the reader with a cornucopia that invites the reader to call forth the thunder bolt of your own creative fire.

distillation –  The evaporation and subsequent collection of a liquid by means of condensation as a means of purification. – The American Heritage College Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin New York. 2000.

We sit in a cradled silence on the patio of my cousin’s home in Arizona. The air is of a warmth that dries our eyes and invites stillness. Soft sunlight caresses the lightly bowing bougainvillea. Hummingbirds buzz our heads: my cousin’s, his wife’s, and mine.

A vireo appears, his egg-shaped belly as grey as our hair. His short round beak is not slim enough to penetrate the tiny hole at the bottom of the hummingbird feeder. Undaunted, he dangles upside down, jamming his beak into the hole, again and again. At last he gets a rush of the clear, sweet liquid, flicks his tail in triumph, and is gone.

My eyes drift to my cousin’s face, so slender now, month 13 of stage 4 cancer.  He walks across the yard to water the olive tree, his lanky gate as slow as a great blue heron stepping through thick water.

As the week unfolds, we revolve around a mysterious, unspoken stillness, orbiting in emotional extremes where even memory is dangerous.  Any topic of tenderness ignites a grief so deep, my cousin’s body shivers in the expression of it. His eyes beg us to help him not go there. We comply. Better to laugh at politics, or land in the life boat of the ordinary: “all the fruit has ripened at once, however will we eat it all before it goes bad?

By day we count hummingbirds, pour over bird field guides: is the interloper a grey vireo or a Lucy’s warbler??  My cousin has no energy for walking, so we drive, ending up at bookshops, and video stores, in search of mirth.

In the evenings we watch comedies, those movies never so funny. We cook food, salmon with chipotle and honey, never so sweet. Whatever lies at the center of our extremes, we cannot speak of it, and yet we sense it is there: more than a mere avoidance of the prognosis, something else…

On the last morning of my visit, I clamor out of restless sleep and unremembered dreams to find my cousin greeting me with a child’s voice, as if  we are children again, ready to raid my Grandpa’s chicken coup.

“I didn’t know if I would see you—“ he says. “It is so early.”

“I’m glad I got up in time,” I whisper, sliding my arm around his so slender frame.

His wife’s face is drawn, her fingers spilling the coffee grounds. They hurry off to the hospital, for a cat scan none of expects to go well. They won’t let me go with them. “It will be good to have you here when we come back,”  she says.

On the patio the hummingbirds animate their shadows. I reach for the books that have come to me in this time of orbiting the unknown and the known. My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer by poet Christian Wiman, who walks his own cancer journey, and Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, a bounteous compellation of analysts’ essays edited by Patricia Damery and Naomi Ruth Lewinski. In the latter I find my way to the section, “Dark Night of the Body”. It provides some of  the nourishment – and the perspective – to understand and hold this terrible, vibrant journey.

Henry Abramovitch writes of the peeling away of persona as he descended into his own journey with cancer:

but one day after chemo, touching my chin

to see my beard fall like snow

I let myself remember two days ago, as I sat in the Barnes and Noble café with my cousin. I showed him the picture of Christian Wiman, also a slender man with little hair. “Reading it makes me feel I can walk this road with you,” I said.  We wept, holding hands. “I can’t imagine what people do,” he whispered, “who have to walk this alone.” We allowed ourselves this moment, to feel united in the depth of our love.  Then, we had to move apart, this touchstone in our emotional orbit simply too painful.

The hummingbirds hover close to my head, forming a winged shadow Chimera that pulses, then vanishes. In my mind I hear the voice of my father in the last year of his cancer, some 30 years ago, “How many people have walked this road, and I am still here?”

I fall into a gentle, restful sleep.

“Hi!” comes my cousin’s voice.

His wife is smiling, “Good news! The chemo is working. The cancer isn’t spreading!

We grow giddy, the air light, the sunshine bold.

We all know this is not a cure, but a reprieve. It doesn’t seem to matter. Not today.

We go for a walk, hope giving my cousin’s legs the agility of a brown skipper dancing over rocks. And, from this place we can talk about the fear, the despair, and oh darling irony, the promise of a spiritual continuity that holds us all.  We don’t need to fly from mortality, or hide out in distraction or the mundane.  There it is, our connection to the unity of all things, at the center of our emotional orbit all along, waiting for us to notice.

This summer, Lindsey Rosen and I were invited to perform my new play, On the Doorstep of the Castle, at the International Jungian Congress in Copenhagen. What a fantastic experience! Such a thrill just to be there – all the voices in languages across the world. Lindsey made contact with legendary dance therapist, Joan Chodorow, at the pre-conference workshop on the body and active imagination. All of the dance therapists became our colleagues for the week. We began the Congress by attending a workshop led by David Gerbi, a Jew from Libya, and an analyst, actor, and refugee. He was so excited about our play, which deals with the oppression of the Jews in 16th century Spain. Lindsey and I were blown away by David’s workshop – he has lived what we are portraying in art. Meeting him gave a depth and meaning to the entire week, as we attended workshops on such a grand scope of topics, including evidence-based research on the validity of Jungian therapy and the use of symbols, metaphor, and emotion to promote mental health. We played hooky some mornings to take in the sights of Copenhagen. What a beautiful city! We were able to immerse ourselves in a classic European city. Bicycles everywhere – families – a sense of relaxation and care for the people –priority space on the buses for baby carriages and old people. And, oh, my , the town square of cobblestones – Olympic gods and goddesses atop ancient buildings – fountains filled with frog-spitting statues; breast-feeding goddesses with water spouting from their nipples– a sense of ebullience everywhere. Of course, our own ebullience was matched only by how nervous we were as the time for the performance drew close. We had no time to rehearse lights or sound, but Murray Stein’s Red Book performance came right before us, so the room was at least set up, with a stage big enough to dance and act on. And, true to old theater lore, after all the angst, the performance was a dream. Our characters connected with so much electricity, passion, and depth. Standing ovation. We were sticky with sweat, but accepted the embraces of Joan Chodorow, Jean Shinoda Bolen (one of my icons: author of The Goddess in Every Woman), Naomi Ruth Lewinsky (author, analyst, poet), David Gerbi, the dance therapists, and many others…I am still walking on air, and lo and behold, the greatest gift –such irony — the inner active imagination I did all week to calm my silly nerves inspired a profound shift in my inner world, even as we traversed the adventure of the outer one.

An affirmation of this work, the International Jungian community — all of us who love art, psyche, and each other!
Footnote: The published book of On the Doorstep of the Castle is now on Amazon with stunning cover art by Seattle Jungian psychotherapist, Patrice Donahue.

On the Doorstep Premieres at the Copenhagen IAAP Congress

On August 22, 2013 – 22:00
at the IAAP Congress Copenhagen
don’t miss the premier of
On the Doorstep of the Castle
A play of Teresa of Avila and Alma de Leon
by Elizabeth Clark-Stern

Book Publication Date coincides with the premier – August 22, 2013 – Advance Orders Welcomed. http://fisherkingpress.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=22&products_id=199

Our setting is 16th century Spain. The Inquisition has expelled the Jews or forced them to convert. Teresa of Avila is igniting the imagination of the country as the nun who receives messages directly from God. Alma de Leon, a young Jewish converso, appears on Teresa’s doorstep, petitioning to become a novice in her care. Their complex relationship explores the feminine archetypes of the Amazon, and the Medial Woman, in a story that unveils the foundations of psyche’s movement toward wholeness: Kabbalah, and Christian rapture, in an oppressive yet luminous time.

This play is a work of creative imagination based on the interaction of a true historical character and a fictional one. Teresa of Avila is admired to this day not only by Catholics and Christians, but by Taoists and Buddhists, psychologists and poets. Carl Jung was fascinated by her master work, The Interior Castle, for its description of the journey of the soul toward intimacy with God. The fictional character, Alma de Leon, is inspired by twentieth century Jewish philosopher, Edith Stein, who chanced to read Teresa’s autobiography, and experienced a profound spiritual awakening that led her to become a Carmelite nun. “What if these two were to meet?” the playwright asked herself, crafting the character of Alma as a Jewish woman true to her time and place in history. The teaching of the ancient Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah, was strictly forbidden by the Inquisition, and yet Alma is haunted by it, even as she dons the habit of a nun and struggles to find her identity in the presence of her passionate, spiritually adventurous mentor.
ON THE DOORSTEP OF THE CASTLE:

A Playwright’s Search for Voices from Psyche’s Mystical Past

Alma: Is this (rapture) not a conjure of your imagination?

Teresa: Valgame Dios! They are as different as the night the day! When my little mind thinks to fashion a colloquy with God, it is like scratches on parchment, all froth and fantasy. When the rapture captures me, unbidden, the voice echoes with all the chords of eternity, my mind awake as the sky at dawn.

 What happened to Teresa of Avila when she received messages from God? Were the raptures an expression of her unconscious, or did they emanate from somewhere beyond her personal psyche? What is the nature of mind, and how do its voices shape our values, beliefs, personal development, relationships, creativity, and destiny?

These are some of the questions that haunted me as I researched and penned my new play, ON THE DOORSTEP OF THE CASTLE.  Where did my idea for this play come from, and how did I learn to listen to the voices of my characters, transforming an intellectual quest into an expansive journey into the depths of the soul?

It began some years ago, with a story seemingly far removed from the arid plains of Sixteenth Century Spain. One night I watched a PBS documentary on the twentieth century philosopher, Edith Stein. Born into a Jewish merchant family in 1890, she lost her father when she was two years old. Her mother took over the management of the business while single-handedly raising seven children. Edith’s character was shaped, in part, by learning from her mother’s determination and confidence. This would serve Edith well as she fought throughout her life to follow a calling unique in any era, but certainly for a Jewish woman in early twentieth century Germany.

Edith had a quick wit and sharp mind, and in young adulthood, moved from the traditions of Jewish faith to the study of philosophy. She apprenticed with pioneer phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and wrote her doctoral dissertation ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY in 1916. In this work, she asserted her own theories, including what she called “non-actuality”, the concept that early experiences in a person’s life can exist in the background of the present and still have an effect. She appears to have arrived at “Non-actuality” independent of Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

Clearly this was a woman who possessed tremendous powers of analysis, rational thought, and creative synthesis of complex material. How intriguing to discover that in 1921, when Edith was visiting friends, she plucked a copy of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography from the bookshelf, and upon reading it, heard the voice of conversion. In the teachings of this modest nun, Edith Stein discovered what she had been searching for all her life. She not only converted to Catholicism, but joined Teresa’s Carmelite order, to the great amazement of her Jewish family and philosophical colleagues.

I was aware of Teresa of Avila, but had never read her work. If her autobiography had such an impact on Edith Stein, a devout Jewish woman whose studies of philosophy had turned her into an atheist, I had to see for myself what could possibly have inspired such on-the-spot enlightenment.

In TERESA OF JESUS:  A LIFE, and her masterwork, THE INTERIOR CASTLE, this self-deprecating nun guides her readers on a journey into raptures with Christ and angels, encounters with the devil, and tells of her transformation from a daughter of privilege to a barefoot nun pioneering a monastic order on the model of Saint Francis of Assisi.

What a story.

I was entirely hooked, and realized that I too was searching for something. Teresa’s story, and Edith’s, reawakened my longing to know the nature of psyche’s relationship with the divine.

Enter my first great love, theater. In May, 2011, Rikki Ricard and I performed OUT OF THE SHADOWS, A STORY OF TONI WOLFF AND EMMA JUNG for the Archetypal Theater Company in New Orleans, accompanied by our technical crew, Donna Lee and John Stern. That experience was so fulfilling, on so many levels, I returned with the desire to write another play.

In her essay, STRUCTURAL FORMS OF THE FEMININE PSYCHE, Toni Wolff articulated four feminine archetypes: 1. Mother, 2. Hetaira, the Greek word for “female companion”, the Mother’s opposite, a woman who nourishes the animus, either in an actual man, as Toni Wolff did with Jung, or, arguably, in a more modern sense, a woman who has a relationship with her own inner animus, or creative drive.

Wolff’s other opposing feminine archetypes are 3.Amazon, a woman like Edith Stein’s mother who fought to make a living and raise a family, and Edith herself, who fought to find her own truth and bring it to the world, and 4. Medial woman, one who mediates between heaven and earth, or the unconscious and conscious realms. This includes Cassandra, of ancient Greece, modern analysts, and therapists, healers and clerics.

There can be an intimate interaction between the voices of our archetypes, and our conscious functioning in everyday life. Women, and men, can call the archetypal Mother to help us through a bad day. We can allow the Amazon’s strength and courage to flow into us before a job interview, and when the medial person needs a break, Hetaira can say, “Take your beloved out to lunch!”

I realized Toni Wolff and Emma Jung embodied the Hetaira and the Mother. What historical characters could embody the Amazon and the Medial woman?

The answer was in the pile of books beside my bed. Teresa of Avila is the rock star of Medial Women. And then I was aided by the archetypal Hetaira from the dream world – not to mention my research.  I awoke in the middle of the night from an unremembered dream with the notion to transpose Edith Stein into 16^th century Spain. A fictionalized “Edith” could walk up to the convent door and apply for admission. They could meet!

Thank you, oh thank you, imaginal part of my brain.

A young Jewish woman of the 1500’s would have been subjected to the persecution of the Inquisition, even as Edith Stein was persecuted by the Nazi’s. She also would have been raised with the great Jewish mystical tradition, Kabbalah, which was kept alive in secret rituals that echo into our present day.

I poured over texts on Kabbalah, stuck by the conception of construction of opposites in every dimension of the human soul, thousands of years before Jung and Freud.

I didn’t want to create a literal character of Edith Stein, and began to see her, not as a philosopher, but as a woman much closer to the earth;  a woman who loved color, movement, sound, music. One night, this emerging character whispered to me that she was descended from Moses de Leon, author of The Zohar, sacred text of Kabbalah. A friend told me that Alma means soul in Spanish, and the character “Alma de Leon” was born.

I pulled out butcher paper and began writing scenes between the characters – how they met, how their story progressed –  how they felt about each other. On this big surface, I felt free to pour in every historical character from Shirley du Boulay’s biography of Teresa , the “kitchen sink” approach to creative writing.

I began to see Lindsey Rosen as Alma, and was thrilled when she agreed to play the role. And, Teresa? I was already reading her works aloud, and could feel her creeping in to that part of me that portrays characters quite opposite of myself.

But I couldn’t make the leap from my Jackson Polluck-style outline on butcher paper to the terror of the blank computer screen.

Then, I began to hear Alma and Teresa, talking to each other as I stood in line at the grocery store, in between therapy sessions, waking me in the middle of the night.

“What are you waiting for?” said Teresa.

“Enough with the butcher paper, “ said Alma, “Stop giving in to your fear (“Who am I to write about these women? I’m not a  Carmelite or a Jew? Alma isn’t a real person…What does this have to do with psychotherapy? Who cares about these women?…blah blah blah”) Alma wouldn’t leave me alone. I had created an Amazon, and she wouldn’t let me be a weenie!

I moved to the computer and faced the horrid blank page. Interestingly, the writing began, not with voices, but with mental images and sensations. I could see the dusty arid plains of Avila, hear the sound of donkey carts, the rustle of a nun’s habit in the hot breeze.

From this imagined reality, the characters began to speak. I “took dictation” as they gave voice to the subtle dynamics of their relationship, their struggles in the world, the expression of their inner reality.

They took me to places I could never have predicted, speaking not only in dialogue, but in movement, dance, music and visual metaphor. Our cast and crew are terribly excited to bring this work to an international audience on August 22, at the Jungian Congress in Copenhagen. After that my vision is to offer it in book form to colleges, meditation centers, Jung societies and theater companies, to mount their own productions.

“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