Life is like a river

The song I used in one of my first lessons with each new set of students while teaching at the university in ChangZhou, was by Garth Brooks, The River. Using the song as a major part of a motivational set, the students were then able to open up more easily and speak of their own dreams and how they changed over their brief lives of childhood and youth. Dreams constantly change as life somehow twists and turns and sometimes doubles back on itself. But that said, there are some dreams that shape-shift to fit the constantly changing terrain of one’s life. The core of the dream remains, only the outer world expression of the dream changes.

But this post is looking at a different simile, the one in which life is compared with the river. Of course, as is the usual manner in which I approach almost anything I write here, this is not intended to be some sort of universal truth, but simply how I see it at this point and time in my life. And, just because I understand it this way at this moment, I can only speak from that position. Life is like a river. The image I chose for today’s post inspired that thought. This is a section of the Battle River which flows through two quarter sections that my eldest daughter and her husband own in east-central Alberta. I have seen this river at different levels depending on the season and the environmental conditions that exist between the source of the river and this particular point along the rivers journey.

At times, the river’s flow is restricted and slow as though there was not enough energy to free up water for the flow.  Something at the source has remained frozen for two long, or there was not enough winter snow to feed the river’s flow. I see that same thing happening in my life at times where my energy levels are lower and I move and think more slowly as a result. Other times, the river overflows its banks and floods the land making wholesale changes which often seem to appear to be more about damaging and destroying. But, when the river recedes back to its place between banks that have changed somewhat because of the flooding, new life appears on the flooded land. The flooding has enriched the land.  And like the physical river, life has a way of overwhelming us with “too much-ness.” Psychologically the unconscious floods us through an overabundance of dreams, or through activated complexes due to our interpersonal relationships becoming heated in any number of ways. In the end, when the dreams recede and our heads have a time to rest, we find that we have changed in some ways, hopefully we have become more conscious and thus better able to be in relationship with ourselves and with others.

But that said, there are no guarantees about anything. The changes could result in improved relationships, lost relationship and perhaps new relationships. The only thing to be certain of  is that everything changes. Attempting to hold on to what was is nothing but a neurotic response for what was no longer exists, what was has been transformed by the flow of life.

Sometimes gray is honest

I do love black and white photos, or should I say, photos that show a richness of gray. My dreams are often about shapes, forms, textures and a lack of colour. The lack of colour isn’t something that gives a problem in terms of the stories for one focus on the action, the drama, the faces, the relationships rather than getting caught up in colours. When colour does present itself, then colour has its own meaning.

This photo was taken while on the road travelling from point A to point B, a journey of more than a few hours. I took quite a few photos of the old building from a number of locations and perspectives, following intuition more than making it a “purposeful” activity. Often in such locations I like to enter the building and take interior photos ore photos looking out from the decay and wreckage of an abandoned building.  But this time, I stayed outside deciding to look at the whole, to take peeks into the shadows or to look through one window and a window opposite to see the outer world to be seen on the opposite side of the house.

I was not pulled to be in the old story, to wander within the decay and wreckage of the past stories of this old house. It was enough for me to see the house and to honour it without disturbing it too much. I do this with my dream work from time to time. Sometimes I write them down, read what has been remembered and then close my eyes for a moment of silence before leaving the dream alone.

I don’t have a logical reason by which I choose which dreams to go into, either in terms of analysis (decoding the dream) or dialogue (engaging the characters within a dream) or through art (attempting to capture the feel and texture of a dream). I have been noticing that in presenting dreams during analytic sessions, my analyst responds in a similar manner. Some dreams are simply given a nod of recognition, others become the subject of some art form, and others become the centre of attention for discussion.

If there are rules for dream work, it could possibly be said that the only real rule is to honour the dream, to honour the response of the dreamer to the dream, and to trust to intuition in guiding the process.

Descent and Decay

I am bringing a fragment of a dream here as it allows me to engage in a dialogue that perhaps needs to be spoken. I am not sure what this will look like when it is finished but I am trusting in the process to unearth something perhaps useful. In this particular dream I found myself in an audience in which there is a sense that the audience would become the real place of drama. On the stage are two men who are visible but there are others lurking in the background. One of the men is tall and thin and more like a form of a man with unfinished face as though an ancient one; the second man is very short and where the tall man had lost facial features and was more about flowing lines, this man had very sharp features as though more of a drawing than of flesh. As I watch they begin to talk.

Now before “imagining” their conversation, I want to be clear that what I am to say wasn’t spoken in the dream. Even in bringing the above details to you, I have expanded from the original dream journal notes in order to attempt to capture the presence that I felt more than saw. Of course, the characters and objects in any dream are all aspects of self of which we are not really aware as these aspects delve into layer upon layer as they sink from the personal unconscious into the depths of the collective unconscious before disappearing into an emptiness/fullness of all becoming one.  Enough said; now the dialogue.

S.M. Ha! Just look at them [pointing at the audience]! Some audience. Did you ever see such a bleak place? There’s no colour here; everything and everyone is mostly shades of gray and black – shadows and outlines. [turns and looks at the Tall Man] Ha! It’s like looking at you!

T.M. Hmm - except for that one at the edge. He’s fidgeting. I can see him as clear as day.

S.M. Ha! He’s got reason to fidget. It’s his dream.

T.M. He’s trying to blend in with the others in the audience.  Hmm, I think he’s actually scared.

S.M. Good luck in trying to fade into the background is all I can say. He hasn’t figured out that the others in the audience aren’t real people. He’s so focused on us he has no energy left to flesh out his audience.

T.M. We aren’t real either. But none-the-less, we are here and they are there even if they are only ghosts and possibilities. What do you think, should we bring the audience up here on stage? If he can’t find a use for his audience, I am sure we could use them.

S.M. Ha! He’ll never now what hit him! We’ll use that energy to gain control of him.

T.M. Are you ready to place your bet yet? Who gets to claim his soul? Will it be you or me?

Now, that sure didn’t go as planned.  Now, I want to shift this if I can to engage these two in a dialogue with me (ego).

Ego Who are you guys? And why do you look so strange?

T.M. We look this way because this is how you made us look. By the way, I am your shadow.

S.M. I am his shadow! 

Ego You are both my shadow? I thought I only had one shadow?

S.M. You obviously don’t know everything. I am your “personal” shadow. He’s the shadow that is what you call the shadow of the “collective.”

Ego Oh, of course. I do understand – personal unconscious, collective unconscious.

T.M. Well, it is not quite that – shadow is the word – your shadow in layers with one layer close to the surface and one deeper connected to the collective unconscious.

Ego So why are you in my dream?

S.M. Duh! You brought us here. Well, that is only part of the truth. Something is going on that allowed us to come here and talk with you. You needed us to put in an appearance.

Ego I need you?

T.M. Yes. You need us. You have to face the fact that we are here, always here.

S.M. Ya! You are in some deep shit right now. You don’t get your shit together, we  take over.

Ego So that’s what the betting is about?

S.M. You got it! I win and you become crazy, looney tunes. He wins and you become a living zombie. 

Ego So how do I get out of this mess?

S.M. You expect us to tell you? Get real!

T.M. You get out of this mess by making choices. You don’t make the choices, don’t do the work, we choose for you.

Ego Thanks.  I need to think about this.

S.M. Don’t think about it too long and use the excuse that you are “holding the tension.”  You think too long and you get stuck in “La la land.”  Ha ha – that’s a good one – La la land.

Carving new lines in the mud

This is a scene from the edge of the Battle River as it traverses its way through east-central Alberta, Canada. This little river will eventually rise as the winter snow in the mountains begins to melt, but as it is right now, the shoreline shows the water still receding and leaving its mark on the mud. Nothing stays the same as the water continued to carve the shore with each season that passes.  The land works on the water forcing it to change its course over time, and the water works on the land, eroding the banks and creating new land formations at a new location, perhaps as an island where the river widens and becomes shallower. The only sure thing to note is that there is constant change.

My life is not much different. I can look at this scene and see my ego, my consciousness as the land and the unconscious as the river. As I age and as I experience life, consciousness grows or should I say, emerges from the unconscious.  It really isn’t about creating something that was never there, it is about bringing what was hidden under the water to the surface to be noted and incorporated into awareness.

All it takes are little things, sometimes so small one is almost not aware that something has changed. Just for example, I write down my dreams now, more than has been my habit for a few years. That change was somewhat significant as it came with the territory with re-entering analysis, but not so significant because it was an activity that had been part of my routine for a number of years. I guess it could be somewhat similar to the changing levels of the river over seasons where high water levels would be marked with increased dreaming and attention to dreams and low water with decreased perceptions of dreams.

With attention to dreams, I am more likely to make shifts in my awareness of the world around me and be more aware of my body as well. That extra awareness causes yet a few more “conscious” shifts in behaviour.  The slight shifts in behaviour then results in slight shifts in terms of relationships with others. In the process, I appear as a different man though in reality I am not really that much different, I am only more aware of who I am. I might “look” or “respond” a bit differently with the loss of a few extra pounds due to a slight shift in eating habits or in exercise habits (minor changes, not focused major changes), or taking a few moments to really ask myself what I think in response to a question before answering. In spite of the cosmetic changes, the reality of who I am doesn’t change. The only thing that changes in how I present that self to the world and how the world responds to that presentation.

Of course, I will continue like almost everyone else to basically live with a lot of unknowns about my self and others and the world around me, live with the unconscious working away over time. Given enough time and enough attention, perhaps I will become even more aware of myself and be better at being in conscious relationship with others and the external world.

Blowing in the wind

I took this image on Saturday afternoon while out with my eldest daughter and her family. My daughter shares my passion for photography and was busy taking photos as well while her husband and two boys occupied their time with more active pursuits such as discovering remnants of old dinosaurs on their private land (yes, real dinosaur bones as verified by the appropriate authorities). This particular image caught my attention today as it matches my “feeling” about being blown around, buffeted by the process of dealing with change.

The process of individuation, a conscious and consensual process, that I am engaged in at the moment, is playing havoc in its own way with all of my preconceived notions of myself and of how I live my life. So much of my life has been lived as more of follower than as a leader. I say this in terms of self-authority. I have to admit that I gave up my self-authority consciously and unconsciously in order to make life easier to live. Responsibility was laid on others. I refused to listen to my own voice, my own opinions, my own dreams. I was reminded of that while talking to my daughter on the weekend.

I was talking about tentative ideas of going back to school and mentioned two scenarios, to become a psychoanalyst or to become a psychologist. She remarked that I had talked of this twenty years ago. I then was left to ask myself why I had not followed up on this dream much sooner, why was I still sitting on the fence, blowing in the wind in terms of making a decision about something that has been a dream for more than forty years. When I was still a teenager, I had told a certain relative that I would eventually have a PhD. He laughed as no one had ventured beyond high school in my family other than as a trade or certificate program. As a teenager, the world of philosophy and psychology were my passions along with music and writing. I never discovered my passion for photography until I was in my twenties.

Why have I denied following my “bliss” or “passion“? I blames it on life. But in truth, I was waiting for permission from someone else as I had (and still have) a sense that my opinion is not enough. Of course this is an outgrowth of parental complexes. In other words, I didn’t grow up to full conscious adulthood when it comes to owning my own vision and taking charge of that vision. Now, learning to be fully responsible for myself, is the central task. I am learning that I must give myself permission, not someone else. I must learn to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions. I must learn to trust my central, guiding vision. I must give up trying to control the world and others in it by trying to always anticipate what the “right” decision would be in the eyes of others and then choosing that choice in order to have people love and accept me.

Now I find myself still blowing in the wind like this new growth on the tree.  Do I view the situation as “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” or do I enter fully into adulthood at the age of 62 and say this is me, this is what I believe in, this is what I want and need in order to live up to my vision of my self?

There is life in abandoned places.

I stopped about an our short of my daughter’s home in order to take photos of an abandoned house sitting on the top of a slight rise in the land. For some reason, the scenes of decay and abandonment have always caught my eye as the scenes talk of rawness and in a sense the truth of what was. the truth of impermanence. This place was home for someone. Whether or not it was a happy home is something I will never know, but I do know that there were moments of happiness and sadness, joy and suffering, love and hate, confusion and clarity – for that is the way of life, the path of each of our lives.

Like anyone else I have ever met, I want to be happy; and like everyone else, I have had moments of happiness. As a somewhat normal human, I have learned that defining my happiness is difficult at times, sometimes only being able to recognise it after the fact in contrast to the darkness of deprssion – being inside the dark looking back at the moments of light. Life is experienced only in opposites. We know darkness because we know light; we know love only in opposition of fear when we feel abandoned by love.

Emerging into the world from the womb of a mother, we are greeted with light and pain. Birth is a painful process for both mother and infant.  We emerge and feel abandoned somehow, pushed out. Like any other father, I rejoiced at hearing each of my children cry out at the moment of birth and their first breath. I was there bursting with love but for them, it was a traumatic event as they were thrust into a strange land with no bearing and no certainties. Like my own story, these children have had to learn first to become conscious of themselves and of their separateness from others. The hardest part, in my opinion, is learning that they can never become at “one” with the mother who carried them within as part of herself sharing the same air, water, nutrients of life. This realisation of complete and utter separateness will mark their lives, has marked my life and your life.

We travel through life and find ourselves again and again having to leave the places, spaces, and relation in which we built a sense of happiness and security. We leave home to attend our first school lessons; we leave our parents to begin lives of our own; we leave being on our own to join with an Other to build a home together . . . The story of leaving goes on and on as we continually find ourselves once again, over and over, pushed into a new dimension of life. And each time, for the most part, a part of us rebels as it feels like we have been once again pushed away, abandoned; we feel this even in moving to some new way of being that is positive and inspiring such as when one marries or one has a child and becomes a parent, or one gets a longed for new job or home.  There is always a sense of loss attached. There is always some level of suffering.

But, there is always new life as well. In this photo, one sees new life beginning to grow as the trees outside the window have new leaf buds, and in a blur of white, a bird flies free. That bird emerged from within the abandoned house, emerged out of the dark and abandoned place that once was home. And there is a lesson for me in all of this. As I change and feel the darkness of abandonment, there is a place and a state of being waiting, a place and promise of new life.

Mandala May 2012 - A blend of influence

I have been adding a new, well I better say that I am revisiting painting as part of my process. This isn’t my first mandala nor will it be the last, in my opinion. As I turned my towards my art supplies shelving, I sensed that it was time to pull out materials for this water-colour drawing.  I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen for awhile until it became obvious that I was going to draw a mandala. With this realisation came a bit of panic for I didn’t have the tools needed for drawing circles or straight lines. All of these things are in my home in Saskatchewan. I was beginning to think that the mandala could wait another week when I return to my home when an idea decided to interrupt my attempts at putting off the expression of psyche that was bubbling – use cups, bowls and other round objects to create the circles; use the edge of various straight objects to draw lines; and most importantly, don’t worry about exactness.

Over a period of about forty-eight hours, this is what emerged in bits and pieces. I painted what came up and then set aside the paint until something else called me to be added to the mandala. I still don’t know what it means but I can catch bits of hints. Obviously it is a self-portrait of sorts that wants me to acknowledge complexity as well as unity. The Chinese characters above the eye are how my students in China would sometimes address me – Lao Luo (in Chinese my name is Luo BoTe). It is a warm and respectful way to address a teacher whom is liked and cared for. Turning the image upside down and the Chinese characters then say Lao Shi, or teacher. This was my role in China and for more that thirty years before China, my role in Canada. As for the eye itself, it could be looking at me, or it could be me looking out at the rest of the world. Surrounding the Chinese characters is a sort of altered medicine wheel that hints at First Nations ancestry mixed in with my French and Austrian heritage. The next layer is a quartet of Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags from which four “almost” triangles emerge as representative of the lotus flower, an image that I must have photographed hundreds of times while in Asia. Black and white squares – consciousness and shadow, masculine and feminine – contained polarities. And finally, the outer layer which is still a mystery.

The process of creating this mandala reminded me of something Guy Corneau had said in his workshop and presentations – healing begins when ego gets out of the way. When we stay in our minds and refuse to listen to the body, the spirit and the soul, we do more damage than good. For a change, I got out of the way and didn’t try to control the process. And in the process, I discovered a sense of wholeness in spite of the many divergent fragments – a lesson for me to learn and bring into other aspects of my life.

Breaking the rules of caring for the body

I am still reading Carotenuto’s book, but slowly. I am taking the weekend off from Calgary and spending it with my daughter who lives about five hours from the city, and her family. We talked yesterday evening of “change,” specifically change in terms of diet. We both have strong negative reactions to seasonal allergies and have come to the realisation that pills and nasal sprays are not the real answer. We need to take control of our bodies at the basic level in terms of what we put into our bodies. This makes sense but it isn’t such an easy thing to do in spite of making sense. For a while I thought I will see how she does with this program and then decide if it is worth the effort for me to engage in the process – I know, not too smart thinking.

Today I went for a physical evaluation with the view of trying to undo the negative effects of not working since the middle of January. I have gained weight and lost energy. I failed to properly read the instructions (I didn’t read them until an hour before my scheduled appointment – self-defeating behaviour) so I hadn’t done the necessary preparations for the evaluation. I had a glass of wine while talking with my wife last night, followed by no breakfast and drinking coffee. As a result, my blood pressure was elevated (though I did drop it through a two-minute focused breathing activity for a second test which was administered). To add insult to injury, my weight has gone back up to a level I had thought had long disappeared.

Putting the two parts together, I have been forced to admit that I need to enact change on the physical level as well as through the psychological process of analysis. Needless to say, I won’t be eating meals like that pictured in this image. Needless to say, I haven’t been listening well to my wife or my analyst who talk about balance in life. I was so focused on the spiritual and psychological, that I had abandoned care of my body.  The work for this change now must begin with the same serious intention that I have given to the spiritual dimension via Buddhism and the psychological dimension via Jungian analysis. The work begins now, not tomorrow.

That all said, it is time for me to go for a good long walk.

Finding something to chew on . . .

Well, the Eden Project seminar series is now done and it is time for me to find another focus for my Jungian interests. One of the big “take aways” from working with a Jungian analyst as seminar leader and eleven others (four women and eight men as seminar participants), was the realisation that we did more than study a book, we also built relationships based on shared interests and passions. Living in a new city with a population of 1,000,000 it isn’t easy getting to know people let alone people who have a curiosity about Jungian psychology. As a special “extra” for me was the discovery that one of the participants belongs to the same “sangha” that I have recently joined and that at least three others have a strong interest in meditation and Buddhism. This adds a lot of extra energy to the dialogues in which we engaged during, between and after seminar sessions.

Now, I have opened up a book that has sat for a long time on my bookshelves waiting for an opportunity to gift me with more thoughts to chew on. The books is The Vertical Labyrinth, by Aldo Carotenuto, a Jungian analyst who lived and worked in Italy. I have read his book Eros and Pathos quite a number of years ago and have hopes that there is much in the book that will enrich me, nourish me so to speak. And, as expected, the opening pages let me know that I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing this book at this time.

Carotenuto begins with looking at an artist and as he speaks about the artist, I heard echoes of myself and what has been my experience too many times over the past decades. Listen:

“Fame pursued this man, but strangely enough this success was completely separate from the feeling he had about himself. For some time he had been troubled by the suspicion that he was dissembling, that he was not, so to speak, up to the situation. . . . the only way to deal with this distressing feeling was complete inactivity. He would have, of course, liked to go on painting, but the block was total: a sad farewell to creativity, a wish for death, the tragic and painful confrontation with his own failure.” (Carotenuto, p. 7)

It is strange how many, including myself, can be seen by others to be very successful, appearing to have life exactly where we want it but beneath the veneer of success is a mantra that denies this success as a sham, a magician’s trick of using smoke and mirrors to disguise the “truth” as we know it, that we are about as unworthy as it is possible to be. When the weight of this self-defined truth gets so loud that we can’t block it out, we crash and freeze. Feeling disappears and we are only left with the voices in the head that come from some dark, inner black-hole. It is a problem of ego, an ego that has lost touch with the foundational inner spirit. It is about loss of soul (or perhaps better expressed – denial of soul) and a loss of relationship to the inner self which is the source of a meaningful life. Carotenuto goes on to say:

“This is a sufficiently common experience that can strike anyone, man or woman, particularly at certain fundamental moments of existence. Perhaps it could also be called fear, but a special kind of fear, without well-defined outlines and endowed with almost mysterious characteristics, paralyzing in part and in part propelling. It is a fear that has to do with the world and with our own being in the face of it. But the world is infinite and gives us no response.” (ibid)

And this takes me right back to the Eden Project and how our desperate search for Magical Other which shifts from parent, to spouse, to work, to authority, to religion and to leaders who have all the answers can never give us what we so desperately search. By projecting to an Other, out these somewhere, we only find a response of silence for that Other who has the answers is found within our psyche. We can express it in art, in music, in dance, in work, in prayer, in so many countless ways – but, can only connect with it within our psyche. Waiting for the world to respond leaves us desperate and abandoned in the returning silence which only tells us that we haven’t been heard or that we are undeserving of being heard or that we are a figment of our own imagination. And, in response to the deafening silence we crash.

We crash and that could be the best thing that has ever happened to us. As Carotenuto has said, “paralyzing in part and in part propelling.” Propelling us to act. The old expression comes to life, “when you find yourself at the bottom, the only way left is to go up.” We are forced to either give up and call it quits, or to begin to fight back to win our soul and our meaning for existence.

Sitting on the fence

I am back with a photo of a little, common bird that more often than not gets overlooked. There is a tendency to focus on colour, on what is striking and different when taking photos and even on how we regard our lives. The common, everyday things are lost to our vision because they are common. It is hard for any of us to associate uniqueness and specialness to ourselves and the lives we live. Meaningfulness appears to be vested in others. Thoughts of superstars, actors, singers, musicians, artists, politicians and religious leaders come to our mind when thinking about having meaningful lives.

I am as guilty in this thinking as anyone else. I project the notion of a meaningful life onto others such as the Dali Lama or famous Jungian writers such as James Hollis, Robert Johnson, John Dourley and past great people such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Jung, Christ, Mohammed, and so on. When looking at myself I see ordinariness. I discount my individuality as being a deficit rather than as being a unique and meaningful version of a human. To harbor the least thought of being somehow special and having significant meaning as a human, is viewed by myself and often those who are in my world as hubris.  I quickly knock myself down before another will knock me down – of course, this is all projection as I don’t really know anyone who would actually denigrate me or discount me as a person.

Yet, like this little bird, I want to fly, to soar and have meaning – meaning that I can understand and honour. I can’t find this meaning in the outer world and have that outer world acknowledgement of my worth actually stick into my psyche. I need to believe in myself. I have just read a book I bought on Friday, The Essence of Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism. I want to bring one quote from the book here which I found in the Epilogue for the book written by Radmila Moacanin:

“. . . psychological health requires a meaningful life. The quest for meaning i the innate and spontaneous urge to self-realization and wholeness or completeness, to become true to one’s inner nature; this is the task of individuation, the path to the heart – to freedom. The urge toward self-realization, as aspiration to buddhahood, is also the central concept of Buddhist psychology. It is the urge of the mind to awaken, to become conscious, which is what the word buddha means: awakened one. Jung points out that the task of individuation – which involves paying serious attention to the unconscious as well as the conscious contents off our psyche – is imposed by nature.” (pp 110-111)

So what is stopping me? Well, it is my mind that discounts what is already present within me. The mind, not others or my body, stops me from acknowledging my worth, the fact that simply in existing I have meaning. In living in community, I bring meaningfulness to those around me as teacher, as principal, as counsellor, as father and grandfather, as husband and friend. Others see what I don’t and they value what they see. Of course, this isn’t just what happens to me, it is what happens to all of us if we dare to admit it. During those quiet moment when we are left alone to our own thoughts, we listen to those thoughts that come from deep within, a place that knows our personal secrets, our personal shame and guilt.

And it is this, this habit of listening to the negative voice of the unconscious, which spurs me to become more conscious, to take the sting out of voices of the personal unconscious. With consciousness I learn to accept the reality that the kingdom of heaven or nirvana lies within me.