Through a Jungian Lens

New Life Out of the Muck - Samsara and the Journey to enlightenment

I was thinking of a friend, Walt, who is continuing his journey as he battles cancer. While I was going over the notes I made from the Guy Corneau presentation in March here in Calgary, I found something that I need to revisit for my own process. This post is dedicated to Walt and all others who find that they are struggling with living and perhaps with dying. That said, here are my notes from the first session of the presentation:

• The “body understands our feeling more than it understands what has happens to the body” – what we “feel” about an injury or an illness has greater impact on the body than the actual illness or injury.
• “Illness has improved my life”
• “creating an alter reality, a preferential reality is needed for rejuvenating the self”
• We are “walking tentatively in life behind our many protective layers”
• We “need to be rooted back into life”
• “listening to the psyche, living authentically
  • Believe in life
  • Dare to live
  • Leaving darkness
  • Giving up pretences
  • No energy to push and deny
  • Intimate choices – new life or death/darkness
• “using active imagination to create a positive vision for self
• “daily practices honouring body, mind, soul and spirit”
• “daring to risk when there is nothing to lose but darkness and fear”
• “we have a subscription for unhappiness that we find hard to cancel”
• “healing comes from inside – thoughts, feelings, needs, beliefs

This is what I will use as the base for my post. It is also what I will need to use to create my own preferential reality. What do I want, really want for my self, to honour my soul and spirit? I need to address this clearly so that I can talk clearly about this need and in speaking clearly I will be able to chart the steps needed to get there. With a plan I can then be honest with my self and

others rather than continually saying “I don’t know” every time I am asked “What do you want?”

Emerging out of the muck

I found these words written by a Chinese poet, Zhou DunYi, that somehow touches deep within me, words that speak to hope and even a promise when I find myself in darkness, wandering around seemingly lost in the muck of the swamplands.

“I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained”

Over the years while living in Asia, I have been captivated by the lotus and have taken so many photos of the flower that it begs the question of why do I continue to take these photos, such as the one here which I took in February in Thailand. Of course the answer is simple – the beauty and purity of this flower emerging from dark and dank waters is symbolic for me of my own journey of healing.

When I listened to Guy Corneau talk about his journey of healing, physical and psychological healing, at the end of March, the image of the lotus somehow came to my mind. In the last part of the workshop, when Guy talked about the conversation with the cells of the body (mp3 part 1 – 3 minutes), I saw the image of the roots of the lotus reaching into the darkness and finding within that darkness, motes of light that were then carried above the water and transformed into the blossom which held golden light at the centre. Today, I want to try and take you on the journey that Guy took us on in his last meditation/visualisation – the “Dialogue with Cells (mp3 part 2 – 20 minutes).”

• Relax opening your body and mind and feel your breath and enter into a meditative state
• Go within and find your heart and feel the presence of the light and energy
• From your heart, go visit a place within you that is in pain, some place that feels rigid, a part of you that is suffering
• Listen to the pain, the suffering without thinking or trying to fix it, just listen, be open to what your body is telling you
• Acknowledge, confirm what you hear from these cells which have been waiting for you to listen
• Set these cells free, thanking them for their work which is done
• Reach into the bones and draw out stem cells and take these cells to the site in need of healing
• Imagine the stem cells interacting with the diseased site, the injured site and out of that interaction emerges a “warming light” that bathes the site
• Feel that light and radiance spread throughout the body creating an aura of light bathing the body
• imagine yourself in perfect health
• ask the question – what will I do with this health?

Guy talked about going through this meditation/visualisation exercise twice a day as part of his healing process. It is important to realise that this exercise didn’t replace the other efforts for healing. Guy was adamant that all understand that his process was one of integrative medicine. He insisted that one trust the doctors and engage the doctors in dialogue about adding in traditional methods, acupuncture, meditation, diet, etc. Guy talked to us about working with the doctors and taking responsibility for the process rather than seeing oneself as a victim and leaving all the work and responsibility in the hands of the doctors.  Together with the doctors, one creates the conditions which allow the body to heal itself.

I know that this sounds somewhat simplistic and easily ridiculed by some, and can easily be taken as a “sure cure” approach by others. However, one needs to be aware that in truth, if it is time for the angel of death to visit and draw another soul home, the best we can do is to prepare ourselves as best we can to make that final earthly journey with some dignity knowing that we are not victims, but heroes on our journey, even the final stage of our journey when it is most needed.

To my friend, Walt Pascoe and to any others who are fighting cancer or other serious conditions of physical and/or mental health – be courageous and dare to do more while yet being humble in the face of something larger than ourselves. As is said in Arabic – Insha’Allah.

Note: The two mp3 files noted above are in French.

Guy Corneau in Calgary, March 2012

As promised, I am writing to talk more about the workshop I attended following an introductory evening presentation given by Guy Corneau to the Calgary Jungian Society. The workshop was limited to a smaller group because it was an active participation workshop that engaged each of the attendees at some very deep levels, moving all of us in unexpected ways.

Guy talked to us about how healing works. The idea that doctors, medicine and other strategies heal  the body was dispelled and replaced with the truth that “healing comes from within.” What we think, feel, believe, and need are what allows the body to do its work. All the health care modalities are needed in order to create the conditions for the body to heal itself.

We get sick because of the toxins that arise through feelings, need, negative beliefs and feelings as these create dis-ease and dis-equilibrium within. Guy looked at the following as sources of dis-ease:

• imprints from the past, existential fears
• wounds of living and the protective measures we enact, dissociating from self and attending to others
• self-imposed wounds including a lack of space for self
• society, church, politics, community, culture, economics
• emerging situations such as floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc.

The idea was then brought forward that we can change our mood, to shift from negative (dis-ease) to positive (self-healing). Guy then had all engage in a Golden Meditation, an exercise in searching in the past for some particular positive (peace, joy, etc.) and allow that feeling to be centre of the meditation, to follow it and hold it. When the meditation was done, we were expected to continue holding that feeling and talk honestly about it with a partner – powerful!

Then there was a shift towards a second activity which looked at relationship in terms of reconciliation/pacification. In terms of others, especially those we hold very close to us, even intimately, Guy said, “you really don’t know the person objectively” one only knows one’s response to the person, one’s projections of self (both positive and negative) upon the person. This second meditation, that of learning to deflate emotion that hurts and gets in the way of healing. I will outline below the flow of this meditation:

• entering into guided meditation
• travel with the mind to the heart/soul within
• invite someone with whom there is a conflict to a circle in front of your soul
• build a bridge between your soul and this other
• bring the conflict to presence – what hurt you? – using “I” statements express feelings
• feel what the conflict has done to you
• explain to this other what you really felt from your “heart”
• choose your next step to this person, choose your attitude, your words, your behaviour
• repeat this as many times as needed until you are “clear” about what will actually happen when you take it from meditation to outer life in order to deflate the conflict and its emotional control that leaves you a victim of that emotion.

There was more, but this will have to wait for another post in a few days. Tomorrow, there is a guest editorial waiting for you. Be well and heal yourself.

Guy Corneau, Calgary - 2012

I was fortunate this weekend to be able to meet and take part in a week-end presentation and workshop with Jungian analyst, Guy Corneau, a Canadian analyst from Montréal, Québec. Guy had been diagnosed with terminal, stage four cancer in his lungs and three organs in 2007. Obviously, since he was here in Calgary, something happened to him that makes for a story well worth telling. In short, he decided that he wanted to live and decided that to do so he would have to use all of his resources – people, medicine, and any other modality that might have his body change its mind, such as tai chi, meditation, writing poetry and playing guitar. Of all these modalities, in his opinion, it was a practice of engaging in a dialogue with the cells of his body that became the key. By 2009 there was no trace of cancer left in his body. If anything, his body was in the best physical shape of the last thirty years of his life.

Below I will highlight a few key points that struck me:

• the body understands feelings more than it does what physically happens to the body
• the self needs to be rooted back into life
• the ego must give up the familiarity of darkness or the body will die prematurely
• use active imagination to create a positive vision for self
• dare to risk when there is nothing to lose but darkness and fear
• we have a subscription for unhappiness that we need to cancel

These are powerful statements. As I listened hypnotized by the words and ideas, I saw so much of myself being exposed, and in listening to his story, heard my own story. When we left China, my wife explained to those we left behind that I was going to Canada to deal with brain cancer. The truth was that I do indeed have cancer that Guy described as being narcosis of the psyche, a cancer in my head that is willing my body to darkness and death.

As he told his story of healing, I heard a story of my first death sentence as a child, and what happened to me that resulted in that death sentence being lifted.  I contracted acute nephritis at the age of four and there was little hope that I would make it to adulthood. As I now come to understand it, the first four years of my life lived with a dark mother who was abandoned by my father sowed the seeds of the disease (dis-ease), and the return of my father which lead to a deeper emotional abandonment by my mother triggered the outbreak of the disease.

I was in and out of hospitals with sickening regularity yet something changed in my life and my feeling state when I was fourteen that resulted in the doctors being puzzled by the disappearance of the disease from my body. That year, was the first year in my life that we stayed in the same house for a whole year with the belief that I would be there for a long time. I began to have friends, I had a horse which I would ride in the open countryside, I spent time studying the stars lying on my back, and I got a guitar and played my heart out. I had embraced living for the first time and my body thanked me.

Knowing now, that I have it in me to heal because I have done so in the past, I feel a huge relief. A road map had been presented to me, a road map for healing in the adult world.  Thank you, Guy.