Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Descent and Healing

    In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the protagonist must descend all the way through the nadir of Hell before he can begin to climb toward Heaven. In terms of Dante’s Christianity, the journey suggests that coming into knowledge of one’s sinful nature creates the possibility to transform and shed those sinful habits, via Purgatory, before finally ascending into Heaven. This geographical and poetic mystery evokes, for me, one process of psychological healing. Fully healing and transforming our suffering requires a descent, a conscious immersion into the pain and every layer deeper until finally emerging into its resolution. To me, this is depth psychology.

    My tendency, historically, has been to withdraw and watch. If I felt I could be invisible and simply watch, I could notice all kinds of things about a group, a person, a situation, and offer great insight. What was terrifying to me was taking action and being emotionally present. I was an intellectual-based person with no sense of my emotions or my body. I used to “joke” that I had no feelings, and with this lack of feelings was a heavy depression. My mind could understand and argue many things, but when it came time to take action or put it into practice, I would balk. What I needed to become whole was my heart and my body. To manage my anxiety, I took up smoking cigarettes. I was in college and dealing with all new kinds of stresses and anxieties, both socially and academically. Because I felt so uncomfortable at parties having spontaneous interactions with people, I preferred to go outside and have a cigarette with a smaller group of folks.

    Allegory of Hell, photo by Wolfgang Sauber.

    Here is where unhealthy coping strategies compound suffering. We have the core pain—my anxiety at being in social situations with others. If I had a therapist at the time and some better strategies, I could have begun to learn being with my anxiety and my ambivalence about intimacy, sink more deeply into the experience, and find ways to connect. Instead I avoided my anxiety through smoking and added more problems—reduced lung capacity, smelly fingers and clothes, a money-draining habit, and the potential for long-term health problems. Smoking became my go-to habit when I felt upset or anxious, and I got anxious a lot. I also kept myself from adventures and new friends, as my smoking buddies tended were usually the same from event to event. They were absolutely wonderful people and dear friends, but after a while it seemed there was no point in going to a party of strangers if I was not meeting new people.

    This is how our automatic and unconscious habits become what I think of as “Devil’s bargains.” In many stories, a deal with a devil figure usually means one gets a short-term gain at a huge long-term cost. Smoking cigarettes helps avoid the feeling of anxiety now, but the anxiety remains, and the economic and health costs add up. In college, a dear friend introduced me to a track called “I Might Fall” by the band Fetish. In the lyrics, the singer says, “To be free from the pain / you have to be free from the painkiller.”

    To step away from the painkiller is to begin the healing descent through Hell. For people who continue to avoid their inner work, this descent manifests as “hitting rock bottom,” reaching that point where they no longer can avoid or deny the costs of their habits. For those willing to engage, this descent into Hell is a conscious work of healing. We work to let go of the numbing agents and feel our true feelings. Dante’s protagonist had a guide, Virgil, who knew the ways of Hell and loved the protagonist well enough to steer him through. Guides might appear as a sponsor, a therapist, a spiritual mentor, or a trusted friend who knows the ways, but such guidance is invaluable.

    When we let go of these patterns and begin to feel the pain we’ve been avoiding, we might feel insane. “Why the hell am I doing this?” What helps me is to connect with my core desire—to be joyful, to be present in my life, to be loving and connected to others. Going into my pain, examining myself, and beginning to name what harms me gathers power within. Discomfort, slowly, lessens as we learn to be more at home within ourselves. We convert our unprocessed pain and stuck feelings into something more fluid, energy we can use to live, not just survive. Pain stops being something terrible to be avoided at all costs. It simply becomes one more texture of emotion, one we can experience with the rest. We can tolerate more life, we can learn to embrace it gladly. We find our way through the forest into the great open plain of possibility.

  • Unbalanced Personalities

    As children, we crave attention and mirroring from our caregivers. The more we receive this attention and mirroring, the more capable we are of developing healthy little egos that help us to grow and develop into healthy, autonomous, and connected adults. Inevitably, however, there are ruptures. No one can be present to another all the time, particularly human beings with adult lives and responsibilities carrying around their own psychic wounding. Even the best of parents can have lapses of attention or make mistakes that result in psychic wounding. Some people argue that the birth process itself is a wounding event, a core wound that we carry with us.

    by Bengt Oberger

    Much of our wounding occurs in relationship and can heal in relationship. We long for connection and we feel hampered by our shame. We learn early how to protect ourselves in our environments while trying to get the attention and love we need to survive. Some kids learn how to make their parents happy, make them laugh, lighten their emotional burdens, and their personalities form around that personality which celebrates laughter and flirtation, but anything heavier or darker feels threatening and scary, best ignored. Other kids learn to become withdrawn, preferring to disappear or sarcastically disregarding any attempts to engage with love. These kids might grow into people who seem to need no one, or to hate everyone, burdened with their own mysterious and painful need for connection that feels so intense that it’s safer to avoid it. Some kids learn to do everything perfectly to elicit praise and avoid criticism, and grow up afraid to make mistakes, or become so judgmental of themselves and others that there is hardly room to breathe. Some kids become the parents to their parents, and grow up serious-minded and concerned with others’ well-being and utterly lacking in their ability to value or care for their own emotional well-being.

    These personality structures are profound strengths and inherent weaknesses. I often think of the role-playing games I had when I was a kid, in which each enemy was an elemental class, and those elements determined the enemies’ strengths and vulnerabilities. Fire elementals were vulnerable to ice; water elementals were vulnerable to lightning. Try to hit a fire elemental with fire and you only make it stronger. But people are more than one-sided elemental beings. We can grow into our weaknesses and restore dynamic balance to the self. Our emotional and mental problems show where our personalities have fallen too far out of balance, and could help us to find where we need to grow.

    Mental and emotional problems compound by the strategies we use to manage these lopsided personalities. Almost every behavior that harms us or those around us arose as solution to the core problem. If our “solutions” come from avoidance of pain, then they are more likely as not going to create even more problems that need solutions. Healing is a process of moving layer by layer through these problems and solutions, seeking to embrace and dissolve the pain at each layer. More on this next week.

  • #blacklivesmatter

    The small man
    Builds cages for everyone
    He
    Knows.
    While the sage,
    Who has to duck his head
    When the moon is low,
    Keeps dropping keys all night long
    For the
    Beautiful
    Rowdy
    Prisoners.

    – Hafiz

    Last night, I had a dream that I was put in jail. A group of us sat at a table while the white male in charge of our jailing walked around, threatening us, insulting us. In the dream I had visions of myself or others lashing out against him violently, cruelly, all the while knowing that any kind of retaliation would only make our jailing worse. No matter what we did to the man in charge of the jail, he was the one with power and could do far worse to us.

    My heart hurts for the people of Ferguson and the family of Mike Brown, and the families of all young Black people killed or incarcerated by a system that disproportionately targets and polices their communities. My heart hurts for the damage caused to these communities by the militarized police responses to protesting we as a nation witnessed, and will continue to witness if things are allowed to continue. My heart hurts for the peaceful protestors whose message can be more easily dismissed because some erupted into violence—knowing that even the most peaceful protest could still have its message dismissed.

    I do not support rioting, but I want to pause and think about how even this behavior comes out of systems of racial injustice. In my work with formerly incarcerated people and people with criminal justice charges, I met with a young person who told me, “Everyone already sees me as a criminal, so why don’t I just go ahead and be a criminal?” For many Black Americans last night, the failure to indict sends yet another message that the system sees them as criminal, does not value their lives and well-being. I think of my dream, how we became violent because we had no other recourse. When nonviolent protesting and the grand jury system are not enough for justice, what is left?

    I think as a country we should be very concerned about the police practices of escalation and using violence to control our citizens. I think as a country we should be concerned when police are not held accountable. If police are not held accountable for the violence they cause then they are, in effect, being turned into a separate class of people who may commit violence with impunity. That is why this is more concerning to me than so-called “black-on-black” crime or interpersonal crimes in which a white person is a victim of violence than a black person. Those act are already illegal and we have systems of accountability and justice in place. We need those systems in turn to be accountable and just.

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  • Becoming Adult, Becoming Free

    “No one can pressure you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

    I recently heard this in a setting in which I had sat through two hours of the speaker attempting to persuade me to do something that I was not willing to do. The speaker was effective and powerful, and I walked away with greater personal insight and inspiration, but I decided at this time not to engage further in his organization’s work. This post is not about that, though.

    The speaker spoke to internal conflicts around domination, about which most adults have some ambivalence. Perhaps this arises from a cultural pattern of parenting, in which struggles between domination and submission are integral. Caregivers set boundaries, and children do not understand why. Eventually, children feel the urge to start pushing for more freedom, more individuality, while parents learn to keep adjusting the boundaries to keep their growth safely contained. That seems something like an ideal, however some parents respond to the steps toward autonomy with greater punitiveness and control. Or parents fear their power and responsibility and submit to their children. Some children lean harder toward avoiding being dominated, either by over challenging or surreptitious acting out. Other children lean harder toward submitting to dominion, perhaps out of fear of punishment or a longing to be loved. This is tricky, and parenting is hard work, and I honor those who have taken it on.

    Flower growing on I-5 overcrossing in Albany – Chris Weigel

    These conflicts only continue to escalate through adolescence to early adulthood, in which the growing young person wants to push off and launch into adulthood, though may be experiencing fears and resistance. They want to be seen as adults by their parents and treated as adults but they do not realize that they’re not yet completely acting like adults. Even in the most stable of family dynamics there can be some conflict here, emotional landmines that get set off by seemingly the most innocuous of situations. If a parent doesn’t approve of something, the adult child might become enraged, upset, tearful, or protest against their asshole parent who never did enough of something.

    When these conflicts are unresolved, they tend to manifest in our relatoinships. I remember the day in my own therapy when I was discussing how upset I felt when criticized by my partner, and my therapist pointed out that I was criticizing him. What???

    In a discussion with someone, they snapped at me, “Don’t tell me what to do!” It occurred to me that this person was in effect telling me what to do!

    The point is not that we’re all hypocrites, the point is that our hypocrisies tell us a lot about what is unresolved within us and what needs to be resolved so we can become more free, more creative, more joyful in life. We can think of these dynamics as the child parts of us still trying to become free of childhood dominion, not recognizing that it’s over. The friction of launching is an important component. Small rebellions, assertions of autonomy, all of these generate the heat, power, and strength necessary to push away. In that respect, the touchiness about “don’t criticize me!” and “don’t tell me what to do!” serve as rungs on the ladder to help us move toward the greater self-realization: when you’re wholly yourself, it does not matter whether someone criticizes you, tries to dominate you, or tries to tell you what to do.

    In this respect, an important caveat: there could certainly be consequences to not doing what a person says, especially if that person is your boss, a police officer, or otherwise has power and privilege that you do not. People who experience marginalization are well aware of the barriers that these systemic factors raise. We cannot wish our way out of structural inequality and systemic violence, but we can start freeing ourselves from within so that we can respond to with greater power and creativity. We can take the tools of personal oppression away from our families and loved ones and remember that the pain and irritation comes from within. Our closest relationships generally offer the material we need to become more adult, that is, to take more responsibility for who we are in the world.

    I want to clarify, though, that this is an aspiration, something we work toward. Until we start practicing this self-responsibility, then we are susceptible to being dominated, to being pressured to do what we do not want to do, to being diminished by others’ criticism. Regarding this, Toko-pa has wonderful things to say.

  • for those who sleep out

    There are people sleeping outside in the cold and the rain. There are systemic, economic, cultural, and personal reasons for this reality, but in almost every large population this is happening. Someone gets excluded and needs to survive at the edges of others’ privilege. They knock, ask, and demand and get shut out. When I worked as a barista, I would pass them at 5 in the morning as I was walking to work—sheltering under whatever awnings were available, clustered together within a temporary fortress of boxes until someone came along and told them to leave. My next job has been, in part, to help these people find places to sleep, and I tell you the pickings are slim if you have no income, and even with a small income, the waitlists are long.

    People who do not sleep on the streets do not always see what it’s like for a person to be homeless and poor every day. We see people begging or cajoling for money, eliciting whatever emotion works to get resources: humor, intimidation, pity. We barely see them if we can avoid it. Instead of providing funding for the housing that’s needed, our communities tend to make being poor and homeless a criminal act, punishable by cycling in and out of jail and back out to the streets without a job, without a place to sleep, with mounting legal debts that are unpayable.

    Being poor and homeless is full-time work. For those trying to pull their way out of their condition, they constantly cycle between appointments and filling out paperwork. And waiting. Killing time. Finding community wherever it is. Most of us do not see this hustling and harassment, we only see what appears to be a life of indolence because this person is sitting on the street, doing things to get money. We feel superior because we are on our way to jobs where we sit or stand for hours, doing things to get money. For some, the poor and homeless are scary because we fear the harm they might cause, not recognizing how their harms can only be personal where we have access to systemic harms. This person can steal your wallet and the city can install fencing and spikes so that there is nowhere comfortable to sleep, and it does so in your name.

    The people who sleep on the streets are neither angels nor demons, but neither are we. We’re all inheritors of the same tangled human heart. Within us are the exiled people, the parts of us that we find offensive or ugly, who remind us of truths we’d rather ignore because they are too unsettling. Somewhere within each of us, something scrabbles for survival, something dwells only on its immediate pains and pleasures and cares nothing for the suffering of others. Each person’s pain is the largest pain they can carry, no matter what privilege supports them.

    Generosity is what expands our capacity to hold pain and care at the same time. Generosity can begin by simply being real and confronting the truth of the moment. Instead of turning away from the uncomfortable reality, turning toward it, truly looking at it. Finding what is human that dwells beneath years of pain and trauma and making what offering is possible in the moment. Not giving into manipulation and scams, but offering what is truly needed and what you are capable of offering.

  • Layers of Being Within the Moment

    “I’ve got nothing to say.”

    This is a mental habit, an automatic thought that arises when it’s time to sit down to write. Another automatic thought is “I don’t know,” which has a far more expansive field of meaning—“I don’t know” arises in response to many questions and demands.

    On another layer is the emotional quality of feeling stuck, feeling stifled somehow, suggesting another truth. Some part of me felt the wish to show up to writing, and if there is a longing to write, there must be something to say. Yet that urge to express something has met with the leaden habit of resistance, “I’ve got nothing to say.”

    The anxiety that emerges is, in my observation, often what happens when resistance blocks energy seeking expression. Anxiety is the longing to act rubbing against a refusal to act. If the longing cannot overcome the refusal, anxiety grows larger and more intense, or burns down into a dull depressive flame. Energy wants to move.

    On another layer is the physical experience of standing here at my desk, looking at the screen, feeling the keys under my fingers, noticing those feelings of anxiety and stuckness. Somewhere in my gloriously biological brain, synapses are firing and moving closer together, braided into a new configuration, a complexity that yields new insight and activity. For whatever reason, as a human, I am not content with the contents of my brain. Some drive seeks to forge new connections, prune connections that lead to suffering, to find a new truth amidst the information my senses constantly receive.

    The Ba (Soul) Returning to the Corpse

    On another layer is what might be called the soul, the Self, the psyche, a part that is highly contested and difficult to find if you’re looking for it. This part seems a totality that is and is separate from the whole. When I dream, my waking mind’s rigid habits of thought relax and my mind’s eye opens to how this part of me, this psyche, perceives the world: A symbolic, non-rational, and profoundly deep and complex experiencing. It is here, I think, that the impulse seeking expression has its origin. Here are the muddy roots, the nourishing dark decay.

    The mind is an expert organizer and manager, and the psyche is fertile chaos, an uneasy partnership. Disconnected from its roots, the mind becomes enamored of its own rationalizations. Our stories harden and our beliefs about ourselves and the world become fixed. Often these stories and beliefs are the strategies we use to manage or avoid these deeper experiences that threaten to overturn the mind’s certainty.

    We think we are engaging in intellectual discussions when we are really arguing because we feel judged or unsafe and the emotional part of us is closing down. We ignore emotions that are not what we think we should feel. We engage in habits of thought and action that shut us down, block our self’s expression, and sometimes actively hurt us because our mind believes these habits are necessary for survival.

    We can liberate the mind and sink deeper into the Self. We can become skeptical of our own rationalizations and stories, and we can look to what emotions lie beneath, what bodily sensations, what stirrings of the soul. We can allow room for the non-rational, those images, practices, or beliefs that are mind cannot easily contain and integrate. We need these experiences to keep ourselves from becoming stuck and blind in our mind’s self-perpetuating cycle. We need the things we do not understand to invite us to continue going deeper, forging those new connections, seeking what lies beneath.

  • Seven Scorpions, Part 2

    Read Part 1.

    Claiming the parts of us that are disruptive, toxic, and at times underhanded is not easy or pleasurable, though it is empowering in the best sense of the word. Whenever we find ourselves repeatedly experiencing the same conflict, rejection, hurt, or even a simply bizarre and confusing relationship, the early tendency is to surrender power by blaming the other people or some vague fate or “universe.” “I don’t know why the universe keeps sending me passive-aggressive people.” If some outside fate is responsible for doing this to you, the best way out is to wake up to your participation in the problem. If every partner eventually turns passive aggressive toward you, perhaps your scorpion is an aloof assertiveness without listening to what the other person says or needs. Identifying this role is challenging, it requires our willingness to accept that we have flaws and blind spots and to work hard at letting those come to awareness, but once known, we have our power back. Now it’s not someone else doing something to us. We can change the script.

    Relational problems often come from the problematic dynamic between the people involved. This requires a caveat, however, when looking at relational problems between different levels of systemic privilege and power. Abusers of all stripes tend to use their physical, social, and economic power to subtly intimidate and groom their victims, separating them from their supports, isolating them, convincing their victims they have no protection other than to give in to what the abuser wants. A child does not take part in their victimization by an adult, a child cannot “seduce” an adult with the informed consent that adults can have when seducing each other. A victim of domestic violence is not necessarily responsible for their victimization. A person who has been traumatized in this way might have difficulty avoiding being retraumatized due to the injuries to self and psyche sustained during previous traumas. Once the abused person is out of the abusive situation, they need compassion and support while repairing themselves and developing the resources necessary to avoid further abuse. I know this is not a pleasant digression, but I want to be clear that saying “everyone contributes the same amount to the relationship problem” is not helpful when violence, intimidation, and coercion are involved.

    Photo by Chris Huh

    Returning to the power of claiming our scorpions, we often feel the urge to punish ourselves for having these scorpions or try to get rid of them. I find naming more productive than attempting to disown or expel, because these scorpions are not easily cast out nor are they without value. As with many things in the personality, when we can name our poisons we can also find the salves that are also within. If I can recognize that I am avoiding a situation and causing harm, I can also find the power of confrontation and facing the difficulty. Powers of malicious gossip also contain the powers of telling powerful, healing truths. We can meet our tendencies to shame and judge with the powers of compassionate thinking.

    One of my young cousins once called me “Mr. I-Know-Everything” and it was true. He was pointing to my aloof, superior outward disposition that I fell into when I was uncomfortable and insecure. Such superiority erodes connection and trust and nourishes resentment, which of course does not help me to feel any less uncomfortable and insecure. I’ve become aware of situations where I’m likely to fall into this pattern, and when I use the word “Actually—” to start a sentence, I know the likelihood is that what’s about to follow is a know-it-all “correction.”

    The salve to this scorpion’s poison, for me, is equanimity, practicing acceptance that I am okay the way I am and you’re okay the way you are. What I find is that when I connect with the salve, then I can go ahead with less drama and hurt. Instead of “correcting” someone, I might instead ask more questions about their beliefs and information, or state my own beliefs as an offering that they can accept or not. Best of all, if I can name and accept this scorpion as my own, I am more open to being called out when someone else sees its stinger poised to strike. If I can accept that my perspective is informed by a racist culture, such as, then I can better accept being called out for saying or doing something racist without getting so defensive.

    Who are your scorpions? What causes them to lash out? What salves relieve the poison?

     

  • Seven Scorpions, Part 1

    Photo by Andreas Praefcke

    After freeing Isis from Seth’s imprisonment, Thoth advised the goddess to hide in the marshes. To protect the goddess and er unborn son, Horus, Thoth provided Isis with seven scorpions. Isis disguised herself as a beggar and began the long journey. When she needed rest, she stopped at the house of a rich woman to ask for food and a place to sleep. The rich woman slammed the door in Isis’s face, not knowing who the goddess was. Isis continued searching for shelter and found a poor fisherwoman who welcomed her, fed the goddess, and gave her a place to sleep.

    As the goddess slept, the scorpions shared their rage over the rich woman’s refusal. They combined all the poison into the stinger of the leader, who went to avenge their mistress. The scorpion snuck into the wealthy woman’s house searching for her, but came upon her infant child first, and poisoned it. When the rich woman found her child suffering, she ran into the town crying out for help. Isis heard the child’s cries and felt compassion. Realizing what had happened, she commanded the poison to leave the child’s body, calling out the name of each scorpion. When her child recovered, the wealthy woman showed her gratitude by giving a portion of her wealth to the fisherwoman who had sheltered the goddess.

    There are many facets to this story of the old gods of Egypt, but one that always comes to my attention is the relationship between the scorpions and Isis. The scorpions protect and shield the goddess from harm while she is pregnant and hiding from her enemy. Isis is not known as a timid or powerless deity, but her position at this point is vulnerable and she is best served by concealment and relying on the strength and generosity of others. What I find interesting about the story is that it does not show Isis revealing any personal outrage at being turned away by the wealthy woman, indeed she offers little commentary at all. Imagine—her husband has been murdered, her kingdom is lost, she has to hide from the man who wants to imprison her and would destroy her child if he learned about it, she has humbled herself to keep safe, and she finally musters up the will to ask someone for mercy only to get the door slammed in her face. One might understand if she would want to shed some tears, or scream, or say unkind things about the woman, but we see nothing. Instead, the scorpions gather all her rage unto themselves and, while she sleeps, take vengeance for the slight.

    Looking at the microcosm of the human personality, I think of the scorpions as those barbed, poisonous parts of us that formed for our protection but can quickly and easily turn hostile and destructive. The scorpions have a job to do, but their guardianship turns toxic and aggressive, particularly when she is unconscious. These are the little slights, microaggressions, even the large oversights that come out in ways from which we could plausibly distance ourselves. The sarcastic compliment, the faint praise, the condescending correction, the malicious gossip, “mansplaining,” the offensive comment that was “just a joke”! Even sometimes the “accidents” that are not fully accidents, those subtle provocations and digs that spur the moment to a crisis.

    When we cling to resentment and pain and refuse to face the problem, the toxins emerge nevertheless, as fatal to a relationship, a project, a team as any aggressive confrontation.

    Isis-Serket as the Scorpion, between circa 663 and circa 346 BCE

    I remember working in a somewhat visible community role with another person who had joined the group after repeatedly and publicly criticizing our work. We attempted to include this person and their critiques into the process of changing community, but this person had a habit of veiling his critiques by referring to authorities who were not in our community or alluding to a mysterious group of people who hated us. “So-and-so thinks that this is the way things should be done.” “A lot of people out there hate our community, and we need to change their minds.” I experienced this as demoralizing and frustrating, and soon I no longer wanted to listen to this person. I realized that it is impossible to address complaints from invisible people who were unwilling to speak for themselves—if indeed they existed and were not convenient ways for the speaker to evade making his own stand. Several of us on the committee asked him to speak from his own perspective and voice his own complaints, but he rarely owned his own opinion and it became impossible to work constructively with him. This pattern repeated itself over numerous conflicts involving him and other members of the community. I advocate working as though people are acting in good faith, but good faith is hard to gauge when a person is unwilling to step forward and address conflict directly, take responsibility for their own actions and contributions, and take responsibility for their piece in resolving the conflict.

    This is one example, but I think each of us has our own set of scorpions, and like Isis we would do well to learn their names and become conscious of how they work and what harm they can cause. Next week, I will talk more about naming and salving our poisons.

  • The Lion and The Stillness

    Strength, Visconti Tarot (15th Century)

    I keep an oracle on my desk, a pot filled with challenges, and the one I drew said to deal with something that I’d been avoiding. I felt annoyed and swore at myself for having left this oracle in the first place, a trap waiting to spring. If I dig deeply enough beneath the habits of avoidance, postponement, and procrastination, I eventually find dread.

    Dread is the lion at the mouth of the cave wherein my life’s energy and purpose is trapped. The lion shows up as anxiety, fear, even anger. The lion is something I do not trust, something dangerous and feral that stirs in me the immediate urge to resist. Why on earth would I want to go face a lion, even if the most precious treasure lies behind him? What would I do when I face the lion, unprepared and ill-equipped as I am to fight?

    Instead of facing the lion I find other ways to spend my time, knowing all the while that he keeps what I desire. I check Facebook for hours, I go buy a box of cookies and eat it all, I sleep a lot, I exercise excessively, I work a thousand hours per week, I get into petty arguments on the Internet with people who do not exist in my daily life, and all the while in the back of my mind I know there’s a lion who’s guarding the only thing that truly matters to me.

    In my imagination I’m a badass warrior who takes down the lion with one blow, or I’m such a glorious being that the lion immediately bows before me. On the other end, in my imagination the lion devours me in one gulp, or strips me apart bit by bit. For all my fear, I don’t know the lion, I only know my image of him.

    When I decide, finally, that I can no longer survive in a world where I allow this lion to control what’s mine, I turn and walk toward him. Not knowing what will happen, the anger and dread rise within me and all I can do is keep breathing and seeking stillness. The lion returns whatever energy is directed toward him; he terrorizes the terrified; he assaults the angry; he devours the anxious. What I can do is breathe deeply into stillness. The anger is there, the fear is there, and I am there, breathing in stillness and breathing out softness. Each breath is a spell on myself, a spell to become something soft and supple, something that can adapt to the moment but move forward.

    From this stillness emerges something quiet and profound. A love that reaches across the space. Eyes meet and still there is anger, still fear, still stillness, and I am there, breathing with it all and walking forward, and the lion is there, approaching me. When we meet, the lion’s mouth opens and within is the cave wherein my energy and purpose is kept. When we meet, I am fully myself and more than I was before.

    The lion is always waiting.

    Buddha under the Nagas, Nong Khai, Thailand — by jpatokal

  • Deepening into the Dark

    At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, when the playful activity of summer begins to cool and withdraw into fall, I feel my energy draw inward. This can feel depressive, especially to someone prone to it, but the quality is different. The period from spring and summer feels like a time of broadening and expanding outward, engaging in new activities, finding new friends, planning and executing, working, playing. When fall occurs, I feel it is time to deepen and sink, to go more inward, to shift attention from relationships that feel casual to those that feel more nourishing, at times more intense. In my early twenties, I remember that there was a belief that now was the time to find an intimate partner, if you did not already have one, so you could share the winter months with someone intimate. Rarely, of course, did that work out as planned, but to me it speaks of that seasonal movement of energy. We are as much animals as we are anything else, but sometimes we forget our relationship to the seasonal cycles.

    Sandro Botticeli, La Carte de l’Enfer

    The roots of the psyche lie in murky, deep, mysterious territory, and sometimes we need to sink more deeply into it. The ego develops its habits and stories to support a sense of self, and that is as limiting as it is necessary. Making room to grow, change, or discover something new about the self means that the ego needs to relax and let awareness sink, finding the truth or insight that lies beneath the surface. Our dreams always offer us a new insight, an expanded perspective, a truth that can heal and balance us, but dreams come from our larger Self and tend to push against the waking ego’s habits and beliefs. In a dream, we might feel a sense of truth and power that follows into those early waking moments, only to later look back and wonder, “What the hell did this even mean? This dream makes no sense.” The ego is the part of us that says it makes no sense, the dream is meaningless, because the dream truth is beyond the ego’s blind spots and limitations, and the dream symbol has a deep truth that cannot be completely characterized by logical description.

    Dream work, trance work, automatic writing, and art are some ways of connecting with the deeper Self and becoming open to its larger insights and deeper mysteries. We do not have to kill the ego to benefit from these, but we have to practice alternate ways of thinking and processing information. Dream work in groups can be useful for bringing up elements of the dream that the dreamer’s ego cannot recognize. Looking at mythological symbols and archetypal patterns, making art, even writing down the dream and reviewing it later allows us space and time to process and integrate the dream truths. The ego’s refusal of meaning is not the entire truth, it is the moment in which the ego feels threatened and wants to clamp down. If we want to grow, we need to breathe and keep contemplating.

    In truth I do not think it is necessary or useful to throw out the logical, rational side of the mind, only to be able to integrate irrational, intuitive insight when possible. When life feels confusing or dried up, when I feel despair or lacking in creativity, I turn toward the unconscious dimensions of the Self to find the mystery that refreshes and invigorates. In turn, I think our communities, our cultures, even our species has its own larger unconsciousness, facets of which make up what Jung called the collective unconscious.

    If you are in Seattle and looking for support sinking into your larger Self for inspiration or renewal, consider the Diving into Enthusiasm workshop I am organizing for November.