Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Culture

  • 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?

     

  • Seeking the Way of Integration

    Decisiveness is not a strong suit of mine, but for much of my life I’ve had this drive to do something. The problem was settling on what something to do. At times, I could envision multiple ways to use my energy, all of them exciting and crystal-clear in my mind as possible. Other times, I felt void of ideas, and even the ideas I already had felt lifeless or beset with barriers and problems. Taking a step in one direction called up all the inner voices that spoke against that step. This weakness can be a strength.

    Not everyone seems to have that problem. I’ve met folks who seem to have the opposite problem, to stride forcefully and purposely with outward confidence and no overt reflection. Perhaps this post is not about them, or perhaps their own inner contradictions are lying beneath conscious awareness. Instead, the people around them try to reach out with advice and challenges and feel unheard, unacknowledged, even as the person walks right off a cliff. This strength can be a weakness.

    Duality is useful but false when taken too literally. In truth, the multiplicity of options before us is so vast that thinking too much can overwhelm us. Reducing things to two polarized possibilities can help to focus our thinking, but it becomes limiting when we try to make one option “win” over the other. If two ends of a polarity pull on us, then certain aspects of ourselves have attached to either end, and to choose one at the cost of the other is difficult and self-defeating.

    In his commencement speech at Wesleyan, Joss Whedon made a useful and well-stated observation about choices and identity:

    When I talk about contradiction, I talk about something that is a constant in your life and in your identity. Not just in your body, but in your own mind in ways that you may recognize, you may not. Let’s just say hypothetically that two roads diverged in a wood, and you took the path less traveled. Part of you is just going—look at that path over there! It’s much better. Everybody’s traveling on it … Not only is your mind telling you this, it’s on that other path. It’s behaving as though it is on that path. It is doing the opposite of what you are doing. And for your entire life, you will be doing, on some level, the opposite, not only what you are doing, but what you think you are.

    I speak of this inner opposite often, which correlates to the Jungian notion of the anima or animus. We have this sense of who we think we are, but within us we contain the opposite. If we can breathe into this and hold polarities, new possibilities emerge that are creative, dynamic, and integrated. Instead of trying to choose between passion and security, what would it look like to honor the parts of me that desire both and let that tension open the way?

    (more…)

  • Arising, Sustaining, Dissolving

    From Western alchemy we inherit a threefold process model. One articulation of the Sulphur-Salt-Mercury triad could be these three phases of process: arising, where processes begin or initiate; sustaining, where processes maintain or perpetuate, are nurtured or grown; and dissolving, where processes loosen, decay, transform, and die.

    We can think about our goals, ambitions, and projects as larger triangles in which this process unfolds through many micro-triangles. Two years ago I launched his blog and committed to posting one entry a week, which was its arising. Now I continue to honor that commitment and promote the writing as best I can, sustaining it. Some day I may end this commitment and dissolve this blog, perhaps turning its content into a book, perhaps erasing the content in a fit of piqué, perhaps simply stopping altogether. I’m only listing possibilities.

    In the meantime, each entry of this blog is its own process of arising, generating ideas and starting the first draft; sustaining by continuing the draft unto completion; and dissolving by editing the draft and eventually declaring it “done enough” to publish.

    Being and Becoming 2, by Berta Rosenbaum Golahny

    Each phase is necessary. Dissolution opens the space for something new to arise. Each phase also has its attraction and challenge. How do I know when it is time to move from one phase to the next? Confusion over phases of work leads to conflict in groups. One person commits to sustaining the project as it is, and sees it as their role to protect the project from any threat to its continuance. Another person thinks the project broken, flawed, or damaging, and wants to push for its dissolution. Another person has all these new ideas for ways to change the project, and wants to let those arise. In my observation, the person committed to sustaining tends to have the most power, in part as a function of the role itself. We need power to keep something in motion, and power-over derives in part from fear of changing things as they are.

    Identifying our work phases is like the orienting practice of “triangulation,” finding where one is by picking three visible landmarks, finding those landmarks on a map, and using the angles of vision to approximate where one is. When I think about where I am in relation to my dream, am I still in the process of arising, initiating change? Do I need to dissolve some responsibilities or habits that are taking time and energy away from my goals? Do the processes in place sustain me, do they need sustainment? What’s working? What’s not working?

    One lesson this model offers is that we can inhabit each phase fully and allow the energy of our project to move in its own way, in its own time. I can begin with a simple intention—“I want more intimacy in my relationship.” I can allow intimacy to arise within me, to suggest activities that would increase intimacy, to start new habits, to start conversations. If I can do this without too much attachment to what “intimacy” should look like, I have more flexibility and focus to discover what ends up working in my relationship, and then bring those working strategies into the process of sustainment. I can also discover what does not work, what impedes intimacy, and let those strategies dissolve.

    Presence with the process where it is, as it is, helps us to flow into the next best step with greater ease and less distress. When a process is ready to die, then sustaining it only causes stress. When a process is so deeply entrenched that to challenge would be taboo, we might better focus our efforts on dissolving rather than trying to start something new. At the same time, we might step away from the entrenched process altogether and focus on the arising, bringing something new into the world that might one day challenge things as it is once it has the strength and sustainment to tolerate a direct challenge.

    What is arising in you? What are you beginning or longing to begin?

    What needs nurturing? What needs to be sustained?

    What is dissolving? What is ending?

    If you are looking to reconnect with enthusiasm or integrity in your work or life and in the Seattle area, consider checking out this workshop coming November 6, 2014.

  • Questions on Enduring with Integrity

    Lately I have been pondering the challenge of sustaining effort toward a desired goal. My tendency is to become excited by a new idea, a new project, a new vision, to spend a great deal of energy in the stages of creation, and then to quickly lose enthusiasm when it comes time to make that work real, to make it manifest. The lesson for I need is how to settle into the long-term work of sustaining and nourishing my project, to return to the work regularly and find ways to bring energy or passion to the parts that bore me, sometimes harder than the parts that feel scary.

    The Knight of Pentacles, from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

    I’ve been blessed to know and befriend many passionate people with long-term desire to make change, whether it’s personal change, change in one’s work culture, or change in the world. In my observation, change-motivated people start with dreams, ideals, and passions, and then get to endure the fixed structures and limiting realities that slowly shape that energy into something denser, more grounded, and at times vastly different and more compromised than the original vision. There is work we do because we’re passionate about it, and there is work we do to make money to make our lives possible. Some lucky people are able to find the space where those spheres overlap, but so many of us sacrifice one and dedicate ourselves to the other, which has a cost.

    When faced with discouragement and feelings of powerlessness to make change, we might consider taking the route of convenience and power-over. We might forego honesty and integrity to ingratiate ourselves to the holders of power and the status quo. We might bend our life’s will to overcoming adversaries and overlords only to find that we’ve submitted our well-being to the quest for vengeance. If we cannot face that which we hate and resist in ourselves, then we are in danger of becoming it.

    I am contemplating how to restore passion and integrity to the process of my daily work, to keep my long-term vision firmly grounded in my everyday tasks and interactions. In turn, I ask how I can keep my vision responsive and open to change without sacrificing my sense of integrity. Too rigid an attachment to my view of how things “should be” could make me ineffective or tyrannical.

    What helps you to avoid becoming too fixed in your opinions?

    What helps you to refresh your enthusiasm and commitment for your long-term work?

    What helps you to remember the journey that you’re on? To be present to the path?

    What helps you to hold fast to what matters and let go of what does not?

    EDIT: To continue to explore and address these questions, I am organizing a workshop to occur in November. If you are in the Seattle area, please check it out. More to come.

  • Sit There, Then Do Something

    “Why are we trying to think less when we need to think more? The neutered, apolitical approach of mindfulness ignores the structural difficulties we live with.” – Suzanne Moore

    “The abused are trained to not talk about the abuse. It keeps the system in place. And when it becomes necessary, not talking about abuse is brutally enforced. We are living in the Panopticon. We police one another. Or we cower under our blankets.” – T. Thorn Coyle

    As a therapist who works with mindfulness and is organizing a group called “Declutter Your Life!” I am someone implicated in Moore’s article, cited above, which is worthy of a read. With this article, and the recent events in the media, I feel the need to take a stand. I do not agree with everything Moore says, but I think she is speaks to real problem in the way we market and understand mindfulness work. In a religious context, meditation and mindfulness practice is not primarily about relaxation or feeling better, it’s a means of developing increased calm and focus to become more effective at doing the work the religion calls its adherents to do, which can include service to gods, service to humanity, and service to the Earth. In Western pop psychology, we took the technique out of its context and left a vacuum of purpose.

    Rushton, Kaszniak, and Halifax cite a definition of moral distress as ‘‘the pain or anguish affecting the mind, body or relationships in response to a situation in which the person is aware of a moral problem, acknowledges moral responsibility, and makes a moral judgment about the correct action; yet, as a result of real or perceived constraints,
    participates in perceived moral wrongdoing.’’ These authors are doing intriguing work studying moral distress among palliative care workers, but I think the concept has implications for all of us.

    We are living in an age of outrage, in which we are constantly bombarded by news and images that stir up moral feelings and empathy. Media feeds our horror and anger, emotions that want to move our bodies to action, for protection or nurturing, but for most of us it stops there. Maybe I think about going out and volunteering to deliver first aid to a devastated county and then think about how hard it will be to get vacation time from work, or board the dog, and who’s going to take care of the house while I’m gone? Or I get outraged by some news and feel afraid that talking about it at work in the wrong way will endanger the lifestyle that feels so secure and precarious at the same time.

    by Jason WIlson

    When the urge to act, the feeling becomes stuck inside, and we suffer. We return to self-numbing habits, shut down emotion, and avoid action. But the alternative often looks like going to unrealistic extremes, to feel overwhelmed, because the problems are so huge and I feel so small.

    In my approach to psychotherapy, Individuation is not about becoming more walled-off and separate from the world. Individuation is about recognizing who I really am and what really matters to me. The Self is embedded in relationships. My family, my cultures, my work community, and my country are all facets of my Self that I must recognize and integrate over time, including their darkness and complexes, because it all already affects me. I think this truth is harder to recognize for people in the US whose identities were treated as the norm, such as White people, masculine-gendered people, non-transgendered people, heterosexual people. These groups are not necessarily compelled to consider how culture, politics, and history shape their identities, whereas those who do not share those identities cannot see anything but that truth.

    Mindfulness, in my practice, is a technique for improving consciousness about one’s self and experience. We learn to dis-identify from thoughts, feelings, and sensations, creating space to understand our larger Selves, including those unconscious complexes that show up in patterns that affect us in ways difficult to recognize. These include complexes of culture, history, and identity. This includes awareness of the stress and pain that arises when I want to do something to help the world and stop myself. Mindfulness helps me to free myself of those automatic defaults to inaction and numbing. Self-observation helps me to see, “Oh, every time I want to do something I automatically think either I need to quit my job and start a revolution, or else I need to do nothing. Maybe there’s something in the middle that I can do.”

    Meditation is not about lying to ourselves. We look at the mirror of our hearts and minds and learn to see who we really are, including what matters, what is painful, what is challenging. As we become better at separating our thoughts, feelings, opinions, and sensations, the mind is freed to engage in more incisive analysis, to contemplate solutions to challenging problems with less reactivity. When the mind and body become more intimately connected, we learn how to step out of the energy-draining patterns of analysis and argument that keep us from taking action.

    The above-linked article from Rushton, Kaszniak, and Halifax offers a nuanced and useful articulation of the problems that arise with moral distress. Without emotional equanimity and self-awareness, many of our reactions tend up being about reducing our own discomfort. If I feel genuine empathy for your pain and I lack the skills to keep myself calm and remember this is your pain, not mine, then my response might be more about trying to get you to stop making me uncomfortable. Offers of “help” become self-serving and ignore the other person’s genuine needs. That’s how we end up saying, “Oh, don’t feel bad! Cheer up!” to people who are miserable or grieving. That’s how we end up in these loops of moral outrage, shouting and insulting each other to drown out the feelings of pain and helplessness. Mindfulness and self-observation help us to find our real boundaries. We can face someone who is suffering, feel their pain, and find out what they need from us.

    There’s a joke that in the West the saying is, “Don’t just sit there; do something!” and in Eastern spiritual traditions it is more like, “Don’t just do something; sit there!” In my opinion, Doing and Being are partners. When we act without reflection or examining our inner selves, I think we tend to react and perpetuate the problem. If we do nothing but contemplate and examine our inner selves, then we deny the world our gifts and ability to make change. I often see quoted the lines attributed to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, and there is a truth to that, but we can also remember that Gandhi changed himself in a way that was radically confrontational to his culture and government, and his work was not isolated but done in community.

    I advocate for working on knowing yourself and finding mental and emotional healing. That is the work I do. If that’s what you need to focus most on now, that is a huge undertaking and worthy of respect. I think your healing can be the healing others need as well. I think the causes that touch your heart and move you are the causes that can further your own healing and the healing of the world. You do not need to start by sacrificing everything. You can start by reading a book to get more information, finding out who else is working on the issue and what they’re doing, showing up to an event and being present, having a conversation with someone who disagrees with you. Right now, you are co-creating the world. If it’s not the world you want, you are the best person to start making it so.

  • Beyoncé: Flawless Evolution, Part 3

    “***Flawless” might be the core text of Beyoncé: a show of rage disguised as pop, a triptych of pieces about femininity, femme, race, and womanhood, seemingly lacking in coherence but expressing a plurality of voices. The first part begins with the artist singing to her fans and followers: “I know when you were little girls / You dreamt of being in my world / Don’t forget it, don’t forget it / Respect that. Bow down, bitches.” After this declaration of matriarchal dominance, the song slows into a tense quiet as a sample of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche speaks of the inequalities of expectation and socialization put upon women, in which women are taught to be less sexual, less ambitious, and less competitive than men; any competition occurring between women for marriage partners. After Adichie declares a feminist as one who believes in the “social, political, and economic equality of the sexes,” the song shifts into a series of chanted pro-femme mottos: “I woke up like dis / We flawless / Ladies, tell them say / I look so good tonight.” The artist almost frantically honors the gifts offered by each member of her family; the confidence, courage, and validation.

    All of this is bookended by clips from the artist’s appearance on Star Search as a member of Girls Tyme competing against an all-white, all-male, rocker-looking group Skeleton Crew. The audience is aware of the dramatic irony that Skeleton Crew wins with four stars over Girls Tyme’s three stars, given that we have no idea who these guys while the artist continues her media domination.

    As an anthem, the call outs “I woke up like dis” and “I look so good tonight” are spells of femme empowerment. Self-validating, these words declare one’s self a preternaturally beautiful and flawlessly put-together being while masking the labor and heartache that goes into one’s look. Within the larger context of the artist’s surrender of perfection, flawlessness becomes less about external standards and more about an attitude, a style of being and confidence that owns its own space. Adichie speaks of the messaging that teaches “girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” and this is the artist’s answer—to become bigger, to demand space, to insist on her own excellence.

    This pro-femme anthem seems contradictory to the song’s initial declaration of hierarchy, the artist commanding respect and submission from all would-be competitors who are growing up and thinking of taking on the Queen against her throne. Adichie’s bridge offers a context that broadens the scope of the song’s message. She speaks of socialization compelling women to vie for male attention “rather than jobs or accomplishments, which I would think a good thing.” She further asserts that are taught, “you can be successful, but not too successful, or else you’d threaten the man.” Part one of “***Flawless” keeps competition within the realm of women, the artist presumably speaking to other female artists to pay homage and respect. This occurs within the wider media culture that pits women artists against each other and isolates music within gendered scopes, echoing back to the 1994 Q Magazine interview with Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, and Björk, in which Amos says:

    It’s funny for women because journalists pit women against each other. If you think about Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton they were all much more similar to each other than we are. We have tits. We have three holes. That’s what we have in common. We don’t even play the same instruments. It really disappoints me when some sort of competition has to be manufactured for their little minds and fantasies.

    Anger toward the patriarchal restrictions that narrow women’s opportunities to a gender-segregated channel seems to simmer within the context of the song. The video itself shows the artist participating in moshing, posturing with ferocity, giving her best femme daddy.

    Still from “***Flawless” video. The raw rage last seen in “Ring the Alarm” distilled and refined into a blade, pointed subtly at the racist patriarchal structures that impede the artist’s further development. Notice the conflict in her body, legs close together evoking the feminine socialization to take up less space in contrast with the arms reaching out to control and expand the space around her.

    Returning to the Star Search bookends, the three asterisks in “***Flawless” call back the three stars given to Girls Tyme. The song allows us to sink into its anger, its pride, its fierce declaration of the power of women, and then take in the reality that no matter how flawless they are, Black women only get three stars in a culture that awards White men four stars as a matter of course.

    In this way, the song is a journey of expansive consciousness, starting from thinking from a place of power scarcity, in which women have to compete for what limited power is available, moving through feminist analysis, and emerging with this sharp-edged honing of identity and exaltation of femme consciousness. This may point toward the direction this evolution will continue with the artist as she moves from five, the experimental expression of self-actualized energy, to six, the meeting of new opposition. The individualizing being, increasing in confidence and a greater sense of purpose, must continue to expand in scope and capacity, meeting and defeating all oppositions. As she was able to divest herself of the limitations of perfectionism, her next step might be well to take on the larger social barriers that inhibit her success and creativity.

    Complete Jungian readings of Beyoncé’s work:

  • Beyoncé: Flawless Evolution, Part 2

    Still from “Partition” video. The mirroring does not suggest an unconscious shadow, rather the surrounding darkness allows the balanced self to come into clearer illumination.

    Can we read the artist through the work, even when the artist is the Work? These questions permeate the album, particularly the intimate portraits of “Drunk in Love,” “Jealous,” “Rocket,” and “Mine.” The artist here expresses more comfort and confidence with sexuality than had ever come through in earlier works—no matter how much she performed sexuality in the past, there was never anything like the sheer joy and shame-free announcement,“I can’t wait till / I get home so you can tear that cherry out.”

    We think we are allowed some insight into the “real” Beyoncé’s marriage to Jay-Z, who is the guest rapper in “Drunk in Love,” but again we face the question of “real” reality versus the images presented. One wonders why the rapper would equate himself Ike Turner and assert “No I don’t play / Now eat the cake, Annie Mae,” evoking a scene from What’s Love Got to Do With It? in which the singer emotionally abuses his successful wife. The opening lines of the (gorgeous) “Mine” teases the audience with a glimpse of marital conflict and a seemingly biographical observation by the singer that “I haven’t been myself since the baby,” only later to have those biographical parallels dashed by the singer’s declaration that “We should get married,” as those who follow the star couple know they were already married when their daughter was born.

    As Beyoncé shatters and reconstructs long-nurtured assumptions about who and what the artist is, the audience witnesses a re-crystallization of the artist’s span of history and career. Throughout the album we see images of the artist at various phases of life, seeing the early victories and defeats, never knowing “who” she is. At the opening of “Yoncé,” we hear her calling the audience to say “Heeeyyy Ms. Carter”—referencing her spousal relationship while refusing the traditional title of “Mrs.”—then name yet another facet of self through the hyper-funky, sexy “Yoncé / All on his mouth like liquor.”

    The bonus video “Grown Woman” encapsulates the artist’s work of integrating her life to date into a new center of gravity. Not offered as pure audio, the video requires us to re-experience this reconstitution with every listen. The video flips between modified home video recordings, the lyrics of the song written into young Beyoncé’s mouth, with reconstructed adult performances of the home videos, all the while interspersed with the adult artist in a sexy, casual, somewhat disheveled appearance confidently surrounded by trophies. Here is the pageant queen post-”Pretty Hurts.” She has gone through perfection and discipline, gone through the journey of meeting and marrying her shadow, gone through reconciliatoin of warring parts into a grander Self. Now her past is not a passive, unchanging set of stories that forever limit her, it is raw material creatively constructed into new form. She rewrites the past to create her future.

    Complete Jungian readings of Beyoncé’s work:

  • Beyoncé: Flawless Evolution, Part 1

    According to McLean’s rendering of the alchemical sevenfold process, the manifested work at 4 progresses toward an experimental expression of its energies at 5, from the static square to the dynamic pentacle. Beyoncé, the artist’s eponymous fifth solo album, certainly meets the criteria of a work of experimental expression. Released without warning, following a secretive recording frenzy, the album exploded into public consciousness with such force that it was nearly impossible to separate the sheer enthusiasm of the public from critical experience of the work itself. I listened to it incessantly, with a sense of excitement. I felt vindicated, as though I had believed all along she was capable of this quantum leap in artistic expression. Having read her so intently, the force of her first two songs felt profound in the extent to which they shook her public persona free of its earlier constriction.

    Here is Beyoncé, renowned perfectionist and self-disciplinarian, who has spent almost her entire life performing in front of an audience—evidenced by collected footage interspersed through the work—opening her fifth album by singing the Sia-penned declaration, “Perfection is the disease of a nation.” Here is the artist in that opening video, performing the role of pageant queen, performing the cracks and dis-ease underlying our culture’s obsession with flawless surfaces, performing the woundedness and vulnerability she had never before allowed in her public persona.

    As soon as the audience begins to consider the implications, the album immediately shifts from powerful ballad into the dark and lush electronic soundscape of “Ghosts/Haunted,” a sound unlike anything the artist has ever done. Here the singer declares, almost casually: “Reap what you sow / Perfection is so… eh.”

    Is this the birth of an entirely new stage of consciousness for the singer? A declaration of freedom from the personality and cultural complexes that have formed and impeded the individuation process to this point? Are the lyrics critical of record labels and the need to “work 9 to 5 / just to stay alive” an evolution in the consciousness of the artist toward greater social concerns? As the individuation process reconciles the painful contradictions and limitations of the self, more energy becomes available for outward concern. Simultaneously, the individuated person increasingly comes to see how her history, her family, her community, and her nation comprise facets of self that must themselves be confronted, integrated, or transformed. In the video for “No Angel,” the artist herself is invisible, instead directing the camera and audience toward a community in Houston typically held in media margins, as discussed by sheridf at Crunk Feminist Collective. She is decentralized from the image, but her passion shapes the images we see and experience.

    Social concern sets the stage for the later video, “Superpower.” We follow the artist through a slow-motion journey in an apparent call-out to the Occupy movement, gathering young people and activists into a climatic charge at the riot-clad police officers, stopped at the last moment for a triumphant stand-and-stare from the artist herself. Were this scenario to play out in a contemporary city, it would end in tear gas, violence, and arrests. Here she aligns herself with the activist youth, counter the policing forces, envisioning opposition without violence.

    Beyoncé by GxStep

    Complete Jungian readings of Beyoncé’s work:

  • 4: The Joy of the Individuated Self

    According to Adam McLean‘s commentary of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, the alchemical sevenfold process reaches its material manifestation at the fourth station. This is the nadir of the spiritual process, after the “involutionary arc” in which the initial spiritual impulse descends, meets with opposition, synthesizes the impulse, and finally emerges into materiality. Jung saw the number 4 as indicative of the quaternity, symbolic of wholeness—four Western elements, four cardinal directions, four corners of a square or four points in a circle. Throughout the course of the artist’s work, we saw her solo emergence of Dangerously in Love, her encounter with her nemesis and beloved in B’day, the internal division and synthesis of I Am…Sasha Fierce, and now we see her forged into a greater whole: joyful, proud, and celebratory.

    Beyonce Tag II PSD, by RenkuFX

    4 is the reconciliation and stabilization of the inner process of solve et coagula within Beyoncé’s persona, dramatized in I Am… Sasha Fierce. The fiercely sexual and wanly vulnerable halves of self have married into a greater whole. 4 is the wedding reception for this hieros gamos. Qualities of joy, celebration, and pleasure permeate many of the songs, particularly “Party,” “Love on Top,” and the ecstatic “End of Time.” The audience bears witness to the singer’s empowered confidence and self-worth. “Finally / You put my love on top,” the singer says to her Beloved, recognizing the recognition of her worth. Many pop romantic tropes emphasize images of incompletion without love and partnership—the Spice Girls sang that “2 become 1” in the romantic and sexual union, where Beyoncé distinguishes herself by emphasizing completion and partnership, declaring “I know 1 + 1 / Equals 2”.

    The only sour note in this reading is the song “Rather Die Young,” an ode to the exhausted and problematic trope of self-negation-as-homage-to-love. Developmental processes are always incomplete, always containing encapsulated, unintegrated fragments of past and cultural complexes. “You make me feel like I’m seventeen,” she sings, noting that this relationship has activated an old complex not fully integrated into the mature self.

    Individuation does not mean a departure from submission or servitude, but an enlivening of these innate qualities within the person. The artist’s work has always include a value of service toward her beloved, and songs such as “Dance for You” show this quality remains rooted within her love and art. She repeats over and over how she’s going to “show” her lover how much she appreciates and values his love and offers her dancing as gratitude and connection. There is no contradiction for the integrated self to be “a woman in the street and a freak in the you-know-what,” to recognize the value and worth of her sexuality and wield it in gratitude.

    In “Girls,” the album’s first single, the singer brings her exaltation to her entire gender, asserting “My persuasion / can build the nation.” The former Virgin Queen has integrated her qualities of power, sexuality, and capacity to bear new life, noting that woman are “strong enough to bear the children / then get back to business.” Bearing children is one of her many capacities, but who she is is larger than any task, responsibility, or role, as she suggests in “Schoolin’ Life”:

    Beyoncé 4 – The Collection, by ValentineSobeit

    I’m not a teacher, babe
    But I can teach you something
    Not a preacher
    But we can pray if you wanna
    Ain’t a doctor
    But I can make you feel better

    Through this refrain if “I’m not, but I can,” the artist claims myriad potentialities and integrates them into the I from a place of self-empowerment, not subsuming the I into an archetype or role. This is a hallmark of the individuated self, able to take part in the world without being defined by it, in touch with the foundational core of essence, who she truly is at heart.

    In this reading, both the artist’s music and public persona are the alchemical workings that the artist is bringing to bear. Because life and art is process, neither she nor we can dwell forever in this space of celebration and achievement, or else it loses its value and freshness and begins to turn. From this nadir of the alchemical process, the manifested work now moves in an evolutionary arc, which mirrors the involutionary arc. The next stages are the experimental manifestations of the work’s energies, the difficulties encountered in expression, and the last mature expression of that initial spiritual impulse. From 4, the stable square, we move to 5, the pentacle of shifting and transformation.

    Complete Jungian readings of Beyoncé’s work:

  • After Victory, Governance

    The Emperor from the Etruscan Tarot

    Managing a chosen course has both richness and tedium. Once the householder has succeeded in acquiring a house and property, they must choose how and when to maintain it. The spiritual seeker develops most when learning to return to prayer and meditation on a regular basis, yet faces moments of excruciating boredom and stalled progress. Development is serpentine: we need integrity and discipline with adaptability. Some times I do not want to go running even when I know it will energize me. Some times I avoid contact with people for whom I like and care very much because something in me feels it is too much work or energy or some such thing.

    When we experience life as a lack, that absence of what we think we need can irritate and interfere with every moment until it resolves. We think we need stability, security, a marriage partner, the right job, and we get motivated by the quest. What is hard to appreciate while questing is that victory does not automatically complete us. Ruling a nation is very different from fighting to conquer it. Whatever we have avoided by focusing on lack is still there. Perhaps we have childhood wounds that awaken in the context of a loving marriage. Perhaps we have persistent existential questions of meaning that flourish in a “perfect” career. The urge to debauch arises even when we feel happy with life.

    The Emperor from Deviant Moon Tarot

    These unresolved challenges can threaten the accomplishments we fought to gain. This is not inherently a terrible thing, but it offers us the opportunity to look again at ourselves. Why do I seek this thing, whatever this thing is, that I want to destroy when I have it? What am I trying to get from the outside that I need on the inside?

    How can I bring the passion and vigor of the search into the diligence and responsibility of governance? Or how can I bring diligence and responsibility into the passion of the search? Any great work requires some balance of both. Creating something truly great needs dedication and the constant return to doing while remaining open to inspiration and guidance. We can make greatness in our lives.