Beautifully Unique

Miranda Hart, on Desert Island Discs Radio 4 Extra Sunday 29th November, said it was a long time before she could look in the mirror and say to herself she was "beautifully unique".
The day before, Jean Shinoda Bolen gave a seminar to the C G Jung Club London entitled 'Path with Soul / Path with Heart - The Inner Compass'.  Her theme was that each person is unique in their particular mix of God-given characteristics ('God-given' used here because it is a well-known phrase - but it is not meant to mean the God of any particular religion, but whatever understanding of the Divine each individual has a sense of) and the importance of valuing, seeing as beautiful, whatever we are.  With the exigencies of the culture of the day, all too often our God-given self becomes hidden or distorted from even ourselves.
Jung said that analysts should put to the side everything they have 'learnt', because, if not, stereotyping can set in, which goes against appreciating the uniqueness of the client and helping them to realise they are "beautifully unique".

The Woman's Voice in Today's Culture

Where is the woman's voice in this world?  This is the passion of Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of the book 'Goddesses in Everywoman', to enable and energise what women can bring to the problems of our world today.  She gave a talk to the C G Jung Club London on Friday 27 November about the  indomitable independence of spirit women have, illustrated so well in the myth of the Greek Goddess Artemis,  Where is the woman's voice in the British Parliament today as they discuss whether Britain should bomb Syria?  She posited that it needs  the fighting spirit that all women have in them, somewhere, even if they have not found it, to balk against this warring trend.  It may seem to be a fruitless task, but calling upon Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Fields, she said how there is an accumulation of individual voices which then results in a tipping point of it having a major effect.  You may be the 14th voice, but without that, there cannot be the 15th voice an so on, until it is the 100th voice, when the culture changes (from the myth of the 100 monkeys).  It is a symbolic myth, the actual numbers are probably much greater, but the journey is the same.
Jean is a Jungian analyst, as such she believes that men have female characteristics inside them that, to be whole, need to be acknowledged and used,  The route to doing that is often to be exposed to women who they feel for - Zeus dearly loved Artemis. 
She was an inspirational voice.

The Darkness when the Clocks go Back

Jungian psychology respects and values the dark side.  Here is what Brian Draper, Associate Lecturer at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, said in Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday 24^th October.  That Saturday night the clocks went back.

“The British Summer Time debate continues as to whether we should keep British Summer Time all year round. Studies suggest that kids are more active for longer when the evenings are light, there are fewer road accidents and we would save on energy bills.  On the other hand, Northern Scotland wouldn’t see sunrise until 10 and early birds from farmers to postal workers would be plunged in darkness for longer.

Beyond these practical arguments however it is perhaps at the visceral level that we feel our descent into the darkness of winter most sharply, accelerated as it is this weekend by the clock change and the often depressing realisation that the darkness has crept up on us again.  This is not helped, I believe, by the way we associate light and dark with good and bad.  We tend to think in terms of binary opposites, because a world of us and them, black and white and so on, is an easier place to grasp.  So when it comes to light and dark, the most primal set of opposites we have, we tend not to like the dark and try to keep it at bay.  Yet if we pause to peer into the beauty of natural darkness – for instance (our eyes do adjust and we are soon reminded of its riches), if the light didn’t fade, how could we appreciate a sunset, or the glimmer of the first evening star.  How could we enjoy a deep and restorative sleep? How could a seed ever germinate?   “At the heart of reality”, says the Quaker writer Parker Palmer “opposites cohere in mysterious unity.”  Religion, if we are not careful, can accentuate the opposition at the expense of the mystery, so we can end up believing that God’s role is just to side with us.  But it doesn’t seem to work that way.  As the poet Henry Vaughan writes “There is in God a deep but dazzling darkness.”   So much of what we have come to associate negatively with being in the dark, such as not knowing or having all the right answers, such as struggle, pain, or loss, is very much part of the mysterious unity of the whole.  Looking back to darker times in our life we can often see that this is spiritually when we have grown the most.  The 16^th century monk Jonathan Cross, from the depths of a prison cell wrote eloquently of his dark night of the soul and accepted it as a gift. 

As the clocks go back, I wonder if we can do the same with our winter darkness as much as with that extra hour in bed.”

Existentialism and Jungian Psychology

'In Our Time' on Thursday 22 October on BBC Radio 4 discussed the Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.  To quote something said about one of the principles of Existentialism "You can never get off the treadmill of choosing, making choices, you can never stop - - -  You can never go with a quiet conscience, you can never think "Oh well, that's it and I've ticked it and I've done it."

In this respect Jungian psychology resonates with Existentialism.  Jungian psychology is about having a good relationship with the unconscious.  Jung writes

""No mortal can plumb the depths of nature" - nor even the depths of the unconscious.  We do know however that the unconscious never rests.  It seems to be always at work, for even when we sleep we dream.  There are many people who declare that they never dream, but the probability is that they simply do not remember their dreams.  Not a day passes but we make some slip of the tongue, or something slips our memory, which at other times we know perfectly well, or we are seized by a mood whose cause we cannot trace, etc.  These things are all symptoms of some consistent unconscious activity - - "

And so it is that developing our relationship with the unconscious never ends, right up to death.  In Jungian jargon, we are never 'individuate', are never completely and totally all we have the potential to be as our individual unique selves.  All we can do is take the individuation journey right up until we die.

Plant Soul

In the Radio 4 Extra play ‘Family Tree’ (9.15-10.00pm Tuesday 20 October) a boy turns into a plant, his mother tends him until he is 30 years old and gets too big to be indoors and is dying.  Experts tell her the plant is being killed with kindness, needs to be cut back and planted outside.  She plants him in the botalnical gardens.  She has become frail and uses up all her energy doing this.  She lies down beside him to rest, he drop all hi leaves carefully on her.  She would have died without their protection and is found by a gardener.  The chief gardener thinks the boy-plant is dead, but the one who found the mother does not, moves it to his shed, tends it with great care and it grows a shoot.  He leaves his mobile by the plant and the shoot touches it to phone home.  The gardenr sees the number and rings it.  The house is on the market (the mother has been put in a home) and the estate agent answers.  The gardener goes round, sees the damp mark on the carpet where the plant pot stood, the marks on the branches were and realised this was the plant’s home.  The chief gardener burns the plant, which still looks mainly dead.  The gardener rescues seeds from the burnt shoot, one survives, he grows it until it is a small pot plant and gives it to the mother. It is her grandchild.  The voice over in the play is that plant, now old and a large tree, having cast its seeds far and wide.  It comments on people finding looking at trees and feeling a connection, reminds us how we die, are buried, become part of the earth and then part of the plants “We are not as distinct as we think” is the finale. 

This is resonant with Jungian psychology which speaks of the ‘One World’, that everything is connected to everything.   There was a C G Jung Club London – Guild of Pastoral Psychology seminar on 17^th of October with Thomas Moore speaking about ‘Care of the Soul and Spirit in a Secular World’.   He spoke of Thomas Aquinas writing that we have a human soul, an animal soul and a vegetable soul. How we need to be in touch with all of these aspects of soul.  To quote Thomas Moore from the seminar “Why do we have plants in our house? - - Feeling the need to vegetate.  - -  We grow out of this earth, we are not on it, we came out of it. - - That is our partciipation, that is not another species somewhere, but we can participate, we can trust our vegetable instincts.  If we don’t do that  we live only from our mind level of soul, which is extremely valuable but not the whole story. - -  Going down into our roots.”

Radio 4 Extra Familly Tree drama about our vegetable soul resonates with C G Jung Club London seminar 17 October speaker Thomas Moore