PRACTICING The Heart of Mindfulness

      In one of Tara Brach's fine guided meditations, she suggests: “… with the out-breath, let go of any unnecessary holdings in the heart.” https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-loving-what-is/

 
     What a wonderful suggestion!

     Of course we all have protective armor of varying thickness around our hearts due to all the traumas we've been exposed to, perhaps even before birth. Even the process of being born is traumatic to the child, no matter how smoothly it goes. 

     So what are unnecessary holdings in the heart? If we've become resilient, balanced, mature adults, and have forgiven those who may have harmed us, and have learned to consciously face & accept even life's harsh realities, we likely will still continue to carry some habitual armoring in our body, but especially around our heart. This is now completely unnecessary, and something best to intentionally work on releasing.

     A much greater challenge is if we're continually traumatized in some manner, be it racism, sexism, domestic violence, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, etc, etc, etc. Even here though, armoring the heart is - somewhat like the "freeze instinct" - a necessary survival tactic of the very young, and for those not yet able to respond more maturely & effectively to trauma. An armored, frozen heart is not capable of vibrantly engaging in life. So even here, it is best to adapt more effective adult responses to end & mitigate the damaging effects of trauma AND intentionally work on releasing these holdings in the heart.

     An armored heart becomes such a natural part of us, that the suggestion to release the armor to some will sound completely insane - as if being asked to immediately become a heart organ-donor! And even if you've reached a point in your life when the idea of shedding defenses around your heart sounds appealing, even urgent, in real life, it's actually a slow, cautious process, mostly out of your direct control. The heart is, after all, our most vital organ!

     So even though we're hard-wired for self-preservation & conditioned to fear, at the same time, our life feels whole & meaningful only when we have open-hearted connection to ourselves, others, the world. So how can we resolve this potent pull in opposite directions?

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     A meditation PRACTICE I've found beneficial is holding a beloved baby in my heart. It can be your own baby or grandchild, baby Buddha, baby Jesus, a puppy, kitten, baby bird - whoever feels closest for you. The key is to feel directly sharing the nurturing warmth, peace & protection of your heart with a tiny, beloved, helpless little innocent being. We are holding this beloved innocent & our own innocence together, in nurturing safety & unconditional love, so both are thriving in real time. Allow yourself to rest in the physical feel of nurturing & being nurtured, embodying our true nature.

• 

     Immediately after writing the above, I listened to an excellent interview in which Dorothy Hunt answered a question about desire - to have something or to get rid of something. "This awareness, this awake nature of ours, it’s moving from inside the thing that we’re trying to get rid of, rather than trying to get rid of it. We just let awareness come inside – it begins to liberate it from the inside. Whereas the mind tries to pry it open, or get rid of it. Awareness is like the sun that melts these frozen things. So much of what feels like a block is just some kind of frozen feeling, frozen experience that hasn’t been allowed to simply be. So when we allow our inner experience to be what it is – the Buddha once said, ‘Hold your anger as though it’s your only child’ – bringing that compassion, that embrace, that intimacy, bringing it close so we can see ‘What is this?’ instead of ‘How do I get rid of it?’ The mind wants to know, ‘How do I get rid of it?’ But this awake space, this awareness, has no judgment, it just shines the light on what is. And then we begin to see desire for what it is.”
        Dorothy Hunt interview: https://batgap.com/dorothy-hunt/

 

“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.”                                           Dorothy Hunt

      “Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.” Jack Kornfield

     “When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.” Tara Brach

 

 

Restless Souls, Acorns and Wisdom

     First, a true story from Cynthia Bourgeault:

     “Long ago, back in Maine, I worked for a small marine publishing company, where I had the pleasure of editing A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by a man named Hank Taft. When I met him, Hank was one of those exuberant, restless souls, sixty-one going on thirty, filled with life and passion. A member of the distinguished Taft clan that has contributed to American history a president and a pioneering educator, he bounced around in a variety of careers, from business executive to president of Outward Bound. He’d rowed the entire Maine coast in a twelve-foot Peapod and was now making a fine debut as an author and a cruising sailor.
     ‘Stunned’ was the response of virtually everyone who knew him when we learned that Hank had contracted pancreatic cancer. And Hank himself was no less stunned, but he quickly regrouped. Characteristically, his first response was to give it the ‘old Yale try,’ taking command of his treatment program with the same panache as if planning a transatlantic cruise. The pieces involved an eclectic blend of physical workouts, diet, light chemotherapy, and – new to a staunch rationalist like Hank – visualization meditation for an hour each morning.
     I remember the day very clearly: February 4, 1991. The sun was just rising over the islands of Penobscot Bay, and Hank’s wife, Jan, had cooked us a hearty lumberjack’s breakfast. As we sat overlooking the cold, brilliant ocean partly obscured in winter sea smoke, conversation came around to the topic of Hank’s plans for the upcoming sailing season. Somehow we got from there onto the subject of fog, and we all shared our uneasiness about making passages in zero-visibility conditions.
     ‘But there’s a lot of ways to keep busy so you don’t feel your fear,’ Hank observed cheerfully. ‘You can keep precise time checks and enter them in the log. You can stand out on the bow and every minute do a 360-degree scan of the waters. You can watch for changes in ripple patterns and identify passing lobster buoys …’
     ‘Yes, I said – and then, volunteering some of my own work-in-progress on the subject of fog passages, ‘or else you can just let the fear come up and fall through it to the other side….’
     He looked at me as if I’d just pierced him with a sword. How I wished those words had never been spoken!
     Over the next few weeks Hank became decidedly more inward. He quickly gave up the visualization and the lumberjack breakfasts, then the workouts and chemotherapy. He gathered his family, made his final reconciliations, settled his affairs, and waited. It did not prove to be a long wait. Within three weeks the rapidly spreading cancer had obstructed his lower intestine, and he faced the choice of eking out a few more weeks of life in a hospital or dying at home. Wholeheartedly he chose the latter.
     Hank had never been a religious man (in fact, he held religion primarily responsible for the bigotry and violence in the world), but in those final weeks a change so extraordinary came over him that none of us could fail to notice it. As his physical body withered, his soul grew large and luminous. Friends gathered by his bedside could feel the energy of love radiating from him almost as a force field. He faced his death with open heart, utterly trusting and utterly serene.
     Three days before the end, I went for what was to be my last visit. Hank was curled in bed, his body totally broken yet somehow radiantly powerful. We hugged each other and said farewell. And then his last words to me – so muffled and unexpected that I did not at first catch them: ‘Are you fearless yet?’
     ‘Not yet, Hank,’ I said. ‘I’m trying.’
     ‘Fall … fearless … into … love.’
     In those final mumbled words, Hank conveyed more to me of the essence of who he was and what life was than could have been done in a lifetime of spiritual teaching. … From a force greater than our own lives, we are made for this, and when we finally yield ourselves into it, we are born into a meaning that is never known as we struggle on the surface with our acorn reality.”

     Even if we sort of like Hank's final advice to Cynthia, without the 'help' of impending death, most of us cannot deeply understand it, because we live in "acorn reality" - our society's shallow, hyper-rational mental prison.
     Cynthia's story about "acorn reality":

     “Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called ‘Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.’ There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.
     One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped ‘out of the blue’ by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, ‘We … are … that!’
     Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: ‘So tell us, how would we become that tree?’ ‘Well,’ said he, pointing downward, ‘it has something to do with going into the ground … and cracking open the shell.’ ‘Insane,’ they responded. ‘Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.’ ”

     Most of us are so armoured-up against life due to all sorts of traumas, that we're 'hard nuts to crack'. And yet ...

          "There is a crack in everything
           That's how the light gets in ..."          Leonard Cohen

     “Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.” Thomas Moore

      Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

     One of Tara Brach's fine guided meditations: https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-opening-hearts-life/

Fresh New Openings Await

     “To change is one of the great dreams of every heart – to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality, or the pain. So often we look back on patterns of behavior, the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and that have failed to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us. So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere.
     We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing.
     Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality beings to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.”
     John O’Donohue. “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.” Random House Canada, 2008.

For a New Beginning
by John O'Donohue

"In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you." 

You are More than your Sorrow

“Suffering is not enough.
Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.
Smiling means that we are ourselves,
that we have sovereignty over ourselves,
that we are not drowned in forgetfulness.
How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow?
It is natural— you need to smile to your sorrow
because you are more than your sorrow.”                                         Thich Nhat Hanh

 

"The world is not a problem to be solved;
it is a living being to which we belong.
It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness.
Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing.
And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature."                        Thich Nhat Hanh 

“… perhaps one can say that reality is not designed to accomplish a defined goal so much as it is made to serve the incomprehensible fact of what is. … We must learn to accept and love what is rather than always wishing for something different.”
    Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

The more you understand, the more you love;
the more you love, the more you understand.
They are two sides of one reality.
The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.”           Thich Nhat Hanh 

 

 

Transforming from Fear to Love

     The underlying crisis in the world today is an unspoken feeling of being afraid, alone & powerless in a messed-up, meaninglessness world. Individually & culturally, we're naturally averse to complicated unpleasant emotions; reject anything deeply meaningful as if it were taboo; are seriously addicted to distractions; and have very low attention spans. So most of us "keep busy" which somewhat distracts us from this corrosive feeling in our gut. "FOMO" (fear of missing out) is actually a legitimate fear, but most of us MISINTERPRET this as missing out on owning 10,000 square foot mansions, $150,000 cars, trips of a lifetime, etc, etc. These are just bigger, shinier distractions. Only the rich can directly experience the fact that these don't work any better than playing video games, getting drunk or being a workaholic.
     HOWEVER, as in many other serious challenges, the only way to get past our aching dys-ease, is to go through it. And it requires courage, patience & perseverance - stepping up, waking up & growing up.

         “If this world is to be healed through human efforts,
          I am convinced it will be by ordinary people
          whose love for life is even greater than their fear.”                 Joanna Macy

     “... grief, if you are afraid of it and pave it over, clamp down, you shut down. And the kind of apathy and closed down denial or difficulty in looking at what we’re doing to our world stems not from callous indifference or ignorance so much as it stems from fear of pain. ….
     That became perhaps the most pivotal point in the landscape of my life: that dance with despair. To see how we are called to not run from the discomfort, and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear. If we can be fearless to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it.
     When we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it, when we keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face. And the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world. Our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”
     Joanna Macy, interview by Krista Tippett, On Being podcast:
https://onbeing.org/programs/joanna-macy-a-wild-love-for-the-world

 

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, 2020

Words about "the nameless"

     Most of us were born into a religion and traumatized by it, and/or were traumatized by others' religions. So it's very common & understandable to be stuck in cynicism, aversion, anger, hatred etc towards religions. Nevertheless, it's vitally important to FREE ourselves from the prison that our afflictive emotions create: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2020/12/natural-evolution-of-understanding.html

 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching

 

     Below are two deeply insightful mystics, the late Robert A. Johnson, and Cynthia Bourgeault, who happen to use Christian terminology - just ONE of MANY - for "the nameless" - that which cannot be named. 

     “Apparently, one must separate from God so that there is an objective standpoint from which we can observe. In my own homespun theology, I believe that perhaps God wanted human eyes in order to be able to see the splendor of the Golden World. If so, then it’s our business to be the eyes and ears, to see and hear the splendor or God, but it requires that we stand apart from God. To be a discrete observer necessitates that one is separated from what one is observing. That is the alienation of a human life. One is reminded of the Zen comment on the intermediate stage of development when ‘rivers were no longer rivers and mountains were no longer mountains.’
     That sense of being separated is the ego. In arriving at adulthood we all have built an ego structure, a separate sense of ‘I,’ but it is precisely that distance from all else that makes us feel so lonely and alienated. One then must find a way to restore the unity with God, to worship. This is the Zen stage when ‘rivers are again rivers and mountains are again mountains.’
     It is our human duty to witness the splendor of God, which is my sense of worship. What makes all of this so difficult is that our duties are in conflict. These principal duties are to separate from oneness (the childhood paradise), develop an ego, and live a cultural life; and then to reunite with the oneness of God. Generally the early part of one’s life is taken up with the necessary distancing from God: learning about the cultural requirements of the society in which one lives, leaving the house of the parents, developing one’s independence and sense of personal self. There is a constant pull back to the sense of unity from which we came, and in Jungian psychology that it called the mother complex. There is a regressive pull in each of us to quit this business of winning independence, to escape the painful human process of becoming a distinct, separate personality. Physical suicide is the ultimate expression of the mother complex, but it takes many other forms, such as the use of drugs and alcohol or mindless consumption of food or other material goods. When people come to my consulting room with a drug problem, I tell them that they are addressing the right problem but in the wrong way. They are trying to go back to a paradise when they need to go forward to a paradise.
     We must separate from God before we can reunite with God. We must create a useful life, learning the customs of the society in which we live. You cannot put back together again that which has never been adequately differentiated. Consciousness must separate before it can reunite. Many of the spiritual communes, monasteries, and spiritual practices in this country are nothing but institutionalized mother complexes, with selfishness and ego regression running rampant in the name of spirituality.
     It is a legitimate question to ask just how far one really needs to push this differentiation before one can legitimately seek to reunite. That is an individual matter. A very simple person may not be differentiated to any great degree, and I have seen this among the traditional peasants who live in the small villages of India; they have the right to put things back together again without a great deal of differentiation. But educated Westerners go much further in developing their consciousness, becoming so split that it is difficult to become whole again. The cultural laws of Western society encourage us to get as separate, as specialized, as unique as we can get. To get a good job today you must have a college education, and a professional degree or a Ph.D. is better still. We are trained to become more and more specialized. Then on Sunday at church we are advised to merge ourselves with God. It’s no wonder we’ve become a neurotic society; the wonder is that we are not all schizophrenic!
     Once we have built a strong ego, we must then link it back to the matrix from which it has grown. Differentiation of consciousness is only one-half of our life journey. But to say, ‘I want an experience of God’ is a total oxymoron; if there is an ‘I’ seeking an experience, that is precisely the problem, since an ‘I’ that sees itself as separate from God is the cause of the suffering in one’s life. There’s a Christian proverb that says he who searches for God insults God, because a search implies that God is separate. Zen Buddhism also is very articulate about this, stating that the very motivation for satori or enlightenment is suspect. You find the kingdom, not by seeking, but only by grace. Seeking after the splendor of God is a highly egocentric and fragmenting thing to do. I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with heaven, with the will of God.”
     Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.

 
     Cynthia Bourgeault (CB): “I became more and more intrigued and disturbed about why it was that Christianity, a religion that clearly has one of the most loving and inclusive gurus that’s ever walked the face of the planet, at its epicenter, should tend to develop itself in formats that were so rigid and exclusive and non-generous. And why didn’t people walk the talk? It became more and more of a heartbreak to me. So it was actually through reading Jacob Needleman’s 'Lost Christianity' in 1980, that the first pieces began to come together. He said at one point, ‘telling people to wake up and be conscious is like telling stones to pick themselves up, sprout wings and fly to the sea.’ There’s a missing piece, and until you can get that missing piece online, you can’t do the teachings of Jesus. ‘If one aspires to live the beatitudes or any Gospel teaching it is necessary to establish the level of consciousness from which they emerge.’ is virtually a direct quote from Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century, who was the first one to be on to the fact that the Jesus teachings emerged from a very high level of consciousness, and that until you could basically run that program, you are going to be constantly dumbing it down to a place where it’s basically an inversion of itself. So Needleman was onto the fact that something was broken in the way that we pay attention that kept our consciousness scrambled, low, distracted, and not under our free command, and it was this that was constantly making hash out of the Gospel that Jesus was teaching."
     Rick Archer (RA): “A speaker, or anyone, can only speak from their level of consciousness; a student, or anyone, can only listen or hear from their level of consciousness, which brings in the whole ‘pearl before swine’ thing, the parable of the sower, if we want to quote Biblical references. There’s always going to be a gulf, not only contemporaneously in the life of that teacher, but then as time goes on, and the teachings get passed down like a party-game from one ear to another, over time it gets more and more distorted. I think it’s happened in every tradition.”
     CB: “Even our understanding of what ‘esoteric’ means. Nowadays, people will think esoteric means secret information that’s withheld from people, which is ridiculous. The esoteric dimension of every faith, which is very simple, is hidden in plain sight. Nobody’s hiding anything. But until you reach a certain level of receptivity, and the teacher reaches a certain level of broadcastability, you can’t see it, you can’t pick it up.
     They say that until a student has enough collective well, and is able to sort out on their own and discriminate between a billion different things out there, the thing that has their name on it, they’re not going to be able to appreciate, they’re not going to be fit for work anyway. It’s like a chicken picking its way out of the egg, you have to do that work before you’re ready to be where the teaching is going to put you.”

     RA: “How do you develop that discrimination to find the thing that’s right for you, among all the different influences out there?”
     CB: "Gurdjieff had a teaching about A and B influences. And he said most of us are out there in the world surrounded by A influences, which are all sort of competing things making a play for our attention. And it’s not until you can recognize something that’s a B influence, which has a qualitatively different taste for you, that you can follow it. You’ve got to get there yourself. How that happens? – A little luck, a little management. I certainly think that meditation is a really good starting point, because it allows you to filter out a lot of the garbage that’s obviously just playing at superficial parts of you, and to listen to something qualitatively deeper.
     I think actually we have the direction wrong of the journey all along. We start from the impression that we are here, and God’s over there, and that we have to go towards God. And if you can make enough noise and jump up & down loud enough, you’ll attract God’s attention. But I think rather it is always the opposite - we’re flowing out from the divine at any given moment, as a particular path, as a kind of instantiation of divinity in form. We’re always guided, and the path is always specific to ourself. What we have to learn is simply to stay in alignment with it. That’s what learning B influences is all about. It’s easier to stay in alignment once you get the hang of it, than not to stay in alignment with it and try on a billion different paths because they seem interesting. I venture to say that God is your heart of hearts."
      Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 Batgap interview:  https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/

Reconnecting with Our Unconscious Mind

     “Most of us have an intuitive feeling about what is meant when we hear the term unconscious. We correlate this idea with myriads of experiences, small and large, that are interwoven with the fabric of our daily lives. We all have had the experience of doing something unconsciously when our minds were ‘someplace else,’ then being surprised at what we had done. We remember getting worked up during a conversation and blurting out some strong opinion we didn’t know consciously that we held.
     Sometimes we are startled: ‘Where did that come from? I didn’t know I felt so strongly about that.’ As we become more sensitive to the surges of energy from the unconscious we learn instead to ask, ‘What part of me believes that? Why does this subject set off such an intense reaction in that unseen part of myself?’
     We can learn to look at the issue more closely. What ‘comes over me’ is a sudden invasion of energy from the unconscious. If I think I wasn’t being ‘myself,’ it is because I don’t realize that ‘myself’ also includes my unconscious. These hidden parts of ourselves have strong feelings and want to express them. Yet, unless we learn to do inner work, these parts of ourselves are hidden from our conscious view.
     Sometimes these hidden personalities are embarrassing or violent, and we are humiliated when they show themselves. At other times we wake up to strengths and fine qualities without ourselves that we never knew were there. We draw on hidden resources and do things we normally could not have done, say something more clear and intelligent that we’ve ever been able to say before, express wisdom we did not know we had, show a generosity or understanding of which we never knew we were capable. In each case there is a startled reaction: ‘I am a different person than I thought I was. I have qualities – both positive and negative – that I didn’t know were a part of my definition.’ These qualities live in the unconscious, where they are ‘out of sight, out of mind.’
     We are all much more than the ‘I’ of whom we are aware. Our conscious minds can focus on only a limited sector of our total being at any given time. Despite our efforts at self-knowledge, only a small portion of the huge energy system of the unconscious can be incorporated into the conscious mind or function at the conscious level. Therefore we have to learn how to go to the unconscious and become receptive to its messages: It is the only way to find the unknown parts of ourselves.
     To get a true sense of who we are, become more complete and integrated human beings, we must go to the unconscious and set up communication with it. Much of ourselves and many determinants of our character are contained in the unconscious. It is only by approaching it that we have a chance to become conscious, complete, whole human beings. Jung has shown that by approaching the unconscious and learning its symbolic language, we live richer and fuller lives. We begin to live in partnership with the unconscious rather than at its mercy or in constant warfare with it.
     Most people, however, do not approach the unconscious voluntarily. They only become aware of the unconscious when they get into trouble with it. We modern people are so out of touch with the inner world that we encounter it mostly through psychological distress. For example, a woman who thinks she has everything under control may find herself horribly depressed, able neither to shake it off nor to understand what is happening to her. Or a man may find that he has terrible conflicts between the life he lives outwardly and the unconscious ideals he holds deep inside himself where he never looks. He feels torn or anxiety-ridden, but can’t say why.
     When we experience inexplicable conflicts that we can’t resolve; when we become aware of urges in ourselves that seem irrational, primitive, or destructive; when a neurosis afflicts us because our conscious attitudes are at odds with our instinctual selves – then we begin to realize that the unconscious is playing a role in our lives and we need to face it.
     Jung discovered that the unconscious is not merely an appendage of the conscious mind, a place where forgotten memories or unpleasant feelings are repressed. He posited a model of the unconscious so momentous that the Western world has still not fully caught up with its implications. He showed that the unconscious is the creative source of all that evolves into the conscious mind and into the total personality of each individual. It is out of the raw material of the unconscious that our conscious minds develop, mature, and expand to include all the qualities that we carry potentially within us. It is from this treasure trove that we are enriched with strengths and qualities we never knew we possessed.
     Jung showed that the conscious and the unconscious minds both have critical roles to play in the equilibrium of the total self. When they are out of correct balance with one another, neurosis or other disturbances result.”

     Robert A. Johnson. “Inner Work. Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth.” HarperOne, 1986. - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED