Now that I feel I am finally casting off the demon of self blame I am seeing the deeper reality of my life and most particularly of my struggles after getting sober in 1993. I was waking up, pure and simple, to the consequences of a tortured emotional past that I had buried over years and through my addiction lost the way to. But with the surrendering of alcohol, I was finally committing to a pathway of descent and uncovery.
It has not been easy and my marriage had to go into the fire at 11 years in. I know there are many sheddings, ending, losses deaths and surrenders me must undergo and accept as we struggle on the path to becoming more deeply conscious beings. As we travel along the path it narrows before us as it lead us into a spiritual wilderness, we become the orphan and live out of that archetype as we are trying to birth something so deep our parents could not give us. So many of us carry unconsciously their unintegrated children deep inside and we have the spiritual and emotional task to make something new of our ancestral legacy. At least that is how I see the bigger picture and it is the only one that gives my life meaning. And we have to undergo this journey alone but not necessarily without guides and companions.
I found my own guidance emerging in the final years of my addiction when my soul witness self knew something was terribly wrong with my life and my drinking. That guidance came from people like Carl Jung, Marion Woodman and John Bradshaw who showed me my addiction was but a symptom and what I suffered was not purely personal but was strongly collective and affects so many others as we struggle under the weight of an unconscious past so spiritually bereft of the healing feminine.
My own parents had it hard. There was no place of comfort or soothing for their inner children. Both lives had been devastated by the impacts of World War ,I both lost their fathers as a result, not during it but in the painful aftermath. That silent history of father absence dogged them both and has repeated its deep echo of abandonment all along our later genetic line. I see myself as ‘the awakener’ to it all. It took my older sister out, the pain of all of those hundred of years of trauma gone unconscious and I stood on the sidelines as the witness. I did not know I was affected by so many larger forces and that my own struggle must, of necessity, be lonely and hard,] as I was trying to open up and break new ground in a family that in so many ways is deaf dumb and blind to deeper realities.
Kat, my therapist was saying yesterday what a lonely path the path of conscious awakening to the deep feminine soul is. Carl Jung nearly went mad on his way to find it, if you read his autobiography and follow his journey it was just prior to the outbreak of World War One that he broke with Freud then had visions of a bloodbath in Europe and then he developed the concept of the shadow and the collective unconscious. He could not agree with Freud that all was ruled by sex and death and that the child wanted to seduce the parents. I am not saying that there are not valid points and great insights in Freud’s ideas and he was bringing them to birth out of Victorian times but Jung went deeper when he realised there are so many larger influences around us as individual souls which we are subject to.
Anyway, as usual I have digressed….back to the sense of being so alone. If we don’t ‘fit in’ maybe it is because we see deeper, and this is what Kat was saying to me yesterday. It IS a burden to see this deep but it is also a gift and a result of all we suffer in our path of being and feeling so alone yet knowing at a deeper awareness other truths we don`t fully understand yet that are emerging (if that makes sense?). Our aloneness is a doorway into recognition of truths others may fear or shun, that they may want to turn a blind eye on and call us ‘mad’ for glimpsing. And on the path we are not totally alone really as there are others souls who went before lighting the way. There are also are our fellow travellers who are willing to dive below the surface to do their own deep work who we share with and recognise. We are all in a process of waking up to what may be being asked of us as humans to recognise at this point our evolution. Could it be an awakening to the truth of our own feelings, soul and love, to understandings of how thwarted power drives can shape and misshape us?
I do not think we should shun or stigmatise the so called ‘mentally ill’; if we are on the pathway of emotional recovery we have to go a bit mad on the way. Our addiction or bi polar or BPD or other diagnoses are but symptoms of soul suffering that we are being asked to understand. We are not our diagnoses and our true selves lay buried somewhere deeper inside. All of our reactions make sense, most particularly our violent reactions to the emotional violence we are so often subjected to in childhood, which may I say has become more endemic in a technologically oriented industrialised society. Go study the myth of the Handless Maiden if you want to see a parable or metaphor for what happens to our soul or inner feminine when it is neglected or abandoned in such a cutlure. We loose our hands, our access to our inner life and our emotional agency and we only grow those functioning hands back when our deep soul suffering awakens our tears which we, in crying use to wash our tortured souls clear and clean of illusions and within that seemingly powerless place, find and embrace our true soul power. We are all in a process of awakening. Let us remember that.
In the depths of our personal and collective dark night we fall down and struggle and awaken alone but we are also connected, nothing of our shared collective human experience is alien or strange, just our dissociation from it and from the larger awareness that we are only as separate as we believe we are at certain points along that path of awakening. At times we are so deeply alone and yet, paradoxically, it is through that aloneness that we are also connected at deeper levels. That said the path does narrow as we move further along it and the loneliness we feel at certain times is so acute, but my deeper experience is that as we deepen into the loneliness a great spiritual light so often is felt if we just hold fast and keep opening our hearts to the deep truths we glimpse and face and integreted the painful realities we have known inside. Through this painful path we finally come to know what love is. Both feeling and action.
Emerging From The Dark Night 