Tag Archives: embodiment

Creativity is Divine

🌟🌟🌟 “Creativity is divine! To me it is the virgin soul opening to spirit and creating the divine child. You cannot live without it. That’s the meaning of life, that creative fire………::”

“::….. My soul is fed. I see, I smell, I taste, I hear, I touch. Through the orifices of my body, I give and I receive. I am not trying to capture what is absent. It’s that interchange between the embodied soul and the outside world that is the dynamic process. That’s how growth takes place. That is life.”🌟🌟🌟

Marion Woodman

{self Portrait series at Kennedy peak 8-6-24}

This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.
Marion Woodman
To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is.
Marion Woodman
When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom — freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone — becoming stone.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you’re left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
In the story of Persephone and Hades there is a child. Hades abducts Persephone and takes her into the Underworld, where in some versions of the myth she has a child. In many of the myths, Leda and the swan, Danae and the shower of gold, for example, the human woman is impregnated by the god. In other words, matter is penetrated by spirit and the child of the union of matter and spirit is the divine child.

Marion Woodman
You think of yourself — light, fast, free — free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your ‘perfect’ body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You’re a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
The word ‘feminine,’ as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: “Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.

Marion Woodman, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, ‘the power of the Supreme Goddess.’ Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
So long as she is obedient to a mother—actual or internal—who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study
The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.
Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
Linearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now. No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry. You might pick it up on the second—or third—or ninth. It doesn’t matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral. If it doesn’t ring, it is the wrong spiral— or the wrong time— or there is no bell.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
A free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth.

Marion Woodman
Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.

Marion Woodman
So long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to
try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride:
William Blake says the body is ‘that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.

Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman
Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with–everyone blooms.

Marion Woodman
The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul
Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul
Change means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
We know we can change ourselves when we realize that we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor
on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for iourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our own inner work, to accept our own darkness and work toward consciousness, the situation will change. We will begin to emanate a different energy, one
that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone

Marion Woodman
Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her “mysterious and exotic darkness” inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this “dark” side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over “marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth.” The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.

Marion Woodman
We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego’s rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

Animistic

🔥🃏🔥 But there was another tradition, which continued to regard personifying as a necessary mode of understanding the world and of being in it
It began with the Greeks and Romans, who personified such psychic powers as Fame, Insolence, Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to name but a few. These were regarded as “real daemons to be worshipped and propitiated and no mere figments of the imagination. And, as is well known, they were actually worshipped in every Greek city. To mention Athens alone, we find altars and sanctuaries of Victory, Fortune, Friendship, Forgetfulness, Modesty, Mercy, Peace, and many more.

Many consider this practice as merely animistic, but it was really an act of ensouling; for there is no question that the personifying of the ancient Greeks and Romans provided altars for configurations of the
soul. When these are not provided for, when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases -a point Jung made often enough. The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonist philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately "The Problems of the Soul" we find this passage:

    ~”I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed
insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readilywhen an appropriate receptacie is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or
representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.”~

When in the next passage (IV, 3, 12) he speaks of "the souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus," he seems again to be referring to the ability of the soul to divide into many parts, and that
its portions and phases reflect the various images of divine persons. Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts. Words with capital letters are charged with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The
tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words tend to become cherished and sacred, affecting the reason of the heart. Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that personifying emotionalizes, shift the discussion from nominalism to imagination, from head to heart.

The image of the heart- “l'immagine del cuor"- was an important idea in the work of Michelangelo who was strongly influenced by the Platonist tradition. Imagining with the heart refers to a mode of perception that penetrates through names and physical appearances to a personified interior image, from the heart to the heart. When Michelangelo portrayed Lorenzo and Giuliano Medici in the Sacristy of Sen Lorenzo, the features which he depicted were unnatural, not as they appeared in life but rather transfigured to conform with the true image
of their persons in the heart. While the scientific Renaissance (Bacon and Galileo) insisted on the primacy of sense perception, Michelangelo’s “imagine del cuor" implied that perception is secondary to imagination. By imagining through and beyond what the eye see, the imagination envisions primordial images. And these present themselves in
personified forms.

Nearer our own times another Mediterranean, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (b. 1864), returned to the relationship of heart and personified images and explained the necessary interdependence between love and personifying:

~”In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only love--that which is like ourselves . . . it is love itself  that reveals these resemblances to us. ... Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.«”

He sums up, saying: "Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify.
Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart.
In this perspective personifying is not a lesser, primitive mode of apprehending but a finer one. It presents in psychological theory the attempt to integrate heart into method and to return abstract thoughts and dead matter to their human shapes. Because personifying is an epistemology of the heart, a thought mode of feeling, we do wrong to
judge it as inferior, archaic thinking appropriate only to those allowed emotive speech and affective logic- children, madmen, poets, and primitives. Method in psychology must not hinder love from working
and we are foolish to decry as inferior the very means by which love understands. If we have not understood personifying, it is because the
main tradition has always tried to explain it rather than understand it.

James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg. 13-15

Anima

As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of
consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She
is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.

So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical
consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.

Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.

Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being.    Such a one has lost soul.

James Hillman , Revisioning Psychology

Pathologizing

Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyché, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the
anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential
nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."

     The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of
"spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.

    We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, prefer-
ing labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It Is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit
into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury-to use an image from St. Augustine -a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. 

    They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa. “Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything
can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows. 

    I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried.?? For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither
truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as
mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall
conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.

    But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psycho-
pathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a
kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.

~James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology pg.68-70

Rejoining Soul and Symptom

Old art 2004
Rejoining Soul and Symptom

    Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple- anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a trans-
action, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has
no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.

    These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative
factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We
can catch the unconscious only in pathological material." And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salomé wrote:"... he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . .”

    Pathologizing is present not only at moments of special crisis but in the everyday lives of all of us. It is present most profoundly in the
individual’s sense of death, which he carries wherever he goes. It is present also in each person's inward feeling of his peculiar differentness which includes, and may be even based upon, his sense of individual “craziness". For we each have a private fantasy of mental illness; "crazy," "mad, “insane”-
all their substitutes, colloquialisms, and synonyms-
-form a regular part of our daily speech. As we cast our internal deviance from us with these exclamations about others, we are at the same time acknowledging that we each have a deviant, odd
second (or third) personality that provides another perspective to our regular life. Indeed, pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect
patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them. The deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology. Those case histories are also our own biographies. To put it in sociological language: nearly every individual in the
United States of America has been, now is, or will have been in the hands of professional soul care of one kind or another, for a shorter or longer period, for one reason or another.

    Discovery of the unconscious has meant the widespread and overwhelming recognition of the psyche's autonomous activity of pathologizing. That discovery and that recognition have led to one even more significant: the rediscovery of soul. But unfortunately and mistakenly we have confused these three interrelated discoveries: the unconscious,
pathologizing, and soul. We confusedly believe that everyone needs professional therapy as if that is where soul could be refound. But this is not so. For then we are confusing the rediscovery of soul during
the twentieth century with the place where it happened-- therapeutic analysis. But therapy or analysis was not the carrier of that discovery.
Psychopathology was. Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul. The persistent pathologizings in Freud and in Jung and in their patients- pathologizings that refused to be repressed, transformed, or cured, or even understood- led this century's main explorers of the psyche ever deeper. Their movement through pathology into soul is an
experience repeated in each of us. We owe them much, but we owe our pathologizing more. We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.

   Analysis has merely given psychopathology a hearing outside the asylums, prisons, and church institutions where it had been kept; the new therapy provided the only place given secular sanction for a prolonged and intense involvement with pathologizing. Symptoms were the very point and focus of its attention. So analysis offered the vessel
into which our unconscious pathologizing could be poured and then cooked long enough for its significance to emerge, for it to make soul.
Out of psyché-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul's suffering of meaning.

   Again a confusion beset this experience: a special state of being- “being-in-therapy"- seemed required for this discovery of soul through pathologizing, and so for many people therapy became a religious ritual, even replacing religious ritual. One was “in" analysis, and analysis was “in."  There were the initiates: those who had been analysed. And there were the others: those who had never even been in therapy or had not been “properly” or "thoroughly" analysed. To
refind the sense of soul one had to "go through" analysis with its regular appointments, its techniques, and its stages of "beginning an analysis." "working through," and "terminating."  Inevitably and without knowing it, the ritual of analysis had produced a new cult of soul. Finally, some have taken this religious direction literally, declaring that actually this is what therapy is all about, an expression of the religious activity of the soul: the psychotherapeutic movement is correctly a religious movement; therapists are indeed a new kind of ministers to soul--gurus or priests.

  In this movement toward religion pathology now tends to be left behind. By shifting its ground from pathology to self-development, recent analysis no longer recognizes the primacy of affliction. One goes
to therapy to grow, not because one is afflicted-as if growth and affliction excluded each other. A gulf has developed between soul and symptom. On the one hand analysis regards itself as a professional contract for solving problems, a variety of medical science without soul, ritual, or mystery. On the other, it imitates the transcendental disciplines, foster-
ing ritual, community, and teachings. Pathologizing again foundered upon its old division, illness or sin, and a further division emerged. Now, to be in soul therapy for growth and realization of personality, symptoms are left out; to be in medical or behavioral therapy for relief of symptomatic afflictions, soul is left out. Soul and symptom have broken in
two.

  This chapter and this book want to mend that division. By retaining psychopathology as a descriptive language of the psyche which indeed
speaks to and of the soul, I would keep psyche and pathology close together. If I seem to be making the soul sick again by such stress on pathologizing, I am at the same time giving sickness soul again. By
returning symptoms to the soul, I am attempting to return soul to symptoms, restoring them to the central value in life that soul itself has.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning Paychology pg 70-72

Body

❤ Body ❤ (2009)

Ive been rereading 'Women who run with the Wolves' and one of the parts has really inspired me to begin a new project...a book of poetry and artwork called Body that chronicles my life up to this point, from the perspective of my body. I want to try and capture what i felt for example, as a child, thru my bodys eyes, and as a teen, etc, thru preg and birth and afterbirthbody...etc etc. I am very excited to start this because it really gives me a focus for creativity, which I have been trying to get fired up again lately. I know that I may not 'complete' this for a long time, but the structure of it gives me a little framework to pour my soul into. And I would like to welcome anyone else who wants to share their own creative voices of Body.... 

The Body theme is very important, especially now, because so many people are suffering due to the way society views and treats the body, and has done for so long....Also, from reading others' posts and blogs, especially mamas, I see how many people deal with issues related to the body, for different reasons. One way or another, Body is something we all take for granted, yet spend a huge chunk of our lives obsessing about. 

Here is a passage that I found very beautiful. 

"...The second awakening involved a much older woman. Her hips were, according to common standard, too pear-shaped, her bosom very tiny in comparison, and she had thin purply little veins all over her thighs, a long scar from a serious surgery going around her body from rib cage to spine in the manner in which apples are peeled. Her waist was perhaps four hands wide. 
It was a mystery then why the men buzzed about her as though she were honeycomb. They wanted to take a bite out of her pear thighs, they wanted to lick that scar, hold that chest, lay their cheeks upon ther spidery veins. Her smile was dazzling, her gait so beautiful, and when her eyes looked, they truly took in what they were looking at. I saw again what I had been taught to ignore, the power IN the body, The cultural power OF the body is its beauty, but power IN the body is rare, for most have chased it away with their torture or embarrassment by the flesh. 
It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burder, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but as a series of DOORS AND DREAMS AND POEMS thru which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own right, one who loves us, depends on us, one to whom we are sometimes mother, and who sometimes is mother to us." 

from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' 'Women who run with the Wolves' 

I think that especially for a mother, loving Body and being Body is very important. Imagine trying to explain to your little baby or child that you dont like or appreciate the body that they adore, that they take so much delight in, and find their sense of comfort and warmth and strength? 
Until I had my son, my body was this abstract thing, really...I was never very connected to it, certainly wasnt EMBODIED...and actually seemed to hold in higher esteem being OUT OF BODY or OF THE SPIRIT...It took pregnancy and childbirth to fully connect me to my body and to really understand Body...as a force as well as a form. I spent years trying to get away from Body, hiding from Body, denying Body...and now it seems to me to be blasphemy...in some sense...Things that I thought I understood back then were just intellectual gropings....now I have True knowing, True Feeling, True Selfness....not a delusion of grandeur...but a participation in something that is so immense and whole and wonderful in so many ways, and that Body is here in order to take this Isness into Herself and Express it in ways that could not exist if Body Were NOT... We as a culture have degraded flesh for so long, and it has led to so many problems on many levels... People seem to believe that if you allow the Body what Body wants, you will be 'led astray'...haha...but I have yet to meet more than a few people who have actually been embodied in the full sense of the word. And there is nothing to be led astray from. Body will lead us home. Body is our ability to relate to other selves and worlds and ideas and vibrations and realitys....Body doesnt hinder us in the pursuit of 'enlightenment'....Body IS enlightenment.... Its not so much that we need to bring awareness into the body, but to allow the bodys awareness to LEAD US OUT of our preoccupation with our prison walls, which we have built around ourselves because Feeling is so damn intense and so completely overwhelming that living a half life is preferable for most. And body gets blamed for keeping us 'beastly' or 'dense and profane'...etc etc....I believe this is all backward. I think that only the truly courageous and those who dearly want to become as conscious as they can be, even attempt to understand and honor Body, because to do so would make most everything else we know seem very insignificant. 

So here is to Body. 
In all her forms. 
In all her force. 
And with all her faces turned to the earth... 
because Body does not need to seek the light....the light seeks her... 
for it is the joy of the universe which dances in her thighs... 

And here is to all the Mamas 
who have been thru the primordial creation 
thru her own body 
here 
now 

Smiles, 
Charleen Johnston 
2009

Chaos of Creation

🌟We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.🌟

Jean Genet
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

Jean Genet
In space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for God to get you in a good wrestling hold and carry you off. So she danced. While walking. Everywhere.

Jean Genet
“Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.”

🌟Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork
Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.

Jean Genet
The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day…The hour in which…every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.

Jean Genet
Creating is not a somewhat frivolous game. The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures. We cannot suppose a creation that does not spring from love. How can a man place before himself something as strong as himself which he will have to scorn and hate?…Every lover does likewise, hoping to be loved for his own sake.

Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Jean Genet
Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?

Jean Genet
I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.

Jean Genet

Bearing the Body Within

The twitch of Dreamtime
As stitched open eyes
Find Time
To cope with Spaces deep inside

I am full with Child
Ripe with fruit
Nerves on fire
With the desire
To open the womb
And carry thru
This seed of truth

Where and when and how
Did the germination
Take place?
I can’t seem to remember
The breath of
Grace
That spoke to me
That broke the hymen
And woke the seed

My belly is swollen
And round
The active fractal
Of self
within
The shroud
Tumbles around with forceful
Kicks
As I wander thru psyches
Maze of bricks
Trying to be found

It is Time

In this Space

Just like
in waking life
So many moons ago
A nodal cycles synodic flow

Sudden fear
For just a moment
Can I open wide enough
To deliver the Numen
Can I bear the terror
Of this movement
As the veil tears
And bares
The burden
Of Being
Human?

Do I push It thru
Or does It
Split me
In Two
Into New Moons
And Minds
As Daimons ride
The wave with me…
Cry out in pain with me…
Wade thru stains
Of bloody chains
That break when the waters
Pour out of me ?

Breathe
Let go
It’s so Real
I Feel
It burst thru
Huge
Alive
Wide eyed
And thriving
Outside
Of Me

My Goddess….!
….The Beauty
The Wonder the Wisdom
Of Womans Body
Alethias forgotten
Melody
My God…..!
….My God
Thou hast christened me
Theos unLoosed
From crystalline
Seams.

Now to nurture
At the breast
Turn blood to milk
Like water to wine
As I climb inside
The feathered nest
Of the divine

I remember
Then
The Name of him
From which
This body
Born from me
Was given the spark
From electric seed

Full exposure
Nowhere to hide
The sight of the light
And the scope of the size
Of this daimon in dream
This daimon in me
This playful parade
Of uncertainty
Birthing me
From within

A mirror of matters magical
Twins
As Mater and Pater
Outside and In
join
At the hip
And dance and spin
Deliciously tangled
In SineWave
Grins.

The Stitch of Dreamtime
As twitching I~s
Rewind Time
In Spaces opened from Inside..

Charleen Johnston
7-26-2024

(Based in last nights vivid dream of pregnancy and giving birth)

Uranus opposition

I have been waiting for this moment for 25 years. Today by evening time, as I get up on stilts, transiting Uranus will be ‘to the minute’ opposite my natal exact Uranus/Sun conjunction in the first house. It will still be pretty much exact to the minute for the next few days after. Meanwhile Neptune hangs out very close to my natal moon in Aries, ( and squaring natal mars)…..and transiting moon will oppose natal mars in Sagittarius ( which conjunction to natal Neptune.)

If you know, you know. 

I feel like I’m plugged into a quantum computer, the fiery electropromethean lightening running through all my nervous system, reWiring the neural circuitry…..

Synaptic Rapture 

Death to the old form birth to the new

For a long while now just trying to ground into the earth and ride the wave 
Not blow the fuses
Not go supernova and rise into Mania
As I’m predisposed to do
Before the reTurn of the wheel drags its heels
And descent into the dark leaden fields
Of Saturn comes again

The Daimons Embrace
In Leather And Lace
…:.trickster plays games
And holds Space at the Gates

Somas Rose

Shhhhhh……
Don’t write so loud-
They might hear
(Prying eyes that hide
Inside
Minds that fear…)
These words tiptoe
Down stairs
Under where
No one else knows…
Somas Rose
So full of Charge
I fear
I am larger
Than Life can hold….
Lead into Gold
As SunLight
UnFolds
Me
From this bed
Of salted tears
I made
As Dream wakes me
Into playful prose
Disguised inside
These fleshly clothes….
That only a Poet
Could Know.

Charleen Johnston
2.15.am6.26.24