danae sinclair

“Where would you have me go?  What would you have me do? What would you have me say? And to whom?”  (A Course in Miracles)

The Course in Miracles is hard work.  I struggle to understand it and to stick with it.  It really is miraculous though.

Take the concept of forgiveness, for example.

I’d always thought of myself as a forgiving person.  My upbringing was full of both reasons to forgive and lessons on forgiveness – at home, in church and at school.

As a young adult my idea of being forgiving was to ‘go back to’ or ‘take back’ a bad relationship again and again (note to past self: this isn’t forgiveness but low self esteem).

As a young mother I wrestled with memories of my parents in the hope of not becoming like them and tried so hard to get past blame.  Again, this was a false idea of forgiveness that just buried my anger deeper – thinking or affirming to myself ‘I forgive’ does not make it so.  Forgiveness is not a thing of the mind but of the heart.

At age 43, after 25 years of trying to think my way through everything and – when that failed – tricking myself out of feeling anything I finally got it.  I reached deep within myself and asked my heart if I could finally, please, let all this pain go.  The answer was, as the Course said it would be, an immediate yes followed by a rush of love.  It was though a weight had been lifted from inside of me.

I walked around with a smile on my face for a few weeks until the next challenge arose and I felt myself flailing around in my head again, rationalising and failing to feel.  For the thousandth time I was reminded that any amount of lasting personal growth requires disciplined practice every day.  So now forgiveness is a daily practice – although it isn’t always quite as easy as that first time.

Acceptance is similarly difficult

Getting to a point of peace with the way things are is a skill.  A skill which can’t be learned through any cognitive behavioural therapy or other mind-tricking technique.  These techniques work with the conscious part of the mind – but it’s the unconscious mind that’s doing all the decision making and controlling.

The unconscious is a complex thing and not to be messed with.  For me, reaching agreement with my unconscious through meditation, prayer and ‘checking in’ (body focusing) has been the key to achieving peace and acceptance.  I’m a work in progress, of course.

Still, it really is a miracle that I haven’t given up – being angry and fighting against my circumstances was sometimes easier than doing the work to release it.  It’s still very painful sometimes.

But, hey.  You’ve got to feel it to heal it.

“I had not become perfect, enlightened or special.  I had become more human.”  (Hansard, The Tibetan Art of Living)

The Course in Miracles lesson 1 says:

Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.

The Course is so cryptic, so poorly written (to my mind), that it can take a miracle just to understand it. I’m going to keep trying.

The first lesson is to unlearn what we learn from the cradle – to name and attribute meaning to all things. It’s the beginning of a series of lessons aimed at helping us to see that all of life is perceived within the mind.  Most of what we see is illusion – we must be willing to accept this.  The first miracle is the ability to see the truth.

“… man is an enigma to himself.”

(Jung, The Undiscovered Self)

Recent media attention on a certain so-called ‘vile’ radio personality brings to mind Jung’s idea that what we repress, whether individually or collectively, will eventually out.  There is always someone who stands for what we ourselves cannot stand.  There will always be one who’ll say the things we cannot say (for us).  In the absence of an actual person to project our collective shadow onto, we’ll find something – an ‘other’ of some kind.  We have to have a bad guy, or we cannot have heroes.

We humans are so blind to ourselves.  We try so hard to be good – to be acceptable to others.  We deny our darkness and the harder we try to do so, the more fearful and fearsome it becomes.

The irony is that unless we stand in complete darkness, we will always have a shadow – and the brighter the light we attempt to bask in the longer and deeper our shadow will be. No matter how we try to pretend it isn’t there – that it belongs to someone else – it will be there.

We will always have known and unknown parts of ourselves unless we remain in complete ignorance.

Why are we so afraid?  Why do we fear darkness, death and other things that go bump? (The mortality rate here on Earth is 100% – yet our own mortality is taboo; hidden, sanitised and abnormal.)

What if we were to accept the mystery of our darkest selves instead of blinkering and blaming?

We might be less ‘good’ – but we may also be more compassionate and understanding toward others.  We might be less guilt-laden… we might not hate and fear one another as much…we might not worry about there not being enough to go around.

We might be happier.

“..because eternity is changeless, that which is governed only the puer does not age.  So, too, it has no maturing organic face that shows the bite of time.”

(James Hillman,  Senex and Puer 23-26)

Day after day spent doing paid work followed by evenings of unpaid work are not conducive to feelings of freedom and creativity. Always doing what we ‘should’ do when we don’t want to will eventually lead to some kind of break-down.

The latest studies on aging and nutrition (‘primal’ eating, calorie restriction, interval training and intermittent fasting)  reinforce that humans have a universal need for freedom, play and deviation.  The human body was not meant to eat the same thing every day, or at the frequency of ‘three square meals a day’ of processed, high carbohydrate ‘food’ – our bodies do not do well on strict or unnatural regimes of any kind.

We are at our best with natural, whole foods and fun.  But we all know that in order to have these things, discipline is needed – discipline to overcome cravings and addictions to manufactured, damaging foods; discipline to move one’s body off the sofa and burn calories.  Discipline enough to not give up and return to things the way they’ve ‘always’ been done.

Doing the same things day after day in every area of our lives is destructive – we need variety and freedom for health and wellbeing.  We need to have breaks from work, breaks from exercise, breaks from the foods we like best and breaks from eating altogether.  We need breaks from thinking and analysing and decision-making and getting around on ‘auto pilot’.

Routines, do serve us but they mean we are ‘set in our ways’ – we’ve over-activated the senex within ourselves.

Senex is time, death, reason – aging and restricting -  the voice in our heads which tells right from wrong and pushes us out the door to the day job; risk averse, governing, law making; senex keeps us on the path.  The opposite of senex is the puer archetype; the divine, ever-playful youth.  Puer is the spirit of adventure and destiny that set us on the path to begin with; curious and impetuous; containing all the possibilities.  This is that part of ourselves that we need to tap into in order to feel alive and vibrant and young.

Puer can be so engrossed in an adventure that the needs – the appetites -  of the body become secondary; can be so involved in play that fear and time are forgotten.  Puer can cause so much mischief that laughter can erase stresses and weariness.  Puer can make us turn left instead of right so that we end up in an entirely new place with an entirely fresh – and refreshed – outlook.  Puer can constellate heroic acts that invigorate the soul.  Puer is freedom from life and death.

Maintaining the tension – the syzygy or union of opposites – can be a challenge: without discipline we are chaotic, dangerous beings – unacceptable in one way of another; without freedom and destiny and play we are not whole, not happy – not alive.

Turning the senex to good use appears to be the answer – rather than allowing this part of ourselves make us rigid with age too soon – consciously sacrificing existing patterns of behaviour in favour of new ones – disciplining our selves toward exploration; flexing ours mind-muscle with previously unheard-of ideas – holding back impulses and cravings that will lead us back to the safety of known things; pushing ourselves past the barrier of fear.

We need not be decrepit while we still have spirit, what ever age we might be.