Harvest Project: Contradictions

I’ve been reading Catholic scholar, poet, and Celtic Spiritualist, John O’Donohue’s book, Inner Landscape, where one of the ideas he develops is how we hold our contradictions within ourselves, of how we are full of contradictions of wanting to be a particular way in life, yet how our decisions often reflect an opposite end result. He urges us to spend time knowing our contradictions, and to keep them close in our conscious world. His suggestion of accepting them, and of working with them, of even joking with them, is a form of active imagination, a key foundation of self-inquiry within depth psychology. Jung’s own inner journey with active imagination was a major resource in his writing volumes of texts, in his intricate paintings of mandalas, in his sculpting, and of course, in his contributions towards individuation and understanding the mysteries of the human experience. Jung was saturated in his personal contradictions, and was aware of the potency of our contradictions, and of their sway or influence they exuded if left ignored and repressed unconsciously away in the shadow world. While O’Donohue doesn’t come out and clearly identify his suggestion of removing our contradictions from exile, of bringing them into our most sacred world of Self, as Jung’s active imagination, he does promote the same process of awareness and of welcoming, of being in conversation with, and of developing an open, grateful relationship with our contradictions, for the sake of enriching daily life with soul, and of eliminating any pending resistance that contributes to our limitation, our neurosis, our sorrow. To be in relationship with our contradictions is of the same alchemical commitment of making conscious the unconscious, the art of ultimate healing and self-knowing.

I completely grok O’Donohue’s notion of how it is natural to exile my contradictions: to banish them, out of shame or frustration, or because of not having the ability to do anything different. And now, after about two weeks of identifying my contradictions, and of me wandering around the space of where I’ve stashed them for a few decades, it was quite a somatic shift when I invited most of them to my table, so I may host them, and honor their protections toward me during past times of need. Contradictions are similar to compensations: they showed up out of necessity to protect me during moments beyond the scope of what my conscious ego could control. They were spawned solely for my benefit, during a moment of crisis and survival. They served me well.

To know our contradictions, to write them out, and to see where they live in daily life, is an important opening where acceptance and grace toward our Self can be encouraged. I hope this self-exploration appeals to you, as you continue in your relationship with creative expression, which while is comprised of the quickening of original thought, is also fraught with self-doubt, punitive forms of inner dialogue, worthiness issues, and other more complex forms of self-exile and banishment. Enlisting active imagination to open this dialogue is one way to become comfortable with the uncomfortable, to reclaim all of those moments waiting to be integrated back home, into Self.

Also, here is a tidy chart on the neural-psycho-biology of emotions, specifically happiness chemicals and what you can do to active various responses via activities. Hacking the brain-somatic link is valuable in building tools and skills.

Happiness Chemicals and how to hack them

And, finally, here is a link to an audio file of me guiding a class into a beginning form of active imagination. You can download the file from zoom, as the file will be available for only a week or so. The process is 20 minutes.

WEB ZOOM LINK

In Service to Soul,

Brenda