The deep, dark process
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life. ― C.G. Jung
When the student is ready, the teacher appears, as they say. The origins of the quote I’m not sure of but it has been very true for me in recent years.
This process of change I have talked about recently was something I avoided as much as possible as I was going through the motions of life.
But a force unknown certainly has showed me that avoidance is not the way toward acceptance and change for the better.
Over the last few months I have been working to write a project, something that I think will benefit people in regards to their own health and wellbeing.
God knows the system we currently live with isn’t working and it never really did for me.
Illness showed up in my life pretty early on. Autoimmune disease manifesting in ways and in different parts of my body.
I suppose I thought I was damaged in some way. A reject off the the pile. Unloved and unwanted. The illnesses were really just showing me what I was thinking and feeling inside.
It took me quite a while to realise that. How my thoughts and emotions were creating my reality.
The signs I have now of changing for good are less about the body, but they show up as patterns and cycles of behaviour I have learned. Coping mechanisms for the all the ‘stuff.’
As I began to write about my journey to health with such gusto, the layers began to rise. To shift, to change, to transform.
I am embracing it. Though it feels difficult. I am attempting to accept and integrate my madness.
It’s the work I do with my clients and so why should I be any different?
We all have this resistance to the process, to the discomfort, to the pain.
We want to escape it with booze, with food, with people that help fill the void.
But we can’t. Not really.
To welcome it with friendliness. To see it as a gift. To transform it into knowledge.
Surely that is the way to go?
Carl Jung’s understanding and teaching seems to resonate so much with me. I’ll leave you with a more famous quote.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —— Carl Jung