Dear Reader,
This blog is aimed at the most sacred time in the life of humanity. We are celebrating - again,the birth of a holy child and one that has been among us for more than 2,000 years. We've celebrated CHRISTMAS for all those years and will do so for many more centuries. The holy child is within all of us!
I am quoting my mentor, Michael Meade, as he is a mighty guide to our Souls. THE CHILD OF JOY is my inspiration for the next celebration of Christmas.
" Our souls are secretly tuned to the world, and the storms of radical change and upheaval that affect both nature and human culture easily become overwhelming waves of emotions inside us. And as accepted patterns of all kinds dissolve around us, we become more vulnerable to feelings of insecurity, anxiety and fear. Even if we live in relatively secure places, a common refrain I hear from friends and even casual acquaintances involves a sense of constantly feeling the weight of the world. And I hear from therapists and counselors how most, if not all of their clients are on the edge of overwhelm. So the first idea is that we are collectively experiencing both a greater sense of uncertainty and also a deeper sense of anxiety. And the next idea is that we each suffer that sense of stress in our own unique way. Another way to say it is that the widening divisions in the outer world tend to activate splits that exist inside ourselves. Being faced with existential issues tends to activate our own early life experiences of feeling abandoned, rejected and overwhelmed. While feeling the weight and the challenge of that idea, I recalled a recent dream in which I was talking with someone while we sat on the floor next to a fireplace. The open hearth of the fireplace was clean, almost white, and where there might be a fire or some logs, I suddenly realized there were two small infants. I was shocked at the condition of the infants and immediately sought to pick them both up. There was a further shock when I realized that one of them was inert and seemed to be dead, the other was bare and thin and had some wounds, but his eyes were open and clear. I held him close and carried him carefully as I looked for whoever had coldly abandoned the infants, while at the same time, I considered how to nourish the child that was alive. The bare stone hearth seems to speak for itself, as it symbolizes a lack of warmth and a cold sense of abandonment. And of course, drop one letter from the word hearth, and we have heart, and in this case, a troubling sense of heartlessness. I have had other dreams about the abandoned child, but this one depicts two infants, similarly abandoned, as if to suggest that I have to let one go in order to be able to bring the other further into life. And that reminds me that the core issue when it comes to truly changing or transforming our lives involves letting go of that which is inert, as well as being willing to commit to taking up and nourishing that which is trying to be born.
Abandonment turns out to be an archetypal condition, so that everyone born has abandonment issues in one form or another. We cannot simply change what happened to us when we were completely dependent and unable to defend or even speak for ourselves. We can recognize the nature of our own abandonment issues and reclaim essential levels of vitality and liveliness that still reside deeply within us. A core psychological idea is that each person enters the world both gifted and wounded, and that at each genuine crisis in our lives, we face the limits of our accepted identity as well as the fears of being abandoned again and or being overwhelmed by troubles beyond our control. Meaningful change occurs when we become willing to suffer again the fears, the angers and the sorrows connected to this early life experience of separation and abandonment. Inevitably, at various times in our lives we become stuck and we reach places where we simply can no longer hold it all together. We then collapse or explode. We lose it, not because we are inherently bad or simply ill-fated, but in order that we may find again and make more conscious to ourselves essential connections of the soul that we lost early on. If we are willing to follow the motions of the emotions we have, we find the trail that takes us down and back in order that we might break through to something hidden and deeply meaningful within us that seeks to become more conscious to us. In that sense, the inevitable trials and seemingly immovable obstacles we encounter in our lives are not there simply to block us or defeat us. Rather, a genuine crisis will activate those early life experiences of rejection and loss in order that we find ways to heal our inner wounds and at the same time reveal our deepest gifts. At each genuine turning point in life, a revelation of self and soul is close at hand, and yet at each crossroads our false sense of self and our ego defenses stand in the way. As in my dream of the two infants and the cold hearth, we each lose, to one degree or another, some of our natural sense of being connected to the source of life. Later in life, we fall apart, or we even choose to descend in order to refind and remember those exact rejected parts of ourselves that are necessary for us to feel and be whole again. And that brings me to an old idea that has become a key theme in some forms of modern depth psychology. The old idea states it this way - joy is the true parent of each child. The psychological point is that each person has an inborn innate connection to joy that can be the source of natural buoyancy, and especially in dark times, a source of inner resiliency. However, finding again our connection to that inborn innate joy requires that we work through the exact wounds that keep us from fully feeling what was once our natural joy at having the gift of life. Instinctively, it seems we expect our innate connection to the joy of being alive to be recognized and be confirmed by our parents. However, just at the point when we as infants begin to feel the presence of joy in a distinct way, something tends to go wrong. At crucial moments our joyous sense of self is met with indifference or avoidance or some lack of relatedness on the part of our parents, particularly on the part of our mother, or whoever is playing the role of mother to us. Although this comes as a great shock to each child, the indifference or neglect our parents show to our joyous inner self is an early life disappointment that turns out to be an essential aspect of the human condition. And I am suggesting that when the collective human condition has most of us feeling the tension of opposite forces and rejection that we each carry. There comes a time when we have to let that go in order to make more room for the child of joy to become more present and grow. In that sense, the problem is not simply the fact that there is an original betrayal that leaves us wounded, but also that we keep betraying ourselves in the same way. Eventually, the issue is not simply who did what to us and why, but rather how we manage to stop abandoning ourselves when we become stuck in life again. None of this is simple, and I am roughly sketching out descriptions of what can take years and years of inner work in order to understand both the nature of our wounds and the unique inner qualities that are most important when it comes to living a life of meaning and genuine purpose. However, as I stated at the beginning, we are all implicated and all impacted by the troubling times in which we live, and although our ego or little self may repeatedly feel that it is about to be overwhelmed and insist that it can't handle this, our deeper sense of self and soul is actually closer to the surface and trying to make us more conscious of both how we are uniquely wounded but also uniquely gifted. In psychological terms, the passage through the critical stage of early life where we feel great fears and a trenchant sense of abandonment is never fully navigated, so that at each critical turn in our lives, we need some sense of mirroring and being genuinely seen by others. Think of all the young people currently facing a world flooded with uncertainty, surrounded by not just distractions, but a seemingly endless stream of things that are inauthentic. The crisis that they feel inside individually is a reflection of the original crisis and wounding and trauma that they experienced as an infant or child. It may be the last thing on the minds of those creating more distractions and those trying to profit from all the divisions, but what each young person needs is to be genuinely seen and therefore to be truly blessed. But the same is true for all of us, regardless of our age or status in life. In the current world, with all its many divisions, imagine all of those who tend to be living longer and longer, who themselves have never been truly seen or fully blessed, thus leaving us with an ever-growing population of olders and an ever-increasing lack of elders.Towards the end of his life, the great psychologist Carl Jung became more and more interested in this imagination of the child of joy. Reflecting on the course of his own life, he wrote, "If you have fulfilled the pattern peculiar to yourself, then you have loved yourself. You have accumulated inner abundance, then you can bestow virtue and you have luster. You can radiate from your inner abundance and overflow from within. But if you hate yourself, if you have not accepted the inner pattern, then there are hungry animals in your constitution which keep getting at your neighbors like flies in order to satisfy appetites that you have failed to satisfy within yourself. Failure to live out the true pattern of our souls generates disorientation and neuroses and deep psychic pain that continues. If a person does not fulfill the inner pattern, the bestowing soul within them remains missing, and there is no radiance, there is no real warmth, there is only hunger and stealing from life." Renewal of the individual and genuine change of the collective both require touching the original splits again and healing the wounds that lie near the divine connection that continues to exist even when we deny it. In the ancient languages of myth and poetry, the child of joy was also called the child of God, for it is the divine connection and the ecstatic essence within us that waits to be found, that waits to be felt again, that wishes to be nourished, and that is capable of seeing healing where others only see division and finding joy that can serve as an antidote to the weight of the world, while also being a unique source of resiliency and renewal. And that brings me to the voices of poets who repeatedly undertook the journey into darkness in order to continuously recover elements of imagination and energies of joy and spontaneity. "What can I tell you but the good news from the invisible world that I heard last night, saying hoard each joyous moment and every loving touch that comes to you, for no one knows how this dance will end." That's Hafiz, who also offered this: "Listen wayfarer, your body secretly is a prayer carpet, and I can see in your eyes that you are exquisitely woven with the finest threads of silk and wool. And I can see that the pattern upon your soul has the signature of the Divine upon it. And all your moods and all your colours of love come from the Divine vats of dye and from the veins of gold. Listen wayfarer, your body, despite its pains and its uncertainties, is a shrine, and if you had the eyes of a seer, you would see Hafiz kneeling right by your side, humming playful tunes and shedding joyful tears that poured down upon your wondrous inner, hidden crown." And one more poem that captures both the joy and the spontaneity that keeps trying to awaken to each of us in the depths of our own self and soul. It goes like this, "Running through the streets, screaming, throwing rocks through windows, using my own head to ring great bells, pulling out my hair, tearing off my clothes, tying everything I own to a stick and then setting it on fire. What else can Hafiz do to celebrate the madness and the joy, the delight and the inspiration of seeing the divine everywhere?
way or another, for over 2,000 yeras.
