The Poetic Pathology
“Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem”
These words, uttered by the sharp mind and vibrant soul of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, have been roaming around my world lately. A world where the idea of "self improvement" Might as well be re-branded as "self-hatred", and attempts at healing embed within themselves the seeds of the same tail chasing behavioral 'wack-a-mole'. I wonder what the consequences lay at the bottom of psychological language becoming second nature in our culture. When sadness is replaced with words like depression, when inspiration is labeled as mania, confidence as grandeur. A world where I am simply a puppet of my childhood trauma, and if I am lucky and work really hard, I might be gifted brief moments of reprieve. Do we ignore the poetic tether of our lives for the seemingly cold and sterile security of diagnosing life as a problem? I hear the echoes of a Hall and Oats line:
"Is analysis really worth it? Is the theatre really dead?"
I am struck by the suffering we all endure, everyone who will lay their eyes on these words has a uniquely twisting and bottomless understanding of what it means to suffer. But, I wonder, I wonder what would happen if instead of approaching our lives as a coagulation of problems we need to desperately claw unassailable walls to "heal", we opened ourselves to the more poetic notions found in music, literature and art. That our suffering actually may serve as our most precious lover.
The alchemical process or "Magnum Opus" comes to mind. The idea excavated by Carl Jung suggests that our lives, our problems, our relationships, these are all processes of the soul. The dance of elements and chemical reactions being guided by our own nature. These are gross simplifications of the work but alchemy as an attitude, it turns towards life, not away. Alchemy says; "Do you feel that fire of rage gripping you? Is the depth of your despair beyond anything you've known? Have you been betrayed and no footing as to who you are, and who you can trust? Ok. Are you alive, breathing, and human? Can you stay in the fire? Can you allow yourself to sink into your despair? Can you open yourself to the possibility that your soul and your psyche know exactly what they are doing, and you are exactly where and who you need to be?"
I wonder what would happen if you and I could embrace this poetry. I wonder what would happen if we embraced the notion that life is the vessel in which the human being may suffer uniquely enough to bring soul into the body. The soul that touches the deepest eyes it gazes, the soul that courageously surrenders to the tides of life through the unknown, the soul that knows compassion, not as an offering, but a necessity of the entire body. This is an approach I try to bring into my work as a space holder and to my own life and I've been privileged enough to witness the flowering of alchemy in the eyes of others, their attitude towards suffering slowly opening to the impetus for living a life in service to that indwelling unfolding, strangled by our modern times.