The Heart of the Matter

“The heart is a living symbol. With conviction, we speak of the 'heart of the matter' to refer to something essential or central without which an issue could not exist.”

~ from the article “Heart” ARAS - Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

8Ch.251 – A bear’s lifeline, starting from the heart, is depicted here.

Textile: trade cloth, with trade beads, sinew. USA, ca. 1900 A.D.

Today, I opened an Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) article titled “Heart” that Jungian analyst Steven Parker shared with those of us who visit his always-interesting Facebook page, Jung Hearted. Attached to the article was a copy of an reproduction of a Bear totem that I've included here. I immediately recognized this ancient totem as similar in meaning to a recent Bear totem/symbol from my own dreaming. 

Back in mid-July I had what I consider to be a Big Dream, one that I will ponder its deeper meaning in my life over time.

In the dream, titled “Heart to Heart” ~

We – a bunch of people, including my son Dylan and his wife Angela - are in a house in the woods. I go to the front door and attempt to open it. Blocking my way are several black bears. I close the door and call for everyone in the house to come see the bears, because it is highly unusual to see bears in this part of the country. In fact, I had never seen a bear this far south in Michigan before. Before the others make it to where I am watching through the window, one of the bears pushes the door wide open. I attempt to close it, but the bear’s strength is too much for me. I run into the interior of the house calling to everyone to go into their bedrooms and lock the doors because now a bear is in the house. In one bedroom with only a curtain for a door are two young children, totally unprotected. I grab them and run to a room with a door. We make it inside, but as I attempt to shut the door and lock it, the bear pushes it open and grabs my left hand and wrist. I am frightened, but Bear’s long, sharp claws don’t break the skin as he holds my hand so he can get in. Because of this gentle handling of my arm, I realize that this bear and I can be friends. I begin singing and crooning to him and smoothing down his facial fur. Soon I'm experiencing love instead of fear, and feel the love from the bear in return. Bear and I begin to communicate telepathically. He tells me that he’s a maverick in his group, and that he broke into our house because he was lonely. After 'talking,' we go out into the main part of the house. Eventually, Dylan and Angela and I walk Bear into the woods so that he can go back to his life in the wild. We stop at a wilderness store to get some provisions at the beginning of our journey. A woman shows me a map and asks if we are going to all the places on the map. She seems very impressed if we are. I tell her that it’s not my map…but I am interested in what all the symbols mean on it. Bear and I step outside for the sake of others who are uncomfortable with a large black bear in the store. I know on some level they think he is my pet, but Bear is not tame. His home is in the wild. After we go on a walkabout together, he will be returning there. Soon, Dylan comes out of the store carrying an over-sized drink that he’s bought to share with everyone…water, I think. I ask Bear where he finds water in the wild when he’s thirsty, concerned that he will have enough to keep him healthy. (EOD)

Upon awakening, I felt a deep gratitude to Bear for connecting me to my inner wildness - a longing for my own instinctive and natural life rhythms - that has been breaking into my conscious awareness since I retired two years ago. When I talked to Dylan about the dream, I discovered that he and Angela had taken an impromptu trip to the west rim of the Grand Canyon after visiting her father in Texas, and that Dylan had expressed a wish, before the trip had even begun, to see a bear as part of his wilderness travels! 

 Alas, no bears were encountered during their travels except those in my dreaming. That in itself is a gift of meaningful coincidence; one that leads me to hold fast to my belief that connections of the heart cross all barriers of time and space. For, while my night dreams of Bear provided a heart connection to my own inner longings, it also connected my mother’s heart to the waking dreams of my son. 

In my opinion, synchronicity doesn't get much better than that...

Ciao,

Jenna

Healing the Sacred Divide

At the top of my 2012 gratitude list is Dr. Jean Raffa’s book “Healing the Sacred Divide: Making Peace with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World.” I’ve been following and enjoying Jean’s blog “Matrignosis” for the past few years, so when she announced that her latest book had been published and was available, I decided to take a gamble and purchase it. Gamble? Ha! The book is a veritable treasure map, pointing the way to psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual healing.  Jean shows us where we’ve been, where we are, and where we can be on the Path to Wholeness if we are willing to look within and challenge some of our cherished beliefs that have been blocking humanity’s journey for the past several thousand years. While this inner exploration may feel uncomfortable at times, never fear. Jean is a seasoned guide who uses her own and others experiences of Jungian psychology, mythology, dreams, imagination, and personal revelation as solid markers along the way to lead us to a place where spiritual probing, personal meaning, and relational unity are all healthy signs of consciousness evolution.

I’m also pleased that the book relates to my own pet project: synchronicity journaling. In the Prologue, Jean begins with a nightmare she had about the Lone Ranger when she was 10-years of age (You’ll have to read the book to find out what happened in the dream). The Lone Ranger is a metaphor that Jean returns to throughout the book. It heralded her tendency throughout much of her life to wall off her feelings and ‘go it alone’ emotionally, living out her fantasy of being the perpetual stoic Heroine. This tendency showed up early in her life after experiencing extended absences of her beloved father as well as the childhood wounding caused by her parent’s divorce, followed three months later by her father’s death. According to Jean, the Lone Ranger motif is discussed in all three of her books: The Bridge to Wholeness: A Feminine Alternative to the Hero Myth, Dream Theaters of the Soul: Empowering the Feminine Through Jungian Dream Work, and Healing the Sacred Divide.
The main motif of Healing the Sacred Divide, however, is the meaning of the symbol known as the mandorla. In Jean’s words a mandorla is “where our power to set ourselves apart yields to a dawning awareness of what we share with ‘other’[… ]a holy place of healing where miracles occur.” The visual of this symbol is the almond shaped place where two circles meet as depicted on the cover of her book.  Jean writes that according to Jungian analyst and author Robert Johnson, “The mandorla binds together that which was torn apart and made un-whole—unholy.”  She adds, “The mandorla is creative synthesis, a symbol of partnership, conflict resolution, healing, and peace-making” and  “a radical middle path to God.”

With these pieces of information about the book - the significance and meanings of the symbols of Lone Ranger and the mandorla - you will soon see how they tie into the synchronicity I am about to relate.

I read all but the very last section of the book a few nights ago, and decided to savor the end for the next morning. That evening I chose, instead, some light entertainment (or so I thought) in the form of Netflix movie. I deliberately picked one that looked rather lighthearted titled Smoke Signals. According to a reviewer, “This was a funny, gentle movie (no cartoon violence or excessive language) that made me think, but not too hard!” Lord knows why I ever trust those reviews; they are almost never on the mark!
In fact, the movie is intense. It is about a couple of Indian kids on a reservation. The one, Thomas, loses his parents when he was an infant - in the very beginning of the film - to a house fire. The other, Victor, lives with a drunken, unavailable father who winds up leaving the family altogether when Victor is 12-years old.  I don’t want to tell too much about it in case you want to watch this fabulous film; suffice it to say that I cried many tears at the end (a bittersweet blend of happiness and sadness). But, here’s the clincher: I found out during the closing credits that the movie was based on a book titled “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”! There is also a remark by one of the characters in the film about Victor acting out emotionally like the ‘Lone Ranger’ toward the end of the film as well.  I didn’t get the mandorla connection until the very last words were spoken, but when I did, it hit me over the head in some of the parting words, spoken by Thomas, who played the Trickster ‘other’ that helped to heal Victor’s emotional ‘Lone Ranger'

How do we forgive our fathers? Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?

Wow! That is what I call a meaningful coincidence! And another synchronicity within a synchronicity: my parents’ divorce and my father leaving our home when I was around 10-years old traumatized me as a kid, too. The combination of the book and film helped to heal part of that wounding.

How does the seemingly magical alchemy of synchronicity work? I don’t know, but I surely do feel blessed and grateful when it happens.

Circles of Stones and Other Circles

I started out the week listening to my son Dylan’s original song “Circles and Speckles” on the video my other son, Jeremy, created for my daughter Julie’s 40^th Birthday party this past Sunday (click on Hyperlink to listen).

Callanish

Today, Stephen Parker, posted photos of several Megalithic stone circle sites on the Jung Hearted Facebook Page. What followed was an interesting discussion as to the meaning and reason for these types of circle of stones sites in Europe and other parts of the world. I immediately thought of feminine spirituality and the numinous quality of the sites that can be felt by all who visit and view them.

“Man and woman that don't get in the Circle get exhausted.” Michelle Proverb

After reading and responding to the JH posts, the very next post I opened on Facebook was this picture of man/woman circle.

Circle of Stones, PIXAR, Emeryville, CA

Later today I went to PIXAR to meet Jeremy and his wife, Aimee, for lunch and the first thing I noticed on the grounds coming up the walk to the main building was...Yep! You guessed it!...the "Circle of Stones" that replicate the circle of stones in the movie Brave. Brave, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet is an animated movie about an exceptional young woman by the name of Merida, who comes into her own as a full-fledged person - beyond her duties as a Scottish princess who is expected to fulfill her clan's expectations of her - and gains the allegiance of her straight-laced, custom-bound mother along the way. It is a wonderful movie that I’m going to go see again!

And as I made my way up the PIXAR walk, I realized  that my thoughts about Merida fit in well with the words I heard in my mind while waking up from a dream a few days ago: “Rethink, reimagine, and Reinvent your life!”

It also came to me while thinking about the connection between circle of stone images, a young woman finding a place in the world for her authentic self, and my dream message to reimagine my own life that I needed to revisit Judith Duerk’s lovely book “Circle of Stones: Woman’s Journey to Herself.”

Image from Shiloh Sophia McCloud's "Color of Woman" Journal

Here are the opening words to Judith Duerk’s book:

“Circles of stones, haunting, healing, powerful…from the ancient circles, the Ring of Brogar in the Orkneys, the Rollright Stones, Stonehenge…to the dozens, perhaps hundreds of circles in Scandinavia and the northern isles…

“Circles of smooth stones on a tabletop…dream images of stones in a circle…primordial places of devotion, the sacred grotto…attending the Goddess. For modern woman, the circle of stones as the place of centered stillness…listening to what is within, her work of individuation as her woman’s ego separates from the values around her and finds a ground through its roots in the archetypal Feminine, in the sacred Self within.

“This writing rests on the image of a circle of stones. Not contiguous, the spaces in between trust the feeling and intuition of the reader to bridge the gaps. The themes—not linear, but circular, like the feminine process of consciousness in either man or woman—come round again and again, impressing meaning through nuance, soft change of colouration, shift of light and shadow, deepening the imprint through subtle change of cadence, rubato.

“The underlying theme…of woman’s birth from woman…identification with the Feminine…separation, as the animus, her masculine side, exerts its pull…her eventual return to feminine ground…to come to her own unique consciousness of the archetypal Feminine…to let the strong, wise, and deep Feminine manifest in her life…now, not in unconscious identification, but through her own individual, subjective being and efforts.”

In light of these synchronicities and awe inspiring words, I find it auspicious that it is my beautiful granddaughter Lexi’s 19^th birthday today. It is my blessing and prayer that she, too, find her perfect place to express her many gifts in this sometimes lovely/sometimes wounded world.

Love,

Jenna

Rethink, Reimagine, and Reinvent Your Life

Taking the Ochre Path by Australian artist John Scott

I woke up this morning from a dream that I couldn’t remember, but these words were imprinted on my mind, "Rethink, re-imagine, and reinvent your life!"

I wanted to write about this and post it with an appropriate piece of art, so I looked through my files and found one that I intuitively thought would go well with the words in my dream. I chose the above piece by Australian artist John Scott titled “Taking the Ochre Path,” knowing nothing about the artist. I had found the piece intriguing awhile back, and copied it to my photo file from somewhere on the web. It seemed to go perfectly with my dream message on a deeper level than could be articulated in words. I found it so inspiring that I wanted to know more about the artist, so I pulled up an interview of John Scott at Lisa M Harrison.com and discovered that Scott had a Near Death Experience (NDE) 20 years ago that "fundamentally changed" his whole life! The interview in which he talks about this re-visioning of his own life was posted the night before I woke up with the message to rethink, reimagine, and reinvent my life. Wow! No wonder I felt drawn to his art.

I found another meaningful coincidence in the information Scott brought back from his NDE that connected it to a book I am currently reading to my granddaughter titled Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers by Jane Roberts. In the NDE, Scott saw how stones and trees and flowers and bugs and all things have consciousness and communicate with one another and with the rest of the world, including human beings if we are willing to focus and listen in new ways. In Robert’s charming children’s story, the protagonist, Emir, goes to the land of the gods and meets the god of insects and the god of toads and the god of the sky and some earth gods and goddesses. They talk to him about how every species has its own god/creator with whom they communicate and how every species has its own language that humans can tap into if they are open to other ways of knowing.

Many things that John Scott says in his interview resonate with things I’m thinking about and processing in my own life. Like self-forgiveness. According to Scott, he saw in his NDE the power of self-love and how it allows us to move forward and stop stunting our capabilities out of guilt and self-punishment. I was thinking about how to go about forgiving myself for mistakes of the past this morning before listening to Scott’s interview, and how I need to move on and quit berating myself, because it is just stunting my growth as an individual on so many fronts. I began to think that with all the support I’d been receiving in the form of synchronicity, I was ready to begin that journey!

And as fate would have it, another friend – not knowing about my dream message or my intention to follow its advice - sent me a link today that led me to find this quote from David H. Rosen in his Foreword to Jungian therapist James Hollis’s book titled The Archetypal Imagination, “With the power of the archetypal imagination available to all of us, we are invited to summon courage to take on the world anew, to relinquish outmoded identities and defenses, and to risk a radical re-imagining of the larger possibilities of the world and of the self.”

Here is the link to the interview Lisa Harrison did with John Scott if you're interested: http://lucas2012infos.wordpress.com/tag/john-scott-australian-artist-and-researcher/

A Cluster of Synchronicities Around the Idea of Self-Knowledge

A few weeks ago, I Woke-up with these words in my head: “As long as you have self-knowledge, you don’t need much else.”

Later that morning, while going through some of my old journals, I opened one at random to an entry having to do with Pramila Jayapal’s story about the matrilineal village in India where she was born titled A Pilgrimage to India: A Woman Revisits Her Homeland. Jayapal writes about her birth village as having good drinking water, higher wages, good education and how all these contributed to a higher standard of living. But the most important thing, in her opinion, was a pervasive  “Knowledge of self and realizing one’s place in the world (universe).” She explains that out of self-knowledge one develops gifts and makes contributions to society through self-expressions, thus benefiting all.

Last week, I was reading a book I’d started, Gurdjieff; An Introduction to His Life and Ideas by John Shirley, and came to this passage: ”But if it can happen, if self-knowledge can change people, then isn’t it a vibrant ray of light in a dark, brutal world?”

That same day, I 'happened' across the words of the seer Edgar Cayce in an Association for Research and Enlightenment update, ” For the beginning of knowledge is to know self and self’s relationship to God, then the relationship to the fellow man, then material knowledge so any entity, any soul, may become valuable, worth while, aggressively advancing in success” ~ 1249-1.

And yet another meaningful coincidence occurred today that helped to underscore the meaning of self-knowledge and pull all the information in this post together in my mind: coming across Carol Tavris's Wall Street Journal book review of social psychologist Jerome Kagan's latest book, Psychology's Ghosts. In the review, titled "Society and Its Discontents," Tavris writes:

"Many people will tell you that having many friends, a fortune or freedom is essential to happiness, but Mr. Kagan believes they are wrong. 'A fundamental requirement for feelings of serenity and satisfaction,' Mr. Kagan says, is 'commitment to a few unquestioned ethical beliefs' and the confidence that one lives in a community and country that promote justice and fair play." 

We have a long way to go to bring our culture back to a country that promotes ethics, justice, and fair play if information on the nightly news - both mainstream and alternative - is any indication of the sad state of affairs we now find ourselves in. But, I do believe, as more of us follow a path of inner-directed self knowledge we will, in the words of Primila Jayapal, develop gifts and make contributions to society through our unique self-expressions, that will help remedy the mess we are in and ultimately benefit all.

Ciao,

Jenna 

The Mind/Body Connection

Several years ago, my sister-in-law Becky was in Madison, Wisconsin as a witness in a trial for the company she then worked for. Between trial sessions, she avidly read the book “Meditation as Medicine: Activate the Power of Your Natural Healing” by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D. and Cameraon Stauth. Becky found the book to be a fascinating read about the mind/body connection and the promotion of healing through what the author calls “Medical Meditation.” It is Dr. Khalsa's belief, backed by the research he presents to the reader, that Medical Meditation is a more powerful tool than regular meditation in healing because of the practitioner's combined use of meditation, postures, mudras, mantras, and breath work - all explained thoroughly in the book.

While boarding the plane to go home to Michigan, Becky noticed a person’s feet approximately 10 people in front of her in the aisle. They were covered by nothing more than socks and sandals. This seemed a bit odd to her, considering that the temperature outside was reaching a scant 16 degrees Fahrenheit. She moved up with her gaze and saw that the person wearing the sandals had a shaved head and was wearing a robe-type garment of red, orange, and gold and that his arm on one side was bare. Ah, she thought to herself, This must be a Buddhist monk. He isn't freezing to death, so he must surely know something about the mind/body connection! By now, my sister-in-law was very excited and made a vow to herself to talk to this person about some of the concepts about which she was reading as well as get his point of view on how Medical Meditation specifically affects the healing response. Becky has been interested for some time now in the mind/body connection, in part because of an on-going health challenge that a loved one in her life has been facing. As she made her way up the aisle, she envisioned herself asking the person seated next to the monk if she could exchange seats to be able to discuss with him all that was on her mind.

But when she got to her own seat, Becky got a pleasant surprise. Who should be sitting directly in her assigned seat but the same monk she had hoped to get a chance to talk with! She didn’t dare ask him to move, and just took the seat next to him.

At this point, the synchronicities just keep piling up, because he turned out to be no ordinary Buddhist monk. He was one, Matthieu Ricard, French interpreter for the Dalai Lama and a recognized expert on the mind/body connection in his own right. He had been in Madison at the invitation of the University of Wisconsin as part of a research experiment to measure the effects of meditation and prayer on healing. He told Becky that westerners do not fully understand the importance of the mind/body connection that eastern cultures take for granted. Of specific importance, from his perspective, are the Placebo Effect and the positive effect of prayer on healing. 

So, did Becky find out that a cutting-edge practice like Medical Meditation has the power - when practiced faithfully - to heal all of our diseases all of the time? Obviously, not. While Medical Meditation does activate the healing force  to a great degree and has been known to heal and reverse physical disease in many documented cases, we each have a destiny and personal path to walk in this life. Also, as Dr. Khalsa also explains in his book, healing can happen on many levels besides the physical.

However, I do resonate to the thoughts that Mathieu Ricard wrote in his blog dated May, 08, 2011 and titled, “How Can Meditation Help us to Learn Resilience in Times of Crisis?”:

“Meditation, or more accurately mind training, helps to cultivate the inner resources that give us confidence to deal with the ups and downs of life. These inner resources include inner freedom that makes us less vulnerable to ever-changing outer conditions. Here, inner freedom means being free from the influence of automatic mental processes that lead to animosity, obsession, envy, and other mental toxins that undermine our well being.”

In case you are interested in finding out more information about Matthieu Ricard and the Dalai Lama's affiliation with the “Mind and Life Institute,” an organization that continues to promote the findings of the effects of the mind and spirit on healing and wholeness, Mr. Ricard gave Becky the link to the institute’s website. It is www.mindandlife.org. 

The above information adds another thread to this already rich tapestry, as I bring my daughter Julie in to the scenario. Julie does volunteer grant writing for an organization called Mindfulness Schools that offers mindfulness meditation training to elementary school children in the Oakland, California schools. As I was telling her about her Aunt Becky’s synchronicity with Matthieu Ricard on the plane in Wisconsin and his affiliation with the Mind and Life Institute, I discovered that Julie, too, had heard - just recently - about the same organization. It turns out that someone at Mindfulness Schools had commented to her on the research being done at both the Mind and Life Institute and the University of Wisconsin on the positive physical, mental, and emotional effects of  mindfulness meditation on children!

I'm telling you, it never ceases to amaze me how we are all so connected on so many more levels than we can ever imagine...

Ciao until the next time,

Jenna