By all means striving for happiness and refusing to accept our human imperfection, “we seem to find ourselves in a glass coffin from which we longingly watch how life passes by,” notes Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. How to start living here and now and enjoy every moment?
1. Living according to ideas means not living your life. It is much easier to try to be better than we are than to just be ourselves. If you strive to live by ideals, you are constantly haunted by a sense of inadequacy.
2. Somewhere within us there is an image of perfection, a perfect work of art, a well-cut mask that tears us from our own flesh and blood.
3. Striving for perfection, hiding some aspects of our personality and overly exaggerating others, we turn into neurotics. The main sign of striving for perfection is obsession. Possession appears when all the psychic energy, which must be distributed in different directions of the personality for their harmonious interaction, is concentrated in one area, while the rest of the personality experiences a lack of energy.
4. Often the wisdom of the body clears the despair of the spirit.
5. A daily diary is like a mirror. When we look into it for the first time, the snow-white pages shine with emptiness, instilling horror in us. But if we continue to look and believe in the “possibility of being” (as the poet Rilke said), then gradually we begin to see the face that is looking at us. Journal entries are a way to take responsibility for being able to find out who I am.
If we are under the influence of mood, it is time to write — to give him the opportunity to pour out of the unconscious. Entries in the diary allow you to satisfy the need for heart outpourings. Intimacy is very difficult for most people, even intimacy with themselves. Journal entries become key to recognizing those parts of our personality that we have been ashamed of. The unconscious needs the eye of consciousness; consciousness requires the energy of the unconscious. Records allow this exchange to take place.
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6. Work with the body is as necessary as work with dreams. Body movements can be understood as waking dreams. In its spontaneous movements, the body is like a baby crying to be heard, understood and answered, and somewhat like a dream that sends signals from the unconscious. Our body is the unconscious in its immediate spatial dimension; the dream is also the unconscious, although it, as a collection of images, lacks the accessibility and spatial dimension inherent in the physical body.
7. Only by knowing our own darkness can we understand very well what the darkness of another is.
8. As long as one person does not cling to another and does not try to gain power over him, mutual love will bind them and new deeper layers of their personality will open.
9. Pollution is the presence of impurities in the metal that weaken its strength; An alloy is a compound with impurities that enhance its strength. Soul like gold; if it is too well cleansed and filtered, it becomes soft and shapeless. It needs to contain impurities that would strengthen it and give it a recognizable shape. If the soul believes that it is above any identity and too pure to have any form…then it will experience the connection with the body as pollution. Our task is to persevere in connection with the body until we realize that this connection is not pollution, but an alloy. This is achieved in the following way: the body is given the opportunity to play, find its own space and make any movements that it wants.
Read more M. Woodman “Passion for perfection. Jungian understanding of addiction” (Klass, 2006).
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