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Get Inspired
Get Inspired is a complimentary feature created monthly and is intended to provide information for you to create and maintain a healthy, balanced, lifestyle. These articles will feature inspirational quotes, health related news and other mind, body, and spirit perspectives.
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September 2008: The shadow - part 3
By midlife the capacity for self deception is exhausted. While the encounter with ones lesser qualities may be painful their acknowledgment begins the withdrawal of their projections onto others.
Enter the shadow. The shadow represents everything that has been repressed or gone unrecognized. By midlife one has managed to repress large portions of ones personality. How humbling it is to recognize the inner dependency on outer authorities, projected onto spouse, boss, church, or state. Many parents project their unlived lives onto their children. Overreaction, excessive emotion is sure signs that something unconscious has been touched and is finding expression. We will find that what we fear in ourselves we will fear in the other and what we avoid addressing in ourselves we will avoid in the other.
The shadow should not be equated with evil, only with the life that has supressed. Negative shadow contents can be destructive when acted out unconsciously but when consciously acknowledged and channeled they can provide new directions and new energy.
The encounters with the shadow are never easy. Each of us must rework painful feelings and experiences and come to terms with ourselves as victims and villains. One may be asked to make earth shattering changes, to rework the entire personality around a new center, which will profoundly affect every role, relationship and commitment. Ones life will be different but it will still be built on the foundation that has been there from the beginning.
You will need to bear the tension of the opposites. Holding onto the ego, the identity ones life has built, while holding onto the new awareness of ones shadow. One needs to bear this tension until somehow this new element can be integrated into who I am, without totally destroying who I have been. This examintation of ones life cannot be undertaken on a whim or finessed through a weekend workshop.
Coming up: Wisdom
Where ego consciousness is the mark of the first half of life....
August 2008: Life Cycles - part 2
Midlife is the third major birth one encounters in the life cycle. The first life cycle is about the development of the ego. Youth is the completion of this development that began in childhood. Midlife integration cannot happen if the ego development is poor. Midlife and the mature years are as developmental as childhood and youth. The midlife years summon us to the inner journey, to integrating the unconscious elements of the psyche. This venture and journey toward integration and wholeness should go on all during the second half of life and be completed in and through the process of dying, death being the fourth birth. The vitality and health of the person in the mature years depends on his or her sucess in making the midlife transition. The mature years are the spirit years. They depend on and bulid on the conversion of midlife.
Difficulties will primarily be in dealing with ones inner world, the layers of the personal unconscious that have not been assimilated. It's about becoming ones true Self than about the ego and following the dictates of the collective. It is about asking the question who am I really and looking for an answer within the inner environment. It's about acknowledging the inevitability of change and to go with it, finding what is true for oneself and to live it in the world.
July 2008: Midlife experience - part 1
One does not choose the midlife experience; It arises from within when the time is ripe. It can be felt like an enormous force pressing from below. The signs and the symptoms are there; depression, overindulgent affairs, recurrent shifts of jobs and so on. Its urgency is felt as disruptive; causing anxiety when aknowledged and depression when suppressed. More and more people are living into and through the midlife period wanting to know what is the meaning and purpose after youth. This middle passage is less a chronological event than a psychological experience.
When embarking on the middle passage the unfinished business of the first half of life becomes painfully apparent. All future growth or decline is dependent on this encounter. As we reach the end of youth the psyche prepares us for this new phase of development and self-knowledge. At midlife we are moving out of the child youth half of life into the second half of life which makes up the midlife and mature years. This new phase of life takes place in the unconscious. Ones own unconscious story, dormant in the psychic layers of the personal unconscious are the first to be claimed. Getting in touch with ones conscious and unconscious life story is preparing the way for increased self knowledge, self appropriation, and self acceptance. One can no longer be the person one became in youth. The conscious personality developed during childhood and youth is no longer the center of the stage. No longer is the ego the center of psychic life.
This article is an excerpt from the following material:
Mid-Life Spirituality and Jungian Archetypes by Janic Brewi and Anne Brennan
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life - How to finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis PH.D
The MIddle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis PH.D.
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