Times change, the Earth changes, the seasons shift, and yet often people don’t; they stay the same. Yet nature shows how beneficial it is to change, and to do so regularly. Evolution, exhilaration, enjoyment of life are all part of a process of change and growth. Why not give it a try?
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Let nature inspire you. In her everyday glory let Mother Nature show you how to live, how to breathe, how to prosper. Follow the path of the sun as it rises, shines equally upon all and then sets at day’s end. Follow the wind as it blows, ruffling everything and everyone, touching all in its path. Examine how you shine and whom you touch. Allow your brightness and your wisdom, your warmth and your compassion to be felt by as many as possible so that you too make the world a better and more beautiful place.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Notice how the changes in nature all around you may seem to occur suddenly but in reality have been undergoing transformation for a long time. Notice how nothing is hurried. Nature takes its time enacting its processes, letting things unfold naturally and without interference. Let your own inner process of change, of spirit transformation, progress naturally as well. To follow your spirit in life is to be as attuned to it and its needs as Mother Nature herself is to the needs of her plants and animals, letting them find their way each day to what is right for them in their slow progress through life. Pay attention to what your spirit needs and tells you in its natural flow through life and as it leads you to your own transformation.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Let your heart be calm as a new day comes into being. Let your heart be as still as the windless sky, as present as the bright sunlight and yet fully alive in its natural beat, beat, beat. With equilibrium achieved everything is in its natural state and there is time for contemplation of the Self. What truth arises in such a calm heart-centered state? What does your own natural state tell you about yourself today? Can you accept it and love yourself compassionately, unconditionally? Breathe and accept all that is.
Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne
Perfection is wholeness. Wholeness is the four-sided mandala: 4 directions, 4 seasons, 4 stages of life, etc. Winter is pregnancy. Spring is birth. Summer is fulfillment. Fall is death.
The decay of Fall provides the seeds and nourishment for new life, as the life cycle completes itself and begins anew. Nature teaches, in this most basic way, that life feeds upon life. The shamans of ancient Mexico called our world a predatory universe, not as a judgment but as nature’s destructive truth.
Evil is branded the demon, and it may present as such, but it is a necessary part of the life cycle, a fundamental part of our wholeness. Archetypes are the primal patterns that generate the life cycle. Archetypes populate the deepest level of the human unconscious, what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Joseph Campbell realized that in world mythology, which personifies the organizing influence of the archetypes upon human behavior, the hero archetype has a thousand faces. Local cultures thus dress the core archetypes in local clothing and masks, but beneath the surface all the different variations can be reduced to the same universal archetypes.
Despite the culture or religion, the hero is always sacrificed, changes form, and is born again into new life. Once again, nature’s fallen resurrects in the new life of Spring.
Archetypes insist on being propitiated. We must appease their energetic imperatives or suffer the agonizing consequences of their wrath. For example, depression is often the withdrawal of life energy by a neglected archetype. If we refuse a rite of Spring, like Daphne our life might harden into a frozen tree.
Modern humanity has forgotten its natural roots. The animal has been confined to the darkness of the basement, in the area of the psyche Jung called the shadow. While humanity luxuriates in its advanced technology, the animal in the shadow plans its escape into life. Here’s how Jung described the ravaged animal’s escape in Nazi Germany:
“Like the rest of the world, [the Germans] did not understand wherein Hitler‘s significance lay, that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody‘s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.” *
Projection of one’s disowned self onto a political leader renders one the sacrificial victim of a wrathful archetype. Victimhood is experienced as both the ecstasy of the entranced and the rage and hate of the rationally disenchanted. In both cases one is drawn into emotional bondage by the archetype.
In either case, the truly disenfranchised is both the personal and collective shadow, the neglected animal and the natural world, the Earth. This is a universal collective problem for humankind, not simply an issue of polarization.
The archetype of the shadow is just that, that which lives in the darkness. This is both the truth of our disowned lives, as well as the archetype of our unlived wholeness. To propitiate the shadow, we must bring the light of our consciousness into the darkness and discover the fullness of who we are.
In waking life, our journeys into darkness require us to own and release the intensity of our emotions in a safe place. Beyond release is the full knowing and acceptance of all we have done, light and dark. Finally, the darkness will reveal the changes we must make to align ourselves with our wholeness.
If we can suffer the Fall, reveling in its final colorful act, and have the patience of a pregnant Winter, new life will surely arrive, to be nourished in the Spring and brought to fulfillment in Summer, as the life cycle perfects its wholeness.
Seeking perfection,
Chuck
*Jung, C. G. (1946). Fight with the Shadow. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 10). Princeton: Princeton University Press.