Your personality was shaped by messages that came from outside of you. Much of what you were taught about the “correct” actions and attitudes, and much of what you did in response, goes against the grain of your soul. Your artificially conditioned conscious attitude (your ego), combined with the parts of yourself you disowned (your shadow) is your enemy-within. The garbage heap of your rejected life-serving values and qualities has a toxic, self-defeating power over you that needs to be extinguished.
Empowering your spirit warrior is an unfolding creative process of facing and befriending the enemy within so you can harness its power and channel it in beneficial directions. Psychologically this presents you with a real problem. The waters of the unconscious are not only associated with feminine nurturing and creativity, but also with “feminine” emotion. Unfortunately, your ego’s automatic response to uncomfortable emotions is to repress them. Refusing to feel and serve the authentic truths of your soul thwarts the maturing of your feminine side.
Accepting eros— the feminine function of loving relationship with yourself, others, and life — will strengthen her. To try to build your soul’s city without her would be like trying to create a baby without protecting it in a nourishing womb, or a work of art without feeling your passions or following the inspiration that emerges from your unconscious. Failure to engage your feminine spiritual source will prolong your ego’s suffering and prevent you from inhabiting your soul’s true home.
Playing Imaginatively with Water
Physicists tell us that everything new in the physical world emerges from an invisible sea of potential. This sea is composed of quantum energy that interacts in relationship with everything we see and know. It creates every change that has ever occurred or will ever occur. The ongoing relationship between the physical world and quantum world creates and sustains your life. This analogy is comparable to what happens in the life of your psyche. When your conscious ego plays imaginatively with your unconscious self you develop a relationship with the unified source of life.
Intuiting this, people from every place and time have associated the feminine creative force with womb-like caves and water. In the Classical period, Aesclepian temples which invoked healing dreams from the unconscious were located at sacred wells and springs. In Celtic mythology there is a holy Well of Wisdom at the center of the spiritual Other-World considered to be the feminine spiritual source which brings healing and wisdom. In England, the Roman hot springs at Bath were given the name Aquae Sulis to honor the local goddess Sul. In Mexican mythology, the feminine womb of creation from which all Mesoamerican peoples emerged was a grotto like the one under the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan through which underground springs ran. Likewise, many old churches in Great Britain were built over goddess worship sites and still contain a crypt or grotto that opens into a subterranean spring.
Alchemists associated the feminine principle with water, which they thought of as the womb. They performed an operation called Solutio in which they immersed elements in water after heating them in fire. From a psychological standpoint, this means that before the base elements of your soul can be transformed into gold, your ego must return to the womb, the prima materia, i.e. your unconscious, for rebirth. Bathing a spirit that has become dry and hard after a prolonged season of masculine logos will moisten, soften, and revitalize it.
Alchemy, religion, myth, wisdom, culture, dreams — indeed all the endeavors of civilization — originate in the playful relationship between logos and eros, conscious and unconscious. To provoke healthy change in your life you need to create a healthy relationship between life’s opposites. Work and play are no exception. Whereas disembodied intellect divides and conquers without ever actually knowing life, imagination and feeling enable us to participate in life. For many people today, their masculine side has had enough of striving. If this is true of you, use this time of quarantine and social isolation to set aside soulless work and reason.
Explore the water side of your nature. It’s a terrible mistake to see it as your weak or inferior side. Remember, the truths we don’t want to face are the real enemy. They brought civilization to this watershed moment. Water is strong enough to carve a canyon out of solid rock, carry an ocean liner, support an ice skater’s dance. Delicious enough to quench your thirst. Gentle enough to rest. Use its properties to nourish and refresh your soul.
Find a comforting oasis in nature and allow yourself to be with yourself. Relish the beauty of your surroundings. Savor each physical sense. Follow your imagination wherever it wants to go. Interact spontaneously with images. Notice your moods and feelings. Feel the miracle of your life, relax into it, flow with its rhythms. Playful bathing in the sacred waters of creation dissolves resistance, opens locked doors, and ushers in new solutions These feminine ways of being have more power to provoke change than anything you can do at this time.
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Image Credits: Jungian quote about the sea, www.heartak.com. Alchemy Water Symbol, Commonswikimedia.org. Elephant playing with water, unknown photographer, pinterest.com.
Jean Raffa’s The Bridge to Wholeness and Dream Theatres of the Soul are at Amazon. E-book versions are also at Kobo, Barnes And Noble and Smashwords. Healing the Sacred Divide can be found at Amazon and Larson Publications, Inc. Watch for her new book, The Soul’s Twins, to be launched by Schiffer Publishing this October.
18 Responses
Thank you so much for this, what I needed to read at this moment in time. Appreciate all your offerings and cannot wait for your book!
Dear Shannon, I’m very glad to hear this was just what you needed to read. That makes my day. It would be awfully nice to be as close to the ocean as you are right now, although I understand the crowds are back. Still, there are places where you can enjoy the sounds of the waves and gulls and the salty scents carried on the breeze. I hope you’ll be able to treat yourself to some of that healing medicine! I can’t wait for you to read my book either. I’ll look forward to hearing your reaction to it! Love, Jeanie
Dear Jeanie,
Thank you for sharing more deep wisdom and these rich feminine insights with us. I’m sure being a water sign (Scorpio) plays a great part in my love for all the lakes and oceans of this world. As I live on the coast, the sea is 10/15 minute walk from my front door … and as luck would have it, in the other direction, a five minute walk away is a protected Nature Reserve, populated with ancient woodland. In hindsight, I realise buying this house was a watershed moment in my life in so many ways.
Furthermore on the subject of water, swimming happens to be one of my favourite sporting pastimes! Hmm, those “living waters” above and below, as Jung would say, are vital to me!
Returning to the womb for rebirth, ah, now there’s a psychic image I can plunge into and go with the flow! Where’s my pen …
In many ways I feel, in this time of Corona, that my inner feminine aspect has been called to the fore as I presently nurse and tend my wife and her recovery from the Coronavirus itself. It definitely feels like our marriage has been watered in revitalising, softer and more loving ways.
Bright Beltane Blessings, Deborah.
Dear Deborah,
Wow. With the Nature Reserve on one side of you and the sea on the other, you are surely surrounded by a magical mega-dose of Mama Natures’s healing bounty. What a wonderful place for your wife to recuperate from the coronavirus, and how lucky she is to have you to share it with! We are very close to water here. There’s a cypress swamp behind our home that is visited by hawks, owls, wood ducks, and other assorted birds that I find very comforting. We have both been blessed with beautiful spaces that nurture our musings.
Returning to the womb for rebirth. Yes, yes, and yes. And isn’t baptism meant to signify some of that? Or is it all about cleansing and purifying? Either way, water is a life-saving blessing.
I’m feeling much the same way as you throughout this time. Softer, more loving. Revitalized. Upheld. Grateful.
Blessings to you and healing wishes for your wife’s recovery,
Jeanie
“Through Wisdom Waters” & “Navigating the Soul’s Journey”…check out http://www.josinclairart.com.
I too resonate with water and the sea….I live close to the ocean and finding solace and renewed inspiration during this pandemic time, returning for daily walks before the crowds gather.
Thanks for this post, for although I appear to flow, I have been caught in the net of my” personality was shaped by messages that came from outside of you. Much of what you were taught about the “correct” actions and attitudes, and much of what you did in response, goes against the grain of your soul.” …At the same time I am being soothed by seashore, these restrictive grating messages have been amplified in my being during this pandemic…I have been raging against them. They no longer serve me. And now I cannot avoid the call of the sea and the voice of the feminine in my soul. Big waves of change on horizon for me…to become free.
Love these posts.
Thanks Jeanie so much. Your post is hopeful, something that is in short supply these days. Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Paying attention means I guess in this instance, staying in the moment and giving the ego a well deserved break, allowing for energy to be transformed into an other kind of supportive soul energy namely a feminine one … Beauty/Eros is all around in different shapes and forms, & we can allow it to touch us and penetrate us.
Thank you for your thoughtful musings on how attention blesses us with supportive soul energy, Susan. It surely does. I think attention, mindfulness, consciousness, self-awareness—whatever name you give to this crucial state of mind—is the key to transformation, both individual and collective. We absolutely have to see the beauty, and also the ugly. We have to let them both penetrate us to the level of soul. Only then can our soul respond “Enough!” loud enough for our egos, who love to be distracted by busyness, to hear and act on our soul’s behalf.
Jeanie, I meant to add and to emphasise that you bring our attention to these vital energies and thank you again for that …
Thank you, Susan. It’s what I love to do.
Dear Jo,
I am one who also appears to flow, and I do flow much of the time, but there also have been times when my raging has been much more powerful than my flowing.These times have always been prompted by my soul’s need to break out of restrictive roles, most of which I created for myself without realizing it. For the first half of my life it felt so dangerous to even want to live by my soul’s truths, let alone act on them. But in my late thirties I began answering the ocean’s call in tiny baby steps. Now, after thirty years of dreamwork, I usually dive right into the waves. I’m still afraid of sharks, but I think that’s just my healthy sense of self-preservation! 🙂
Your exquisite paintings show that you are following your passion and it is working for you. “Inspiration” is just that. It’s profoundly inspiring when someone reveals their soul. Yours is beautiful.
Thank you for reading and taking the time to share your comments here, Jo.
With much appreciation,
Jeanie
I live in Motherwell which is a town in Lanarkshire, Scotland. It is probable that ‘mother’ and ‘well’ are associations with the feminine and the unconscious which goes back to Celtic times and gave my town its name.
Oh yes. What a lovely name for a town! I have no doubt the two words and their meanings are related, even if unconsciously in the minds of the people who named your town. The love for nature and the connection between nature, water, and the feminine depths is archetypal. We share those associations with all humanity. So beautiful…Thank you for sharing that. Jeanie
Thanks, Jeanie. It’s just where I am now. I finally realized I had to step back from everything I’d been doing that created stress, and get back to myself and the writing/authorship foundation for my life I began building a couple years ago. We’ve had beautiful spring weather, and a robin built a nest on the sill of the transom window above my front door. I regard this as a positive omen for the direction in which I am now going. –Carol (http://thescheherazadechronicles.org)
Hi Carol, it’s lovely to hear from you.
I think you’ve beautifully captured where a lot of people are finding themselves today: coming back to themselves. Back to their creative foundations — or wells :-). Back to flowing and nesting in rhythm with nature.
We’ve forgotten that we were born of and are still part of nature: our bodies, our souls and our creativity. All nature. The only thing that isn’t nature, i.e. natural, is the obsessive push and stress our egos put us though in our striving for unnatural heights that leave nature behind. Many of us got so used to it that it seemed natural. But it wasn’t. Our souls and bodies and Mother Nature knew it, and now our egos are finally listening to what they’ve been trying to tell us for a long time.
Synchronistically, a wren built a nest in a plant holder on our back porch and I watched a fully fledged baby leave this morning. I felt it was a positive omen too. It gave me hope.
Thank you for writing,
Much love, Jeanie
Thank you.
You’re welcome, Frank. Thank you for stopping by. Jeanie
Thank you, Jeanie. Water is not my strongest element by nature. In astrology, I have Saturn in Cancer in the 4th house in my natal chart (for those of you who use astrology), so water must be actualized and made part of the ego structure. I’ve spent a lifetime connecting with the feminine and water element. It’s essential for me every day. I also appreciate the sense of hope in this post as our government is stripped of feminine values, beginning with empathy.
Dear Elaine,
I hungered to connect with the feminine all my waking life without having any idea that was what I wanted. I guess I didn’t get what I needed from my mother, who was too busy working hard and being strong during a difficult marriage to give much time to softness, play, feeling, relationship, and self-reflection. I admired her and became the warrior I believed I needed to be to succeed and please her: hard working, stoic, tough, goal-oriented, driven. When I discovered Jung at 47, I finally knew what it was I yearned for: my feminine Self. And I began to seek her through dreamwork and writing.
I was lucky. Many women in this country still believe, as I did, that they have to deny the feminine half of their nature and obsess over the masculine side in order to succeed in a patriarchal world. That’s such a terrible mistake. Emancipating the Feminine and partnering her with the equally emancipated Masculine is the topic of my new book: The Soul’s Twins. I know it is the one I was meant to write. I’ve lived what I’ve written about and it has made all the difference in my life. I believe it has the potential to make a lot of people more hopeful and determined to restore feminine values to our government and its people.
Thank you for writing. Warm spring blessings to you and your sweet pups,
Jeanie