Jungian psychology speaks of the need for us to honour our own human and innate archetypes, to allow them to play their way through us – and if we do not live that quality into being then we die – spiritually. These archetypes live within our unconscious self, often unfulfilled and under resourced.
This can lead to deep depression and hunger for acknowledgement.
Shutting down our psyche and becoming numb are often associated with depression, with the underlying anxiety that this can bring.
What does it feel like when these parts of us are deadened to the world that we long to live in? De-pressed, forced inwards, shut down, unfeeling, un-creative, frozen in time.
There are no feelings as such, there is simply nothing there, a deadening of the soul, a hunger that cannot be filled. There is no sense of emotion, nothing that the heart can speak of, or sing of, or dance with. The body shuts down, barely able to eat or else stuffing food in until the stomach is fit to burst, or drinking alcohol in great quantities, in a desperate attempt to disallow any pain that might want to start to seep through the opening cracks of despair.
We know in ourselves that a walk, a dance, a conversation with another will help us to overcome some of these sensations, but we are also unable to motivate ourselves to do this. No matter how many people tell us we ‘should’ be doing this, we simply cannot. So we stop talking to others, we stop communicating about the heart ache and we isolate ourselves so that no one can reach us, so the trauma continues to hold us in its grip. For this often does come from trauma, or neglect, or abuse in its many forms. How to reach into that place is not so easy. But it is also because we are not living our passion, our soul purpose, our reason for being alive.
And how many of us put on that mask of being fine, of being ok, of being able to lie and pretend that there is no problem in our world?
Making it through life as if nothing has happened. Pushing through the dark place and yet deep within there is a numbness hiding away a hurting that is covered up so well, there is only a disappearing. A disappearing of the soul and the archetype that is our birth right that longs to live and longs to love.
That steely stare will banish all that is possible and only death can reach that door.
It takes one to know this place and this crippling heartache to be able to reach in, to the cries from within the other.
So we start with a finger, a tiny movement, we pick up a pencil and we write the words ‘I am here’ and we write it over and over again, reminding ourselves that we really are alive. And then the words, or the pictures begin to find their way onto the page. And whatever is in our heart, it begins to find its way into the world of the living, or that piece of music, that artists tale, that surrender to humanity and hope and recognition becomes the fruit of this calling, to stretch our soul once more into its rightful place.
The archetype is living and remembering itself, who ever we are. No longer lost and caught in an unfeeling web, we learn to express and to reach out again. And if we can trust there is something so much greater than ourselves, that there is something so much greater than our own thinking mind and ego, then we can also reach out to that one, that god of our own understanding and we know we are loved and cared for again. For without this, with too much loneliness, where connection is hard to find, we too easily become lost once more. And so with the support of knowing our archetype and its particular journey, we embrace the calling of our soul and in those moments of loss, we understand how much we are needed by others who live in such similar places and we begin to serve and support them into their own artistry.
Our Middle Earth Medicine Wheel we share with you, takes us on the journey through those depths of heart, loneliness, depression, even the deepest loss and then revealing to us how our chosen archetypes, can support each other into the Sovereign archetype that we were initially born with.
From ‘Middle Earth Wisdom’ soon to be published
