James Hollis lays out the “tough shadow laden questions” to help us decipher our summons to wholeness. It requires the ego strength of a hungry student desirous to know what lies beyond her repetitive patterns and engage the teacher within. He writes,
“These questions require examining our Shadow and being willing to deal with whatever comes onto the screen of consciousness. Hearing the other’s experience of us in the face of these specific questions is often a good place to start, if we can bear that. The Other whom we most wish to blame for the shortcomings of the relationship is also the person who knows us the most, or at least knows us from a refracted angle from which we are often unable to see ourselves.”
The “whatever comes” is typically met with ego demands that throw out the baby with the bath water. Growth is aborted. The “whatever comes” will challenge one to experience and tolerate feelings of disturbance, confusion, loss of control, and anger without dissociating. Dissociation is where free will is annihilated, immobilized. How many women know this difference? Coming out of dissociating, which can take hours to years, one must be able to experience, without identifying with, all the elements of chaos, a natural part of interior reorganizing necessary for supporting growth, supporting authentic, non-destructive power. How many women get caught in the gap between these growth summons and the myriad mechanisms that have tampered them down for generations? How many women are caught in destructive power cycles?
On Saturday, May 14th, at 11:00 a.m. we will be soaking in the questions outlined in Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. Let us examine the questions as trail markers guiding us away from dissociation, toward encounter with the turning over the soil of our soul to receive the sun, water, air, and nutrients for growth. Let us dissociate from identification and become open to experience of “whatever comes.”
