Soul-Making: The Meaning of Suffering
A conversation with Jungian analyst and astrologer Christina Becker and an excerpt from her upcoming book Soul-Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery
Soul-Making: The Meaning of Suffering | Christina Becker | HITW 179
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Perhaps we can best understand the journey of our lives not as the story of one path, but of two.
They start the same way, beginning with a violent push into existence, gasping for our first breath. At the other end, we are sucked back into eternity, leaving our earthly container behind. The passage between birth and death is a rich tapestry of events, experiences, triumphs, sorrows, laughter, tragedy, and legacy.
And depending on your belief system or your spiritual lens, the soul is recycled back into the divine reality or the universe to begin the process again and again for subsequent lifetimes.
One of these two paths, that of outer events and actions, is the historical and literal record of our lives: “I was born on this day. I had this profession and I lived in this town. I had these parents and these siblings, these children, and grandchildren.” It’s like looking through the rearview mirror where we see the road behind us. If we are wounded, we search for the causes of our pathology, or maybe for a place to lay the blame. But this perspective limits the richness we can experience in our lives. As James Hillman writes, “The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred … the more my biography is the story of a victim.” We dull our lives, he says, if we see them through the lens of “genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents.”4
Along the other path an invisible thread runs through our being. Like a current through an electric cable, this path supplies meaning and energy. It is along this path that we contemplate destiny, fate, and life of the soul. If we explore our lives through this lens, the seed of destiny inborn in our character becomes a unique unfolding. The plot of the journey is the realization of the soul and a process of soul-making. Our biography is the play with a set of characters, directed by an invisible hand. Our awareness of the unfolding remains hidden until a dream, a hint, a synchronicity, physical symptoms, or an intuition suggests something more than mundane and forces us to wonder about the nature of our existence.
Using Plato’s and Hillman’s metaphor, the acorn must become the oak. It can’t become anything else, just as we must become ourselves. The myth5 opens a view of our life, with all its exhilaration and sadness, through a redemptive lens. We may now see the thread of soul in action, attracting to it events and experiences necessary for its realization, which seem to us like fate until we reflect on the pattern that is revealed.
Most of the time the two roads run parallel. Journeying through our daily lives, we can remain blissfully blind to the deeper course that runs beneath—unless a fateful meeting, a tragedy, or a “dark night of the soul” plunges us into the underground. That is when we start to wonder, is that all there is—or is there something more? It is conceivable that during these moments, we understand that our life is a work of fiction, that is, a series of imaginal events and fantasized people. The intersections of these two paths are the places of the soul and of our spiritual lives. Creating the bridge between the sacred and the profane is the act of soul-making.
This perspective originates with Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Jung’s ideas differed significantly from those of his mentor, Freud. He believed that human beings have an innate need for meaning and spirituality, and this idea forms the basis of his theory of individuation, a lifelong path of psychological and spiritual growth. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote: “In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment.”6
What makes a soul-moment? It is when an inner experience connects with an outer event, resulting in an act of self-reflection that touches us in a deep way. We feel them in our body. These moments of grace are like finding a tail-feather from a white dove. We see it on the ground as we walk to work or to visit a friend, but we did not see it fall. An image may hold our attention, we may feel captured by a piece of music, by the dream that wakes us up in a cold sweat, or by the drivenness to finish a piece of writing.
We do not see the making of the moment; we do not see the journey of the falling feather, its lilting and swaying, the twists and turns until it lands. These soul-moments connect us to the fabric of a divine order that permeates everything.
All stories must start somewhere. The humble acorn needs to begin the journey of growing into the oak.
Our origin story explains the pattern of our being and helps frame the basic problems in our lives. It has a fated quality to it: something spoken by the gods that marks each existence. Our fate is there at the very beginning, surfaces at critical junctures to make itself known,8 and meets us at the end.
— From Soul-Making, A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery
Learn more: www.cjbecker.com/soul-making-book