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COAGULATIO: The Alchemy of Settling Down · This Jungian Life Podcast

0:00
Speaker 1: We can fall in love with the salutio stage or
0:03
Speaker 1: even the sublimatio stage if we have a personality that
0:06
Speaker 1: likes to prospect, likes options to stay open. Typologically, that's
0:11
Speaker 1: the p-type in the Myers-Briggs, and that if we stay
0:16
Speaker 1: in all possibilities, the swirling solution of options, at the
0:21
Speaker 1: end of our lives, we often have very little to
0:24
Speaker 1: show for it. So Too much coagulatio can be a problem.
0:28
Speaker 1: Things get fixed too quickly, a little too tightly. But
0:33
Speaker 1: in the natural sequence, when we come up with a
0:36
Speaker 1: brilliant idea and there's an enormous amount of energy about it,
0:40
Speaker 1: like starting a podcast, that it's demanding the opportunity to
0:47
Speaker 1: be lived out, to be made so. So then it
0:52
Speaker 1: can be an object that we relate to and learn
0:56
Speaker 1: much about.
1:00
Speaker 2: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
1:05
Speaker 2: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
1:08
Speaker 2: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
1:12
Speaker 2: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
1:18
Speaker 3: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
1:21
Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in in
1:25
Speaker 1: Virginia Beach, Virginia.
1:26
Speaker 3: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
1:41
Speaker 1: Today we're going to work again through our alchemical sequence
1:47
Speaker 1: in the way that Jung found it so valuable. Today
1:50
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the coagulatio. And subjectively, that's
1:56
Speaker 1: a process when our psychological life begins to slow down and,
2:03
Speaker 1: in a sense, kind of thickens into a more tangible substance.
2:08
Speaker 1: Our own psychology takes form. It accepts limits. It prepares
2:14
Speaker 1: itself to kind of stand on the earth. And we
2:18
Speaker 1: move from, for instance, not knowing to knowing, to standing.
2:23
Speaker 1: stopping equivocating to making a choice. There are many subtle
2:29
Speaker 1: ways that this plays out. Dreams are, in essence, a
2:33
Speaker 1: coagulatio of the invisible, unconscious processes into tangible images that
2:40
Speaker 1: we can interact with. And most importantly, the alchemists didn't
2:46
Speaker 1: invent these stages, they observed them. And then they projected
2:50
Speaker 1: kind of innocently onto the chemical observations. And Jung knew that.
2:55
Speaker 1: So it's not so much that it's a dictate in
2:59
Speaker 1: terms of the stages, but in fact, they already exist.
3:04
Speaker 1: They're already influencing us. And if we can rise to
3:07
Speaker 1: a kind of metaconscious level, we can see our entire
3:11
Speaker 1: life as a process that's ever refining us. Which brings
3:19
Speaker 1: us to the dictum, salve et coagula, that Jungians have
3:25
Speaker 1: secretly tattooed on the inside of their wrists, but rarely
3:29
Speaker 1: let their analisants see it.
3:33
Speaker 3: If I were going to get a tattoo, that might
3:35
Speaker 3: be it. Well, of course, Jung was very interested in
3:39
Speaker 3: the medieval art of alchemy because he saw it as
3:42
Speaker 3: a very elaborate, specific... highly imagistic metaphors for the process
3:50
Speaker 3: of psychological transformation. And the alchemists came up with these
3:55
Speaker 3: various stages that they observed, as you said, Joseph, in
3:59
Speaker 3: their laboratories. And this is part of a series that
4:03
Speaker 3: we've done on the alchemical stages. So if you're interested
4:07
Speaker 3: in the others, go back through our catalog and check
4:10
Speaker 3: out some of the others. But yes, like you said,
4:14
Speaker 3: I like the way you put that, that it's where
4:16
Speaker 3: life kind of slows down and thickens. And one of
4:18
Speaker 3: the things that brought up for me is, you know,
4:22
Speaker 3: a lot of times people come into an analysis because
4:24
Speaker 3: they're going through a kind of intense state of change.
4:28
Speaker 3: They may be in crisis. It may be both disturbing
4:31
Speaker 3: and also at the same time exciting. They're discovering new
4:35
Speaker 3: parts of themselves. They may be dreaming like crazy. It's
4:39
Speaker 3: like their world is reordering themselves. It's really dissolving. There's
4:44
Speaker 3: the salve and you can check out our previous episode
4:47
Speaker 3: on soluteo. And I can remember my own stage of
4:52
Speaker 3: this when I was, you know, first got really interested
4:55
Speaker 3: in my inner life and my psyche and I was
4:58
Speaker 3: writing down my dreams. I still have this like really
5:01
Speaker 3: thick dream journal from that time. I was having crazy dreams.
5:05
Speaker 3: I was reading. Everything was exciting. Everything was in flux.
5:08
Speaker 3: Old structures were dissolving who I thought I was, what
5:12
Speaker 3: I thought I wanted to do with my life. And
5:13
Speaker 3: then at some point, things slowed down and started thickening.
5:17
Speaker 3: I went to graduate school. I got a degree. I
5:22
Speaker 3: got a job. You know, I didn't stop being interested
5:26
Speaker 3: in the things that I was interested in before. But
5:30
Speaker 3: the whole process, say, of analytic training... what was in
5:34
Speaker 3: some sense a dissolution, but it was also a real coagulatio,
5:39
Speaker 3: a coagulatio of my stance and persona as an analyst,
5:42
Speaker 3: a coagulatio of information and wisdom, taking in the theories
5:47
Speaker 3: and teachings of my supervisors and teachers. And then there
5:54
Speaker 3: I am, you know, middle-aged, you know, a Jungian analyst,
5:59
Speaker 3: and something has coagulated and is a little bit ordinary
6:04
Speaker 3: and earthy. You know, it just is. It's the what is.
6:08
Speaker 3: It's not so exciting and in flux anymore. And I
6:11
Speaker 3: don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. It's like, no,
6:13
Speaker 3: this is what I'm doing.
6:15
Speaker 1: Yes, we can fall in love with the salutio stage
6:18
Speaker 1: or even the sublimatio stage if we have a personality
6:21
Speaker 1: that likes to prospect, likes options to stay open. Typologically,
6:27
Speaker 1: that's the P type in the Myers-Briggs I prefer to
6:31
Speaker 1: look at possibilities. And for p-types, when they finally have
6:35
Speaker 1: to make a choice, it's almost always accompanied by grief,
6:39
Speaker 1: which is the loss of options. And yet, at the
6:43
Speaker 1: end of our life, it's the things that we actually
6:47
Speaker 1: created that provide us with a stable foundation for the life.
6:53
Speaker 1: And that if we stay in all possibilities the swirling
6:57
Speaker 1: solution of options at the end of our lives we
7:01
Speaker 1: often have very little to show for it right so
7:05
Speaker 1: too much coagulatio can be a problem things get fixed
7:09
Speaker 1: too quickly a little too tightly then it can be
7:13
Speaker 1: a problem but in the natural sequence when we come
7:17
Speaker 1: up with a brilliant idea and there's an enormous amount
7:20
Speaker 1: of energy about it like starting a podcast that It's
7:26
Speaker 1: demanding the opportunity to be lived out, to be made so,
7:33
Speaker 1: so then it can be an object that we relate
7:36
Speaker 1: to and learn much about.
7:39
Speaker 3: One of the alchemical stages that often comes after the
7:42
Speaker 3: coagulatio is putrefactio or mortificatio. So once you coagulate something,
7:48
Speaker 3: by the way, you can expect that eventually it's going
7:52
Speaker 3: to rot or putrefy or rot. change yet once again.
7:56
Speaker 3: And that happens too, right? We've been doing the same
7:59
Speaker 3: job for 20 years. We're not even aware that we've
8:01
Speaker 3: fallen out of love with it. But one day we
8:03
Speaker 3: wake up and we're just like, God, I just hate
8:05
Speaker 3: this and I need to change. Or we've been in
8:07
Speaker 3: a marriage for a long time and we realize we've
8:10
Speaker 3: gotten really constricted and unhappy and that's like too much
8:13
Speaker 3: coagulatio and then something has to happen again, which is
8:16
Speaker 3: back to solve et coagulo. It's a recurring... process right
8:23
Speaker 3: that there's always some like you said refinement so.
8:28
Speaker 1: The loosening once things are congealed allows new ideas to
8:33
Speaker 1: come forward allows a reorganization on a higher arc ideally
8:38
Speaker 1: or a dissolution that takes the basic elements and offers
8:43
Speaker 1: a way to recombine them perhaps in a dramatically different
8:47
Speaker 1: way so coagulatio must happen in order for things to
8:54
Speaker 1: proceed and happens in a cyclic way you know you
8:59
Speaker 1: decide you're a high school senior and there's all this
9:03
Speaker 1: salutio it's like oh my god what am i going
9:06
Speaker 1: to do am i going to go to college which
9:07
Speaker 1: college you land on a college you kind of persevere
9:13
Speaker 1: there's a lot of coagulatio in learning because you're taking
9:17
Speaker 1: a concept and then you're expected to remember it yeah
9:21
Speaker 1: And that goes to the image of salt, which is
9:24
Speaker 1: also connected to the coagulatio because dissolved salt, as the
9:30
Speaker 1: water evaporates, it mysteriously becomes a crystal. Salt is also
9:34
Speaker 1: a preservative. So we preserve knowledge, we preserve experiences, we
9:41
Speaker 1: make memories through the coagulatio process, and then you graduate
9:48
Speaker 1: and you discover something that you got an undergraduate degree
9:51
Speaker 1: in acting and you can't get a job. And then
9:54
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, not that that happened to me,
9:57
Speaker 1: of course, and then all of a sudden you're back
10:00
Speaker 1: in the soluteo. Right. You're like, okay, my future is
10:03
Speaker 1: now fluid, which was wonderful for me. And I was
10:06
Speaker 1: able to recoagulate as an Alexander technique teacher, which in
10:11
Speaker 1: fact was the better and right choice for me. So
10:15
Speaker 1: few of us actually went into the careers that our
10:18
Speaker 1: undergraduate degrees provided. Totally. But they gave us a period
10:23
Speaker 1: of coagulatio, which gave us a kind of often philosophical
10:28
Speaker 1: ground to stand on. So then the next solutio actually
10:33
Speaker 1: is tolerable.
10:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's a really great point. One of the
10:37
Speaker 3: things I think is so difficult about adolescence is we've
10:40
Speaker 3: never been through such a thing before. It's like, And
10:44
Speaker 3: I think we use this metaphor in the Saluteo episode,
10:49
Speaker 3: but boy, it is an apt one. So what happens
10:52
Speaker 3: to caterpillars when they go into a chrysalis is they
10:56
Speaker 3: become liquid, absolutely liquid. As I have mentioned before on
11:00
Speaker 3: the podcast, I did for a while raise monarch caterpillars.
11:04
Speaker 3: And when the pupa first forms, if you shine a
11:07
Speaker 3: flashlight through it, it's just liquid. There's nothing in there
11:10
Speaker 3: that's solid enough. And then what happens is it recoagulates.
11:15
Speaker 3: So talk about salve at coagulo. I mean, it starts
11:19
Speaker 3: as a caterpillar and then it dissolves into goop and
11:26
Speaker 3: then it coagulates into a butterfly. And I think that
11:30
Speaker 3: probably the first time that you dissolve, in my estimation,
11:34
Speaker 3: is it's the most frightening time ever. Because you've never
11:39
Speaker 3: done it before. You don't have any language for it.
11:41
Speaker 3: You don't know what's going to happen at the other end.
11:44
Speaker 3: So that's adolescence. That's you have this this kind of
11:48
Speaker 3: life as a child that you were pretty unconscious of.
11:51
Speaker 3: And then that all dissolves and you're like, what the
11:54
Speaker 3: F is happening to me? You coagulate something often in
11:59
Speaker 3: kind of later adolescence, like you're saying, Joseph, in college,
12:02
Speaker 3: you maybe have this sense of self. Maybe you have friends.
12:06
Speaker 3: Maybe you have favorite bands that you like. You have
12:08
Speaker 3: a persona. And then you go out in the world
12:12
Speaker 3: and maybe that's a new salutio. It's like, okay, what now?
12:17
Speaker 3: And for me, I did have a salutio when I graduated.
12:20
Speaker 3: I was like, you know, what am I going to do?
12:22
Speaker 3: And I was like, hey, I'm going to be in
12:24
Speaker 3: this career. And I picked this career and I really
12:26
Speaker 3: liked it. But then there was another salutio because it
12:30
Speaker 3: wasn't really the right choice for me. And so I
12:32
Speaker 3: had to deal with that grief and loss. and wait
12:37
Speaker 3: until something new coagulated. And it did. I can remember
12:41
Speaker 3: that moment, though, where I said, well, what if I
12:44
Speaker 3: really let this go? What will happen? Like, will something
12:48
Speaker 3: new coagulate? And I didn't know if it would. And
12:52
Speaker 3: that was, I can still remember how terrifying that was.
12:56
Speaker 3: You know, and actually, to be specific, what I was
13:01
Speaker 3: waiting to coagulate was a desire. That's what I was
13:06
Speaker 3: waiting for it to take form. Not a vague desire,
13:11
Speaker 3: like I'd like a good life, but like a specific desire.
13:16
Speaker 3: I want this thing because that would give me a program,
13:21
Speaker 3: you know, and oftentimes that is kind of what we're
13:23
Speaker 3: looking for. But when you go through it later in life,
13:27
Speaker 3: like a midlife crisis, your marriage dissolves, you... are 55
13:31
Speaker 3: years old and all of a sudden you're like, oh
13:33
Speaker 3: my God, what do I want to do for the
13:36
Speaker 3: next 30 years? When you retire.
13:37
Speaker 1: Retirement's a plunging solutio.
13:40
Speaker 3: Absolutely. At least you've been through it a few times
13:43
Speaker 3: and you have some sense of like, there's something on
13:46
Speaker 3: the other end of this, you know. But yes, but
13:50
Speaker 3: when you dissolve, you are waiting for that new coagulatio.
13:54
Speaker 1: So we can, in some ways, choose to dissolve something,
13:59
Speaker 1: you know, rationally. I don't like this job. It's not
14:02
Speaker 1: serving me. I'm going to dissolve that. I'm going to
14:04
Speaker 1: choose this one over here. That's a kind of dissolution
14:10
Speaker 1: and recoagulation. But the true alchemical changes that change our
14:15
Speaker 1: personality are instigated by the self. And often we notice
14:22
Speaker 1: it's happening more often than choosing it. Coming back to
14:27
Speaker 1: this transition from the salutio to the coagulatio, and we
14:32
Speaker 1: were talking about adolescence, I certainly remember being in middle school,
14:37
Speaker 1: or back then they called it junior high school, and
14:42
Speaker 1: just in this kind of dark salutio, and the symptom
14:46
Speaker 1: of that was, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That
14:52
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. This doesn't matter. That doesn't The inability to
14:59
Speaker 1: let things matter. Now, it's an interesting turn of phrase
15:03
Speaker 1: because matter is also substance.
15:06
Speaker 3: Oh, that is so interesting.
15:09
Speaker 1: That I'm not letting something become solid. Yes. In part,
15:14
Speaker 1: I probably was in an adolescent depression. I'm sure I was.
15:17
Speaker 1: But it's also not an uncommon stage. And boys particularly,
15:21
Speaker 1: to give some hope to the parents... Boys find themselves
15:26
Speaker 1: in that salutio place often a bit longer. They're in
15:32
Speaker 1: the it doesn't matter, and you ask them to do something,
15:35
Speaker 1: and they do it half-assedly, which is letting you know, like,
15:40
Speaker 1: you know, I'm doing it for you, but it doesn't
15:42
Speaker 1: matter to me. And so there's a kind of this
15:47
Speaker 1: rolling around in the unconscious for a while. Then, for me,
15:53
Speaker 1: it really wasn't until I was about 16 that a
15:59
Speaker 1: kind of sharpness emerged inside of me, volition, desire, as
16:04
Speaker 1: you said, and it became a defining process. I was
16:09
Speaker 1: able to tell myself, it does matter. This matters, that matters,
16:15
Speaker 1: something else matters, that the great void of not mattering
16:20
Speaker 1: had kind of finished itself up and I began to
16:23
Speaker 1: discover edges, so to speak, to my character and to
16:26
Speaker 1: my personality, which then served me.
16:28
Speaker 4: Well, to a certain degree, going on after I graduated
16:33
Speaker 4: high school.
16:34
Speaker 1: So there's a natural process of it doesn't matter. And
16:40
Speaker 1: just as you were saying, when you discovered later in
16:43
Speaker 1: life a true desire, and desire is come to us
16:48
Speaker 1: from the self. Appetites come from the environment. Desire, as
16:54
Speaker 1: the Kabbalists sometimes say, desire is God's promise to you
17:01
Speaker 1: because you discover a desire. It's like, even in a
17:05
Speaker 1: small way, you can't like something you don't like. We
17:08
Speaker 1: all know that if you have a spouse. Oh, look,
17:11
Speaker 1: I painted the living room pink. I love pink. You
17:15
Speaker 1: may find yourself unable to love pink in your living room, perhaps,
17:20
Speaker 1: maybe so. And you can tolerate it, be supportive, but
17:26
Speaker 1: you can't like what you don't like. You discover what
17:29
Speaker 1: you like and you discover what you desire. And every
17:33
Speaker 1: discovery begins to grab the resources of the psyche and
17:39
Speaker 1: organize them towards a strategy of to manifest or possibleize
17:46
Speaker 1: the discovered desire, which is an extraordinary thing. Again, happens
17:51
Speaker 1: to everybody. We're just putting words on it as a
17:55
Speaker 1: discrete and really interesting process that we can now name.
17:59
Speaker 3: I really like the direction this has gone, actually, that
18:03
Speaker 3: we're talking about this sort of a space where you're
18:08
Speaker 3: a little lost and you don't know what you want,
18:10
Speaker 3: you don't know what your direction is, that many of
18:13
Speaker 3: us have at some point, either in adolescence or young adulthood.
18:16
Speaker 3: You know, coagulatio has this part of the image, I think,
18:21
Speaker 3: is that it's a gradual process. Some of the amplification,
18:26
Speaker 3: I mean, you already brought up the salt one, the
18:28
Speaker 3: salt crystallite. Well, that doesn't happen in a second. That
18:30
Speaker 3: happens over days, you know, that the salt crystals crystallize out.
18:34
Speaker 4: In many.
18:35
Speaker 3: creation myths the world is covered with water and the
18:40
Speaker 3: creation of some solid land like an Iroquois creation myth
18:44
Speaker 3: for example it like it takes time this is a
18:47
Speaker 3: gradual process it doesn't happen like that and when you
18:51
Speaker 3: are that person with no firm structures in who's you
18:56
Speaker 3: know 24 years old and not sure what the heck
18:58
Speaker 3: you're doing and who you are it's a gradual accretion
19:04
Speaker 3: you know I think one of the ways that we
19:06
Speaker 3: can think about this is coagulatio has to do with
19:10
Speaker 3: the development of the ego. That's one way of thinking
19:14
Speaker 3: about it. When something gets coagulated, it's a content from
19:18
Speaker 3: the unconscious that is now attached to the ego and
19:22
Speaker 3: that is available for the ego's use, as it were. So,
19:27
Speaker 3: you know, you're talking about the volition. When nothing matters,
19:32
Speaker 3: like you said, Joseph, you don't want to do anything.
19:35
Speaker 3: But when you have a desire and a sense of
19:38
Speaker 3: what you want, there is an immediate kind of inherent
19:41
Speaker 3: possible structure in the psyche that begins to, you know,
19:46
Speaker 3: things begin to dry out a little bit around it, revealing.
19:50
Speaker 3: some solid ground. Okay, I guess if I want to
19:53
Speaker 3: become a tree expert that I need this or that,
19:57
Speaker 3: you know, qualification and, you know, whatever it is, you know,
20:00
Speaker 3: you start to, things start to line up and fall
20:04
Speaker 3: into place. And, you know, it's like, here's what it's
20:07
Speaker 3: going to take to become an arborist.
20:10
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So another way to think about it is that
20:13
Speaker 1: a true desire creates a gravitational field. And we all
20:17
Speaker 1: know that, you know, we fall in love with somebody
20:19
Speaker 1: and we feel drawn to them. We fall in love
20:23
Speaker 1: with an author and we're drawn to read their books.
20:26
Speaker 1: We use that language all the time. Wanting is a
20:30
Speaker 1: form of gravity and gravity is what creates fixity. So
20:38
Speaker 1: even atoms and molecules have this way that they stick
20:42
Speaker 1: together in these magnetically held shapes, and we call it
20:46
Speaker 1: a desk or a tree. The quantum physicists say, well,
20:52
Speaker 1: on an atomic level, there's very little holding that tree together.
20:56
Speaker 1: I mean, if the substance of the tree actually collapsed
20:59
Speaker 1: in upon itself, it might, you know.
21:01
Speaker 3: It'd be tiny.
21:02
Speaker 1: It would barely fill the head of a pin.
21:04
Speaker 3: So.
21:06
Speaker 1: What's holding all this stuff together is some form of
21:08
Speaker 1: a gravitational field that's potent enough that it acts like
21:13
Speaker 1: a solid. We're the same way that a desire creates
21:18
Speaker 1: a gravity that pulls us towards the necessary opportunities, often
21:25
Speaker 1: that allow the desire to actualize, and it also tugs people, things,
21:30
Speaker 1: and situations to us.
21:33
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
21:35
Speaker 1: This also gives us some space to consider the difference
21:40
Speaker 1: between an assigned choice and a desire. What we find
21:47
Speaker 1: is that our boss, life, may give us a task,
21:51
Speaker 1: but we have no desire. And what we find is
21:54
Speaker 1: that the ego has to kind of donkey its way
21:57
Speaker 1: through the task, but we don't feel like we're getting
22:00
Speaker 1: a lot of help inside or outside. And that's that
22:04
Speaker 1: experience of the lack of the gravitational field. It never
22:08
Speaker 1: quite comes together, which is from a phrase that we
22:14
Speaker 1: often use. It just didn't come together. You go on
22:17
Speaker 1: a date. There's no gravitational energy. You kind of drift apart.
22:24
Speaker 1: There's not a reaction between those things.
22:28
Speaker 4: So....
22:29
Speaker 1: Let's take a moment and actually talk about perhaps the
22:32
Speaker 1: shadow of coagulatio, because things can become too fixed. Here's
22:40
Speaker 1: something that we've talked about many times, and Jung also
22:44
Speaker 1: talks a lot about, literalization. We take something like a
22:50
Speaker 1: religious text, which is mythopoetic and beautiful and inspiring, and
22:55
Speaker 1: it touches us, it fuels our imagination. And then for
23:00
Speaker 1: one reason or another, we decide to make it extremely literal.
23:05
Speaker 1: And then we start grabbing onto the material world, forcing
23:10
Speaker 1: it to do things so that it approximates the religious fantasy.
23:18
Speaker 1: And that can be a very painful process for the
23:21
Speaker 1: literalizing individual, but also for the environment around it. The
23:25
Speaker 1: symbolic attitude is... a way of allowing the levels to
23:32
Speaker 1: stay separate. There are certain things that live organically in
23:38
Speaker 1: the psychological landscape. That is their fixed state. Certain feelings, ideas, symbols,
23:47
Speaker 1: the gods, for instance, they inhabit Valhalla. They inhabit Olympus.
23:54
Speaker 1: They are participating in our lived life. but they belong
24:01
Speaker 1: in the subtle world. Just being able to perceive them
24:06
Speaker 1: is enough of a coagulatio. They become knowable. But when
24:11
Speaker 1: we take the knowable symbol and we grab it and
24:16
Speaker 1: we try desperately to shove it into an object, it
24:23
Speaker 1: does violence to the vitality of the image. So literalizing
24:28
Speaker 1: is one dangerous, excessive use of coagulatio.
24:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think it bears
24:39
Speaker 3: just saying again that this is a recursive process, that
24:43
Speaker 3: things coagulate and then they rot or they dissolve. And
24:46
Speaker 3: you have to kind of let that happen, even though
24:50
Speaker 3: it's often painful. I want to just maybe talk about
24:53
Speaker 3: a slightly different way that coagulatio can work in our lives,
24:57
Speaker 3: which is, and this is a way that it might
24:59
Speaker 3: happen almost on a daily basis for any one of us.
25:02
Speaker 3: It's certainly, I think I'm about to describe a central
25:05
Speaker 3: process in an analytic situation. Let's say that you are
25:11
Speaker 3: aware that you have an uneasy feeling and it's maybe
25:15
Speaker 3: a feeling in your body a little bit. There's some
25:18
Speaker 3: tension maybe and just a little, a little, bat's week
25:23
Speaker 3: that something's not quite right, but you don't know what
25:25
Speaker 3: it is. And so you sit with it, you think
25:29
Speaker 3: about it. Maybe if it's really bothering you, you kind
25:31
Speaker 3: of slow down, close your eyes, let yourself drift. And
25:35
Speaker 3: then it could be that some words come up and
25:39
Speaker 3: you realize that you're anxious because, you know, the anniversary
25:45
Speaker 3: of your parents' death is next week. And that is,
25:50
Speaker 3: you know, maybe you'd forgotten that, but there it is.
25:54
Speaker 3: And that is a very important moment because something has
26:00
Speaker 3: been diffused. If you want to think about it, it's
26:03
Speaker 3: kind of been in solution. It's there, but it's not
26:07
Speaker 3: very tangible or known. And then you know it. And
26:13
Speaker 3: once you can say something like, oh, I forgot this
26:17
Speaker 3: time of year is always hard because it was, you know,
26:20
Speaker 3: that's the week my mom died. You have a very
26:24
Speaker 3: different relationship with it. Now, ideally, once you know that,
26:29
Speaker 3: you don't split off from that embodied feeling. The thinking
26:35
Speaker 3: function has allowed you to know something that was in
26:38
Speaker 3: some sense not known, like there but not known. You
26:41
Speaker 3: have language for it. Once you have language for it,
26:45
Speaker 3: the language can function as a kind of key or
26:48
Speaker 3: a doorway back to the original embodied experience, hopefully. So
26:53
Speaker 3: that you can say, oh, that's right. My mom died
26:56
Speaker 3: a year ago. Then you can put that worried feeling,
27:00
Speaker 3: that dis-ease, you can kind of put it up on
27:03
Speaker 3: the shelf. You can set it aside. Yeah, but I
27:06
Speaker 3: got to make this phone call from work. And then
27:08
Speaker 3: there's this thing that I have to do. And it's
27:11
Speaker 3: okay because you know that's there and you know what
27:13
Speaker 3: it is. Then when you have some free time later,
27:17
Speaker 3: you can take it back down. You can think about it.
27:20
Speaker 3: You can call back the feeling. And this time you
27:24
Speaker 3: can think about the feeling, maybe a journal about it.
27:27
Speaker 3: Maybe you talk to a friend. Maybe you call your
27:31
Speaker 3: therapist up and go, you know, can we have a set?
27:33
Speaker 3: I know we quit working together six months ago, but
27:36
Speaker 3: I'd like to come back in for a session because,
27:37
Speaker 3: you know, next week's going to be a little hard
27:39
Speaker 3: for me. Whatever you can You can manipulate it. You
27:43
Speaker 3: can get your hands around it. It's now a thing,
27:46
Speaker 3: you know, in essence. So it's the way that we
27:51
Speaker 3: can think about coagulatio as connecting thinking and feeling, not
27:56
Speaker 3: in a way that gets rid of feeling, but that
27:59
Speaker 3: gives us kind of a handle for it. We can
28:02
Speaker 3: carry it around. We can turn it a different direction.
28:06
Speaker 3: We can see it from a different perspective. And so
28:09
Speaker 3: that process of taking something that's like in that solution
28:14
Speaker 3: and then making it firm up, that is very much
28:19
Speaker 3: an important part of what happens in analysis.
28:22
Speaker 1: Yes, mentalization, this ability to find representative words for these
28:30
Speaker 1: mysterious body states, these memories that have fallen out of
28:36
Speaker 1: our awareness. is absolutely essential. And when we can ponder something,
28:44
Speaker 1: which we often use the term circumambulation, you put the
28:48
Speaker 1: mystery in the center of the temple and then you
28:50
Speaker 1: walk around it from different angles and think about it.
28:54
Speaker 1: What's my body got to say about it? My mind,
28:57
Speaker 1: my emotions, what does my soul, my spirit have to
29:00
Speaker 1: say about this? And that circumambulation incarnates something. And a memory,
29:07
Speaker 1: as we had said earlier, is a way of congealing
29:12
Speaker 1: something so that it moves from being unknown to known. Now,
29:17
Speaker 1: we can have a lot of resistances to that. I'm
29:20
Speaker 1: sure you've all had the experience where you ask somebody
29:23
Speaker 1: a question and they'll say, I don't want to think
29:25
Speaker 1: about that right now.
29:27
Speaker 3: Oh, yes.
29:28
Speaker 1: I don't want this to coagulate. Shush, shush, shush, shush.
29:32
Speaker 1: Or we even feel... Like we've heard, let's say somebody's
29:35
Speaker 1: had a misfortune, we kind of want to comfort them,
29:37
Speaker 1: but we're a little afraid to ask how they're doing
29:41
Speaker 1: to coagulate the reality between you and the person that
29:46
Speaker 1: you're concerned about. Should I say it? Is it okay
29:52
Speaker 1: to coagulate the sadness, the loss? We feel tentative about
29:58
Speaker 1: it because we know that when it coagulates, it's going
30:02
Speaker 1: to have a greater impact, to the ego at least.
30:06
Speaker 1: The irony is that it's still affecting the person and
30:09
Speaker 1: the people around them. It's just happening a little bit
30:13
Speaker 1: below the surface, but people are getting stomach aches or
30:15
Speaker 1: they're feeling spacey or they're eating too much. All of
30:20
Speaker 1: that energy is still doing stuff to us, but we
30:24
Speaker 1: can feel very cautious about naming the things.
30:32
Speaker 3: And to just unspool that one more rotation, I guess,
30:38
Speaker 3: you know, I think about it very much verbal because surprise, surprise,
30:42
Speaker 3: I'm a super verbal person. But the same thing can
30:46
Speaker 3: be true for an image. If you have that uneasy feeling,
30:51
Speaker 3: getting an image is another way that it coagulates. Then
30:55
Speaker 3: you have an image and it might be an image
30:57
Speaker 3: from a dream or an act of imagination. Once you
31:01
Speaker 3: have an image for something, again, you have the possibility
31:05
Speaker 3: for relationship with it. And once you have that, and again,
31:10
Speaker 3: you're not cutting off the kind of body sensation or
31:15
Speaker 3: that deeper resonance of it. It's kind of connected and
31:19
Speaker 3: it's sturdy. That's when things can actually begin to transform
31:24
Speaker 3: as well, which goes back to this idea that what
31:27
Speaker 3: happens after coagulatio is often putrefactio, things transform. Once they
31:33
Speaker 3: have a form, that can transform, but they have to
31:36
Speaker 3: have a form first.
31:38
Speaker 1: Entropy is ever-present in all the worlds. And even accepting that,
31:44
Speaker 1: which our Buddhist friends do such a beautiful job with,
31:47
Speaker 1: let's say, Vipassana yoga, that we become aware of the artifact.
31:52
Speaker 1: We recognize that all artifacts are created, all artifacts are
31:58
Speaker 1: sustain and all artifacts will again dissolve and the cycle
32:03
Speaker 1: will continue again and again but ideally on a higher
32:07
Speaker 1: arc this also goes to trauma work when we have
32:11
Speaker 1: a trauma particularly in childhood it becomes a fixed thing
32:16
Speaker 1: and it resists the soluteo process to turn the trauma
32:23
Speaker 1: into a memory we had a guest um who came
32:26
Speaker 1: and described this so beautifully to us that persistent trauma
32:31
Speaker 1: is actually apparently living in the wrong part of the brain.
32:35
Speaker 1: It's living in the part of the brain that is
32:38
Speaker 1: tending to current time reality. And then the memory becomes intrusive.
32:44
Speaker 1: When we can think about it, we might go through
32:47
Speaker 1: a process of offering its symbols, and by that I
32:50
Speaker 1: mean making art, poetry out of it, over time what
32:55
Speaker 1: we want. is to take that and to move it
32:58
Speaker 1: into long-term storage so that it can be quiet, not forgotten,
33:04
Speaker 1: but be quiet so that then the current reality has
33:09
Speaker 1: our full attention and then we can work with the
33:12
Speaker 1: current reality and create a life that we want. So
33:16
Speaker 1: this change, the overly solid, becomes a solution and then
33:22
Speaker 1: it recoagulates as reality something in the archive. I mean,
33:27
Speaker 1: that's very much what trauma work is, when it is
33:30
Speaker 1: possible to do. Some of this language is also showing
33:33
Speaker 1: up with psychedelic-assisted therapies. There's an idea, I'm not personally
33:40
Speaker 1: sure about it myself, but one of the reasons that
33:44
Speaker 1: we can find it difficult to change and evolve is
33:48
Speaker 1: that there's a resistance in the actual neurons of the
33:51
Speaker 1: brain that There's a fixity there and there's an evolutionary
33:55
Speaker 1: reason for that. That works to our advantage. For instance,
33:58
Speaker 1: you learn how to walk, the body just continues to
34:01
Speaker 1: build on that as a fact. If every morning we
34:05
Speaker 1: had to relearn how to walk or every morning we
34:08
Speaker 1: had to relearn how to brush our teeth or to swallow,
34:11
Speaker 1: I mean, we couldn't survive. So we rely on the
34:15
Speaker 1: fact that our neurons kind of lock down and so
34:19
Speaker 1: we can have a stable platform. The problem is that
34:23
Speaker 1: on a neurologic level, the locking down can be indiscriminate.
34:28
Speaker 1: And so then we have to look at our quote-unquote
34:30
Speaker 1: bad habits and find a way to soften it up
34:36
Speaker 1: and rework it, turn the vase back into clay or
34:42
Speaker 1: into molten glass to try to let it be influenced
34:47
Speaker 1: by something more sophisticated, more useful. That's also part of
34:52
Speaker 1: that psychodynamic process of looking at a primitive defense and
34:57
Speaker 1: working it till it becomes a more mature coping mechanism
35:01
Speaker 1: that's less costly to the person. That's a dissolving, reformulating, dissolving,
35:08
Speaker 1: and reformulating. So the person that may be sadly dissociated
35:14
Speaker 1: very easily after a couple of years might be in
35:17
Speaker 1: the same circumstance and find it just humorous. instead of overwhelming.
35:23
Speaker 1: That's that process of dissolving and recoagulating our coping mechanisms. That's, again,
35:29
Speaker 1: something very central to analytic work.
35:33
Speaker 3: You know, what you're talking about reminds me of this
35:38
Speaker 3: really beautiful fairy tale. And one of the central images
35:41
Speaker 3: in the fairy tale is this golden tree that arises
35:47
Speaker 3: out of this molten gold, this tree comes up, is created,
35:51
Speaker 3: and immediately falls back down and gets melted back down.
35:56
Speaker 3: And it's this ever kind of circulating process. And this
36:02
Speaker 3: goes to the point that you made earlier, Joseph, that
36:06
Speaker 3: if there was never any tree there, there would be
36:09
Speaker 3: molten gold, which is very nice, but there would be
36:12
Speaker 3: no thing So it's the importance of coagulating something in
36:19
Speaker 3: our lives. And I'm thinking of the book Anatomy of
36:25
Speaker 3: the Psyche by Edinger. He says something really interesting in there,
36:30
Speaker 3: in coagulatio, that it is a guilt-ridden process. And that's
36:36
Speaker 3: so interesting to think about. And I think it's true
36:39
Speaker 3: because in the stage of salutio, everything is possible. the
36:45
Speaker 3: highest version of everything is in potential. And once you
36:50
Speaker 3: coagulate something, whether it's a marriage or knowledge or, you know,
36:56
Speaker 3: you're dreaming of the great novel that you're going to
36:58
Speaker 3: write and then you write it, you may be very,
37:01
Speaker 3: very satisfied that you've written a novel and you may
37:05
Speaker 3: think you did a great job. But in some way,
37:09
Speaker 3: it's betrayed the ideal that existed in before there was
37:14
Speaker 3: a concrete thing. So every coagulatio is a kind of
37:21
Speaker 3: fall from grace. It's the coming into being of the real,
37:28
Speaker 3: which always is a disappointment from the ideal in some way.
37:34
Speaker 3: In some way it is. And Jung talks about this,
37:37
Speaker 3: the importance of guilt. Guilt is so much a part
37:41
Speaker 3: of sort of living a real life. Because you do
37:45
Speaker 3: something and you've betrayed the ideal, always, whenever you actually
37:52
Speaker 3: do something. You know, I've worked with many, many married
37:57
Speaker 3: people in my career. And I would say that every
38:00
Speaker 3: long-term marriage, there is some deep heartache in it. Because
38:07
Speaker 3: no matter who we married and how carefully we chose,
38:11
Speaker 3: there was something that got betrayed by us picking that person.
38:16
Speaker 3: There's some part of ourselves we couldn't let into the
38:19
Speaker 3: relationship or we had to not know about or we
38:21
Speaker 3: had to split off or that we haven't been able
38:24
Speaker 3: to pay attention to because of the demands of that
38:27
Speaker 3: particular relationship. If we'd married someone else, maybe that part
38:31
Speaker 3: would be online, but there'd be something else that we
38:34
Speaker 3: couldn't let in. So always the real thing in the
38:39
Speaker 3: world is, is a kind of.
38:42
Speaker 1: There's a loss of virtue.
38:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there always is.
38:46
Speaker 1: Right, the divine version is full of virtue and beauty.
38:52
Speaker 1: Artists feel this all the time. You know, they have
38:54
Speaker 1: this gorgeous idea, and then the poet is hammering away
38:58
Speaker 1: at words, trying to induce the experience in themselves and
39:03
Speaker 1: in the reader, and it's never quite... happens that you
39:07
Speaker 1: almost have to have the experience before you can actually
39:10
Speaker 1: understand what the poet is saying, which is, you know,
39:13
Speaker 1: a heartache. Just as you said, we develop this image
39:17
Speaker 1: for the perfect divine partner. And then, you know, as
39:22
Speaker 1: often is in the fairy tale, everybody comes and offers,
39:25
Speaker 1: to marry the prince or the princess everything's turned away
39:30
Speaker 1: because nothing is quite as glorious as the idea the
39:36
Speaker 1: internal image and to settle and That's an important word
39:42
Speaker 1: because settling implies gravity. Yes, it does. You know, things
39:46
Speaker 1: are in solution and then, you know, they settle down
39:50
Speaker 1: to the bottom. Things settle down. Yes, that we have
39:56
Speaker 1: to settle down in order to have a lived experience,
40:01
Speaker 1: even if it's only part of the virtuous fantasy that
40:06
Speaker 1: we hoped for.
40:07
Speaker 4: No.
40:09
Speaker 1: Jung has a wonderful way of understanding this. If we
40:13
Speaker 1: understand that we exist in multiple levels, there are certain
40:17
Speaker 1: experiences that will incarnate, let's say, in a love relationship.
40:22
Speaker 1: But the other experiences can still be matured in the
40:26
Speaker 1: imaginal world. We can still have a relationship to them,
40:31
Speaker 1: even if the marriage doesn't necessarily create a ground where
40:35
Speaker 1: all of that would be welcomed. by ourselves or by
40:40
Speaker 1: our partners. And yes, I like this idea that once
40:45
Speaker 1: we discover the beautiful thing, that there could be a
40:50
Speaker 1: sense of betraying it when we manifest it. I know
40:58
Speaker 1: writers can feel this way, creative writers particularly. They'll write
41:03
Speaker 1: the book and it's accompanied by a kind of punishment
41:08
Speaker 1: from the gods. The unconscious feels something's been stolen from
41:12
Speaker 1: it and now it's going to be out in the
41:14
Speaker 1: world and the punishment often is great fear right before
41:18
Speaker 1: publishing it or this vague sense that the collective is
41:22
Speaker 1: going to hurt the writer for stealing fire from the gods,
41:27
Speaker 1: which of course Prometheus is a frightening example. And I
41:32
Speaker 1: think a number of artists might say, yes, I had
41:35
Speaker 1: my gallery opening and then I went home and a liver,
41:37
Speaker 1: a eagle ate my liver afterwards on a feeling level.
41:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. So it's allowing ourselves to be tied down
41:48
Speaker 3: to the real and the actual and To kind of
41:54
Speaker 3: come back in a way to where we were at
41:56
Speaker 3: the beginning, you know, you were talking about the need
41:59
Speaker 3: for coagulation in life. And that if you don't do that,
42:04
Speaker 3: it often leaves you feeling empty at the end. So
42:12
Speaker 3: coagulatio is to move into another vein of Jung's thought.
42:18
Speaker 3: It is the antidote to puer psychology.
42:22
Speaker 1: For sure.
42:23
Speaker 3: It is allowing yourself to become real and substantial and
42:28
Speaker 3: kind of made of earth.
42:31
Speaker 1: And again, if somehow the earth has become too painful,
42:35
Speaker 1: we kind of touch the earth as if it's a
42:38
Speaker 1: hot griddle, and then we bounce off. So we try
42:41
Speaker 1: a job for a couple of months, and then we
42:44
Speaker 1: bounce back into the air because it's a little too hot.
42:48
Speaker 1: And that's because the coagulation process was often associated with heat.
42:55
Speaker 1: That we're hot in the beginning, and then as something cools,
43:01
Speaker 1: it coagulates. If you've ever made jello, by the way,
43:05
Speaker 1: stick that package of God knows what's in it into
43:08
Speaker 1: a pot of water, you boil it, and then you
43:11
Speaker 1: have to be patient. You have to, you understand the heat,
43:16
Speaker 1: and then we have to let things cool down. And
43:18
Speaker 1: the cooling is also that part of loss.
43:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if I can amplify that for a second.
43:25
Speaker 3: I love that, that you brought that up, because what
43:27
Speaker 3: it made me think is, you know, the new thing
43:29
Speaker 3: that coagulated for me when I was around 30 was like, God,
43:32
Speaker 3: I think I want to be a Jungian analyst, you know,
43:34
Speaker 3: and that's the thing that kind of created this new structure.
43:38
Speaker 3: It was this new coagulatio. It was very exciting. I'm
43:42
Speaker 3: reading Jung. I'm going to graduate school. I'm learning all
43:46
Speaker 3: this stuff. I start the Philadelphia Jung Seminar. I may
43:50
Speaker 3: have told this story before on the podcast, but I
43:52
Speaker 3: remember the first time I went to the Philadelphia Young Seminar.
43:55
Speaker 3: You know, I'd been in analysis for some years, but
43:57
Speaker 3: I'd never been in a group before where these ideas
44:00
Speaker 3: were being talked about. And I felt like I floated home.
44:04
Speaker 3: I was in an altered state. And I was so,
44:08
Speaker 3: I mean, talk about hot, right? It was so hot.
44:11
Speaker 3: And God, I loved going to those seminar weekends. And
44:15
Speaker 3: then I applied for training and I got in. It
44:17
Speaker 3: was so nice and bubbly, warm and oozy and gooey.
44:23
Speaker 3: And then, you know, I've been in training for a
44:25
Speaker 3: million years and, you know, I've been going to the
44:28
Speaker 3: seminar for a million years. And I can remember going
44:30
Speaker 3: to the seminar and, you know, having someone fantastic teach,
44:35
Speaker 3: but just sort of being like, I've heard that before.
44:39
Speaker 3: And it was kind of a loss, you know. And,
44:42
Speaker 3: you know, by the time I graduated, you're like, by
44:44
Speaker 3: the time you finish training, you're like, oh, God, I
44:46
Speaker 3: can't wait to get out of here.
44:50
Speaker 4: Like the fixity of the training became this kind of
44:53
Speaker 4: torturous fixity.
44:56
Speaker 3: Yeah. But then it's like, there I am. I'm consolidated, right?
44:59
Speaker 3: I am now a Jungian analyst and I have this
45:02
Speaker 3: professional credential and I have this professional persona and.
45:06
Speaker 1: I've got, right.
45:08
Speaker 3: I've got all of the books on my freaking bookshelf.
45:12
Speaker 1: And then you get the post-graduation depression.
45:14
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the thing is that it didn't have that.
45:19
Speaker 3: juicy excitement anymore. It just didn't. That's not to say
45:24
Speaker 3: that I haven't loved it. I obviously have. I think
45:26
Speaker 3: that's pretty obvious. But that first feeling of the day
45:31
Speaker 3: that I went to the Philadelphia Young Seminar and don't
45:33
Speaker 3: remember how I got home because I was in some
45:35
Speaker 3: kind of glorious, joyful, super heated, billowy, altered state. No,
45:43
Speaker 3: that is gone, baby. And it's just like it's cold.
45:46
Speaker 3: And I'm just like, OK. I've got to do the
45:49
Speaker 3: next thing to graduate from training and, you know, and then.
45:53
Speaker 1: All of that.
45:54
Speaker 3: And it coagulates into something that, you know, I mean,
45:59
Speaker 3: you know, that's rather ordinary, actually. Oh, I got to
46:03
Speaker 3: wake up in the morning and have my cup of
46:05
Speaker 3: coffee and then I go see my patients and that's
46:09
Speaker 3: and then lather, rinse, repeat. That's what I do the
46:11
Speaker 3: next day too, you know.
46:13
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the albedo, which is part of
46:16
Speaker 1: the coagulatio, the whitening of things. So some alchemists think
46:23
Speaker 1: of the negredo as the nighttime. It's black. It's mysterious.
46:27
Speaker 1: I don't know. Stuff is moving around in the nighttime.
46:32
Speaker 1: The rebedo is often depicted as just the beginning of sunrise.
46:36
Speaker 1: And we all know that moment. It's, you know, that
46:41
Speaker 1: half hour before sunrise. where it's dead silent, and then
46:46
Speaker 1: the morning chorus of birds just starts, and then it's
46:49
Speaker 1: like this cacophony of announcement, the sunrise, and then in
46:55
Speaker 1: true daybreak, when the sun is really bright, that's often
46:59
Speaker 1: associated with the albedo, where the eye becomes capable of seeing,
47:07
Speaker 1: seeing one's thoughts, seeing one's imaginations, taking the dream at
47:13
Speaker 1: night and putting it on the paper and pondering its
47:18
Speaker 1: relevance to the last one to three days of your
47:22
Speaker 1: life and seeking to sip new meaning. And the dream
47:28
Speaker 1: itself is giving us new images of our feelings, perhaps
47:32
Speaker 1: other hidden dynamics, making the invisible visible. So the coagulatio
47:39
Speaker 1: is the daybreak. the light that gives us something to
47:45
Speaker 1: actually look at. Now, if we literalize everything, there's more
47:51
Speaker 1: of a loss. But if we can understand that the
47:55
Speaker 1: symbol is pointing to a vast reality beyond it, that
48:01
Speaker 1: the symbol is mysterious because it is expressing more than
48:06
Speaker 1: can actually immediately be seen.
48:09
Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
48:10
Speaker 1: If we live a symbolic life, then the objects around
48:15
Speaker 1: us are part of that symbolic world. They too partake
48:21
Speaker 1: in a symbolic reality that says more than the actual
48:26
Speaker 1: object can say in the material world. Things are more
48:33
Speaker 1: than they seem. And That's part of a whole process
48:37
Speaker 1: that the Gnostics talk about in terms of finding the
48:40
Speaker 1: sparks of Sophia in the material world, or the Kabbalists
48:45
Speaker 1: talk about the breaking of the vessels and the sparks
48:50
Speaker 1: of God that each human being needs to recognize. So
48:54
Speaker 1: if we can recognize the self in its expression in
49:01
Speaker 1: the physical world, we are re-enchanting the sequence where we
49:07
Speaker 1: put the self as the actor and the material event
49:11
Speaker 1: or the object as the fruit, then the objects continue
49:18
Speaker 1: to hold the potential of change and the possibility that
49:22
Speaker 1: the self is still acting, that it isn't done yet.
49:27
Speaker 3: And really, the self is never done. And that's actually
49:32
Speaker 3: the exciting thing, is that even if you have a
49:36
Speaker 3: life that you love, but it feels like you're done. And,
49:41
Speaker 3: you know, where's the possibility for growth and change? Because
49:44
Speaker 3: you've sort of been there, done that. You're not done.
49:47
Speaker 3: The self will have other plans and there will be
49:50
Speaker 3: a putrefaction or another dissolution and you'll get to go
49:54
Speaker 3: around again.
49:56
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And the great agent of salve coagula is love.
50:04
Speaker 1: That is a great spiritual secret. that we intuitively know.
50:10
Speaker 1: We embrace it much more willingly when we're young. When
50:15
Speaker 1: you're 15 and you fall in love for your first
50:18
Speaker 1: time with another person, you'll throw yourself fully into it
50:23
Speaker 1: that you want to have this kind of solution magic
50:27
Speaker 1: and two become one and we give everything and we're
50:31
Speaker 1: so influenced by the interests or the opinions of the
50:34
Speaker 1: other person. We're willing to fall into a love solutio
50:42
Speaker 1: to blend. As we become older, you'll notice it's harder
50:47
Speaker 1: to fall in love because it's harder to imagine changing
50:55
Speaker 1: or even wanting to change. So later in life, it
50:59
Speaker 1: takes a much more powerful love and more of a
51:05
Speaker 1: choice to surrender yourself to that crucible that is asking
51:11
Speaker 1: us to soften and take in something new, which could
51:16
Speaker 1: be the birth of your first child. It could be
51:19
Speaker 1: a second marriage. It could be finding a new philosophy
51:25
Speaker 1: that changes you and turns you upside down. But if
51:29
Speaker 1: you love it and you know it to be love,
51:33
Speaker 1: can you permit yourself to dissolve enough to let the
51:39
Speaker 1: new thing matter.
51:44
Speaker 3: There you go. And with that, I think we'll switch
51:49
Speaker 3: to a dream. And today's dream comes from a 32-year-old
52:06
Speaker 3: woman who's a marriage and family therapist, and she has
52:08
Speaker 3: titled her dream, Fragile Forms. I dreamt I was walking
52:14
Speaker 3: into a room that felt like the toy room from
52:16
Speaker 3: my childhood home, though it was empty now. Sunlight streamed
52:20
Speaker 3: through large windows, illuminating the warm brown hardwood floors. As
52:25
Speaker 3: I stepped inside, I saw three strange yellow creatures on
52:28
Speaker 3: the ground, somewhere between jellyfish and single-celled organisms. They pulsed
52:35
Speaker 3: gently but were under attack from a dark, roach-like creature
52:38
Speaker 3: that moved with an unsettling fluidity, almost like an animal cell.
52:44
Speaker 3: I managed to save two of the yellow creatures, tossing
52:47
Speaker 3: them across the room to safety. But the third one
52:50
Speaker 3: that I didn't toss had already been torn open, its red,
52:55
Speaker 3: circular insides exposed. It was dead. I felt a deep
52:59
Speaker 3: sadness for it. Determined to protect the survivors, I carried
53:03
Speaker 3: them out the back way, just as I would have
53:06
Speaker 3: in my old home, through the laundry room and boiler room. Outside,
53:10
Speaker 3: I stepped into one of the most breathtaking landscapes I'd
53:14
Speaker 3: ever seen, a dream or in life. The world was alive.
53:19
Speaker 3: Lush green grass that seemed to roll endlessly, tall oaks, butterflies,
53:24
Speaker 3: and bees moving in harmony. People were strolling peacefully. I
53:29
Speaker 3: crossed a bridge and saw a creek, deciding that this
53:31
Speaker 3: would be the safe haven for the creatures. I searched
53:34
Speaker 3: for the right spot, avoiding chaotic currents and small waterfalls,
53:38
Speaker 3: until I found a calm, shaded area. Carefully, I placed
53:43
Speaker 3: them into the water and watched them begin to swim.
53:46
Speaker 3: But suddenly, a creature emerged, something like a tardigrad, a
53:50
Speaker 3: water bear. It swam up effortlessly and swallowed one of
53:54
Speaker 3: the yellow beings. Before I could react, it took the
53:57
Speaker 3: second as well, then sank back into the depths where
54:00
Speaker 3: another dark, round creature lurked. I realized with a sinking
54:05
Speaker 3: horror that I had placed them directly in a predator's path.
54:10
Speaker 3: I had led them to their end. A wave of
54:13
Speaker 3: guilt and grief washed over me. What I thought was
54:17
Speaker 3: safety had been a trap. And she says, I dreamt
54:21
Speaker 3: this as I am transitioning from a group private practice
54:24
Speaker 3: to opening my own private practice as a therapist. It's
54:28
Speaker 3: the first time I've ever been my own boss. I'm
54:31
Speaker 3: excited about it overall and also have some creeping doubts
54:35
Speaker 3: about marketing and losing clients. I'm also navigating a hard,
54:39
Speaker 3: strenuous relationship with my sister who is two years younger
54:42
Speaker 3: than me. It's been the most strained ever and I'm
54:46
Speaker 3: having a hard time coping. I'm also noticing the emotional
54:50
Speaker 3: distance that I feel from my mom. Things don't feel
54:53
Speaker 3: the same as before ever since I spoke up about
54:56
Speaker 3: some of my needs. And the main feelings in the dream,
54:59
Speaker 3: I went from disturbed and determined, happy and at peace,
55:03
Speaker 3: then totally guilty and mortified. She mentions feeling vulnerability, predation, beauty, life,
55:12
Speaker 3: and death.
55:15
Speaker 1: So, the dreamer starts. in a room that reminds her
55:20
Speaker 1: of the toy room from childhood. So the initial setting
55:26
Speaker 1: gives us a bit of information about where in the
55:32
Speaker 1: psychic environment is the work, the opus, the action of
55:37
Speaker 1: the self dissolving and recoagulating is putting its lens. And
55:44
Speaker 1: at the end, there's a new or different attitude. quite
55:49
Speaker 1: different from the naive innocence of childhood. Yeah. And a process,
55:54
Speaker 1: what I would say, of initiation, painful and essential to
56:01
Speaker 1: transition from the child place to the place of the adult,
56:08
Speaker 1: the world.
56:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really like what you did there because it
56:13
Speaker 3: is so helpful sometimes to start with the initial situation
56:17
Speaker 3: in a dream, and then contrast it with the situation
56:21
Speaker 3: at the end. And this is a great example of
56:23
Speaker 3: that because they're very, very different attitudes at the beginning
56:28
Speaker 3: and at the end. Sometimes in dreams, we can be
56:30
Speaker 3: so caught by a particular image, like the images of
56:34
Speaker 3: these creatures, for example, and we could spend all this
56:36
Speaker 3: time talking about them. But if you don't sort of
56:39
Speaker 3: clock what happened, this is how it was at the beginning.
56:44
Speaker 3: Like you said, the childhood toy room, like it is
56:46
Speaker 3: a place of kind of childhood innocence. And when she
56:49
Speaker 3: knows something at the end, she didn't know that at
56:52
Speaker 3: the beginning. I want to say related to that, something
56:56
Speaker 3: has been sacrificed. It wasn't the dream ego's intention to
57:01
Speaker 3: sacrifice these creatures. But if you just look at what happened,
57:06
Speaker 3: she took them and fed them to the monster, which
57:12
Speaker 3: is what happens in a lot of initiations and rituals
57:17
Speaker 3: in indigenous cultures is that some angry god needs to
57:23
Speaker 3: be propitiated by being fed something, just like the Minotaur
57:29
Speaker 3: required seven women and seven male virgins. You have to
57:35
Speaker 3: feed the monster. And that is something that might happen
57:42
Speaker 3: in an initiation. is the dark forces of the unconscious
57:47
Speaker 3: have to be propitiated.
57:49
Speaker 1: So if we think of the sunlit and sunny yellow
57:56
Speaker 1: egg yolks, for lack of something else, you know, in
57:59
Speaker 1: the room gently pulsing, and it fills her with a
58:03
Speaker 1: kind of seemingly sunny feeling almost in the beginning. And then,
58:10
Speaker 1: as happens in childhood, nature... and the realities and vicissitudes
58:17
Speaker 1: of life begin to intrude upon the sunny sweetness of
58:23
Speaker 1: early childhood, particularly if we were shielded, correctly so, by
58:27
Speaker 1: the way. For instance, I remember the first time my
58:31
Speaker 1: nephew discovered that things can die. And many of us
58:35
Speaker 1: may remember that it's shocking that if you weren't raised
58:40
Speaker 1: in a family where that was discussed, maybe the the
58:43
Speaker 1: first time a family pet passes away. It's astounding because
58:48
Speaker 1: in the child mind, all of these things that we
58:51
Speaker 1: enjoy are eternal, or should be, or we want them
58:54
Speaker 1: to be. And yet life intrudes, and the process of
58:59
Speaker 1: salve et coagula, which is a truth, it is a
59:03
Speaker 1: natural reality, intrudes upon the innocence, the sunny innocence of
59:09
Speaker 1: our childhood. which also makes us more capable later in life.
59:15
Speaker 1: She is also the unwitting participant in nature. So she
59:22
Speaker 1: goes outside and it's breathtaking and beautiful and people are
59:26
Speaker 1: walking and the sky and the plants, but she's naive
59:31
Speaker 1: to the fact that all those people kill and eat things,
59:35
Speaker 1: and there are things that are eating the plants, and
59:38
Speaker 1: that there's a constant process of things being gobbled up,
59:42
Speaker 1: energy is freed, it's integrated into another system, which might
59:46
Speaker 1: be an animal or something else, and that part of
59:51
Speaker 1: keeping that verdant beauty of the world is the constant
59:56
Speaker 1: process of dissolving and recoagulating, which, by the way, is
1:00:01
Speaker 1: also what keeps people young. The faster your cells grow
1:00:08
Speaker 1: and die and get replaced, the younger you look. The
1:00:13
Speaker 1: reason we look older is that the cellular growth begins
1:00:17
Speaker 1: to slow down. The cells last longer and longer and
1:00:23
Speaker 1: longer until you're 63 and.
1:00:30
Speaker 1: And that's why we look older, that youth and vitality
1:00:35
Speaker 1: require that very fast process of salve coagula to make
1:00:42
Speaker 1: things fresh once again. So, yes, she took a piece
1:00:49
Speaker 1: of her childhood. She thought she would set it free
1:00:52
Speaker 1: into a world that would be as innocent as her
1:00:55
Speaker 1: toy room, only to see that it is subject to
1:00:59
Speaker 1: the endless cycle of eating and being eaten which is
1:01:05
Speaker 1: in the larger sense the release and reintegration of energy
1:01:10
Speaker 1: ATP metabolically and that the entire universe relies on that
1:01:19
Speaker 1: you can't make a battery function without that you can't
1:01:23
Speaker 1: eat and live without that and We ourselves, our spirit,
1:01:29
Speaker 1: must be freed from these vessels, these pelts, so to speak,
1:01:36
Speaker 1: so that, if we believe in reincarnation, as I do,
1:01:39
Speaker 1: that we then are able to return in a new vessel,
1:01:43
Speaker 1: a new form to continue to experience life. And her
1:01:49
Speaker 1: own process of leaving the toy room of the group
1:01:53
Speaker 1: practice And being out on her own in the world
1:01:58
Speaker 1: means that something innocent in her is exposed to the
1:02:03
Speaker 1: world as it is, which is also a competition because
1:02:09
Speaker 1: nature competes. If you're the alpha predator, you're at the
1:02:14
Speaker 1: top of the competing. And she's worried about being able
1:02:17
Speaker 1: to compete successfully to make her practice work.
1:02:22
Speaker 3: If I had to have a fantasy about what I
1:02:25
Speaker 3: think this dream might be commenting on, I'm obviously making
1:02:29
Speaker 3: this up. But here's the fantasy that I have. She's 32.
1:02:35
Speaker 3: So in a way, she's sort of in the first
1:02:40
Speaker 3: stage of sort of mature adulthood, I think. For me,
1:02:43
Speaker 3: I didn't really grow up until I was 28. So
1:02:45
Speaker 3: 32 is pretty early in that. And it is a
1:02:49
Speaker 3: time where you're where you feel that more often. You
1:02:53
Speaker 3: feel that you're more your own person. Two important relationships
1:02:57
Speaker 3: in her life, her sister and her mother, she's been
1:03:01
Speaker 3: struggling with. And it sounds like, and this is where
1:03:04
Speaker 3: I'm making things up, sounds like she recently took a
1:03:07
Speaker 3: stand with her mother and spoke up and said something
1:03:12
Speaker 3: about her needs. And maybe what happened is she thought
1:03:17
Speaker 3: that that that was going to bring about a resolution.
1:03:20
Speaker 3: And in fact, it has brought more distance. So there
1:03:24
Speaker 3: was maybe, again, I'm just acknowledging I'm making this up,
1:03:27
Speaker 3: there was a fantasy, that an innocent fantasy, that if
1:03:33
Speaker 3: she spoke up and said, mom, here's what I need,
1:03:38
Speaker 3: that she would have the experience with her mom that
1:03:41
Speaker 3: maybe she'd always hoped for. And what's happened instead is
1:03:46
Speaker 3: her mom hasn't been able to respond to that in
1:03:49
Speaker 3: the way that she might have hoped. The innocence of
1:03:52
Speaker 3: childhood has been sacrificed in service to greater psychological truth.
1:03:59
Speaker 3: But that's very hard. That's a very hard thing. Maybe
1:04:04
Speaker 3: that this kind of sunny, beautiful thing was the unrealistic expectation,
1:04:10
Speaker 3: which I think you were getting at, Joseph, too, that
1:04:13
Speaker 3: things might be easily resolved and that there wouldn't have
1:04:17
Speaker 3: to be a mourning process.
1:04:20
Speaker 1: I think you captured that feeling very well, that the
1:04:26
Speaker 1: dark creature that's pursuing the egg yolk has an unsettling fluidity,
1:04:33
Speaker 1: is how she describes it. And it's going to, if
1:04:36
Speaker 1: it eats it, It's going to break down that congealed
1:04:40
Speaker 1: thing and turn it back into the fluid called gastric metabolites.
1:04:46
Speaker 1: She wants to protect the survivors, protect her innocence, just
1:04:51
Speaker 1: as you were saying. And she innocently brings it to
1:04:54
Speaker 1: the beautiful place, the beautiful world that she hopes for.
1:05:00
Speaker 1: I love that. She takes the innocent yellow thing and
1:05:05
Speaker 1: she has to carry it through the laundry, which is
1:05:09
Speaker 1: connected to the albedo, and then she has to go
1:05:12
Speaker 1: past the boiler, which is often related to the calcinatio,
1:05:18
Speaker 1: and then out into this dream of life, beautiful, gorgeous, water, people,
1:05:25
Speaker 1: everyone's happy. And then she returns it to the unconscious.
1:05:29
Speaker 1: She doesn't put it in a little fishbowl where she
1:05:31
Speaker 1: could take care of it. She herself doesn't want to
1:05:35
Speaker 1: take care of it. She wants to let it go,
1:05:38
Speaker 1: but the unconscious kind of tricks her into letting it
1:05:44
Speaker 1: go and imagining that it's somehow going to magically be
1:05:48
Speaker 1: unaffected by life. So the innocence works in her favor
1:05:54
Speaker 1: by introducing something to life, thinking it's going to all
1:06:00
Speaker 1: be sweetness and sentimentality And life comes to it. And
1:06:06
Speaker 1: as you were saying earlier in the episode, guilt and
1:06:10
Speaker 1: grief is the last two things that she talks about.
1:06:12
Speaker 1: And we were just talking about that. A wave of
1:06:15
Speaker 1: guilt and grief washed over me because something that was
1:06:21
Speaker 1: pristine and whole and in the child mind has now
1:06:27
Speaker 1: been manifested in the real world and is It didn't
1:06:32
Speaker 1: go as she fantasized. So, again, an initiation.
1:06:37
Speaker 3: You know, I've been thinking about this poem, and, you know,
1:06:44
Speaker 3: throughout the episode, actually, because I think it does capture
1:06:47
Speaker 3: some of what we've been talking about, but it's here, too.
1:06:53
Speaker 3: And it is Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost.
1:06:59
Speaker 3: It's a very short poem. Nature's first green is gold,
1:07:04
Speaker 3: her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower,
1:07:07
Speaker 3: but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf,
1:07:12
Speaker 3: so Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down today,
1:07:17
Speaker 3: nothing gold can stay. So that sense of, as we
1:07:23
Speaker 3: were discussing, when you allow something to coagulate, Eden sinks
1:07:28
Speaker 3: to grief. And leaf subsides to leaf. And I think
1:07:32
Speaker 3: that happens here in this dream, too.
1:07:35
Speaker 1: Beautifully said.
1:07:38
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
1:07:42
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