Ode Magazine is a must-read. Here are two quotes from Miriam Greenspan’s sharp, incisive feature, “How the Light Gets In,” from the Spring, 2011 issue.
This is how the article starts:
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” said Carl Jung, “but by making the darkness conscious.” Originator of the psychological concept of the shadow—the unwelcome parts of ourselves that we hide from conscious awareness—Jung cleverly added, “This procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not very popular.”
As the article continues, it argues that rather than suppressing dark emotions like grief, fear and despair, actually feeling them and dealing with them is essential to mental health. What a concept.
Here’s three quick quotes:
We grieve because we’re not alone and what connects us also breaks our hearts. A fully experienced grief brings us the unexpected gift of gratitude for the lost beloved, and for life.
While we think of fear as an obstacle to action, it’s just the opposite: fear alerts us to threat and impels us to act to preserve life. In consciously befriending fear and accepting the sense of vulnerability that comes with it, we expand our capacity for joy.
Despair (a discrete emotion, as opposed to depression, which is a chronic condition of stuck despair) too has a purpose. As a signal of our human hunger for meaning, despair calls us to cut through illusion, repair our souls and find a sense of meaning that will sustain us through hard times. The hard-won gift in this journey through despair’s dark night of the soul is a sturdier, more resilient faith in life.
Read the whole article at http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/74/how-the-light-gets-in/