Reflections

The Pandemic & Creativity

09/25/21


Liminal Space:

This pandemic shift into liminal space - a place where we have let go of the past and do not know what the future will bring - has created many challenges. Now in our 18th month, we are all well aware of the great hardship, loss, pain, anxiety, and depression many have experienced worldwide.


But through the darkness, some of us have found a golden light.


Blessings:

I would like to focus on one unexpected blessing: Renewal or discovery of our creativity.


For some of us, who have consciously yearned for the time and space the bring forth their creativity, the transition has been easy. We may relish this reclusive time and space. But for others, especially extroverts, whose energy has been directed to the outside world, it has been more challenging. For all, forced isolation can be an opportunity to re-discover creativity that has been buried since early childhood.


Clients & Creativity:

Like most therapists, I have transitioned to meeting on Zoom. Among the many discovered benefits, I have found that it is easy to be with clients as they work in their own homes.


Some who have never considered exploring any artistic medium have opened a long-locked doorway into a hidden creative dimension. I have clients who have discovered they have a gift and a love, which will now be a permanent part of their identity.


When I suggested to one client struggling in isolation, who had done no art since kindergarten, that they take some colors and just see what happened, the results were amazing. Work with colored pencils this soon transformed into acrylics and then to watercolors. Amazing feelings triggered memories which deepened our psychological and spiritual work. This brought great energy and joy into our sessions as well as into their life.


Another client has discovered through our integrating her art into therapy that what was a hobby is now a desire to move from her career of teaching into professional life as artist.


Many professional and established artists and musicians have enriched and deepened their practice as we have worked to integrate feelings stirred by loss, fear, and isolation.


Creativity has manifested in many different ways for different clients - for some, through cooking (some beginning for the first time) or gardening. Many have turned consciously manifesting their soul into their living space, expressing who they are by designing and renovating their homes.


What a Joy to be there with you all!


Personal:

I have carved out space and time for the art I left behind in my 20’s. I have always felt myself to be an artist, but in my busy professional and intellectual life devoted little time to it. Through the external and internal shifts prompted by the pandemic, I finally began a project I had only previously been planning to undertake “someday” - creating my own version of Jung’s Red Book. In it, I paint or draw on one side and write a poem on the opposite leaf. I make no attempt to polish either. Rather, I am learning to trust the muse coming through me.


My grandson’s voice comes to me with his injunction, “Grandma, you can’t start over, just keep going,” when I try to say to myself, “I don’t like this. I will just start over.” I am learning the beauty and satisfaction that can come out of persisting. Or, perhaps, if I indeed feel it is a disaster, then a learning of what not to do going forward. I use colored pencil, charcoal, pastel, acrylic, and watercolors.


In addition, I have taken up the clarinet. I am not a musician and never will be. But I wanted to know how it feels to create sound. I chose an instrument that is, by all reports, difficult - the clarinet. Why the clarinet? Well, first and foremost, because I wanted an instrument that I could easily travel with; and, second, because I just happened to have one. I have both a saxophone and a clarinet. I took them to my synchronistically manifested teacher to help me chose. She looked at them both and said the saxophone was “junk” and the clarinet was “a treasure.” So it was decided. Well, me and my clarinet….that is another story…


I invite each of you to join in exploration of your own way of expressing yourself through creativity. If you have not discovered how your unique voice call forth your courage and welcome the journey.

Reflection on The Crown

02/08/21


I am mesmerized by the Netflix series “The Crown.” One could say I am addicted. As is often the case with many incredible series, each night I eagerly return to immerse myself in this other universe.


In contemplating why I am so captivated, I discover that “The Crown” explores my favorite Jungian themes: Shadow, Individuation, Myth, as well as Nature versus Nurture (how the environment and genes intertwine to form one’s personality and character.) Other spiritual and psychological themes include the nature of one’s destiny and how might this conflict with Individuation. Many of the characters in the show have been forced to live an unfulfilled life. The series further looks at how family patterns of abuse are passed down through the generations.


For many viewers any idealization of Royalty is dispelled.


Each of the characters is portrayed from a deeply human perspective. That is, they are exposed from their shadow sides; bitter, resentful, mean, sad, unloving (and unloved), envious, frightened, repressed, and frozen.


If “following her bliss” (to use Joseph Campbell’s concept), Queen Elizabeth would have devoted herself to horses - breeding them, training them, racing them. She would have lived and breathed horses and horse people. The one place where she could truly relax and be herself.


Prince Philip would have become an aviator, and, in his wildest fantasy, an astronaut.


Prince Charles would have been an actor.


Yet each, through the roles assigned to them by virtue of the families they were born into, was to follow the script given to them. Although not all did. The most renown of those who refused, perhaps, is King Edward, who abdicated the throne in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, thus thrusting Queen Elizabeth into the Queenship.


Princess Margaret had the constitution and desire to be the Queen, but birth order intervened.


Further blogs will explore in more detail the Jungian concept of Individuation as portrayed by these characters, including what it means to take the point of view of the Shadow when developing a character. Generational abuse will be looked at in detail.


Elizabeth never wanted to be Queen, yet by the accident of being the first born (after Edward, who refused the crown in order to be with his love), she came to the throne. Her younger sister Margaret would have basked in being Queen. Thus envy created lifelong bitterness between them. And Philip by virtue of his being first-born son was thrust into the role of Crown Prince.


When a series has many episodes going on for years there is the opportunity to amply explore not only the depth of each character but their developmental process as they mature through their life. Most of these individuals do not Individuate in the true Jungian sense, but they do strengthen and develop character.

We also see through flashback to family backgrounds the effect of cruel, often abusive and traumatic upbringings. Each had withholding, unloving, even cruel, mothers, and, in the case of Philip, an extremely abusive father. Philip, in turn, perpetuated abuse onto his son Charles.


None were loved nor received affection or even affirmation. Parenting was focused on rigid shaping of who they were scripted to become.


The Crown enters the myth of ROYALTY and dispels our ordinary man’s idealization.