Wellness Articles Articles Invitation to Wholeness: Begin the Journey where the Path is Darkest
| Invitation to Wholeness: Begin the Journey where the Path is Darkest |
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By F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed. Holistic education seeks to educate the student for wholeness in life, physical, psychological, spiritual, ecological and cosmological wholeness. It follows, then, that in order for our students to come to such wholeness, we, the teachers are called to model such wholeness. The invitation is for usto enter into the darkness of our own personal and collective unconscious and find a balance between our inner and outer worlds. There are many symbols that describe the beginning of the journey into the darkness. It is known as the blackening, the confrontation with the shadow, the exit through the wound, the road of ashes and grief, the nekya, the raven’s head, the dead head, escape from the matrix, the road of freedom, the journey to the underworld, the dark night of the soul, hitting bottom, night sea journey, among others. In the stories of the Holy Grail, it was said that each knight began the quest where he found the forest to be darkest, where no one had beaten a path before. The greatest challenge for the teacher to become whole is that the path to be walked can not be walked by anyone else and the lessons are all different, each according to the nature of the individual. For all of the images, the attitude that is suggested is one of humility and learning. The turn to make is inward, introspective and contemplative. Dreams are one of the ways to enter into the darkness. This requires a steady attention to dreams and the keeping a dream journal. When you start, the work is to acknowledge that all the persons and places in your dreams are elements of your own soul. Jungian’s call this “embracing the shadow.” Your shadow is composed of all those inner, psychological characteristics that you despise, hate, degrade, attack, shame and neglect in yourself. In dreams, when seen in this light, the enemy you wrestle is part of the larger wholeness that is you. As a teacher, when you dream of the out of control classroom, those rowdies whose names you can’t seem to remember or have never seen before are the parts of your own soul asking for recognition. As stated above, the goal of the work with shadow is a union of the opposites, a dynamic, creative balance that moves according to a wiser motion than your ego could ever plan. Two books that offer assistance in the turn inward and downward are Clarissa Pinkola-Estes’ (1992) book, The Women Who Run with the Wolves: Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype and Robert Bly’s (1990) book, Iron John: A Book About Men. While it’s good to read the book that matches your gender, both are overflowing with profound soul insights. What is gained by making this journey is meaning. Meaning, here, is to be understood in the way Joseph Campbell (1999) described it: A deep experience of being alive. One indicator that you are moving from a surface awareness of your life toward greater depth is called synchronicity. Synchronicity was called providence or grace during earlier historical periods. It was first re-introduced in 1928 by C. G. Jung who found it to be a constant quality in his life as well as those of his patients and students. Synchronicity is defined as: a meaningful coincidence in which two independent events having no apparent causal connection nevertheless seem to form a meaningful pattern. At Berea High, I have heard it called, being in the zone. As a teacher, you suddenly hit a wave where everything fits together. The book you need suddenly appears. The person you wanted to talk to seems to unexpectedly drop by the school. Students hand you the information you were searching for. It’s an experience of everything falling together in a way that could never have been planned. Another example from BHS is the number 444, which seems to appear when students and/or teachers are experiencing a breakthrough. The concept of synchronicity has gone mainstream over the past 20 years. It is now known to appear in a life in 3 stages. Richard Tarnas, (2006) offered three stages of development. First, the experience of various coincidences and patterns, though they seem remarkable, are ignored or described as “nothing but..” Second, there comes a second experience of coincidences that are especially powerful. They mark a threshold in a person’s psychological and spiritual development and often occur in association with births, deaths, crises, and other major turning points. This second experience can bring new meaning and purpose in the life of an individual. Finally, synchronicity becomes an accepted fact of life, part life’s intelligence and artistry. When you are wide awake, the world is talking to you all the time. A great book for living with this kind of awareness is Ray Grasse’s (1996) The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of our Lives. References Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book about Men. Campbell, J. (1988). The Power of Myth. Grasse, R. (1996). The Waking Dream. Pinkola-Estes, C. (1992). The Women Who Run with the Wolves. Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations toward a New World View.
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