Every day we feel the soul's minor or major discomforts, but
because we habitually overlook these signals of soul pain, we may fail to
respond. Just as some people can't perceive colors or musical tones, so
we may be soul-blind and soul-deaf. The soul's yearnings simply don't get
through to consciousness; or if they do, we try to numb ourselves to them
with medications, frenzied activities, or other palliatives. The
resulting alienation within our very hearts bears its own painful
melancholic loneliness.
A first step, then, in tending to the soul in regard to our
relationships is to understand and honor its particular mode of being. It
may help to realize that there are two pulls in us: one upward toward
transcendence, ambition, success, progress, intellectual clarity, and
cosmic consciousness; and another downward, into individual, vernacular
life. As we work through difficult family relationships, struggle with
the demands of marriage, apply ourselves to the job we're doing, become
settled into the geographic region fate has chosen for us, and
continually sort through the personality issues that never seem to change
or improve--in all these areas we are gathering the stuff of the soul.
The soul wants to be attached, involved, and even stuck, because it is
through such intimacy that it is nourished, initiated, and
deepened.
NEAR AND FAR
We can apply these principles of attachment and freedom to our
relationships, discovering that our involvement with people may be most
soulful when we can live fully amid the tension of these two
inclinations. If we have strong desires to have a family, live with
another person, or join a community, but find, after these desires have
been satisfied, that we are drawn in exactly the opposite direction, then
we might remember that this complexity is simply the way of the soul. We
may have to look for concrete ways to give life to both sides of the
spectrum, enjoying both our intimacies and our solitude.
Sometimes the matter presents itself as a questioning of our own
natures: Am I the kind of person who should get married, or do I need to
live alone? Should I get a job in a large corporation, or should I be
self-employed? The best answer to questions like these is intellectually
and emotionally to hold both sides at once. Out of the tension may come a
way of being attached and separate at the same time.
In everyday life there are always opportunities to honor both
separateness and togetherness. Often one person in a relationship feels
one emotion more than the other. In his essay on marriage, Carl Jung
describes one partner as the "contained" and the other as the
"container." Maybe the best way to tend these two needs is to notice
where the anxiety is. A person in a marriage who is longing for freedom,
finding marriage too confining, might best avoid the temptation to flee
and instead work at reimagining marriage and partnership.
Many people seem to live the pain of togetherness and fantasize the
joys of separateness; or, vice versa, they live a life of solitude and
fill their heads with alluring images of intimacy. Bouncing back and
forth between these two valid claims on the heart can be an endless
struggle that never bears fruit and never settles down. In the end, the
only answer is a polytheistic one. Honor both gods. Pursue and run away.
Be lustful and chaste. Wholeheartedly link up with someone else but just
as passionately find your own way.
For some of us, a strong dose of individuality can be the best
quality to bring to a relationship. That nymph in your heart who runs
away at the first sign of love, sex, and commitment might be doing an
important service to the soul, which needs flight as much as it needs
embrace. On the other hand, the proud spirit that rushes into
relationships is also important to the soul. Without impetuous desire,
there may be no intimacy.
All we can do is follow the lead of our emotions and images. An
abstract comprehensive understanding is both impossible and undesirable.
In matters of the heart, we may have no choice but to allow other forces
beyond our intentional selves to work out the debates, the incongruities,
and the contradictions, as we bring hope and desire to new love and
affection.
SEX AND IMAGINATION
Sex is a great mystery of life that resists our many attempts to
explain and control it. Along with money and death, it represents one of
the few elements left in life that virtually pulsates with divinity,
easily overwhelms our feelings and thoughts, and sometimes leads to
profound compulsions.
Emotional compulsion is often regarded negatively as a failure of
control or a sign of irrationality. We might see it rather as the soul
yearning for expression and trying to thrust itself into life. Sexual
compulsion may show us where and to what extent we have neglected this
particular need. Compulsion asks for a response from us, but we might be
careful lest we simply react to the felt need. Some respond by advocating
"free love," as though the best way to deal with the compulsion were to
give in to it literally.
This is the way of compensation, which doesn't solve the problem
but only places us at the other end of it. The soulful way is to bring
imagination to sex, so that by fulfilling the need at a deep level, the
compulsion is brought to term.
Tags:
attachments,
friends family,
good job,
hometown,
impulses,
inclinations,
innate tendency,
intimacy,
job offer,
mysteries,
particulars,
penchant,
periods,
point of view,
pornography,
possibilities,
reconciliation,
relatedness,
relationship,
sex,
soul,
soul mates,
soulful life
