You see, when we fall in love, particularly if we immediately see our “twin flame” in another, what we are falling in love with is not the other person, per se, but a projection of our other, internal self. Each of us, whether embodied as a male or female, have both masculine and feminine halves to our Self: ying/yang, Shiva/Shakti, anima/animus, etc. What happens in this immediate love of Other is that we are projecting the neglected Other part of ourself onto the new Love. Eventually, however, this idealized projection that the Other is carrying for us comes into conflict with the reality of them being a human being, with traits and habits that are in conflict with our idealized view of them. Thus, a break-up is, in reality, the breakdown of the projection.

The previous paragraph was to make you aware of the notion that if we want to have truly conscious, loving relationships in our lives, it is a good idea to be able to be aware of, own and take back your projections. Thus, when you come into partnership with another person, you are both “seeing” each other realistically for whom they are. So how do you go about taking back your projections and inviting unlimited, inconditional love into your life? I cover that in the next paragraph!

Love will flow into our life in abundance when we come into peace with all elements of our Self; yes, even the dark, grubby little bits that we never want anyone to see because they are “bad” or “sinful” or “dirty.” It doesn’t mean that we live our lives out of these dark little places or personas, rather that we acknowledge and accept them as part of who we are. We also bring love into our hearts by turning inward and meeting OUR “Other” the other half that we have neglected for so long. Once we meet this other half of ourselves, we build a romance with it, we acknowledge it and we make love to it. This opens our heart to the ever present Love of the universe. In that moment, we shed the armor around our hearts and open them to the world; when that happens, the Love in our heart becomes a beacon in the world and the Love starts flowing in.

If you would like to stop the cycle of unfulfilling relationships, click here to schedule a heart opening session with me.

However, our karmic and energetic wounds can show up as physical symptoms such as premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction for men or painful intercourse and lack of orgasm for women.  Sexual abuse and trauma may also show up somatically in the body, or it may show up in an inability to form intimate relationships on an emotional or energetic basis.  Osho talks about this:  “to control the mind, one has to remain so cold and frozen that no life energy is allowed to move into the limbs, into the body. If energy is allowed to move, repressions will surface. That’s why people have learned how to be cold, how to touch others and yet not touch them, how to see people and yet not see them. “

Tantra is a way to heal these wounds in a safe, supportive atmosphere through breath, meditation, and learning how sexual energy moves through the body; it is done with clothes on.   On an energetic level, you become unblocked in all of the chakras, getting the energy flowing and raising your vibration.   It is a process of turning inward, and viewing your whole Self and connecting to Source, learning to vibrate and bring more and more light into your field.  The realization that this ecstatic Love is there, inside of you, available whenever you want frees you from looking Out There and once that happens, you attract and can consciously connect with a partner, creating intimate, related and passionate connections that last.

Learn how to LOVE and be LOVED by booking your session now.

How does shame get mixed up with sexual feelings?
What is the connection between sex and love?
What would making love without shame feel like?

Shame is an emotion that is inculcated in children as an attempt to provide an internal, moral compass. Specifically, it is created in order to discourage “bad behavior.” While this might be useful in terms of keeping children from hurting or stealing, if shame of the body or sexual feelings are also added, it reduces or eliminates their ability to form truly intimate, loving connections with others. It leads them, as adults, to pull back both physically and emotionally. We lower or close our eyes. Perhaps we flush, tense up, withdraw, or go inside, just wanting, trying to disappear. This very withdrawal is the very mechanism that prevents truly intimate relationships from developing. If we have learned shame about our body or biological processes (sex, elimination, etc), then it is natural to have shame about love; masturbation is “dirty” or the “devil’s work” or “temptation” or “wrong.”  A person who has not learned how to build up and sustain an erotic charge in their psychic or energetic field are not experiencing Eros in its full richness.  In order to move up the ladder of intimacy we need to start with flushing the shame about our bodies or sex out of our energetic field.

Sex and love are often used interchangeably, yet they are fundamentally different.  Sex is fundamentally a body/biological function, only one half of the mind/body problem.  Sex is about feeling a sexual discharge or perhaps survival of the species.  However, in humans, it is known that we have a capacity to transcend sex.  We call this emotional feeling and attachment love.  It is through love that we can develop true intimacy.  However, when we have an objectified view of love we are not really loving:  we are having sex, not making love.  We are embodied, spiritual beings, therefore the physical expression of love is a physical union between partners:  the joy and freedom to fully embody love as expressed through this Union, the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine, dancing together in Eros.

To listen to people talk or various pundits on television you would think that love is elusive, something that someone “finds.”  We hear it in colloquial expressions like “they found true love” or “she fell in love.”  Yet there is no elusiveness or scarcity of love available in the world.  All of the major religions teach this, the stories reified down through the literature and traditions.  Examples:

From Galations 5:22:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness.”

The Sixth Dalai Lama:

“If one’s thoughts towards spirituality
were of the same intensity as those towards love
one would become a Buddha
in this very body, in this very life.”

In other words, Love, God, Christ, Allah, Buddha are all symbols of the Divine Love, Omni-Love, present within us.  Each of us is embodied Eros!  All that need be done is recognize and love all parts of who we are, including this embodied life at this time.  Thus, making love, is an expression of recognizing the opposite in the other, a way of showing up with no shame, a way of mirroring our own divinity so we recognize it within ourselves.  Sweeping aside the shame of our bodies or sex is a necessary step to free ourselves to love all aspects of our Self, clearing our DNA to embrace higher and higher levels of love until we experience the unconditional, unlimited love of Omni-Love.

Hello my child.

[in a child's voice] Hello.

You had questions?

I know my purpose is to heal, but how do I go about it.

Use the tools you have learned so far…your shamanic iniations, the breathwork and soon the DNA perfection codes.  Your vibration is rising…they will find you.

Ok.  May I ask who this is.

Why it is Babji child…you’ve been asking for me, no?

Yes.

Well, I have answered child.  We’ll talk soon, it is time for your day to start.

As previously discussed, transpersonal psychology seeks to move beyond the one size fits all paradigm of clinical psychology. By opening psychological understanding to include cultural lenses and artifacts, bringing the role of nature, space and place to bear, new psychological moves emerge to inform us. Under this paradigm, one opens oneself to new understandings about the nature and role of all of the constructs and structures that work on an individual’s psyche. Working from this perspective emphasizes adapting healing technologies to suit the culture. In this vein we have Jung freely “credit[ing] karma theory with the filling in of his notion of the archetypes” (Coward, 1985, p. 98). In contrast, the clinical, behavioral model, places the emphasis on putting the individual in the context of a generalization of her symptoms. It is focused on a specific culture’s view of the construction of the brain and how it operates. It is a statistical method of viewing human behavior, rooted in the idea of normalized behavior entrenched in what has been dubbed Western psychology.

Transpersonal psychology challenges the dominate, clinical psychology viewpoint, examining the very question of human ways of knowing; it answers with knowledge may be known via sense, perception, emotion, intuition, as well as reason. It acknowledges that ways of knowing are culturally situated, in both positive and perhaps negative ways. It asks what is taken for granted in this particular community? How does my age, culture, experiences, education level and associations affect my knowing? Marsella (2009) asserts you must “recognize the historical and cultural contexts of your knowledge and practices. See them as ‘cultural constructions’ relative to time, place and person” (p. 26).  In other words, transpersonal psychology is about seeing YOU and understanding how you have been shaped by your environment.

One of the primary, western theories of human existence is that a person’s personality is shaped by both conscious thoughts as well as unconscious thoughts. What these conceptions of personality are called depend upon the culture and time that we are immersed in. Jung developed his theory of complexes to describe how both the individual’s personal experiences as well as the collective experience of living in a society, geography and time contribute to a person’s personality. Jung’s theory of the complex, at its core level, consists:

primarily of a “nuclear element,” a vehicle of meaning, which is beyond the realm of the conscious will, unconscious and uncontrollable; and secondarily, of a number of associations connected with the nuclear element, stemming in part from innate personal disposition and in part from individual experiences conditioned by the environment (Jacobi, 1959, p.8).

Deconstructing this definition, we see that the “nuclear element” is essentially the framework for the unconscious point of reference. Radiating out from these nuclear elements are the associations with that particular framework, both positive and negative. The nuclear element can be thought of as a potential charge, the nuclear core of an atomic weapon, stable until the external explosive wrapper, in a particular geometry, is ignited. As in the nuclear weapon analogy, it takes an external disturbance or association, along with the internal potential, to activate a psychological complex.

Once a complex is activated, it acts autonomously. As Jacobi (1959) states “once constellated and actualized, the complex can openly resist the intentions of the ego consciousness, shatter its unity, split off from it, and act as an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness” (p. 9). This autonomous feature of the complex has its root in the ego’s function of keeping painfully psychological information away from the conscious: “they [complexes] react violently to being known because this destroys or relativizes the autonomy (omnipotence) they enjoy while operating unconsciously” (Edinger, 1984, p. 16).

The Laika shamanic view is remarkably similar to Jung’s theory of the complex, at least on the surface. In the Laika lineage of shamanic work, imprint is the descriptive term used to describe mythological stories that autonomously and unconsciously affect our emotional and physical health. The term “mythological stories” was chosen carefully by the author to emphasize that these stories are viewed by the shaman or individual working soul retrieval as

a kind of play or drama going on that shows the stories that live within you and that choreograph your world. These stories may not be literally true, but they’re emotionally true. They’re subroutines played over and over by the limbic brain….what you find in the Chamber of Wounds may not be what actually happened, but it’s how you remember it, and this memory defines the plot of your life. The details of the story are only significant in that they reveal the underlying patterns created by the original wound (Villodo, 2005, p. 53).

These autonomous, unconscious stories are sedimented, or imprinted into our luminous energetic field (LEF), typically caused by traumas that drive our past, current and future behaviors. These traumas are then reactivated when we experience something that resonates with the original story of wounding; this resonation causes the imprint to open up, flowing energy down through the associated chakra well and into the somatic body via the spinal cord (Allec, 2010). What is of particular import in the preceding description of an imprint, is that it contains the two primary components of Jung’s theory of the unconscious complex: there is autonomy and a feeling tone associated with the imprint.

If Jung’s psychology is about helping individuals understand the meaning behind images emanating from the collective and personal unconscious, Hillman’s is about the autonomy of the image: the people and images in our dreams are there because they want to be there, not for personal development. Hillman’s psychology is a mytho-poetic one; life as a relational and transpersonal experience by living with Psyche’s images within, seeing through the metaphors in the stories of gods and goddesses and enriching our relationship with myth. Hillman is about letting go of goals in the literal sense and enriching our imaginal life, using the images on our stage within to increase our psychic space, allowing and encouraging a metaphorical sensibility.

I have chosen these three theories to highlight my own personal development and engagement with depth psychology. Each of the three theories presented have a common thread that resonates with me, namely a nexus or engagement with the transpersonal. In the spring of 2009, after my own numinous experience, I stepped on to the “path of fire,” engaging with tantra and shamanism. Tantra was the gateway to learning to love myself again, letting go of guilt and rage, shamanism appealed through its use of imagery, metaphor and nature. However, this transformative work followed my descent into hell.

My hell came after fighting two wars and alienation from my then wife. I felt cold inside, almost lifeless. I felt unable to engage in my work, my life, I was a zombie. Then, I experienced something that defies all rational explanation; I was left with no choice but to go inside, to descend and return, to read the great mystics, to hear what resonated with my experience. This experience awakened me to reality as I perceive it today

My new reality began abruptly one morning as I was lying in bed between the state of waking and actually moving to get up. An intense white light penetrated my being starting at the head. It was this white light that opened my head, the crown chakra in the eastern traditions. Then, angels were pouring electric blue cleansing water through every fiber of my being. It was exquisite, it was wondrous, it was bliss. The energy of God, sloshing through me, caught in the timeless place of creation, the angels singing hosanna to me. As Glass-Coffin (1998) said “experience is personal and, to a large degree, unshareable. If the numinous could be adequately expressed to others, there would be no need for faith” (p. xi). My experience with the godhead showed me a wondrous way forward; this encounter reignited my passion for life and restored my capacity to love myself and others in a way I never knew possible.

The crucial tie-in to the three theories I articulated earlier was my numinous experience, an encounter with the godhead, an experiencing of the pure essence of who I am in a transpersonal way, an encounter with Psyche. Of Jung and shamanism Smith (2007) writes:

both shamanism and Jungian psychologies are theories of the soul, of its disorders, and its therapeutic treatment, and that both may be considered spiritual psychologies, or psycho-spiritual systems of healing. Both disciplines rest upon the direct immediate experience of non-ordinary dimensions of reality, the collective unconscious for Jung, and the non-ordinary three-storied cosmology of shamanism (p. 237).

In the end, transpersonal psychology is a soul centered enterprise that offers up different healing technologies. Whichever modality that appeals to the individual should be ascendant in that person’s healing. We all have diverse life experiences leading up to our descent, and hopefully, ascent. Culture and life experience will dictate what resonates with us. Whether that is Jungian analysis working images towards individuation, shamanic work such as soul retrieval and clearing of imprints, or a Hillmanian approach of being with autonomous images and seeing through them metaphorically as they parade across our inner landscape, it really matters not which theory is “right.” Freedom is about experiencing your own truth, the Self.

An act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them….the same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.

Thus, it is with ourselves that what we believe wholeheartedly in what as perceive as seen.  Thus, we often fail to recognize the unseen that is driving the seen.  Let me give a quick example.  I once had a verbal fight with my ex-wife.  We had been arguing and arguing…my main complaint was that she didn’t support any of my dreams and was always selfishly focused on hers.  In reality, I wasn’t focusing on my dreams because I knew, deep down, that if I pursued my dreams, that it would mean the end of us.  Thus, the seen surface part of this argument was about her lack of support for my dreams; the unseen part was my unwillingness to acknowledge and accept that our relationship was over.  Thus, it was easier to project my lack of support for my dreams onto her.

So what does this have to do with freedom?  Freedom is a mental state; to be free means to be free of limiting beliefs, to drop the “monkey mind” that has been conditioned to believe that external events are ruling our life, rather than our own unseen belief structures that drive our behaviors.  Thus the goal of this post is to challenge you, the next time you feel very strongly or emotionally about something that you see, to take a deep breath, slow down and ask yourself:  what unseen memory or programming in my brain is driving this reaction?