I am getting ready to teach a class on Carl Jung next week and going through my materials I find a section that I wrote years ago on the importance of not shrinking from pain. This was, admittedly, before cancer but I think it still applies.
Jung, in talking about why we become neurotic talks about going toward pain, "go toward the thing that scares you" etc. Jung, of course split from Freud over the issues of spirituality in healing and personal growth and he believed that we had to integrate our shadows/pain/fears rather than annihilate them.
In one place he says, "God comes through the wound." I love that. But I loved it even more when I read on and learned that Jung was borrowing from Julian of Norwich who said, "Our wounds become our trophies."
I think, maybe, that is the true essence of celebrating survivor-hood. It is the integration and the god/good in us coming through the wound that is being celebrated rather than "I kicked cancer's ass."
What do you think?
1 comment:
This fascinates me, particularly since I have just come from reading two different interviews with two vastly different writers, both of whom posit that we can only ask for what I would call partial recovery, and that we need to use what's left of the wound to work from.
In both cases, I was was on the exercise bicycle when I read the idea, and in both cases I had to get off and lie down and think.
Same here.
Thanks for the think.
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