Guided by aliveness

  "For the Eastern mystic all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality", Fritjof Capra says in The Tao of Physics . "The highest aim in life is then to become aware of the unity and mutual interdependence of all things, to transcend the notion of an isolated individual self  and to identify themselves with the ultimate reality. The emergence of this awareness is called enlightenment."   Many thinkers, poets and mystics through the centuries have formulated this insight in different ways from different angles. What is truly magical is that the awareness of our interconnectedness is present and available to us in every moment, if only we are able to notice it.

We experience the world through the body. Muscles, connective tissue, the brain, the nervous-system and all the other parts – the body is an amazing wholeness, which constitute the context of our perception of reality. In western culture we have traditionally seen the mind and body as split apart, and our everyday life is often lived disconnected from the body and with an emphasis on the mental activity of the brain. On this background many people feel a need for practices which facilitate a reconnection with the body. Embodied meditation, relatefullness and circling, and different kinds of bodywork and yoga, are tools which I myself apply in my everyday life to stay in connection with my embodied inner world. Practices which create new space for the breath, more flexibility in muscles and connective tissue, and a closer connection to the body, are in my experience gateways to feeling more energy, aliveness, power and flow in life. The body, which we often take for granted, is in r

  In a significant scene in the Black books 4, Jung encounters the dead, who have a message for him. One of the dead, Ezekiel, tells Jung that the dead are going on pilgrimage to all the holy places because they have no peace, although they died in true belief. Why is that, Jung asks, and Ezekiel says: “It always seems to me as if we had not come to a proper end with life. (…) It seems that we forgot something important that should also have been lived.” In the further dialogue it becomes clear that the dead don’t know what their unlived life is, but Jung points to suppression of the animal side as one possibility. (Black books 4 s. 208).   What is the animal side? I n the article “Encounters with the animal soul. A voice of hope for our precarious world” N. Furlotti points to different jungian aspects of the animal side: The ‘pleasure of the forest’, the pagan which resides outside the split of good and evil, possessing a natural undividedness which is impervious to logical and mor

  Carl Jung’s diaries from 1913-1932, the Black books, were published in October 2020. The context of the beginning of the diaries is Jung’s break with Freud, his mentor and an important father figure in his life, and the following crisis in Jung’s professional and personal life. A life-crisis will often imply the falling away of our surrounding structures which represent safety and control, and this may open up for important insights because we get access to the unknown. For Jung, in the crisis he realized that he had somehow lost the connection with his soul. Jung writes on the first page of the diaries: “A huge task lay before me – I saw its enormous size – and its value and meaning escaped me. I got into the dark, and I groped along my path. That path led inward and downward. (…) My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you – are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again,