Honouring the gods

Life, like a pantheon of jealous gods (take the ancient Greek or Roman Gods for example) makes many and conflicting demands upon us. To deal with these conflicting demands it helps to view these gods and goddesses as representative of the deep urges embedded within us.   

According to certain psychotherapies these urges, mostly unconscious, are an integral part of our soul. Many of us feel a void at the middle of our existence because we have become disconnected from, or 'educated' away from, these urges. Others feel torn by conflicting urges.

Writers like Thomas Moore (see his book ‘Care of the Soul’) concentrate on what these dilemmas can tell us about what our soul needs. (Transpersonal psychotherapies are particularly concerned with this.  Therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, NLP and hypnotherapy, while extremely effective and useful in their place, are more concerned with alleviating symptoms.) So rather than see envy, for example, as a feeling that we have to overcome and conquer, it would be better if we stepped back for a while and consider what our soul is attempting to resolve, or gain, or draw our attention to.  To begin with, such a step allows us to detach from the envy. Secondly, it can remove the guilt and denial that stops us from exploring these feelings in the depth needed. When we are attached to something we see as unpleasant, unworthy, or shameful, we tend to deny it, which precludes working constructively with it.

Envy, like all emotions, exists for a reason. All emotions, even those deemed unworthy or dangerous, or which are banned by one of the ten commandments,  are indicators that we are paying insufficient attention to something of importance.

If we accept from the start that our emotional and spiritual lives are, by nature, contradictory and paradoxical, we are in a better position to deal with the problems that this throws up. This goes further.

We may think, for example, that all we need is a healthy relationship, somebody to love us who treats us properly, and consider ourselves bereft and incomplete, without this. But, deep down, when we reflect, we know that to love, to experience security in the affections of some-one we love in return, is to risk. Who knows what life might throw up to tear us apart? Or what we might be called upon to sacrifice for this relationship? When I was a counsellor, I had many clients who declared that all they wanted was to love and be loved. But further investigation revealed that that their feelings were actually very ambiguous. This is understandable. Having discovered the conflict, those clients could then go on to make a conscious decision about how much they were prepared to risk, and the price they were prepared, or not, to pay.

And it goes further.

Our soul needs to find some way to hold and honour all the paradoxes within us. Our soul knows that to love is to risk. It wants to expand and hold within itself the dichotomies and the paradoxes. Take for example the demands of two very powerful gods; between Apollo – rational, sober, constructive, light, male, yang; and Dionysus – intuitive, intoxicated, destructive, dark, female, yin.  Consider also that our soul needs to honour both Aphrodite - sexual, sensuous - and Artemis - pure, asexual.  If we repress one, if we ignore it and do not give it the attention and/or the respect it demands, and do not examine it as a signpost to an area of emotional or spiritual inattention/lack of respect, it may well destroy us.  Greek, Roman, Viking and many other mythologies abound in stories of how destructive the gods and goddesses can be if they’re not receiving the attention or respect they think is their due.

 “'In every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god.” (Fernando Pessoa). If we can accept this, that with every impulse that we have there will be a conflicting impulse, and that in every impulse there is the seed of its own opposite (see the yin/yang symbol,) perhaps of its own destruction, we would not feel so short-changed by our lives. Indeed, we could use that very fact to enrich our immortal souls.