How we can authentically participate, embody, and co-create with the inexhaustible depths of the psyche and reap benefits from this divine resource is the focus of tonight’s program. We are all possessed of many personality parts and the more dissociated we are from these parts, the more we are unwittingly possessed by them. Building a bridge of relationship to these many selves yields more than a duality of good and evil like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The dive down might more resemble Alice going down the rabbit hole and encountering an entire world of characters. There we may meet a talking rabbit or receive an invitation from an unseen, traumatized inner child, which may come to us from the compelling experience of a panic attack.
Common genres of the multiplicity appear at various depths in the psyche holding different qualities of emotional energy, such as parental and child voices and identities conceived in trauma. Self-attacking parts that emerge on the daily stage, like the judge and the perfectionist are abundant, as are the needy indecisive, the angry, the fearful, the risk taker, the procrastinator and the devourer, etc. At deeper levels the intergenerational transmissions of trauma hold energy from unresolved ancestral patterns. Available are lovers, tricksters, hags, wise guides, goddesses, prophets, magicians, gender fluid beings, shamanistic animals, and unlived lives. Deeper still, we may encounter experiences that seem so real and so historic they feel like memories from past lives or even the progression of a future life.
All inner multiplicities interact at a cellular level, transforming our neural pathways and immune systems. They determine how we relate, eat, work, exercise, sleep, individuate and find love, health and peace. By experimenting with lucid dreaming, creative imagination and visions, and other inner work practices, we expand our somatic consciousness to open to all experience. The dissociative walls that once served to contain our pathologies and shadows can now ripen and dissolve into a “participation mystique” with the many selves and the macrocosm. This can open us up to a lifetime of guidance and healing from the depths and in turn, the multiplicities learn from us.
** Three Friday evening talks (you are invited to attend all or each) on exploring how to “cook” holistically with the inner fire of your alchemical kitchen, and hopefully, get to taste some nourishing dishes.
Please note: after the program ends at 9:00 PM there will be an extended question and answer discussion for those who would like to participate in this option.
