We all know that life has its ups and downs. We know that, some of the time, we’re going to experience difficulty and unease, while at other times life will feel easy and natural. Unfortunately, this knowledge can’t adequately reflect the true experience of being in the darkest places we could ever find ourselves. In true darkness, we begin to wonder if we’ll ever see the light again. We might feel like life could never be anything other than the suffering we’re facing, or that the rest of our lives will be forever changed because of our suffering.
The What Matters Most series returns, and Dr. John Price leads an exploration of the ways we experience, and imagine, suffering. In a brief but powerful essay, Jung equates our suffering with an inability to adapt to outer or inner conditions, and says that our inability to adapt essentially arises from a conditioned inability to trust. The core of the healing process, he thought, was not really to adapt to any particular life situation, but to learn, in that situation, that you can trust the people close to you; you can trust your own judgment, instincts, or talents; you can trust in the autonomous nature of the healing process itself. Jung’s vision of health as the ego’s ability to rely on and access things beyond the ego – whether outside, in society and the environment, or inside, in our grit and intuition – influenced the work of many later psychologists, whose work we’ll explore alongside Jung’s. Join us as we discuss how misery really might have something to do with generating love and company.
