The Gift of Stopping

In our busy lives today, we all need reminders that stopping is possible. Stopping is going nowhere happily, turning away from the hurry that fills so much of modern life.

Each day you can give yourself a mini-vacation, simply by stopping what you are doing so that you can reside in being for a few moments. Let go of paying bills, returning phone calls, crossing things off your to do list, and take some time to just be.

I recently had a patient whose life was in a shambles, but still she could not seem to adjust the pace. She brought her cell phone to our sessions and interrupted our conversations to take calls. One day, exasperated, I asked how much she made per hour.

“I bill my service out at $120 per hour,” she said proudly.

I inquired, “Can I hire you for an hour.”
She agreed to this. I hired her for one hour and told her I wanted her to sit in a chair and not go anywhere or do anything. She did it. She wouldn’t do it because she needed it, but she would do it for $120. That was the only way I could get her to stop doing and contemplate being.

Although it is hard for us to slow down, the synthesis of life’s tensions and contradictions requires a quiet place. Continuous doing generally flips more energy into the complications that already exist in our lives. For example, when couples are having trouble with their marriage, often the first solution is, “Let’s go on a holiday. We will take a vacation, and then we will feel better.” Well, a modern vacation generally involves expending more energy, traveling long distances, doing things from morning to night and spending money. That doesn’t help. It most likely will send the oppositions that trouble you farther apart. How often do trips like this result in conflict?

Anyone in the second half of life must find ways to, in the felicitous phrase of the Swiss psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, “decently go unconscious.” We all require relief from the tension and burdens of ordinary consciousness, and it is natural to seek altered states. (Watch children spin in circles until they become so dizzy that they fall down. They will laugh themselves silly, get up and do it again). To decently go unconscious means purposefully stopping the constant, droning buzz of information that floods the mind – but not by blotting out consciousness through excessive and soulless work, eating, drugs, shopping, sex, television, or other compulsive and repetitious behaviors.

Through the quality of our attention we can step outside – transcend – our habitual patterns and gain harmony with something greater and more complete. There is a long and rich spiritual tradition by which people achieve transcendent states using prayer and meditation. Life begins to flow again. One is open to the vast potentials and possibilities of the universe.

We are so busy living that much of the time we don’t question how we experience, and as a result we neglect most of what is possible for us to sense, feel, or think at any moment. But it all still exists. Paying attention is essential for expanding one’s consciousness.

Complexes

Each day we have choices to reclaim stuck and outmoded aspects of our being.

The poet, Rumi, urges us heed the call:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep!

So-called imaginary pains hurt just as much as legitimate ones, and a phobia of illness has not the slightest inclination to disappear even if the patient himself, his doctor, and common speech usage all unite in asserting that it is nothing but “imagination.”

In dialoguing with dream figures we are trying to alter our relationship to the complexes. The universal belief in spirits is a direct expression of the complex structure. The royal road to the gold in the unconscious goes through the complexes, which are the architects of our dreams and our symptoms. As Jung noted, this road is not so very “royal,” however, since the way is more like a rough and uncommonly devious footpath that often loses itself in the undergrowth. Whereas the ancients euphemistically referred to the Furies, which had to be propitiated cautiously, the modern mind conceives all inner activity as its own and simply tries to assimilate these energies.

For so-called primitives the world of the spirits has a real existence. Where this “naive” perspective is lost through civilization, we speak of dreams or fantasies or neurotic symptoms rather than spirits or ghosts, and thereby attribute less importance to them.

Primitive pathology recognizes two causes of illness: loss of soul (those complexes which naturally belong) and possession by a spirit (patterns not naturally belonging to the self. Similarly, for modern people we can imagine two classes of complexes, 1) all those potentials that could just as well be part of our conscious repertoire were they not rejected or repressed for some reason and deemed incompatible with out conscious personality; and, 2) those potentials which may exist in the collective but don’t rightfully belong as part of the conscious personality.

These “spirits” appear when the individual loses his adaptation to reality or seeks to replace an inadequate attitude with a new one. The primitive knows how to converse with his soul, whereas we are unable to suppress many of our emotions; we cannot change a bad mood into a good one, and we cannot command our dreams to come or go. As Jung pointed out, we believe we are masters in our own house only because we like to flatter ourselves. Semi-autonomous patterns take over our thinking feeling, and actions.

Recognizing how relative and even arbitrary many of our patterns of thought and behavior are can help us to let go of them and open to the exhilarating notion that there are other ways of being. We all rely on yesterday’s patterns of response—that is how all life learns, adapts, grows and copes with the demands of life. The problem is clinging to the fixed and the known even when it is clear that these are no longer serving us. By midlife the accumulated life becomes a crustaceous shell. Our solutions are often actually the problem. Why should we imagine that the attitudes of one stage of life and development of the personalitywould be adequate for another stage?

Rice and Vitamins

In 1905 there was an enterprising young British physician living in the East Indies. This man of science observed something quite unexpected; he grew curious and went to work to understand this phenomenon. It was the custom in Malaysia at this time to feed prisoners brown rice and water and nothing else. It wasn't an ideal diet, but the prisoners lived on it. Then the missionaries came and declared, “You really must do better by your prisoners than this; you must feed these people properly.” In response, the prison officials began doling white rice out to their captives. When they did this, many of the prisoners responded by dying. Observing this cultural clash and looking into the cause of the deaths, the British physician discovered that the polishings of the brown rice contained an essential element for the human diet—he had discovered vitamins, and it was he who named then; vita (life) min (source).

In the interim period of a hundred years we are now doing much better in understanding basic human needs on the physical level. But on the symbolic level, we have become poverty stricken. As soon as something is missing in the human diet, be it physical or psychological, symptoms appear. Something essential is missing from our psychological diet today, and that something is as important to life as any vitamin—it is connection with feeling.