I’m never exactly sure when my projects begin their gestation period in my psyche. I gave a lecture on this topic in 1996, and since that lecture I have slowly become aware that every decade in my life has been shadowed by the illness of someone close to me that became a turning point affecting my future. So now I can see that this project is attached to a thread woven so deeply into the fabric of my life that it goes beyond my memories. What has surprised me the most is that as this new project is taking form, it is beginning with a “grief observed.”

Up until 2005 my daughter had been a young, highly energetic wife and mother. Then her diagnosis came, after several medical problems, like a punch in the stomach to all of us. I expected to face the “so-called” stages of grief. But I didn’t expect to be dropped so profoundly back into the Tartarus, the further reaches of the underworld of my own experiences that I have done so much hard work on.

If this experience wasn’t so deeply personal I might have expected this return to a “grief observed.” I might have realized that this revisiting would be on a more profound level, seeking a new degree of conscious awareness, and this is part of the work. As a Jungian analyst I am generally in the role of the wounded healer and frequently have to revisit old wounds and dark places. Jung tells us that, “…a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.” (C. G. Jung, CW vol. 16 par. 239) And while I am not my daughter’s doctor, in order to be able to fully accompany her on this journey, involves a descent and enlargement for me so I can understand her reality better and burden her less with my defenses and projections from the past.

Sickness and health are opposites that I can seek to reconcile, not by attempting to eliminate illness or change its nature, but by more clearly understanding the interdependence of them within the container of my full humanity.

And this journey must be the classic hero or heroine’s journey. Not the shallow journey of the conquering hero but the journey of the one who is seeking hidden values that nourish the soul and bring wisdom and a greater sense of being alive. Entering the places of our greatest vulnerability, pain, shame, or illness can transform these places into holy places.

But this is a possibility only if we enter them as a conscious quest for healing and transformation. It is both the perilous journey of the hero searching for the Holy Grail and that of Chiron, the wounded healer, seeking the wisdom of nature’s healing powers.

The door to this project, as well as my renewed journey inward, opened when my wife offered me her help. She suggested that I participate in one of the sound therapy programs she uses as a Solisten provider. These programs are based on the work of Alfred Tomatis, who my wife met while undergoing her training in Paris almost thirty years ago. She has found that being a Solisten provider and Jungian analyst makes a powerful combination. The music and sound work opened me to a stream of memories and feelings that had been so severely clamped down in my unconscious and in my body that they hadn’t surfaced during many years of analysis and inner work. With the help of the gated music, bone conduction (which reaches into the body) and my knowledge as an analyst and the symbolic life, they came into a story of a “grief observed.” As I digest this story and weave it into the larger story of my life, I am shaken to find how much rage, terror, and how many tears my body has carried in order to keep my ego from being overwhelmed. It is my hope that, after being digested, these events and experiences will flow into my writing and teaching and support it rather than show up in ways that would secretly shape them into a subtle defensive structure. I am also surprised to see how much transformation, relief and how many new images can still emerge.

If this new inner work opened the door to this project, walking more closely with my daughter in her illness has taken me through that door. I have worked with other people with acute and chronic illnesses, even with MS. But I’m now learning how sanitized our analytic hours are, how focused on the psychological and rightly so, and how easy it is to think we understand what it is like to be in their shoes when we actually know very little about what their true pain, terror and physical condition really is.

We are currently discussing Al Kreinheder’s lovely book, Body and Soul: The Other Side of Illness. This book and our discussions are inspiring and in my upcoming newsletters I will be talking in more detail about what I’m learning in this journey, what I’m learning about illness, its reality and how I’m transformed and deepened by the descent and the lessons that I think we and our society can learn from our illnesses.

Strangely enough, this walk with my daughter is a gift, though I wish it was only a dream. So much goes on in terms of hopes, dreams, fantasies, conflicts, disappointments, love, hurt, and betrayals between parents and children that we rarely get to walk together as who and what we truly are. There are simply too many emotionally-based archetypal influences for this to happen. So this experience is a gift. But, it is a gift of fire, of “clinging fire” to borrow a term from the I Ching. It burns and clings and burns and reaches up to heaven

Curious that this image had come so readily to mind I looked up this hexagram, number 30, after I finished writing. I was stunned to read that it represents the middle daughter, which my daughter is. It says in part, “…that what is dark clings to what is light,” and the judgment is that, “perseverance furthers.”