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Wellness Articles Articles Invitation to Wholeness: The Call to Adventure
Wellness Articles Articles Invitation to Wholeness: The Call to Adventure
| Invitation to Wholeness: The Call to Adventure |
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Holistic education seeks to educate the student for wholeness in life, physical, psychological, spiritual, ecological and cosmological wholeness. There were generations of addiction suffered on both sides of my family, so it was a great gift for my mother and father to end the cycle. The way their gift helped me was to remove the fog of alcoholism in order to reveal the wounds beneath. There are seven soul wounds that are widespread in American Culture. They are: separation from nature, separation from personal creativity and perception, separation from dreaming and the visionary capacity, separation from the ancestors/spiritual worlds, separation from the body, (deep masculine and deep feminine), separation from the Essential Self/Purpose, and separation from the cosmos. This series of short lectures will take up the soul and the seven wounds. With Freud’s publishing of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, the soul began its return as a key element in human life. The work with dreams and the word-association tests gave verifiable proof for the existence of the unconscious. From Freud came the notion that psychological wholeness must be a union of the conscious and the unconscious. In 1912, Carl Jung, deepened Freud’s psychological ground. He moved through what we now describe as the personal unconscious into the collective unconscious. The difference between the two is that the personal unconscious consists of symbolism drawn from a person’s life which takes the form of the complexes, while the collective unconscious consists of transpersonal symbolism that appears in all times and places regardless of life experience which takes the form of archetypes. What we call the personal and collective unconscious, the ancients called the soul. To enter into the unknown depths of oneself seeking wholeness is the traditional task of the second half of life. The call to do it comes in many ways. For my parents, who dealt with addiction and later on for me, who dealt with a shamanic crisis, (Grof, 1994) the expression from depth psychology, in your symptom is your soul, has been the case. It’s a fact that many enter soul recovery work by suffering affliction. For others, it comes as a moment of powerful revelation, a near-death experience, a dream or vision, an overwhelming moment of falling in love, of beauty and/or majesty. For still others, it comes by invitation of a teacher to break free from life as you have known it and seek the wisdom hidden in the depths of yourself. The educative power of a teacher who has found a unity of the conscious and the unconscious and who has found a degree of awareness of the seven wounds is in his/her presence. By presence, I mean a wide-awake responsiveness and relational awareness that inspires others to be whole and generous themselves. There is a playful alertness in the presence of such teachers,. When important life-changing moments come, as in experiences of the relationship with nature, claiming of personal creativity and perception, guidance from dreaming and the visionary capacity, messages from the ancestors/spiritual worlds, connection with deep masculine and deep feminine, revelations of the Essential Self/Purpose, and feelings of wonder and being a part of the cosmos, the holistic20educator responds in ways appropriate to the meaning of the experience. That means recognition of what has occurred by naming it for the student and by marking the moment in some memorable way that honors the soul. The journey of integration of all the parts of the soul into a whole is called individuation This first essay is an invitation to individuation and if you have already begun the journey, it is a call to share with others what you have discovered along the way. By F. Christopher Reynolds, M.Ed.
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