Surrendering to the Adventure (25 slides) Creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

“If you would have real control over your life, says the tradition, abandon your artificial control, your identity, the brittle ego that you desperately feel you must have for your survival. Real survival, the gold, consists in living according to the dictates of your own nature, and that cannot be achieved until the risk of psychic death is confronted directly. This, in the alchemical view, is the meaning of the Passion. When Christ said “I am the way,” he meant, “You yourself must go through my ordeal.” No one else can confront your demons for you; no one else can give you your real Self.” (James Hillman, quoted in The Re-enchantment of the World by Morris Berman, p.80)

This gift of your real Self is what the adventure and journey is all about. The ordeal of letting your ego die (dying to the things of attachments) and the confronting of your own shadow demons (within your own inner kingdom) awaits us all. It is an ordeal all of must eventually face if we are to awaken from our cultural slumber.

The awakening that many of us need is the introduction of the unconscious shadow side of our self to our conscious idealized ego self. This introduction is often postponed via repression and stress- full living (i.e. being too busy to engage such things) so that the ego can be protected from the dangerous energies of the shadow. It is a tenuous truce at best that will eventually be broken.

The shadow only continues to gain in strength and perversity the longer it is ignored and unacknowledged. Fragmentation is not healthy. It will free itself and when it does…the invitation to healing will probably be met with a divorce, addiction overload or crisis that results in a doctors visit and medication where one’s insanity will be open for cultural review. A mental/emotional breakdown often comes as a psychological invitation to stop living one’s life in such an inauthentic and destructive way.

The energies, fears, emotions and feelings of the shadow are messengers in disguise. They have important information to share with us about the nature of our lives and what happened to us when we were small and vulnerable. To ignore these messengers is to put our emotional, psychological and intellectual balance and health at risk.

When people ignore their own messengers of truth (that come in the form of energies, feelings and memories) they do so at the risk of becoming sick and depressed. (not only physically but psychologically as well) It is very stressful to live in a dishonest way and the stress and imbalance of it all will eventually catch up with you and make you ill. 80% of the doctor visits we make in this country are directly related to stress induced illnesses.

Our energies and feeling can be our teachers if we start attending to them and stop ignoring and dismissing them. If our energies are given to us a gift, then maybe we should learn to honor and pay attention them.

The energies are part and parcel of a sacred blue print from which our life unfolds— these energies carry the results of what happened to us. Now ponder this idea since we experience life… What sense does it make for us to have these life experiences- (difficult as they may be) and then spend the rest of our lives pretending they didn’t happen, denying that they happened and disassociating from them?

Embrace the dualities Many of us lack passion and depth in their life… at least, that is what I have observed. Many are afraid to live their life in an authentic and profound way- opting instead for the safety of being told what to do and how to feel. These men and women become one dimensional and some what dishonest in how they attempt to live their life according to some cookie cutter recipe.

Many of our neurosis and fears in life come from dishonestly hiding from the pain and discomfort of what already has happened to us. It may be so that happiness is the design of our ultimate existence but we will only know happiness to the extent that we have been able to know and embrace the sorrow and sadness of our own existence and life. That is the law of opposition and life and why we had to come here to live our lives.

“Carpe Diem” is Latin and means to seize the day. (Dead Poet Society) It invites us to live life meaningfully and fully. It invites trusting in life. It invites a knowing that what ever comes can be for our own understanding. Seizing the day means to embrace the up and downs of life and not to be put off by notions of romantic and immature values of being protected from the sorrows and problems of life.

This is a condition that one author said was living “fierce with reality”— Can our life be fierce with reality or would we rather order up a dishonest and pretentious life? Life is hard. Life hurts. Life is happiness. Life is bitter and life is sweet. To know one, we have to embrace and know the other.

This is a hard concept to get! Many of our past wounds and traumas have been hurtful but we have survived them, we are functioning even if the functioning is not optimal. The problem for many of us now is that we are pretending that we are not really wounded, traumatized and hurt. This pretense is now the source of much of our pain, dysfunction and discomfort as adults.

This psychological pain and discomfort of living life in- authentically is what this process is all about. It comes when we are dishonest about what happened to us growing up and try to pretend that nothing is wrong. It creates imbalance and stress in our life which then manifests itself as physical sickness, psychological malaise and relationship dysfunction and withdrawal.

Being wounded does not make us bad or unworthy. Even if our wounds cause us to do wrong and stupid things that does not make us bad it makes us wounded and believe me, we have lots of company.

This is important! Remember it! When we speak of being perfect the meaning of the word perfect is Greek in origin and means to be made whole, complete, mature, of full aged and finished. The notion that to be perfect means to be above making mistakes is simply a man-made traditional interpretation of modernistic and materialistic origins (remember Newtonian Physics).

Please stop beating yourself up for being human with weaknesses and wounds. You need not be anything other than you are.

I need to end this part with two very serious implications and problems. Please do not assume that they have no application to you personally or philosophically. One issue is that some are not ready to change and go through a healing process. They are too comfortable in their familiar wounded territory. They have lived too long in a defended state and lack the motivation and courage to move forward. And that is okay.

This does not make a person bad or weak for wanting to stay with the familiar we are all more comfortable there. It makes it more a matter of timing. Sometimes, even if the ideas speak to us we are not ready for the change they invite us to make in our lives. I think it very important to honor our own readiness to embrace the dynamics of surrendering our hearts to the power of the inner adventure.

The other issue is more serious. There are some with so much contempt and anger at themselves that they do not feel any enticement to undertake the journey. They reject the dynamics of awakening because, in their hearts, they loath themselves and cannot see their way clear to want or engage such an inner adventure. This psychological dilemma is difficult to escape. Their hearts remain defended and hardened against them selves and this is a most dysfunctional conundrum.

Please consider both prospects and feel if any of the energies and dilemmas apply. This awareness may be a most important first step on the psychological adventure.

Because it just may be true that the divine center for the Self may be closer than we think… that’s what the adventure is all about. For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21

the end