The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (35 page)

Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then you will endure forever
.

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Marion Woodman is, as I have said, one of the world’s best-known Jungian analysts. She is a widely admired author of important books on feminine psychology and on the relationship between the psyche and the body, including such influential works as
Addiction to Perfection, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter
, and
Leaving My Father’s House
. She has become well known for her lively collaborations with American poet Robert Bly, with Rumi scholar Coleman Barks, and with author Thomas Moore and others. She is a member of an illustrious family: Her brothers are the late Canadian actor Bruce Boa and the well-known Jungian analyst Fraser Boa.

Marion and I have been friends for twenty years. We first met in 1994. I called her on the phone one day entirely out of the blue. Knowing her only by reputation, I called her at her office in Toronto to invite her to speak at a conference I was organizing at Kripalu. It was a conference on psychotherapy and spirituality. Marion had a reputation as a spellbinding speaker on the topics of women, feminine psychology, psychotherapy, and spirituality, and I wanted her voice at this conference.

I was moved by our brief phone call. The voice on the other end of the phone was warm but commanding. It was much as I had imagined it might be, but softer, maybe older. “Well, Stephen,” Marion said after we
had chatted for a while and I had laid out for her the parameters of the conference I wanted her to address, “I must say you have intrigued me. However, I have to tell you that I am not very well just now. I may not even make it to the podium.”

I had no idea how literal Marion was being. She was hugely unwell. She was maybe even dying. She didn’t say—and I had no way of knowing—that she was deep in the middle of a life-and-death struggle with cancer, and had just finished a wracking series of radiation treatments. In fact, I would not truly understand what had transpired in that phone call until I read about it years later in her book
Bone
—published after she had narrowly survived her struggle. To this day I marvel that that she came to our conference. (She told me later that she was “listening to inner guidance.”) I told Marion on the phone that day that I understood she was “not particularly well,” and that we would be delighted to have her join us for the conference, and would consider it a bonus if she were able to speak. Just come, Marion, I said.

Well, as it turned out, Marion did come, and she
was
feeling well on the day of the conference. She
was
able to speak. It was an unforgettable moment. Marion approached the podium slowly, regally. I had not yet seen her in person. She was of medium height, with beautifully coiffed graying hair, and warm blue eyes. I imagined her to be in her late fifties. She had a marvelous, chiseled, intelligent face and beautiful skin and eyes—the face of a Shakespearean beauty, I thought, and the poise of a diva. Had she been an actress, I wondered? Marion showed no sign of radiation-induced weakness, though I learned later how devastating the damage was, and how much pain she was actually in.

That day on the podium, she was, as it turned out, right in the middle of taking her cancer on as her dharma. Of embracing it. Of opening to the journey that was cancer.

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On November 16, 1993, deep into her career as a Jungian analyst, Marion was diagnosed with cancer of the endometrium. “Talked to Dr. Fellows,” she writes in her journal on that fateful day. “
He made it clear that I have carcinoma of the endometrium, with a three-doctor check. I
made it clear to him that I am not 70—that I still have things to do with my life.” I have plans, she said. Plans! (This is just what my father would have said to his Alzheimer’s doctor if he had been offered the luxury of such a conversation.)

Cancer provoked an immediate crisis in both Marion’s personal life and her professional life. It wildly interrupted a perfectly sublime dharma. But Marion realized, overnight, that she had a
new
dharma. It was called cancer. She wrote in her journal: “
When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.” Wow. Not much holding on there. It was an instinctive move: Recognize the winds of change at once. Move with them.

Marion is a woman who is compelled to find meaning in experience. Indeed, the view that all experience has meaning is the very tenet that had drawn her to Carl Jung’s work in the first place. Now she insisted on understanding the meaning of her cancer. “
I persevered,” she said in the preface to
Bone
, “in trying to experience its many shocks as symptoms attempting to bring healing—wholeness into my body-soul connection.”

In
Bone
, Marion describes how she saw her illness as “Destiny.” (Her view of Destiny is really very similar to our notion of dharma.) “
Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life.”
All of life
. In another journal entry, she writes: “
These are strange days, knowing that I have moved into Destiny, knowing I am in exactly the right place, agonizing as it is.” No war here whatsoever.

Marion rearranged her life to conform to her new reality. She realized that this process would take every ounce of strength she had. She made careful choices about her time. She began to wind down her analytic practice in Toronto. Over the months to come she would terminate with many of her longtime analysands. She was paring away everything that was not her new dharma. Frost pared his life down to “poet.” Susan B. Anthony became a guided missile for the vote. Whitman became a Soldier’s Missionary. And Woodman opened her life to the possibilities of cancer.

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Marion Woodman has a fascinating dharma story. Until she was fifty years old, she taught English literature and drama at South High School in Toronto. In those years it must have been apparent to anyone paying attention that Marion Woodman was living her dharma. For twenty years, she brought Shakespeare and Keats and Beckett and Dickinson to life for generations of high school students.

During these years, immersed in the world’s great literature, she nurtured a world-class mythopoetic consciousness, until finally at midlife she felt a new call—a call to investigate this consciousness more explicitly. At an age when most people are thinking about retirement, Marion packed herself up and headed to Zurich, Switzerland, to train at the Jung Institute.

Marion studied with the top teachers in Zurich. She lived at the zenith of Carl Jung’s world. But she told me once that the real initiation into her new dharma came through her own personal analysis with a legendary Jungian analyst in London. In her book
Coming Home to Myself
, she writes about this experience:

That’s when my analysis began
. That’s when Marion began what Carl Jung would call the “night sea journey.” That’s when Marion began pointing her sails into the wind of the unconscious, and made the journey into the parts of herself that had been exiled to the basement and the attic of her body and soul. With the help of her analyst, she made the irrevocable decision to accept whatever she found there.

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