The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (36 page)

The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness. It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to
exile nothing
.

Marion taught me that in the process of the night sea journey we expose the shadow. “
The shadow is anything we are sure we are not; it is part of us we do not know, sometimes do not want to know, most times do not want to know. We can hardly bear to look,” says Marion. “Well,” suggests Marion, “do look!!” It will be startling. (“Ourself behind ourself, concealed—should startle most,” wrote Emily Dickinson, Woodman’s muse.)

“
The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived,” writes Marion. “Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.” Marion discovered, of course, that Jung’s technique for discovering our
exiled parts centered primarily around the analysis of dreams, which Jung called “the royal road to the unconscious.”

Marion was endlessly fascinated by the capacity of dream analysis to reunite us with ourselves. And she was fascinated, too, with the structure of dreams. She was astonished to find in dreams the very same dramatic structure she had been teaching in literature and drama. And she came to believe, as Jung did, that at the heart of the unconscious mind there is a panoramic intelligence that is deeply connected with fundamental human consciousness. She came to believe that this was the only true guide for her soul.

After termination with her analyst in London, Marion would henceforth let her life be guided by an ongoing analysis of her own dream world. “
Once we know what the dream world is,” she writes, “to be without it is to be rudderless. The dream continually corrects our waking course.” Marion, like Jung, came to believe that dreams are the path—circular and meandering as it is—to a knowledge of the exiled self.

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When Marion finished her training in Switzerland and her analysis in England, she returned to Canada with Ross and set up a psychotherapy practice, using Jungian techniques. Early on, Marion became particularly fascinated with food addictions and eating disorders, because she herself had wrestled with these very issues.

In the early years of her analytic practice, Marion found herself struggling to understand the repetitive themes in the dreams of her addicted clients. This was for her a phase of deliberate practice. She was trying to find patterns in the psyches of her patients—trying to find new paths to healing. She was systematic about it. She says, “
I put rows of dreams on the floor of my studio, organized and reorganized them by theme. I marveled at the overwhelming power of the unconscious and at the same time the intensity of its drive toward healing.”

Marion discovered an underlying theme in her clients’ dreams. She discovered that her addicted clients lived divided lives—lives split between body and soul, between perfection and imperfection, between
light and dark. Healing came about through integrating these “pairs of opposites.” She came into an understanding of the way in which longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.

What a relief, then, she discovered, to learn to accept both sides of these pairs of opposites—not just the God in us, but the animal, too. Not just the transcendent states, but the realities of embodied life. “What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them to be,” she declared. She found that her clients experienced the same kind of relief. No matter how painful the truth may be, it’s usually a relief to acknowledge it.

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Now Marion would use all of her Jungian analytic techniques—especially dream analysis—to come into relationship with cancer. She began a new phase of her dream analysis. Everything became subservient to this work. Marion told me that she would spend hours each morning in bed with her dreams. “A dream not understood is like a letter unopened,” wrote Jung. Now these letters—these dreams—were for Marion a matter of life and death.

Her dreams began to teach her about her current state of mind and body. In her dreams, she became aware of feeling trapped. She sensed that light could not penetrate the darkness of her body. “
My dark images are related to depression as surely as my cancer is related to dark imagery,” wrote Marion in her journal. “The connecting space is the subtle body, the home of the metaphor, the world of soul. That’s where I’m working now, visualizing radiant energy transforming into healthy cells. Jung knew psyche and matter were not opposites.”

She had a growing awareness that she was somehow trapped—squeezed into too small a space. “
I know that this death I am going through has to do with matter that cannot move as quickly as the consciousness that inhabits it. Too much light in too dense matter. My dreams have been telling me that for a year.” She had written often about this feeling of being trapped in too small a consciousness.

She was trapped in a consciousness that was not yet expansive enough to embrace her new dharma. Where was the block? What, precisely, was split off? What had she not yet gotten big enough to embrace?

Finally, the answer came to her.

What aspect of herself had she exiled? Death.

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Marion’s dharma journey had brought her over and over again to a confrontation with the pairs of opposites: Body and Spirit. Heaven and Hell. Psyche and Soma. Now her dharma—what she liked to call Destiny—would bring her to the final pair of opposites: Life and Death. Could she embrace both life and death at the same time?

This challenge, of course, is precisely the one facing Arjuna at the outset of the Bhagavad Gita. As he quietly surveys the great battlefield of Kurukshetra laid out before him, Arjuna realizes that he is looking squarely at the prospect of his own death. And in the face of this death, he folds. He drops to the floor of his chariot.
I cannot fight this fight
.

It is at this point that Arjuna—terrified—begins “the wondrous dialogue” with Krishna. Krishna begins with a magnificent sermon (and here I paraphrase): “You see Life and Death as opposites,” he says to a befuddled Arjuna, “as if you had to choose one over the other. And of course you choose life. But don’t you get it? You have to choose both. Life and Death are not enemies. They are not opposites at all. They are
inextricably bound to one another. You cannot really choose life without also choosing death.”

“
Death is inevitable for the living,” teaches Krishna. “Birth is inevitable for the dead. Since these are inevitable, you should not sorrow.”

All of the Eastern contemplative traditions finally see a full-hearted embrace of death as the very bridge to full life.
Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then your work will last forever
.

To our minds this makes no sense. Aren’t an embrace of life and an embrace of death mutually exclusive? Krishna teaches that they are not. They are not—not any more than light and dark, mountain and valley, psyche and soma are mutually exclusive. Indeed, holding them both at the same time is what is
required
. It is a sublime paradox.

Paradox is, of course, Marion’s home territory. When she looked into the heart of her struggle, Marion discovered her aversion to death. She was trying to keep death out—out of her thoughts, out of her consciousness, out of her dreams. Just as Mom was trying to keep it out. And, alas, as Marion discovered, there is no way to pry loose from the horns of this dilemma but to embrace death fully. Remember that Keats came to exactly the same insight when he finally embraced death as “Life’s high meed.”