The art of rewilding the psyche is most of what my course on Inner Wayfinding is about — so if you like this article, you might want to check out the course as well.
To join the Inner Wayfinding cohort (starting July 12), get your ticket here.
To pick up just the Inner Wayfinding self-guided course, without joining the cohort, click here.
You’ve got a lot of forces in you, a lot of sub-personalities and competing currents; a lot of patterns, schemas, habits, and memories; a lot of urges and energies, eros and ire. Each of us is less of a consistent individual than an ecosystem, thronging with profligate life.
Ecosystems have a tendency to shift, to swing from one balance to another. In between balances is a strange time, both dangerous and rife with possibility.
You probably know a few of the ways people manage our psyches when they’re out of balance. Techniques like meditation, therapy, IFS, Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, breathwork, CBT, on and on and on. These can each be really great ways of changing the balance of the inner ecosystem.
One bit of trouble: pretty much all of these techniques are ways of asserting the will of the conscious ego. The “me” behind the eyes. The ego that chooses which techniques it will pick up and how it will use them, because it likes the idea of where the practice is supposed to go.
When you take actions, again and again, that are meant for the benefit of one member of the ecosystem, rather than the ecosystem as a whole, you get — well, look around. How much wildlife have you seen lately? How are the local forests doing? Did you know that early visitors to Monterey bay said the sea otters were so plentiful that if they were stepping stones, you could walk right across the bay without getting wet?
The question is, do you want to do to your own psyche what humans have done to ecosystem after ecosystem? With the best of intentions, just trying to take care of yourself, fit in with your needs and your environment, you can practice jhanas and set boundaries and get massages — and at some point, you look around to find your inner wilds paved, your lust for life endangered, your mycelial connections with the messy world around you withered, your intuition a caged bird.
Any time you decide in advance, “I want to be more like this” and then choose a way of becoming more like that, you are letting the ego bend the ecosystem into a shape it likes better. Don’t get me wrong, the ego needs to have a voice in this process — sometimes even a prominent one. But it can’t just dominate every other voice without wrecking the ecosystem over time.
Are there any alternatives to turning your psyche into a strip mall? Yeah. But the ego doesn’t tend to like them or take them seriously. We tend to need someone with Big Serious Authority to give us permission to take them seriously.
On an unrelated note, here’s a quote I like
[In this practice] you can not only analyse your unconscious but you also give your unconscious a chance to analyse yourself, and therewith you gradually create the unity of conscious and unconscious without which there is no individuation at all.
— Carl Jung
Now we’re on the trail — not just looking at our unconscious, but meeting it, letting it look at us as well, letting it affect us as well. Unifying the various aspects of the mind, instead of simply imposing one on the others.
Jung also says
It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.
This is the ethos of Jung’s “special legacy”: the technique of Active Imagination.
Describing the technique is simple — internalizing it and letting it take on a life of its own is a vaster task. But as for the simple description: take some contents from the unconscious (maybe a dream image, or a fantasy, or just some urge that came up while you were out for a walk), and hold it in your mind’s eye until it comes to life.
That’s it. That’s the gist.
When we turn ourselves over to this kind of activity, a weird non-linear process starts to unfold. Basically, now that you’ve set the ego aside, opened up some space inside you, and created a container for everything else in your psyche to speak and act… they start to do exactly that.
It’s a lot like re-wilding a patch of earth. At first, it seems impossible. You’re getting nothing but weeds and a couple stray seeds from local farms. But as time goes on, and you tend to the patch by attending to what’s there — a couple saplings sprout up. A local berry bush.
You notice how certain little vines cluster around certain shrubs, and realize they must work well with each other. Year by year, you learn the patterns of this patch of earth, and you find your role not in changing or shaping those patterns — but by helping those patterns express themselves, and by heading off anything that tries to disrupt those patterns.
The same process unfolds in your psyche. By creating a container and allowing the deeper, dreamier, more instinctive and strangeful parts of yourself to mingle, synergize, fight, wither, and attract new creatures into their branches — you allow something special and robust to assert itself. You allow yourself to become the Psyche, not just the ego.
This kind of inner work involves the body, heart, mind, and soul, and it goes as deep as you’ll follow it — as long as you’re willing to follow it. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but the rewards have been quite outsized for me, compared to the effort put in. The joy of watching my Psyche spark back to life and support me in ways I didn’t know were possible, it’s been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. Even then the Psyche chooses experiences that aren’t pleasant for my ego, I tend to look back on them with a lot of gratitude. (Though not always when I’m in the middle of them.)
You can look around for resources on Jungian Active Imagination, or even work on shamanic journeying if you want to approach from that direction. If you want personal support and a group to learn with, I’m running a cohort of my Inner Wayfinding course starting July 12 (details here).
To join the Inner Wayfinding cohort, get your ticket here.
To pick up just the Inner Wayfinding self-guided course, without joining the cohort, click here.
This style of inner work is one of my favorite things to practice with people; I hope to see a few of you there.