The Journey Within

The notion of journeying within the self has been a bit abused over the past couple of hundred years due to the inception of and the growing pains within the field of Psychology. Bless Freud and Jung, but they have made it a staple of therapy to have to dig into the painful past, plumb the depths of our subconscious, and look at our shadow self in order to be healthy. All of which has merit to a point just like most modalities do. Taken to extremes they can cause significant harm and even when not they often leave people with unsatisfied questions of “Ok, what now?” A large number of my clients come to me having picked the bones clean digging into their past, plumbing their depths and looking inside for the root causes of things. When you’ve pulled things out by the roots, what you’re left with is barren soil and a hole, right?

But that’s what we think of when we think of journeying within because those are the symbols we are taught from early childhood. Going into the self is like exploring a dark cave or the “Dark Continent of Africa” and everything there is mysterious and dangerous and we might not come back. Some people discover alternative meditations which lead them into their core or their spiritual self via their Prana or life force, but usually these processes are meant to lift us out of ourselves, not to have us go inward. The inward movement is meant to be a grounding process which allows us to connect to the universal or downward Prana flow so we can get out of our body and back to source. It’s a process of going inward to escape our current selves rather than to make new discoveries about them.

I struggled with all of this for years because it never made sense to me. It all seemed summed up by the myth of Persephone and her abduction into the land of the dead. To summarize: a goddess for some reason comes into being as an eternal teen. A powerful being in her own right she never matures, never comes into full agency, and is never meant to be in balance in any way. She’s incomplete by definition being the virginal essence of spring. Hades, (sometimes seen as symbolizing our subconscious) for a whole host of reasons which are amazingly unhealthy and petty including jealousy and brotherly rivalry, decides to kidnap and rape her. Within the myth this is seen as appropriate for some reason and is rarely commented on even today. Oh, and to add to the creepy…