Click here to listen to Allies, Uncertainty, and Soul in the season 2 archives on buzzsprout
The old forms are dissolving. I find myself thinking about allies–how to be an ally, and also, where are my allies? These questions are important in my “outer life” as a citizen, and a human being making my way through the day-to-day.
I can find some answers in movies and books and my community… but can these take me far enough, deep enough, into the desired transformation?
How can depth psychology and the soul life help me grapple with the challenge of allyship, alliances, and support today?
Transcript of “Allies, Uncertainty, and Soul”
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Well, my friends, it is Saturday morning. I still have a cup of coffee. It’s going to be hotter than blazes again today here in the Mojave Desert and this is not my usual time for putting together a podcast for you. This is– I don’t know–maybe the second, the third, the fourth time/week that I’ve worked hours and hours and hours on a program for you, only to have it dissolve in my hands, the longer that I spend with it. And that’s part of what I want to talk about today, because it’s frustrating, and it disturbs me, because I do feel that the regularity of our shared schedule is part of our connection. And yet, in these times, everything is changing. The old schedules and the old forms are changing and events outside and also in our inner lives, in our response to things, which are shifting so rapidly, that it’s hard, at least for me, to get ahold of something and say “yes, this is it. This is the message. This is the meaning, this is what needs to be brought across right now.”
I frequently find myself thinking about the lyrics from a song that my friend Rags Rosenberg wrote. He wrote this song called “Making It Up As We Go” that’s about the fact that we live in a world of human made constructs. At one point in the song, the Tinker turns to Christopher Columbus, and says, “The maps are all dissolving, the compass spinning around,” and that about sums it up for me. So what do I have to offer you today, in this time of great change?
I find myself thinking about allies. How to be an ally, and also, where are my allies? These are important questions for me in the so called “outer” sense, in the literal sense, from a literal perspective. And by that I mean, the question of being a good ally arises in the face of the calls for white people to deal with their issues and get on board that’s coming from the black matters movement. And the movement of other people of color. And the question of “where are my allies?” certainly has a lot to do with my everyday life and looking around at like-minded people, listening to them, supporting them, receiving support from them. But the literal perspective and the events of what we call our outer life, our social political life, our everyday routines being in material reality–well, we know that that exists simultaneously with, even arises from, what we talk about here on this program, which is our psychic reality.
We experience through mythology and story. Psychic reality is really where we live, because everything that happens is being handled by us through our imagination, through that imaginative capacity that I call soul, and I get that definition from James Hillman and the tradition of archetypal psychology. We don’t ever stop imagining and interpreting what comes into us, what comes into our bodily perceptions, through our senses, and what we receive through the mind, our concepts and ideas. All of these things are made into experience in that, by that third, the soul, which is the thing that has really dropped out of most of the constructs and considerations in Western culture. Bringing soul back in, that has been the primary contribution of depth psychology and studies of mythology by depth psychologists, mythologists like Joseph Campbell, Michael Meade, and I put myself in that tradition. So when I consider this question of allies and my feeling that I need those in my outer world, I immediately step into the consideration of where those questions are answered or where they are located, if I look at my life from the mythic perspective, if I consider this psychic reality of it.
Now, I know that you know that this is true, that there is more going on than the literal events that are recorded by the news, for example, otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast! And it’s my hope that this podcast validates for you, your awareness and interest in this other perspective, in integrating your sense that life is lived, literally, yes, and also metaphorically, all the time. And that you are interested in developing the practice of turning to this other perspective as something that is always available to you at the same time that you make your moves in that so called “outer” world of facts, and events.
My thoughts in the moment about these questions of allies, how to be one, and where my allies are–who they are and where they’re operating, from the perspective of psychic reality, of the metaphor and the mystery in my life, isn’t contained in a particular story. So I’m not going to be telling you a particular story in this podcast today. I want to start with the notion of being an ally. Yesterday I went to a gathering to celebrate Juneteenth and the speaker was encouraging those of us who were present to be reading some books by some different authors and investigating the history that we have inherited, the history of race relations and slavery and all of these institutions. He said, “what you have learned is simply not true.” And I thought, well, my investigations have already revealed that. Yes! I don’t know if you have been doing any reading or listening to any podcasts yourself. I’ll put a plug in here for the film “13th” and a plug in here for the podcast, “Seeing White,” the second season, which is about race in America. I have found these to be very illuminating. And I must say that I had no idea how consciously we have all been manipulated into this brutal and exploitive system, and set of relationships with each other.
So what does mythology and awareness of the psychic reality have to do with this process of learning how to listen and asking better questions and turning to new teachers and new sources of information? In other words, how can your awareness of psychic reality and the metaphoric imaginative possibilities, how can awareness of the existence of that, help you in this process? Well, what I think that we’re talking about here is being willing to learn a new story, right? About being willing to question the old one question, the story that you tell, that you’re so sure of, that appears to be based in incontrovertible facts. That means that we need to shake up our certainty and the seed of certainty is the ego. Now this concept of “ego” is a bit tricky to talk about because we are so immersed in Eastern traditions and Western ideas, and they’re not the same. So I’m going to take a moment to clarify what I mean by “ego.” When I use the term “ego,” I’m speaking in the tradition of depth psychology, and from that perspective, the task is not to get rid of ego. It’s not to become ego-less. It is to relativize the positions of the ego.
In other words, it is to work with the ego, which is your dominant, daily, literal minded sense of self and the organizer of experience, to work with it so that there’s always this sense that there is more. That’s really the nature of therapy, in depth psychology. It’s to introduce an element of doubt that then allows for new information, for new stories to come in, for new possibilities to arise. And where do those new possibilities come from? They come from contact with the soul life, with psychic reality. This is why dreams, for example, are a very important source of material and reflection in this type of therapy. Dreams are regular infusions of material from psychic reality. This is why familiarity with mythology and stories like fairy tales, is an important element of depth psychology and of the training of depth psychologists. Because it provides that background, it is the source of these metaphors, and working with them alerts us to the presence of those metaphors in life and helps us exercise that perspective in our lives.
To have awareness of psychic reality, of the mystery, and be able to see things metaphorically and to wonder what they mean, and to to see through them–that loosens up or softens the certainty of the ego. And that is what we need, isn’t it, to be open to the possibility that the stories that you’ve been told, in this case, I’m talking about stories as in history, and the news and even ideologies, political ideologies, social theories, religious dogmas, whatever, that those things need to be questioned right now? And that the best sources of information of new information likely lie outside of your familiar world, outside of the places and the people, the sources, that you have habitually turned to in the past.
So, being aware of psychic reality can help us shake ourselves loose from the certainty that governs our everyday lives. And this I feel we are being called to do, if we are moved to develop the capacity for allyship, which in my view is not only for other people, but also essential to one’s own self liberation.
Now, the other part of my question had to do with “where are my allies?” Certainly I have them in my outer world. But where are they in my inner world? Do I have them? And the answer that is found in the content, in the plotlines of our myths and stories is yes, most definitely, we do. We do have allies in the psychic realm that can help us with the overwhelm, with the struggle, with the exhaustion, and the fear. Myths and stories, especially fairy tales–and this is one of the reasons that I share so many fairy tales with you– are metaphoric descriptions of psychic reality and of psychic, or what we call “psychological” processes.
I especially love fairy tales because not only do they seem to aptly map these so called internal processes, but I feel they have an inherently subversive quality. Look at all of those kings that are overthrown! And we have so many stories of helpers. I’m thinking of the story that I told about the valiant horse not too long ago. In fact, the constant presence of helpers or mentors of some sort is so prevalent that their appearance is even part of Joseph Campbell’s famous pattern, or monomyth, the hero’s journey. It’s such a common feature in our stories that it’s part of the map of the journey, that at some point, you will meet someone, something, who can help you in invaluable way. Who will guide you, teach you, give you a magic talisman–the help, the assistance takes many different forms.
Now, this is not literal. I want to pause right there and remind you that we are talking about soul life and messages from the soul, that is the psychic realm. So I’m talking about what is available to you and your personal psyche, and in the larger soul field in which you operate. The easiest way to talk about this may be to reference the last story that I told you, “The Man Without a Story.” If you didn’t hear that one or you don’t remember, I encourage you to go and listen to that podcast. I love that story and the more time I spend with it, the more I find that’s relevant to our current moment.
But so here’s the snapshot we need for our discussion now. The man is a basket maker. And he’s really run out of resources to survive as a basket maker. He makes a journey to the edge of the fairy glen and we know the fairy glen, that metaphorical place. It’s a liminal spot. It’s a step into the soul life. It’s an opening into this psychic reality. And he has a very interesting series of adventures in that space. One of the things that he discovers is that he is actually, in that realm, is not only or merely a basket maker. He is also a very good priest. He is also a highly accomplished fiddler. And he is a skillful surgeon.
Now, all of this is much to his surprise. So see, we have that ego point of consciousness in that realm, that is experiencing this and going, “Oh my god!” “Who me?” he keeps saying, and they look at him and say, “ey, you do it” and every time time he reacts with understandable confusion. And then he discovers that he does have the capacity. He does have the requisite skills. Well, what does this suggest? That he’s that he’s more than he thought he was, and that his identity may be more than the function, that is the role, that he plays in that outer world, that is from the perspective of his ego. He is more, he can do more, and his identity is more fluid.
One of the things I love about this story is that he apparently rests in the role of storyteller. According to the end of the story, he tells his story of this adventure many times, and he and his wife have plenty for the rest of his life. What does it mean then, that he’s gained a story? I think it means that he’s gained a relationship to that other realm, to his soul life. So do we have allies? We do indeed. In the energies, the personifications that arise in our soul life. And these allies, this help, takes two forms; an infusion of energies that are autonomous, like the young woman with the long black hair in that story, (The Man Without a Story), and also the revelation of capacities and energies and vitality and skills that have been concealed, that are part of us. That our habitual ego perspective on our own selves conceals from us. So I return to this theme of softening the grip of the ego.
Softening the grip of the ego, allowing some doubt and uncertainty and fluidity to come in, not only opens you up to possibilities in the so called outer world, it not only positions you to learn and to accept new stories, new histories, new facts, it also allows you to communicate more freely with your internal world, and with the larger soul life/soul field in which we live and move. And in that field, we find that there are helpers, mentors, allies, and that we have capacities beyond those that the ego, with its various limitations, has understood and attempted to live.
This is part of the beauty, my friend, in reflecting with story. Because these stories show us this, and when you find your place in a story that I’m telling and allow yourself to let that detail, let that moment that grabs your attention, be significant and relate to it, think about it, ponder it, consider its metaphorical possibilities for you… well, it can be quite an opening into a broader and deeper and richer sense of yourself and your life inside and out.
Now I have a gorgeous poem for you that I want to share before we wrap up. It’s called “Make It Matter” and I have a recording of it being read by the poet, Brenda Littleton. I also have a couple of announcements that I want to make and I’m going to share those now, before the poem, in order to preserve the meditative reflective space that I think the poem will invoke for you. First of all then, my announcements. A big welcome to all of the new subscribers and a shout out to the new patrons of Myth Matters: Rochelle LeBlanc, Pioneertown Sun and Barbara Hockley. Thank you so much for your financial support of this podcast!
And if you are finding value here and have the means to support Myth Matters financially, I hope you will join Barbara and Rochelle and my other patrons and find me on Patreon. Now, I know that the simple satisfaction of supporting this content is a major motivation for most of my patrons and supporters on Bandcamp, and yet there are other benefits, like having a podcast created on a mythological topic of your choice. I also am offering some special online talks and q&a sessions. There is going to be one next Tuesday on the hero’s journey, which I’m very much looking forward to.
Second announcement. Speaking of special programs, I invite you to tune in to a panel discussion called the “Language of Time” on Monday, June 22. This discussion is hosted by award-winning writer Aditi Khorana and the House of Beautiful Business, as part of their Living Room Sessions. The House of Beautiful Business is a global think tank and community for making humans more human and business more beautiful. I’m very pleased to have been invited into this panel discussion about the language of time, and the relationship between our old myths and stories, and language and meanings, and the present moment and what might be coming.
You can find out more about the House of Beautiful Business and the Living Room Sessions and sign up for that panel discussion online. Google “House of Beautiful Business” or go to my website, mythicmojo.com and I have a link posted there. This gathering is free, but you do need to register ahead of time to receive the zoom link. And I hope to see you there.
And now “Make It Matter, “read by the poet, Brenda Littleton. (recording)
Thank you so much Brenda. And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Take good care of yourself. And until next time, happy myth- making and keep the mystery in your life alive.
Helpful links:
“The Language of Time” panel discussion and exploration at the House of Beautiful Business
Schedule of all upcoming Living Room Sessions at the House of Beautiful Business
