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People
Tell Their Stories: Every
Inch A Queen Marion Woodman There he met his old friend Gloucester who had been blinded. He said, "How goes the world?" And Gloucester said, "I see you feeling me." Feeling me. He can no longer see with his eyes, but the two old men meet with love, a love that they never expressed in this way before. Lear in the heath, with the storm smashing at every part of him, appeared in rags. No scepter, no crown, nothing. But his suffering had brought him face to face with himself. What he found was his own soul. He stood up and said, "I am every inch a King." It was when all the pomp and circumstance, all the superficiality was taken away that he recognized himself and called himself a king. Later, Cordelia, his beloved soul child returned from France. When she met Lear, he could hardly believe that she had returned. He saw himself reflected in her, as she saw herself reflected in him. Of course, the two were bonded in love. He told her of all the sacrifices that he made. He said, "Upon these sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves pour incense." Many of us know what it is to feel the incense of the gods poured on our sacrifices. We have been through many lessons, and we have recognized our sacrifices. But we have also known the power of the love that is being poured upon us. Through the suffering, we have come to the recognition of our own soul. Those lines from Lear always resonate at a very deep level, because without the recognition of the incense, the suffering is meaningless and can be intolerable. The Descent of the Earth and our Bodies What I am suggesting, in referring to Lear and in the larger scheme of things, is that our earth itself is in descent. Descent deeper than the planet has ever gone through before. A dangerous decent at an extremely difficult time of transition. We all know that the patriarchy has been through its obsessive, compulsive materialism. It is bringing us to a terrible crisis. We know that patriarchy is crumbling. We are living in a toxic world. Air pollution, water pollution, over population, the breaking down of the ozone layer. We all know the symptoms and see the same ones in our bodies. Our immune systems are breaking down. The toxicity of what we are living in is impossible to live in. We live in harmony with our planet. Our matter is in harmony with the planet's matter. As we look at those signs of crumbling in the earth, we look at the crumbling in our own bodies--not only those of us who have cancer, but those of us who have AIDS, those of us with autoimmune diseases who have to recognize that our body is turning against us, a most rare thing. We have to look at that symbolically. Process Most of us also recognize that, in the healing process, we have to learn to honor the feminine principle. We have to break with cultural values. We have to break with efficiency, perfection, and going for the summit. All those values, which the patriarchy holds dear, will not work in the healing process. Many of us facing illness have had to give up our jobs and often make other sacrifices that are even more precious. Giving up the security of our bodies is also immense. I always thought I could depend on my body. No matter what happened, I knew it would hold. Now I do not know that it will hold. The crumbling stages of discovering that is terrifying. I remember one of my old friends in the Bay area saying that in the earthquake, she suddenly remembered what it was to have a body that you could not depend on. There is immense sacrifice. We are being called to recognize the feminine in ourselves. For example, process is a very important word in the feminine principle--process rather than product. One woman who was part of a team of breast cancer survivors that climbed Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, said that she had to stay with the process. She had to recognize that getting to the summit was not what was important. It was being present to the moment. Presence Present for her was recognizing three breaths to every step, then four breaths to every step, and finally recognizing that she would not be going to the summit with the rest of the group. I would ask you to look at your own process, look at the presence that is required. I think of my own process of healing. I had to learn to eat green and yellow vegetables--steamed, and that was about all there was to eat. I had to slow down and enjoy my green and yellow vegetables. I still have to slow down and eat the green and yellow vegetables, make sure to get the vitamin pills and to receive enough rest. In that process, for the first time in my life I experienced the relationship between eating food and getting energy from the food. You may think that is a wild statement, but I had never put those two together--that you could actually get energy immediately after eating. These are the tiny details that we have to learn when we are sick. Take an hours rest every noon if you expect to get through to the evening and to sleep that night. I personally have had to learn discipline of inverse order. I had a most undisciplined life. Now, I think of the word discipline as I think of the feminine divinity Sophia. I look into her eyes and see myself reflected. Through her love for me, and my love for her, I do what I need to do to obey nature's rhythms. I've had to learn nature's rhythms in my body and accept them, and be disciplined by them. I am finding the sacredness of matter, this incredible instrument that we are. We could go on and on about presence in relation to being with the people we love as well. We realize we may not be with them in a month, so we are present. Looking into someone's face and seeing the smile. Honor and reflecting the smile. To know that life does not stretch on endlessly is to bring the moment to life. That is all that matters. To live it right now. Paradox Another word that goes along with the feminine is the word paradox. The feminine can hold the paradox. It can say, "This is beautiful. This other, which is very different, is beautiful, too. This is an elephant; this is a gazelle. They are equally beautiful." Moreover, we say that we have to lose our life in order to find it. That is a paradox. Now what does that mean? We lose our life in order to find it? I am sure many of you know well enough what that is. You have lost your old life in order to find your new life. There are other paradoxes as well that happen when you have death on your shoulder. I can give you a couple of rather funny examples from my own experience. When the doctor told me I had two months to live, my husband and I went out to the graveyard to choose a grave. He found a place that he really liked in the middle of the row. I was not happy with that. I thought, You know, it's okay. There was a water tank right beside it, but I thought, "WellÖI don't want to be in the middle of a row. I don't sit in the middle of a theater row, and I am not going to sit in the middle of a row for all eternity." You see the paradox, part of me was living on earth, and part of me was already gone. I didn't quite know whether I was in temporal time or eternal time. I think you find that all the way along when you are trying to hold back that you are mortal, and you have to keep reminding yourself that you are mortal. My husband is very intuitive. During the time that I was in a wheelchair he would take me to the art museum. We both love art. I would go around in a wheel chair, and he would take me right up to the picture. He could see it fine, but I was looking only at the bottom of the picture. I discovered a whole new wall of art. I tell you there is a whole new world there, and someday you may see it. I discovered the world of children also--children being taken around in their buggies and looking at this strange big child in a different kind of buggy. I wasn't quite a child, but I was still going around in a buggy. There was a whole world of communication that took place with these little ones. There was a whole new life born out of going around in the wheel chair. Receptivity Yet another word that one would associate with the Feminine is receptivity. That word has also been coming up. Having ears to hear what is being said. I think one of the most difficult challenges in our society is that so many people have so many different receivers than what is coming into them, or they simply haven't got the receivers to hear what is being said. If you are trained to hear hard rock, you won't hear Mozart. People are trying to speak to us and we're not receiving. I will give you an example about talking to a medical doctor. Now, I wouldn't be standing here if it weren't for the medical profession. However, my own doctor in London, Ontario gave me two months to live. I accepted that. I had no reason to think otherwise. However, my dear friend from Palo Alto phoned me and said, "What is going on? I sense that something is really wrong." I told her, and she heard the flatness in my voice. She said, "Marion, surely you're going to get a second opinion." The only cancer clinic in my home city of London is all one clinic, so every doctor is involved and there really was not another doctor there to consult. She told me she would give my x-rays to a doctor at the Stanford clinic in Palo Alto and see what he thought, so I sent the x-rays down to Stanford. About two weeks later, there was a voice of hope on the other end of the telephone, and it just clicked into my being. I decided, "Maybe there is hope and I will go for it." Afterwards, I asked my medical doctor in Canada, "Will you be glad to see me sitting here six months from now?" He said no. I said, Well, I will certainly be cheered up to see you sitting there." He said, That has nothing to do with anything." I asked, "Don't you believe in soul?" "No," he said, "I don't believe in soul." I said, "Well I believe in soul in the healing relationship. Don't think you think you could even try?" He said no. He was absolutely honest--that was the one great thing about him. When it came to the parting of the ways, I looked into his brown eyes and said, "I have to leave you now because I look into your eyes and what I see written on my forehead is D-E-A-D dead." And he said, "That's right." I said, "Because I like you, I feel that in every cell in my body, and I will die if I stay with you," and he said, "You will." So I said, "I am leaving," and he said, "I will be here when you need me." He had no receivers. It did not matter how I tried to make him understand my position; there was no way of getting through. I must also say that my present doctor said to me, "I don't know what it is you are doing with that imagery, but do it." He is beginning to hear. I think you have to be careful who you waste your time on. If doctors or other people don't have ears, don't worry about them. Resonance Another word I would put with the feminine is the word resonance. The experience that rings right down to your whole body. You know something and it rings right through. What we go through in facing death is experienced in every cell in the body. That cell resonates with life or death depending on where you are looking, on what your glasses are, or what your timing is. That resonance can give you goose pimples, and your whole body responds. That is so important to recognize when it comes to imagery. If the imagery is not resonating, it is not hitting into the depths of the cells, not into the life force. If the imagery is going to work, it has got to go in at the life force level. Surrender The other word that is involved is surrender. Many people think that surrender is a weak word. You are weak if you surrender within the patriarchy. You're viewed as someone who just hasn't the guts to stand up and not surrender. I can tell you that it takes great strength to surrender. You have to know that you are not going to collapse. Instead, you are going to open to a power that you don't even know, and it is going to come to meet you. In the process of healing, this is one of the huge things that I have discovered. People recognized the energy coming to meet them. When they opened to another energy, a love, a divine love, came through to meet them. That is what is known as grace. We all sing about amazing grace. It is a gift. I think that it comes through the work that we do. For some people, it can come out of the blue, but I know that in my own situation, the grace came through incredible vigilance. I do my visualization everyday, sometimes six, seven, eight times a day. Just opening to light. Letting my body open. Power of Prayer The night before my first operation, I was so shocked, and my husband was equally shocked. We were sitting in the living room and the room was scintillating, just as if there was gold dust in it. Like Christmas Eve. He asked, "Marion, what do you think is going on in this room?" I said, "Well, it must be the love that is pouring in from all over the country in prayer." I had a vision of this web right across the continent and the gold nodules where all the little prayer groups were holding the web together. That love sustained me through many dark, dark, dark nights. I know many of you were in prayer groups, and I thank you for that. I have total faith in the power of prayer. I have total faith too in meditation. Meditation opens you to the possibility of the divine energy coming in from the other side. I will give you an example of what happened that sort of ties this whole thing together. I had been in a wheel chair for about three months. During this three months I had pulled back from life. I said, "It is not for me anymore. I will watch it, but it is too painful for me to try and participate, so I will sit in my chair and I will watch." Gradually it became absolutely peaceful and blissful to sit in the chair and watch. I was leaving life. I went to a party of one of my friends one night. He was fifty years old, a Dutchman. My husband and I sat on the couch all evening. Everyone patted the poor old lady on her head because she couldn't walk. People do feel sorry for you and pity you in situations like this. I hate pity. I think it is sentimental and destroys the genuine feeling. It was sweet of them I suppose to pat me on the head though. Dancing Into Life About ten thirty my husband said that we should go. We were on our way out the door when this tuba player came in. This tuba player was playing his tuba. He called himself the Campbell Soup Orchestra. He had on a Campbell's soup colored coat, yellow lapels, and a little Dutch sailor hat. The word Dutch is important. When I was in Ontario, I learned to dance polka to all the German and Dutch music. I loved it with a passion. We used to dance from nine to twelve. Afterwards, there was supper, and then the real dancers started at one and went until five. That was the world that I loved Twelve other horns followed this tuba player. Trombone, trumpet, you can imagine the sound. I said to my husband, "We must listen to this." We came back into the living room, there was a polka and I said, "Ross, let's dance." He said, "Marion, you know you can't dance." Then, this voice started from my vagina, and it said to me, "Marion you can sit in that chair until you rot. But I am going to dance." And I did. I was halfway across the floor by the time this voice finished. I looked at Ross, and he looked at me in total dismay. I was dancing with my hands in the air, and I was turning into light. I could see everyone looking at me as though I was a ghost risen from the dead or the biggest hypocrite that ever was. What was I doing? I was here dancing when I had just been sitting in this chair all night. I knew, though, that whatever was happening would save my life. Actually I didn't care whether I lived or died. It did pass through my head that I was going to break my back, but that didn't matter either at this point. The light force was in me. I was twenty years old, dancing as I had danced at the age of twenty when all my body was strong, and all my spirit was strong. Soul and body were one. The energy was there and a wonderful big Dutchman, realizing what was happening, came and danced with me. My whole being just resonated through this male presence. The two of us danced a sacred dance. Opening to Grace I want to point out what happened because some of you may say, "Well, so what." Here is an example of what happened with creative imagination. My world was dance. For me to be able to open up to that life that I had known was to be whole again. My body had forgotten how to be healthy. It had accepted death. Something had to happen to activate the life force at the lowest possible level. It just came up in me. I could feel it happening and explode into this moment that I can only call grace. Consciously, I surrendered to that power. It came through weeks of imaging dance, because there were weeks when I couldn't possibly do it. But the imagination never gave it up. Through the imagery, when the moment came, I was there to receive it. It seems to me so important that you work through process, through presence, through receptivity and resonance to recognize the surrender to that power which I can only call divine love. What I am saying is that many of you also know that power. You know the meaning of those words. I think it is important that we call them feminine. We all know that the patriarchy, not the masculine power principle, has ravaged the feminine. A people become like the God they worship, if God is only masculine, the feminine principle that would embrace that spirit is not in the culture. I am suggesting that we who have suffered immune breakdown are being called to honor the feminine principle. We are being called to live the feminine principle, to recognize the sacredness of our bodies. In recognizing the sacredness of our bodies, we recognize the sacredness of the planet. If you believe in the evolution of consciousness, or you believe in the evolution of history, you must wonder if it is possible that we would have come this far for nothing. No purpose, no meaning. Life without meaning. I am sure that we won't see it in our day, but I think the day is coming--perhaps after a deeper descent--when the feminine principle will be recognized as the union with the divine masculine. As I perceive the divine masculine, it is the warrior that stands up and fights for the feminine. The warrior that can stand up for you in your illness and say, "I will not take this. I will read, I will understand, I will find out what the questions are. I will make them as clear as possible, so I will get the clearest possible answer. Using Imagery You may not like the word fight. I am not very good at the word fight either. I could never do imagery that had to do with the word fight. Fighting dogs or fighting cancer cells. Instead, I have tried to embrace the whole concept of light coming out of darkness and permeating the cancer with light. Permeating my own huge question mark about the illness with light and insight. As I see it, the feminine principle may be what this is all about. The plague that is going through our culture. So many illnesses have to do with our immune system not being able to hold the balance. The images that we eat are as important as the food that we eat. My healing with that moment of dance was in the image. Researchers have done tests where they show a film like "The Sound of Music" to a group of people. The images which come in on the neurotransmitters of the body can actually change the chemistry of the body for a month. Talk about the connection between mind and body. The soul brings us the dream. The dream is a picture of your soul condition. The dream comes right out of your bones. The imagery is coming right out of you instinct. The connector between body and soul is in the immune system. On a psychic level, it is in the subtle body, which connects through metaphors and through the imagery. This is where the power of visualization is. Think twice before you turn on the news before you go to sleep. In this test, they also gave a control group the movie "The Omen" to watch. The bodies of those people reacted in a negative way. The immune system was affected to such a degree that it was dampened for a whole month. In finding our feminine principal, we find what Lear found, his own soul. The meaning of his own life in his own soul. If we are going to live, we have to recognize our queenliness and our kingliness. We eventually recognize our queen and our king. The feminine principle when it comes into its full glory opens to spirit. Here is the creative process. The empowered soul, the empowerment in the body opens to the touch of spirit from the other side. The creative process happens and in that process, a new life is born. Out of that new life we recognize our suffering and we recognize its immense value in bringing our new life to meaning. We have been there. Therefore, we have the right to our own truth. We have the freedom to speak it because we know. I know that the vision comes from having been to the bottom and coming back up. We can take that vision to the world. Even if we can't speak it, we can live it. Everybody sees it. And whether we live five years, twenty years, forty years, or five days, to live and to honor that is to change everyone in our environment. We also need something for ourselves. I want to share with you the poem that I have recited to myself many nights while I was in terror. It's from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: I
said to my soul Be still © 1996 Healing Journeys. This transcript is from the 1998 Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving™ Conference held in Oakland, California and is used by permission of Jan Adrian, Executive Director of Healing Journeys. Marion Woodman, Ph.D. (Hon.), is a leader in feminine development and a Jungian analyst. She is the author of many acclaimed books including Addiction to Perfection and Leaving My Father's House, that bridge the fields of analytical psychology and feminine psychology. Her newest book, Bone : Dying into Life (Viking Press, September 2000) is the story of her dealing with and healing from uterine cancer and transforming her life in the process. Healing Journeys (www.healingjourneys.org) sponsors a free annual Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving™ conference in Northern California and other locations. The purpose of the conference is to celebrate, empower, awaken and network all those whose lives are touched by cancer or any life-threatening illness, including people experiencing illness, healthcare providers and people supporting friends or family with cancer. If you would like more information about Healing Journeys and its conferences or to find out about videotapes of past conferences, call 800-423-9882. You can also e-mail Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys at jan@healingjourneys.com
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