Vibrant Jung Thing: Jungian Images and Reflections

Here in the Middle Years of Life: Is That All There Is?

The great jazz artist Peggy Lee performed the following beautiful, highly disturbing yet haunting song in 1969, at midlife, in her 50th year: 

 

I doubt that questions get much more real than those in this song.  And the question that Peggy Lee sings about here is of the type, that, for many people, can become achingly urgent at the middle of life. 

For many people, especially in our tumultuous times, the middle years of life can come to feel like an endless process of coping with chaos.  It can feel like life has become a time of just responding to one crisis after another: issues with maturing children, issues with the health of parents; job issues; issues of financial security.  At times, life can come to seem endlessly wearying, and very much as if there is nothing to it, but "just going through the motions".  From such a place, for very many people, there can come a deep heartfelt cry: "Is this really all that there is to my life?  Is this all that I get?"

This moment, the moment of this question, is highly important in the life of the individual.  This is true, even especially true, if the time when this question arises is filled with depression, anxiety -- even despair.

From experience with clients, I can almost guarantee that there will be no canned, pre-packaged answer to this question that will slake the desperate thirst of those who ask such a question. Only an answer rooted in the individual's life will bring any peace, any hope, any meaning -- any sense of value.

By an individual answer, I mean one that emerges from the very depths of the individual.  Not something that the individual's intellect or conscious mind has cobbled together, but something that emerges from the very depths of the person, from what they most fundamentally are.  Something to which they can say "Yes!" with their whole being.

It is the task of good therapy (and of Jungian analysis) to assist the individual in finding the symbolic dimension that conveys meaning, to find the deep story or myth of an individual's life.  There are many in suburban places like Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga for whom the question "Is that all there is?" has become urgently real.  I invite you to enter into the therapeutic journey inward, to find your own inner treasure.

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections from readers.  Have you had the experience of wondering in this way "is that all there is"?  How has that question affected your life?  If you were willing to share this important and personal part of your life, I'd be deeply interested to dialogue with you.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2010 Brian Collinson

 

Identity and Anxiety in the Film, "Up In the Air"

Make no mistake, moving is living.  -Ryan Bingham

"Up in the Air", directed by Jason Reitman, stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick.  Clooney's character Ryan Bingham is a full-time corporate down-sizer whose life consists of an endless stream of business travel ("322 days last year").  He moves from place to place, letting people go from corporate roles when their employers cannot stomach doing it.  He has no permanent attachments to people, a desolate and hollow single bedroom apartment he never sleeps in, and he has accumulated 10,000,000 airmiles...

Up In the Air Official Website

Ryan Bingham's life is in airports and hotel rooms and is filled with constant movement.  The stability and security in his life, his secure base, is found precisely in those things that others find impermanent and impersonal.  His finely orchestrated and choreographed travel routine, his mechanized method of moving constantly from place to place gives him re-assurance, and in an odd way a sense of belonging.  Which is good, because Ryan has no permanent connections to anyone in his life. 

Ryan also has a budding career as an motivational speaker.  His message: "Make no mistake: your relationships are the heaviest components in your life....  The slower we move, the faster we die."

Ryan is completely identified with his corporate role.   His aircraft-bound life is an appropriate symbol of his existence on a deeper level.  In the terms of Jungian psychology, Ryan, like Christopher McCandless, the subject of Into the Wild is a true puer aeternus ("eternal boy").  He floats above life in his social self, and never puts down roots into the deep soil of his genuine self.  And he is danger of discovering that his life is tragic because there he has no remaining way to turn back.

In its own way, this is a very disturbing and provocative film, but it's a very good one.  It raises the question for each of us about how connected we're willing to be to the real substance of our lives.

I'd welcome comments below from readers on anxiety, identity and work.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDITS: © DW Studios LL.C. and Cold Spring Pictures

© 2010 Brian Collinson

 

Job, Identity, Anxiety

I don't know what might motivate an employer to choose to lay people off 3 weeks before Christmas.  However, judging from the calls I received from clients and potential clients prior to the New Year, there were quite a few employers who took such action this year.

Having been on the receiving end of such news myself in prior times, my thoughts and very best wishes are with anyone who had to confront that reality this holiday season.  Here's to better times and a better job market for all. 

This is difficult for people all on its own -- just dealing with the economics of job loss.  However, when it's compounded by issues of identity and self-worth, it can become incredibly painful, to the point where it is almost unbearable.

It's all too easy for all of us to allow our identity to become completely bound up with our social role and with others' expectations of us, especially where work is concerned.  In his writings, Jung warned incessantly of the dangers of becoming over-identified with the social self, the "persona" as he called it. 

Today, for many people, the pace of work simply increases and increases as organizations make new demands on their employees.  More and more consideration, energy and time is demanded by the workplace, and, for many, there is intense and endless anxiety about work, about whether one's job is stable and sustainable, about relentless change, and often about the endless political complexities of workplaces where resources are scarce and communication and leadership are inadequate for the task at hand.

You might think that these factors would lead individuals to be less and less identified with work, but in an odd way, the effect seems often to be just the reverse.  Even though work is fraught with anxiety, people become strangely identified with their work role.  Perhaps it's precisely because so much effort has to be put into keeping working life on an even keel, and so much worry and anxiety keep pulling individuals back to confronting their work. 

However, it's essential for each of us to hold on to the realization that I am not identical with my work role.  Don't allow work to consume the substance of your life.

Easy to say, but doing it is often not as simple as that.  Often it is not just the identity at work that confines us.  It can be just as much about the way that we are perceived in various social settings, and in the community at large, through our work roles, as it were.  Very many of us are powerfully addicted to the drug of success.  Or, perhaps more accurately, we are highly invested in being seen as a success, perhaps to such an extent that all of our self-esteem and self-respect is riding upon it.

This gives rise to some fundamental questions:

• What really is it for me to be a success?  How will I know when I get there?
• Who gets to say whether I'm a success?  Me, or some outside authority to which I've given the power to say whether I've made it or not?
• Is it what I own that makes me a success, or is it what I am?
• And simply, am I over-identified with my work role?  How do I understand myself independent of it? 

Don't let your work keep you from your life.  Don't let it persuade you that it is your life.  Don't let it keep you from your vocation, what it is that you are really meant to be and do.

I'd be interested in your comments about how you experience work, and how you understand yourself and your identity independent of your job, and, as always, any other comments that you might have.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2010 Brian Collinson

Work and Boundaries

This week I spoke with a very large number of people who are confronting serious boundaries issues in the workplace.

I don't mean facing sexual harassment, or things like that -- although that's common enough, unfortunately.  I mean situations where people are being asked, or more often told, to put up with working arrangements that take working life right inside their private lives.

Often these situations have to do with expectations around availability that completely obliterate the distinction between personal and private life. For instance, it seems that more and more people are expected to carry Blackberrys or pagers and to keep them on 24 / 7.

If you look on the web amongst thinkers who are identified as "advanced thinkers" or "those ahead of the curve", you may find justifications being put forward for this kind of thing.  You can find people saying that the division between personal and work life is obsolete.  That in the new era, people don't need to make that kind of a distinction anymore.

Maybe that explains the man I saw today on a hiking trail.  He was talking animatedly on his cell phone, and completely ignoring his wife and children.  The wife and kids didn't look too happy about it, but he didn't even seem to notice.

The plain fact of the matter is that work is a fluid, like a gas.  It will expand to fill the space you give it.  If you don't want it to take everything -- including your soul -- you have to establish boundaries.  If you don't have boundaries around your working life, you either are -- or are in great danger of -- becoming a workaholic.

You cannot possibly find your own individual path if you don't spend some time with yourself, alone, exploring yourself.  That's the only way to really, truly see yourself.  If a person keeps letting work have more and more of themselves, they run the risk that soon there won't be anything left inside of them but work.

Here are some very concrete actions that you might think about to establish your boundaries in the workplace:

1.  Cut the Electronic Tentacles

Think carefully about how you might keep some of yourself and your privacy free from electronic intrusion.  You might want to cut out answering your cell phone or Blackberry during meals. Maybe you need to free up specific blocks of "me" on the weekends when you're "electronically unavailable".  Consider keeping computers laptops and Blackberrys out of your bedroom, the family room and the dining room.

2.  Priorize...For Real! 

This can be a very important skill: developing the ability to decide what's most important -- and just accepting that there is less time than tasks that demand to be done.

3.  Get Real About Your To-Do List -- And Make Sure that Your Needs Are On It 

The endless to-do list isn't an efficiency tool -- it's a tyrant.  Decide on a small, reasonable number of things to put on the list.  Make sure that your own needs for growth and for fun don't get left off the list.

4.  Take a Very Hard Look at Your Own Motivations 

It's easy to blame an employer for letting work take over my life.  Oftentimes, employers do overload their employees, particularly in hard economic times.  However, there may be motivations that I have, and parts of my personality that help ensure that I'm continually behind the 8 ball.  Do I have an identity other than my role at work?  Do I use work to avoid facing things and relationships in my life?  Do I face overwhelming anxiety when I don't work?  Do I regard my over-busyness as a badge of status? It may be very important to address these kinds of issue with a therapist, and as soon as possible.

I'd be interested in your comments about the challenges you face in keeping boundaries intact in your life -- and the solutions that you may have worked out.  

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca 

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson    

Anxiety, Depression and My Own Truth

According to a recent New York Times article, people in North America are finding their lives more and more embroiled in anxiety.  This is a social trend that started prior to the start of the economic downturn, and which has been increasing since that time, if the mass media are to be believed.

The Times article  cites the example of one woman who found herself more and more in the grip of panic attacks, which impelled her "to read every single economic report" -- not an uncommon response.  It seems quite possible that this obsession with economic information could create a vicious cycle: in response to her anxiety, the woman might read more economic reporting, which in turn could be expected to further elevate her anxiety.  And so on, potentially without end.

This brings us to a very fundamental question.  As individuals, are we prepared to accept the assessments of social scientists, journalists and economic and business experts, when it comes to the most basic attitudes that we will have to our lives?

Jung has something interesting to say about this.  It is couched in the gender usage conventions of the past (1957), for which I ask your understanding.  Nonetheless, his point is clear, and as relevant today as it was then:

"...[A] man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth.  He must live in the world of his mythological truth [italics mine], and that is not merely statistics.  it is the expression of what he really is, and what he feels himself to be.  A man without mythology is merely a product of statistics, as it were, an average phenomenon.  Our natural science makes everything into an average ... while the truth is that the carriers of life are individuals, not average numbers.  And, of course, all the individual qualities are wiped out, and that is most unbecoming....  It deprives people of their specific values, of the most important experiences of their life, where they experience their own value, the creative background of their own personality."

"The Houston Films" in McGuire, William, and Hull, R.F.C., eds., C.G. Jung Speaking (Princeton: University Press, 1977)

What is the dominant story that I choose to live under?  If I accept my life story as told by the mass media, I am a very small speck indeed, swept up in the great currents of economics, social trends and technological change.  My living and dying will be a matter of negligible significance.  I will be only a statistic.

But what if I make a determination to look for my story elsewhere, and to give that story my energy, my love and my trust?  What if my dreams impart to me some additional sense of the meaning of my life, of who I am, and what I really value?  To attempt to see my own myth, as not something so much consciously created, as a story made up, but as something that I am only partially capable of understanding, that emerges over time from the reality of my own life and my own psyche.

Real therapy, therapy that makes a fundamental difference, connects me to the deep story of my life.

I would welcome your input, comments or any sharing of your personal experience as you seek to encounter your own myth.

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journeys to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca 

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

Get "Vibrant Jung Thing" posts delivered to your email using the "FeedBurner" box in the left column!

PHOTO CREDITS:  © Kentoh| Dreamstime.com ; © Arhaic| Dreamstime.com

© 2009 Brian Collinson 

Stress, Anxiety and Basic Trust PART TWO: Coming to Terms with the Fates and Furies

In Part One on this subject, I looked at the connection between stress and our relationship to our own deepest being, the Self.  In this post, I examine the way that stress plays out in our daily lives, and some possible ways in which we can reduce the impact of stress.

In these economically stress-laden times, it's possible to feel ourselves getting more and more drawn into fear.  The economic news plays right into one area of sensitivity that nearly everyone has: the money complex.  Money, wealth, prosperity, "having enough" -- these are all very emotionally laden concepts and symbols.  The continual diet of dark economic news that we are subjected to recently plays right into our deepest fears about our security, and for many people conjures up feelings and traumas that have their deep roots in the family of origin.

Touchstones In the Midst of Stress

1.  Are you keeping up your connections with friends, and people you love and cherish?  Do you need to renew your contacts with people who care about you?

Staying involved with friends and people who are close to you is a great way to feel connected and grounded, and to keep your focus.  Isolation can lead to increased obsession with worry and fear.  Are you staying in touch with the people who matter to you?  Are you enjoying their company?  Are you making the distinction between superficial contact with others and being deeply in touch with those who love you.

2. Are you staying connected to ultimate things?

What about your ultimate values?  For most of us there is something that is of fundamental importance in life, whether you call it God, Goddess, the Self, the Ground of Being or Truth.  Whatever symbols are meaningful to you, connecting with them can give a sense of value and stability to life.  For many people, the sense that there is a destiny for me, something which is seeking to emerge in my life -- which will emerge in my life -- is a source of hope and strength in the face of anxiety.

3. What about connecting to your physical self? 

Whether it is through exercise, yoga, or some form of body work, connecting with and experiencing your body can bring reduced overall tension and fatigue in your body.  This is certainly true, but even more importantly, experience of the body can help me feel real and substantial.  It can even help me feel like I have a home in the universe, that I belonghere.  In the face of the sense of financial threat, which some on the religious right are even prepared to characterize as the judgment of an angry and wrathful father God, connection with the body can bring awareness of our connection and rootedness in the Great Mother.  We can share a sense that our life is a participation in what Matthew Fox has called the "original blessing" of the universe, rather than a sense of condemnation and festering guilt and fear.

4. How are you relating to your creative and imaginal self?

In the midst of our current lives, the greater Self is seeking to come into realization.  The ways it does this usually have to do with different kinds of awareness, and differentapproaches to our inner life and to the outer world than we habitually use.  If we can work with those different ways of experiencing, it can help greatly with feeling grounded and feeling real.  Many people find that working with clay, painting, making music dancing or other creative and imaginative "ways" or methods can bring a sense of rootedness and reality to their lives.  Also, it can be of great value to engage in active imagination, but I do not recommend that you use this technique without the assistance of someone who has been thoroughly trained in Jungian analysis.

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journeys to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Websitefor Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca ; Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson 

Jung on North America's Anxiety and Individuation Dilemma

In 1931, over 75 years ago, C. G. Jung gave an interview to an American journalist in Vienna.  In it, he laid out a description of what he saw as some of the central dilemmas facing Americans.

In this moment, we are in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage and financial crises, and hopefully at the beginning of some kind of recovery from those fearful events, and the anxiety associated with them.  I believe that Jung’s remarks still speak very directly to Americans – and equally to Canadians – as we are unavoidably forced to re-evaluate what is fundamentally important in our values, our psyche and our lives. 

"The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which life should be directed....  What America needs in the face of the tremendous urge towards uniformity, desire of things, the desire for complications in life, for being like one's neighbours, for making records, et cetera, is one great healthy ability to say 'No.'  To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life, and that trying to live exactly like one's successful neighbour is not following the essentially different dictates, possibly, of a widely different underlying personality, which a person may possess and yet consciously try to rid himself of, the conflict always resulting in some form, sooner or later of a neurosis....

We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of overestimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false.  We want simplicity.  We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things….

These things are being expressed in thousands of dreams.  Women’s dreams, men’s dreams, the dreams of human beings, all having much the same collective primal unconscious mind – the same in the central African… and the New York stockbroker – and it is in our dreams that the body makes itself aware to our mind….  The dream calls our mind’s attention to the body’s instinctive feeling.”

"Americans Must Say 'No' in McGuire, William, and Hull, R.F.C., eds.,

C.G. Jung Speaking (Princeton: University Press, 1977)

 

At this difficult anxious time, the world situation confronts us with fundamental choices about how we will see our own lives, how we will define ourselves, and what we will value and choose as we move forward in our lives.  Jung seeks to brings us back to recognizing and living out of the reality of the psyche, and to seeking to be conscious of the whole of what we are as human beings, which is the core of a meaningful life.

 

My very best wishes to each of you on your individual journeys to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca ; Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson 

Stress, Anxiety and Basic Trust PART ONE: Rooted in Myself

Here in Oakville, Mississauga and the surrounding areas, many people are really feeling the impact of recent economic events.

  There is a strong sense that the last 6-8 months have brought a lot of changes to people's economic and business situations.  Things are not feeling anywhere near as secure as they did even a year ago.  Recent events have really heightened peoples' stress levels and their overall level of anxiety.

In human life, everyone is looking for security.  It may be that I find it in a different place than my neighbour, and that (s)he can take risks in areas that I would not be comfortable with, and vice versa.  But to somehow feel secure and to feel connected in the world is a very basic human need.

What has become apparent, is that quite a number of things that seemed secure prior to this fall have shown that they weren't nearly as solid and immovable as we all thought.  My investment portfolio, the value of my house, my job -- all of a sudden I find myself less able to count on these things.  And that can be incredibly scary.

So, what can I count on?  What is there that will not let me down? 

There are many kinds of security that do help at a time like this.  Connections to friends, to spouses, children, lovers -- all bring us a sense of value and of being rooted in the world.  But there is something that is even more important.  That is the connection to Self.  

To experience the deep connection with my own being, to know and accept who I am and to feel that I myself have a home in the world, that there is a "rightness" to my existence, and that I belong here, in my life -- that is the fundamental source of a basic trust in my life.  It's essential to withstanding the pains and shocks that life brings.  It is only in knowing and accepting who I am -- who I really am as opposed to the socially constructed image of the self -- that I find a deep trust.  A deep trust, first of all, in my own being, and from that, a trust in my life.

Therapy cannot do everything, but it can bring a person into more complete contact with his or own fundamental identity.  In a world of uncertainties and anxiety, that is definitely a gift worth having.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Websitefor Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca ; Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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© 2009 Brian Collinson 

A Quotation from Carl Jung on Midlife Transition

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm planning to add some posts to this blog that are built around quotations from Carl Jung, in addition to the posts that are my own reflections.

This is because I think that Jung's own thoughts and language often have some very good things to say to us directly about what life is now.

A good example of this is the following quotation, taken from C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, a book which compiles many of Jung's public addresses and the experiences that other had in in encountering him.  This quotation expresses in its own way a kind of experience associated with mid-life transition and "the unlived life" that I recognize in many of my clients.  Perhaps you will recognize it, too.

"Take the example of a businessman -- successful, rich, not yet old.  He is perhaps forty-five.  He says, 'I have made my fortune; I have sons that are old enough to carry on the business which I founded.  I will retire.  I will build a fine house in the country and live there without any cares or worries.'  So he retires.  He builds his house and goes to live in it.  He says to himself, 'Now my life will begin.'

But nothing happens.

One morning he is in his bath.  He is conscious of a pain in his side.  All day he worries about it; wonders what it can be.  When he goes to the table he does not eat.  In a few days his digestion is out of order.  In a fortnight he is very ill.  The doctors he has called in do not know what is the matter with him.  Finally, one of them says to him, 'Your life lacks interest.  Go back to your business.  Take it up again."

The man is intelligent, and this advice seems to him sound.  He decides to follow it.  He goes back to his office and sits down at his old desk and declares that now he will help his sons in the management.  But when the first business letter is brought to him, he cannot concentrate on it.  He cannot make the decisions it calls for.  Now he is terribly frightened about his condition.

You see what has happened.  He couldn't go back.  It was already too late.  But his energyis still there, and it must be used.

This man comes to me with his problem.  I say to him: 'You were quite right to retire from business.  But not into nothingness.[Italics mine]  You must have something you can stand on.  In all the years in which you devoted your energy to building up your business you never built up any interests outside of it.  You had nothing to retire on.'

This is a picture of the condition of man today.  This is why we feel that there issomething wrong with the world.  All the material interests, the automobiles and radios and skyscrapers we have don't fill the hungry soul.  We try to retire from the world, but to what?  ....They are like the businessman who tried to go back to his desk.

....I say to him, "My dear man, I don't know any more than you do the meaning of the world or the meaning of your life.  But you -- all men -- were born with a brain ready made.  It took millions of years to build the brain and body we now have.  Your brain embodies all the experience of life."

'....Now suppose that I am in need of advice about living, and I know of a man who is already thousands of years old.  I go to him and say, 'You have seen many changes; you have observed and experienced life under many aspects.  My life is short -- perhaps seventy years, perhaps less -- and you have lived for thousands of years....

When I say this to my patient he cocks his ears and looks at me.

'No,' I say, I am not that man.  But that man speaks to you every night.  How?  In your dreams.'

The psyche is much older than our personal existence.  The Self is a present reality if we are prepared to look for its manifestations in our own life.  Carl Jung knew it, and we can, too.

In my next post, I'll be continuing my series "Therapy: Pain Killer or Path to Myself", of which I've already published PART ONE and PART TWO.

I wish each of you every good thing on your personal journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, www.briancollinson.ca

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Therapy: Pain-Killer or Path To Myself? PART ONE

People are most commonly motivated to come into therapy or counseling because they are in serious distress or pain.  I know that's what motivated me to start on my own therapeutic journey many years ago.

Often, it's only intolerable pain that can bring someone to the point where she or he is ready and able to go and sit with a therapist and start talking about the intimate aspects of his or her life.  It seems as if it is often only our pain that can bring us to the point where we are willing to entrust someone else with our own intimate and unique story.

So let's imagine that, bringing my pain, and no doubt with some fear and misgivings, I make my first appointment, and I start to go to therapy.  And perhaps I find that the therapy helps to some degree.  Perhaps some of my anxiety or depression abates.  I find that the process of talking about the situations in my life, the things that make me anxious, the things that make me depressed brings me some relief.  And after perhaps a few weeks, I start to actually feel somewhat better.

Often this can be a moment when it's easy to believe that the things that brought me into therapy have largely gone away.  There can be a sense of freedom and relief.  Things can feel good enough that my previous pain starts to feel rather distant.  Then the other priorities of life start to seem more urgent and to crowd in, and I get caught up in the old rhythms of my life.  Soon I am back, living basically as I've always lived.  Underneath the surface, the same old issues remain, and if I am honest with myself, the patterns that have governed my life are starting to fall back into place and to re-assert themselves.

Sometimes it can even feel like something is pulling me back into these patterns that are well-known to me and which are, in a sense, comfortable.  Those patterns may not give me any relief from my misery, but they are at least familiar, and there is a certain kind of comfort expressed by the old saying "better the devil you know than the devil you don't."  In circumstances like that, people can end up learning to ignore their pain, in favour of feeling secure.

It's easy for me to choose the status quo over going on my personal journey.  But who we most fundamentally are continues to call to us.  In Jung's great words, to which I find myself continually going back, "Only that which is truly oneself, heals."  It's only in having the on-going courage and strength to confront the different aspects of myself that I am going to find the awareness and energy that really transform my life and make my living meaningful.

This is the first part of my series on "Therapy: Pain-Killer or Path to Myself?"  I hope that you've enjoyed it, and I invite you to share your comments.  I'll be posting more on this topic in the very near future.

Wishing all of you the very best on your journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson www.briancollinson.ca

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