On The Unconscious
a reflection exploring what lives within us
Hi there, I hope you had a restful break and a good beginning of the new year. We really are in 2024? WOW!
So many of you have requested me to expand on some of the things I write so I thought of creating a topic for each monthly newsletter, for example: guilt, faith, grief, fear, hope, and so on. To start I want to write about THE UNCONSCIOUS (why not begin with a big one, right?). As always I will try to bring a Depth Psychological view on the topic from a spiritual and somatic curious lens.
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When I was in preschool, back home in Brazil, the yard had a fence and we could partially see the street. If we squeezed each other towards the left side of the fence, everyone could peek out for a little bit. One of the things we used to do is to be on the lookout for The Sack Man (the equivalent to the Boogeyman in North America). This legend is portrayed as a man with a sack on his back who carries naughty children away. Oh, the 80’s! The case is, I was one of the kids that ran to the fence every time we were in the yard and kept waiting to see if he would show up. I remember the feeling of curiosity and fright meeting inside my body. It was the first time I was aware of these contradicting emotions. Fear and excitement, interest and terror, longing and anxiety.
The inclination to get to know these different states within us, is always present. As we grow, we develop our capacity to inhabit our ambivalence or actually defend against it. Carl Jung, who wrote extensively on the unconscious, shadow, archetypes, etc., has a quote that I think symbolizes this feeling: “I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.” To continue to quote Jung, here are some of his thoughts on the unconscious:
“In my view the unconscious is a psychological borderline concept, which covers all psychic contents or processes that are not conscious, i.e. not related to the ego in any perceptible way. The unconscious is both vast and inexhaustible. It is not simply the unknown or the repository of conscious thoughts and emotions that have been repressed, but includes contents that may or will become conscious.
So defined, the unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; and everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.”
Not to make this too wordy, but I think it is helpful to understand that our psyche is formed of many aspects, including unconsciousness and consciousness. Our ego is the center of our consciousness, it’s really our personality as we are aware of it and experience it first hand. The ego in a way acts like a mirror in which the contents of our psyche can see itself and can become aware. For Jung, the ego is responsible for retaining contents into the consciousness and it can also eliminate contents from consciousness by ceasing to reflect them. And the ego can repress contents it does not like or finds intolerably painful. It also retrieves contents from “storage” in the unconscious so long as they are not blocked by defense mechanisms. Ego is morally neutral, not a “bad thing” as we often hear. The ego is, in fact, necessary in our process of individualization. A strong ego is one that can obtain and deliberately move around large amounts of conscious content. By having a self reflective ego, we can know that we are and what we are. A lot of what we think our wrong doing is, what our suffering is an ego that hasn’t fully developed and strengthened due to many circumstances. This has a very big impact on what goes under the radar into the unconscious. Carl Jung, also is known for the very instagrammable quote “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Here’s what I know to be true, probably the only thing I’m very sure of: Life is wild, unpredictable, mysterious, exciting, scary, beautiful, and full of invitations (for mistakes, for failure, for happiness, for simplicity, for generosity, for new beginnings, for stories). We are made up of many parts and what lies below, behind, above what we know. We are made of what we can’t see, can’t touch and can’t remember. It’s all there! The thing is, because of our upbringing, traumas, circumstances, sociocultural factors, we had to develop certain defenses to make it through, to “survive”. As we become adults and life becomes very complex, what was hidden also wants to come to surface through parenting, relationships, career decisions. It’s as if we are the kid looking at The Sack Man and The Sack Man who is looking at us at the same time. Carrying around our large bag that's very scary to look at.
Robert Bly wrote “Behind us we have an invisible bag and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parent’s love, put it in the bag. Then we do a lot of bag-stuffing in high school. We spend our life until we are twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”
To name a few, repetition, the feeling of being at war with ourselves, isolation, fear, anger, anxiety, obsession are all ways our bodies and our unconscious are telling us that there is something that wants to be acknowledged, communicated, known. Unless we really begin the work of an explorer, we’ll most likely spend a lot of our lives feeling stuck, scared, conflicted, and lost. In order to move forward, we at some point need to look within ourselves. To what we are aware of and to what we aren’t.
The good news is that Jung also attributed the unconscious to a creative function, in that it presents to consciousness contents necessary for psychological health. Even though Buddhism has divergent views, in which, the unconscious could be considered more like mental factors, I keep thinking of The Buddhist perspective on the nature of mind as this quality of luminosity, vastness, and reflectiveness. A quality we direct our attention towards and we rest on it. As it is.
Here’s my invitation: What if we begin to orient ourselves to what is hidden, to what we can’t see with some reverie? With curiosity? With tenderness? What if we can trust the lives within us that are helping us to become more of who we are? I’m fully aware that this is the harder and longer road to take. I’m taking it myself. However, the more I walk it, the more I get out of that yard and cross the street to greet The Sack Man. The more we look at the sack the more we understand who we are, the more we can name what we end up finding in there, the more we disentangle, the more we can find interesting and beautiful aspects of ourselves that were hidden at the bottom, the more we can find clues to where we’re headed. Emptying the sack in a way can also fill ourselves, slowly. Isn’t that what we all wish for in our time here? To experience life to its fullest?
With love,
Mariana
1- A new playlist to tune into the unconscious
2- Awakening from the trance - Embracing unlived life, Tara Brach’s church
3- No is a complete sentence - an interesting reflection from Sebene Selassie
4- If you are here long enough, you know I like to hear from the ones that lived longer. Anne Lamott on what she knows at 69.
5- I loved this as a seasonal practice.
6- We can’t always get what we want.
7- Every time I want to touch the mystery of life, I come back to this conversation between Krista Tippett and John O’Donohue
8- On Meditation and The Unconscious: a conversation between a Buddhist Monk and a Neuroscientist
9- Let your body be the guide, by Andrea Gibson
10- This conversation is so beautiful and has so much to do with this topic of the unconscious. Elizabeth Gilbert on her most important practice
Some of you have asked me more about how my individual sessions are, so here’s a brief description:
I see my work as a bridge between the psychological and the contemplative worlds. Together, during the sessions, there’s space for talking, sharing, reflecting, and somatic practices: breathing exercises, guided meditations and visualizations that are according to what is coming up to each client. There’s a lot of unveiling, releasing, grounding happening held in a space of compassion. Together we work towards a slow and spaciousness integration.
If you need more information, you can find it here:
Private Sessions: One-on-One Contemplative Psychotherapy Program
Mentorship for New Teachers : One-on-One Mentoring Sessions to Beginner or New Teachers or people who wants additional training
Corporate Programs : Contemplative Program for Companies
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FREE MONTHLY GATHERING IS BACK IN JANUARY
Friday, January 26 at 9am/pst
So glad to be back with the Monthly Gatherings. As always, everyone is welcomed! We’ll work with the topic of the unconscious.
I introduce the topic, often do a quick reading of related material and we dive into the practice: breathing exercises + guided meditation and that is it. (sometimes there’s some journaling). No need to talk/share, if there’s questions you can ask at the end or send me an email.
To join, visit here
“I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
― John O'Donohue