Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

Recently I listened to a talk by Lynn Twist, activist and author of “The Soul of Money.” During her presentation, she spoke about the process of metamorphosis and of how the earth-bound caterpillar becomes the liberated butterfly.

During the later stages of its development, the caterpillar becomes ravenous, and unable to satisfy its hunger, devours everything in sight, ultimately consuming hundreds of times its weight. (Remind you of our consumer driven culture by any chance?)

Finally, too bloated to move, it attaches itself to a branch and forms a cocoon. Soon, from within the caterpillar’s body, new cells, called imaginal cells, begin to emerge. Because they’re completely unlike any of the caterpillar’s s existing cells, they’re perceived as invaders and are promptly attacked by the caterpillar’s immune system. Out numbered and under assault, these tiny indomitable imaginal cells keep right on coming.  They begin to multiply, to recognize one another, and then to band together and to organize. Eventually, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed, and it dies.  And yet, what looks at this point very much like death and disintegration, is in fact, a process of birth and transformation. You see, the dead body of the caterpillar provides a rich and nutritious stew (‘nutritive soup’) for the new life that’s forming, and ultimately the caterpillar’s tomb becomes the butterfly’s womb.

In an interview with Larry King on CNN Physician and author, Deepak Chopra observed that the term imaginal refers to “dreaming a new reality” and suggests that “we right now could be those imaginal cells, and the chaos…devastation… psychological imbalance and … destruction that we currently face may just be our nutritive soup.”

Filipino activist, Nicanor Perlas, suggests in an editorial entitled “The Butterfly Effect and Social Transformation” that the process of societal transformation begins with the emergence of ‘imaginal’ individuals who possess a vision for a better future. These visionaries frequently threaten the status quo and are all too often attacked and sometimes, as in the cases of Gandhi, Javier, King, and Kennedy, imprisoned or assassinated. And yet, their visions time and time again have continued to live on as others who come to know and embrace their dreams multiply, find one another, organize, and with tremendous perseverance and commitment provide the ‘nutritive soup’ required to transform the longed-for vision into reality.

In “Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic: A Story for our Times,” Anodea Judith calls for an awakening of the global heart where the overconsumption and greed that exists in our world is transformed, and we’re awakened to “a higher vision of perpetual reciprocity, compassion, and unity.”   Judith likens these awakened individuals to imaginal cells or ‘co-hearts.’

As a psychotherapist contemplating butterflies and imaginal cells, I’m reminded that the word ‘psyche’ refers to both butterfly and soul, and that the term psychology itself is defined as “the study of the soul.” Psychoanalyst, James Hillman, defined psychology as “giving soul to language and finding language for soul.”   What is the language of the soul?  I imagine it to be one that is timeless, creative, authentic, wise, and untamed.

Poet, David Whyte, suggests that a lack of soul is “a refusal to open to a full experience of the world.”  Sadly, it seems, there have been so many ways that our souls have been deprived of living deeply and fully. Buried beneath the duties and details of our lives, we’re all too often shifting into high gear or automatic pilot, barely skimming the surface of our days, and consequently all too often losing sight of what makes our lives meaningful, beautiful, and authentic.

Alan Jones, Episcopal priest and author of “Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality,” asserts that soul making involves contemplating gigantic things, paying attention to the invisible, cultivating an openness to love, pain, wonder and longing.  He believes we are stretched and become more of who we are as we fully engage in ‘soul-making’.

“Soulcraft” by Bill Plotkin addresses the psycho-spiritual developmental stages that we each pass through during our journey towards “genuine elderhood.” The book focuses on one phase in particular, what Plotkin calls, “the second cocoon.” It’s at this stage, contends Plotkin, that we evolve from our first caterpillar-like self into a new way of being that is soul-rooted and requires “the death of an old way of being and a birth of something new.”

English Poet, John Keats was intimate with pain and loss during his short life. His father was killed when he was just eight years old, and his mother died when he was 15.  As a young man hHe nursed his dying brother, was forced to leave the woman whom he loved, and suffered with and died from tuberculosis when he was only 25.  In a letter to his sister-in-law and brother George, he shared, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? … Call the world if you please, ‘the vale of soul making’.”   Psychoanalyst, James Hillman asserted that our soul comes through our wounds, and Keats, the young poet, understood that our struggles nurture our growth and shape our development just as a butterfly’s wings are strengthened for flight by its struggle to break free from its cocoon.  

Mythologist and storyteller, Michael Meade wrote, “each soul is imbued and broadened with an inner story that tries to live its way into the world… Soul makes us deeper in order to make us wiser. Secretly our souls seek wisdom, and wisdom is a darker knowledge found in dark places and in hard times.”

Today the entire planet appears to be facing “dark places and hard times” and while the longing of my soul calls for change on a societal and even global level, my day to day life is caught up in the challenges confronting my family, friends, neighbors, and clients. It’s right here among the wounds, dreams, hopes, fears and triumphs of those with whom I work, live, and love that my soul stirs and my heart threatens to break. And it’s also here in my own little corner of the world that I most often sense a presence stirring within myself.

During a difficult time in her life, Sue Monk Kidd wrote in her superb book,  “When the Heart Waits” that, “Everything incubates in darkness. And I knew that the darkness in which I found myself was a holy dark. I was incubating something new…Whenever new life grows and emerges, darkness is crucial to the process. Whether it’s the caterpillar in the chrysalis, the seed in the ground, the child in the womb, or the True Self in the soul, there’s always a time of waiting in the dark…” In working through her angst, she concluded that she was being prodded into doing soul work and asked herself, “What would it mean to live, welcoming all? What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new?”

As we grapple with how to best respond to the challenges in our personal lives as well as to those that collectively face us, it seems to me that now more than ever we must incubate our pain and allow it “to birth something new” from out of the “holy darkness.”