Jean Shinoda Bolen

A MIDLIFE QUEST FOR THE GRAIL AND THE GODDESS Dr Jean Shinoda Bolen's extraordinary memoir celebrates the pilgrimage that heralded her spiritual awakening and leads readers down the path of self-discovery. In this account of her journey to Europe

A Woman's Midlife Quest for the Sacred Feminine

Crossing to Avalon

Laura Mei

The idea of passing through a gateway or doorway is reflected in the psychological word 𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺, which is derived from the Latin word 𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯, meaning "threshold". Jungian analyst Murray Stein describes midlife transitions as periods of liminality, which aptly describes those times in our lives we are in an "in-between" zone, a state in which we are neither who we used to be, nor who we are becoming. It's like standing in a doorway, or being in a passageway, or even in a long dark tunnel, between two phases of our lives. At such times, we are often thin-skinned and vulnerable, which accompanies being psychologically receptive and open to new growth. During times of passage, we may also find ourselves in a liminal psychological state, which is what the poet T.S. Eliot is describing when he writes of "the point of intersection of the timeless / with time," that place of poetic sensibility where glimpses of the eternal and ordinary perception overlap. Here the invisible spiritual world and visible reality come together; here intuitive possibility is on the threshold of tangible manifestation. During significant junctures and passages when the former fabric of life comes apart at the seams and old patterns unravel, dreams and synchronicities often become more important and numerous. It is a time to pay attention to the people we encounter and the events that occur as being both real and symbolic. Synchronicities are often choice bringers. Will we respond? And if we do, will it usher in a new phase of our lives?

Each time I discover some personal truth, I realize that it was there all along. It is, in other words, available wisdom, there to be rediscovered by each of us if we can only see it. The link between truth-speaking, trusting child and wisdom, for instance, is archetypal. To perceive anything divine or numinous requires the capacity for awe and wonder that is a natural ability of the innocent child, who still sees the world as magical. The magical child archetype appears in the dreams of people who are getting in touch with meaning or creativity in their lives and sense that they might have a personal destiny to fulfill. In their dreams they perhaps give birth to a special child or meet a child who is in some way exceptional. Characteristically this is a dream that arises in conjunction with a new connection with the archetype of the Self, the archetype through which we derive a sense of meaning and affiliation with something greater than our small selves. The dream appears with the possibility of new or renewed life. The soul is awakening.

To be initiated into a mystery psychologically is to have a mystical experience that changes you. You are no longer who you were before. You have undergone something that sets you apart from those who have not had the experience. Often an initiation involves an element of isolation, of facing fear or undergoing an ordeal. But perhaps just as often, the initiatory experience comes as a gift of grace, when mystery and profound beauty come together in a numinous moment of which we are a part. The new initiate feels archetypally twice-born: into life at birth, and now through a mystery, into a new state of being or new consciousness.

The forest, the labyrinth, the otherworld, the underworld, the sea, and the depths of the sea are all poetic and symbolic descriptions of how we perceive the unconscious as a realm. It is where we are when we are lost, and it is where we need to go in order to find ourselves. Individuation, the need to live from our own depths in an authentic and growing way, is a journey that takes the ego into the forest. When we enter a forest phase in our lives, we enter a period of wandering and a time of potential soul growth. In the forest it is possible to reconnect with our own innate nature, to meet what we have kept hidden in the shadows and what we have been kept from knowing or acknowledging about ourselves, or the personal and patriarchal world we inhabit. Here it is possible to find what we have been cut off from, to "re-member" a once vital aspect of ourselves. We may uncover a wellspring of creativity that has been hidden for decades. Here we may be attacked by criticism or abandoned to our worst fears. Most of all, once in the forest, we must find within ourselves whatever we need to survive.

Hands represent competency, the capacity to reach for and hold on to what is personally of value; hands are the means through which we can express feelings of intimacy and sensuality; hands are used to create, to comfort others and heal; hands get dirty when we muck around in soil or machinery, or enter shadowy transactions; hands hold musical instruments, paintbrushes, cooking implements, tools, and weapons; hands protect us, fulfill curiosity, and are in their many ways extensions of our psyches into the world. Hands have to do with self-esteem and self-expression both actually and metaphorically.

A king's mandate is to accumulate power and build secure defenses. These happen to be the ruling values in a patriarchal culture as well. Time and energy for personal feelings, play, sensuality, emotional bonding, the pleasures of discovery, enjoyment of the outdoors, expressiveness and individuality, friends of the heart, or the company of children are begrudged. Being cut off from these sources of personal renewal eventually saps the ability to be creative, to enjoy sexuality and sensuality, to be playful or loving. "When is there time?" is the lament, especially in the career-track years. Only if our heart is in the work and we are either doing work we love or are with people we love will creativity and play be a part of our work life. And when most of the hours of the day are spent away from our families or personal intimates, deprivation may make what should be a source of emotional nourishment feel like one more demand. The wounded Fisher King sitting in the midst of the wasteland is a metaphor for midlife depression for men and women who have become caught up in acquiring position and power. In the rigorously scheduled, productive patriarchal world measured by Father Time, we suffer the lack of the kind of nourishing activities in which we lose track of time — when we can play or just enjoy being instead of doing. A flat, dry depression results; there are so tears or grief; existence is joyless.

I think of the lies that happen at the emotional or body level as a denial or repression of the truth of feelings, which we do unconsciously in the interest of maintaining the truth of what we feel isn't acceptable to us or others. Too often we do not even realize that we are being untrue to our authentic selves; we don't know that we are lying. Healing and reintegration of the psyche have to do with telling the truth. But it is a truth that often takes some doing to discover. It requires that we get in touch with what we really feel and face that we are in pain over something significant in our lives. When we know, we will need to make changes in order to be true, which is to be healed. The body can be a discriminator of truth; why it is for some people and not for others is an individual matter. When we repress feelings, memories, and perceptions, we love our integrity as intact whole people and become divided. When we do this at the mental level, we split or dissociate; the psyche breaks into parts, with information that we do not or cannot heed kept out of our conscious awareness. At the physical level, symptoms, functional change, and physical disease can result. Distress that we disown hurts us.

Sometimes someone appears in our waking lives upon whom we project a part of the dream of who we could become. Such a person can be as symbolic as a dream figure and imbued with the same quality — the promise of new life and meaning. They attract us with a promise — a potential to heal us — which we either correctly intuit or miscast upon them. It is not just gurus who receive these projections, but anyone who becomes larger than life and intensely attractive in the same way; when there is a call to soul, we do fall in love with the person — who may be of the same or opposite sex — upon whom we project these yearnings to be seen and loved and divine and beautiful beings. When we project soul upon another person, we are drawn out of our mundane lives by the numinosity of such an attraction; it is a spiritual, erotic, and mysterious call, which stirs us inwardly and is likely to disrupt our lives. Such attractions may seem destructive, to resemble the attraction of moths drawn to light, because what follows is a phase of deconstruction of structure and disassembling of priorities, the metaphoric death of some phase of our lives. This can also lead to disillusionment. Projections cannot be sustained. What happens when he or she turns out not to be as magical and wonderful or spiritual as we had imagined? We may then be plunged into a period of confusion or darkness that is about the soul. Out of an often-unrecognized need to lead a spiritually meaningful and emotionally authentic life, we project soul upon someone, something, or some belief that then draws us. If the new perspective or the attraction then disrupts our lives and what drew us away from our former stability loses the magic, a dark night of the soul results. Many adults in the midst of what others depreciate as a midlife crisis are on a spiritual quest. 

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