A note from Jean Shinoda Bolen...

"This is an invitation to form circles of wisewomen, women's spirituality circles, crone circles--circles with a spiritual center--through this web site. Imagine yourself in a circle of women, meeting together around a fire in the center of a round hearth. The fire in the center of the circle is a symbol of divinity,of spirit or soul, of goddess or god; its the archetype of the Self in the center of your psyche, as it can be in the center of a circle, and as such, is a source of emotional warmth, spiritual and psychological illumination, wisdom and compassion.

Since this is my Web site, every woman who has been drawn here is likely to be intuitive and a reader, probably with an interest in Jungian psychology and spirituality. Sometimes, it is hard to find others to share the kind of thoughts, observations and feelings that I have written about, which the reader in her own Aha! moment, has recognized as paralleling her own.

I invite you to read my new book, The Millionth Circle because CyberCircles grew out of the ideas I wrote about. It seemed possible to me that women could form circles-with-a-center on the Internet and meet in cyberspace. I wondered about this possibility with my assistant Betty Karr, she e-mailed my webmaster, and here they are, ready to be turned over to you.

Sincerely,

Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.

Psyche betrays his admonishment, which was to really keep the form. (“Don’t change anything. Stay unconscious about the basic agreement that we have.”) She breaks it by lifting up the lamp. Then the lamp sputters, and a drop of oil falls and hits Eros’ shoulder. He awakens, hurt and angry, blaming Psyche for destroying the situation as it was. He’s got wings, this god, so he flies away and leaves her.

In this story we have a transition zone that begins with the end of the unconscious relationship. Pregnant Psyche is now abandoned, left on her own with no employable skills, as it were. When Eros leaves her, she feels so unable to cope that she throws herself in the river to drown and the river throws her back on the bank. It’s like the river saying, “Your life force is too strong, honey. This isn’t going to be the end of your story.” Psyche then proceeds to go to the various temples of the goddesses, and they all say, “Ah, your issue is not with us. It’s with Aphrodite.” She’s not who she used to be, but she must still confront the offended goddess.

Aphrodite gives her four tasks that she must learn to get through this particular zone. The story, then, is about her four tasks and her growth. As she learns each task, she grows beyond what she knew before. The first task is to sort all the seeds that are heaped up in this room. This is a wonderful metaphor for all of the possibilities, all of the emotions at the beginning of a transition period. Sorting the seed is really taking stock. What are all of the seeds of possibility in your psyche of your world? How much money do you have in the bank? How much energy do you have for this? How much talent do you have for this? What are you putting together out of all your possibilities? To plan to have a conference? If this is your particular dream, then you’ve got to sort out the seeds.

In this particular story, Psyche’s first reaction to every single task is despair. It’s more than she’s ever done before, she’s consciously not up to the task, and she wants to give up. Sort the seeds of possibility. At the beginning, she doesn’t know how, and then the symbol comes to her. Ants. All the ants come sorting out the seeds, one seed at a time, so that by morning they’ve been sorted, each into its own kind, every one into its own stack.

Aphrodite comes back to find the task is done. The goddess doesn’t seem to be at all pleased about it, so she then gives Psyche another task. The second task is to get some golden fleece from the rams of the sun, gather a small amount of it, and bring it to Aphrodite. So our young Psyche goes and looks at these ranging up and down the field, in this meadow, in that valley, all having a wonderful time. These rams are butting their heads up against each other, roughing each other up. They’ve got a great deal of competitive power, but they’re big and they’ve got the strength and they’re doing fine. It’s just a big game with them, this competitiveness.

Psyche looks at them and realizes that, if she goes out and tries to grab some fleece from the rams as they’re charging and hitting each other and running up and down the field, she would be trampled. This does not seem to be the thing to do. So she goes down to the river again, and this time a reed tells her, “Psyche, you don’t have to go out there and do it that way. They are energized by the sun. Wait until the sun goes down. Then you can go pick fleece that they have scraped off against the bushes and trees. Gather enough of it for your use and fulfill the task.”

The reed that tells Psyche to bide her time has wisdom. It isn’t just about attaining a certain amount of power, climbing to great heights or participating in competition. The wisdom of the reed tells you to listen to your own rhythms. It advises when and how you can gain the power that you need, but not have your soul destroyed in the acquisition. Listen and learn from the voice of the reed, which is organic and grows out of the water, the river.

The application here has something to do with the feminine psyche or soul, but it has to do with the soul of both men and women. When you are in a competitive game (and almost everything that is about outer commerce or outer success involves competition), you can be trampled if you get caught up in wanting to grab more and more and more golden fleece. The more you go out and take on the archetypes to play the game (because these are archetypes, these rams of the sun) if you should leave your soul behind or forget that you have a soul, it will be trampled.

The third task was the creative task: Psyche is told that she must fill a crystal flask with water from a stream that runs from the River Styx to the highest crag in a continual cycle. The great water of life, the water of creativity, cycles. It is archetypal. It moves and moves and moves, and yet each person needs to seize some of that fluidity and give it shape. Some of that is a conscious desire to capture archetypal energies, visions, emotions and give them shape through your own personality, which is relative to the great expanse of the archetypal world of gods and goddesses. It is symbolically fragile, and yet this is the task.

Again Psyche looks at the task. She sees this river that is carved into the side of the mountain. It goes down to the River Styx and then rises up through a spring to come up to the top again and down the face, etching its way into the mountain. If that isn’t bad enough, there are snake-like dragons on either side warning, “Stay away! Stay away!” The water itself is hissing. Psyche again thinks, “Too much! I can’t do it,” when another symbol comes to her aid.

Now, this third task is supported by Zeus’ eagle. Zeus is an archetype that succeeds very well as an entrepreneur in this world. After all, he is the Chief Executive Officer of Mount Olympus. He has lightening bolts. He can punish. His symbol, the eagle, has the ability to see what it wants and plunge from the sky to grab it in its talons. That ability to see the overall picture, to see the forest but not each individual tree, is a way of being in the world. If you’re a man with Zeus as your innate archetype, then the world (especially capitalistic United States) rewards you very well. An entrepreneurial woman with Zeus as an archetype finds it really helpful to see the overall picture, to not get emotional about losing a sale or being undercut in business. An eagle doesn’t stop and have an emotional fit if that succulent mouse that he had his eye on suddenly follows intuition and runs under a rock. The eagle just flies up again and looks for another dinner somewhere else. That unemotional ability is very successful.

Of all the innate male air sign archetypes that have to do with the sky like Apollo and Hermes, Zeus succeeds very well in this world. Some people have more of them than others. If you are a man in this culture and you happen to have these archetypes, they will be stretched on that Procrustean bed to fill the picture. Those parts of you that have to do with creativity and emotionality are often ignored and, therefore, you are cut off from them.

Zeus’ eagle now comes to this very personal Psyche giving her an overview of how to go after what you need, how you avoid the dangers, keep your eye on the prize, and go for it. The eagle takes the flask. It returns to give Psyche the flask, now filled with Stygian water that she was to get for task three. One would say that at each step Psyche has learned something new. The fourth step is the first time that Psyche will end up accomplishing the task herself. As her very last task, Aphrodite commands that Psyche must go into the underworld, fill an empty box with beauty ointment from Persephone the goddess of the underworld, and return it to her. For the first time, Psyche thinks, “She must want me dead.” The only way she knows to go into the underworld is to die. Psyche now climbs up the highest tower to throw herself off.. This time the tower talks to her saying, “Psyche, there is another way to finish this task. Go into the underworld via the Vent of Dis. Take coins with you for the ferryman. Take two cakes for the three-headed dog; one to let you into the underworld, and one to let you out again.”

And then the tower warns her saying, “Three times you will be asked for help, Psyche. You must harden your heart to pity, refuse, and go on.” And so Psyche does. Three times she is asked by very pathetic creatures or people to stop for a moment and help. Each time she remembers the advice. She says “no” and she walks on. She gives one of the coins to the ferryman who ferries her across. Even as she’s going across the River Styx, a pathetic man says, “Just hold my hand and pull me across. I didn’t have a coin.” But she ignores his plea. There was one other piece of advice from the tower. “Psyche, once you get the beauty ointment in the box, DON’T OPEN THE BOX!” (Laughter)

Psyche enters the underworld, gives the three-headed dog one cake, fills the box with beauty, gives the three-headed dog another cake, comes back across the river because she has one more coin, and returns to the upper world. All of the advice that the tower gave her was good. Psyche, having done exactly what the tower told her understands that, if she had stopped for help, she would have had to lend a hand. In each hand she had one cake and one coin. Had she lost what she was holding, she would not have had the means to return from the underworld.

People in the transition often have limited amounts of strength, health or energy as they go into the underworld. For example, the story of Psyche speaks to people living with cancer. They say, “Cancer was a cure for my co-dependency. Cancer was a way in which I could say to people ‘I can’t do that.’” The ability to say “no” is one of the challenges for a feeling man or the feminine psyche. When other people expect you to always be there for them, and you break form by saying “No,” you create a crisis in a relationship. It may be that you need to not stay in the underworld of your own depression or your own addiction or your own whatever it is, it is there. Addiction, illness, and depression are images of the underworld that you need to get through in order to get out. This liminal period of transition is a very long one. The tasks to be done keep on growing. It’s hard. It’s scary. If you’re going to make it through this transition to the new phase of your life in which you have integrated the new you, with all that you are for the next phase of your life, you’ve got to often learn to say “No.” Otherwise the people who have expectations of you will use your energy. Say, “No” and they’ll say, “You’re selfish.” Psyche manages to do all of that. She returns to the upper world. She’s no longer in the underworld. She has made it through.

By now, you can imagine, she’s very tired. She’s pregnant, and she’s been on this journey a long time. Because she is who she is, her archetypes are related to the relationship goddesses. That is, her archetype is she’s the Mother. She started out the Maiden very much like Persephone. She became a Lover, so she was like Aphrodite. She is pregnant, so she’s like Demeter. And she wants to be reconnected with this bridegroom, so she’s got the persistent energy of Hera.

For all that she has learned in mastering these good things, these are not strengths that she particularly feels deeply connected to as her meaning. What she wants most of all, after accomplishing all these tasks, is to be beautiful in order that Eros might love her and return. Psyche opens the box and death-like sleep envelopes her. She falls, like Snow White, as if dead. This is the point in the story where some people find fault with her decision. “Oh Psyche, after all this, did you have to become unconscious again?”

 It is this action that calls Eros to her side, but Eros has been transformed as Psyche has grown through her ordeals. He used to be this child who ran home to mother, who hid things from mother. He felt betrayed because Psyche actually looked at him. It didn’t matter that when she looked at him she actually consciously loved him. He was so wounded that she broke the form and disobeyed him. Now we see a very different Eros who comes to her side, wipes the deathlike sleep off of her, and then takes her to Olympus. There, in front of all the gods and goddesses, Eros announces that this is the conscious relationship that he wants. The Olympians celebrate a grand wedding now, no longer a hidden affair, not this unconscious relationship of love and soul, because those are the names of these two folks.

What is really fascinating is that we know all along she was pregnant, which is the symbol of the journey. A new child is often present in dreams when you are growing into the next phase of your life. Sometimes the dreamer is actually pregnant, but more often the dreams I’ve listened to over the years show an exceptional, divine child (divine in the sense that it’s exceptional; it’s little and it talks.) Something of this wonderful child is growing as a symbol in the person as they move into this new phase of life.

When it’s announced on Mount Olympus that the marriage of Eros and Psyche is celebrated, she gives birth to the child that was forecast to be a god if she kept the secret and a mortal if she gave the secret away. The child is born, a girl, and her name is Joy. This is the first mortal in Greek mythology that is made an immortal. The soul (Psyche) is elevated and made divine as well, becoming part of the Olympian landscape. This is actually the archetypal world of the gods and goddesses in our psyches. She goes through this chrysalis phase. That’s her name, after all: it is butterfly, it is Psyche, it is soul. Trust emerges when there is a willingness to die to the old, to be vulnerable and have faith. There is a time when you know that you have been taken only so far by your human abilities. Something else must come in to make the soul reconnect with Eros. And often when we start the transition journey there is a loss of love, or of our ability to love. We’re depressed. We have had difficulties.

In a very similar way, womb or tomb is a story of Jesus. The short-form is that all kinds of people expect him to be the Messiah. He arrives on Palm Sunday with great hosannas, and by Good Friday he’s crucified. On Saturday he is in the tomb. At that point in his story, Easter Sunday hasn’t happened yet. Is this going to be a tomb? Or is it going to be a womb from which a new aspect is born out of suffering and dissent? Most of the myths that have to do with underworld have, as a story in our psyches, an implicit descent. There is the possibility of being like that caterpillar. In the cocoon stage, you enter into solution, and become vulnerable. You do not know whether this is a birthing place or whether it is an ending place.

I’m going back to the images of birth, of people who help others deliver babies living out the archetype of Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads, the goddess of twilight, the crone. Hecate was also the archetype of the Mid-wife/Healer. The first women who went to the stake in the Inquisition lived out of this archetype. As goddess of the crossroads, Hecate appeared at every major fork in the road where transition decisions are made. She sees where you are coming from and where the two paths will take you. At important forks in the road in ancient Greece, you’d see a little statue with three faces: one facing the direction you had come from, and the others facing two paths you might choose. This is the archetype of people who act as midwives to other people. It is also the archetypal observer in ourselves who has seen us through many descents and many transitions. This observer has an overview of the pain and the joy, the suffering and the changes.

This is the archetype of the midwife who is a therapist, because every therapist is a midwife. People come to therapists at times of transition and crisis. The Hecate in us can see where they came from. We have some idea of where their choices might take them. Patients stay with us at the crossroad until they become clear which direction they will choose. The path that is most authentically them is about individuation. The choices often are to conform and go back to an old form, but one that other people are comfortable with as well as a part of themselves. Then there’s the individuation path that does not promise that everyone will like you at all. Instead, this path promises that it will feel true as long as you do what Joseph Campbell says about living your personal myth.

Keith Thompson writes about how a man in his audience asked Dr. Campbell, “But how do I find my personal myth?” And Campbell answered with a question: “What gives your life bliss and harmony? Find it and follow it.” Bliss is a strange word. It sounds too, too, too…actually (Laughter).

When you live from an archetype it means that you’re in the world with the energy of whatever that role is that that archetype holds. That archetype is deeply rooted in the matrix of your self. There is a sense that when life is lived from an archetypal depth, that life has meaning. Someone else doing the same thing might feel like they were doing time. That’s what it feels like when you’ve outgrown or chosen a path that is not deeply your own path but someone else’s idea of who you should be. You’re going through the motions. Life is okay if you can conform. When you live from an archetypal depth, then it may take suffering, but there’s something worthy and true about who I am when I do it that is me. Living your personal myth, in fact, is all about the crises, the transitions, and the suffering. It is about integrating your personal myth into yourself as you move along the path. Those of us that are psychotherapists or artists or writers or anybody here who draws from the stuff of your own life, know that no experience you have ever gone through is wasted. You can use it in your art, in your therapy, in your compassion for or understanding of what comes through the suffering that you personally integrated into yourself. You can use the experience in your work, and nothing goes to waste.

As you get older, your path becomes increasingly a realization that you have moved in an authentic way along the journey. There are the archetypes in both men and women: goddesses in every woman, gods in every man. Had I known better, I would have written a big book called “Gods and Goddesses in Every Person.” As I stand up here and talk about archetypes, I am not embodying a goddess archetype. I’m being Hermes, the messenger god, talking about entering the underworld and returning to the upperworld. Most men and women find that they’re a mix of different archetypal energies, much as we are all mixes of human talents. Imagine if you had the gift of a Mozart and you never heard music. Then in the second half of your life you were introduced to music. You had a sense that said. “This is who I am!”

This individuation happens to people often in the second half of life. The middle-aged person has done that which was possible for them to do. You were either successful in fulfilling the educational career relationship patterns that first half of life is about or not. You either do it or you don’t. And here you are. I wrote in my last book called “Crones Don’t Whine” that the third phase of life is the actual real essence of being present to the path that you are on. Unless you can grieve for losses, let go of your sense of entitlement, you will stand at the gate, never get through that transition, never get under the pubic bone to the other side. If you sit at the gate whining, you’re looking back at the past feeling that you, of all people, deserve better. Your kids should have turned out differently. Your marriage should have turned out better. The world should have recognized you differently. You’re whining about what happened or didn’t happen to you. You have no perspective on the whole wide world experience of being human. For one thing, you don’t understand the amount of suffering and pain and reality that exists if you’re still here. You’re standing at the gate into the individuation path of the Crone. The Crone, an archetype that both men and women draw from, is about wisdom, and compassion, and active action, and healing humor, and a lot of other good things. But it’s an internal experience. The crone archetype exists in men and women who can change the world.

I see the metaphoric story about Psyche, the much more dramatic whistle-blower experience that Jesus represents. Did Jesus have a sense that what he was supposed to do would go against everybody’s expectations, would scare everybody to death, and yet would involve him with great suffering? In the midst of the great suffering, he even felt that maybe he was wrong, that this was not what he was supposed to do at all. He did that. A number of people go against expectations, and they suffer as whistle-blowers. Or they make a choice that other people just didn’t expect, and they experience anger and disappointment and crucifixion at some symbolic level. Once it happens, the old self dies.

We’ve returned to the symbology of death/rebirth. When you are no longer who you are, you’re in a transition zone. You’re learning something about who you are now, and what you have in terms of sorting seeds. You’re giving form to your creativity. How much power do you have? Do you have the ability to put boundaries on your own energy? Then you can pass through into the next phase, a spiritual path, which may also demand of you that you now call upon something greater than yourself.

I’ve often said to look at us all as spiritual beings on a human path, rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path. At some level, think how absurd it is that an immortal soul comes into the dysfunctional lives we all have. An immortal soul has chosen to be human. Human path is very strange. At the beginning, most people seem to have their own version of dysfunctional family with lots of mistakes, and difficulties, and loves, and sufferings, and lessons along the way. Then it’s over so soon. Nobody gets through without suffering. Now why would an immortal soul do that?

Yet, all of us intuitively would say, “I believe I have a soul.” As soon as you do that, you assume that you are essentially a spiritual being in a human body for now. There must be something about this journey of vulnerability, of sharing it with others, of suffering, of learning, of trusting, of finding that sometimes grace comes in the form of love, and that Eros rescues us when we’re unconscious again.

This is a story that resonates at many different levels and it’s about us all. It’s also about reconnecting with that which is in solution. We were caterpillars; we enter this solution in which everything got dissolved. Somehow, if we’re fortunate, we reform and come out as a butterfly. In our transition times we travel down to the underworld, down to the unconscious, and reconnect with what mattered to us before. Or we uncover a talent that gives our life meaning, and we claim it consciously and bring it up. We make it part of what gets reformed when we break out of our cocoon into the next phase of our life.

As human beings and immortal souls in this life, the major metamorphosis for us all is just to know that the last metamorphosis is the great mystery. When we die and we leave this body, what of us continues on? What I find enormously heartening and fascinating on many different levels is how many people have had after-death communications from others who have gone on in many different forms. Sometimes there are visitation dreams. Sometimes there is a sense of presence. Sometimes there’s actually a hearing or a seeing the person.

Recently, because I’ve had a number of people who are close to me who aren’t here anymore but who I have had a real sense of presence. Now I’m going to tell you a story that was told publicly. I believe it because of my own other experiences.

 I went to a memorial service for the son of two friends of mine. He had a head-on accident and died on the spot. It was a great loss. Jed was only 26 years old, and he had this wonderful soul and spirit. His sister was angry and weeping a day or two before the memorial service. She was really having trouble with it, and finally she just wanted to be by herself. So she said, “I’m just going to go for a walk.” As she was walking, Jed appeared to her and walked along with her. He spoke to her saying,”I’m really okay, and I want you to be okay. I want you to hold my hand.” The sister said, “People must have thought I was really dumb because they saw me holding his hand. I mean, I’m sure they couldn’t see Jed, but there I was holding his hand.”

Now, Jed was known for giving big hugs. It seemed to be his trade mark. Once he even got hit by a man who fell into a homosexual panic. The fellow moved toward Jed. Of course, Jed interpreted it as “He wants a big hug.” And when Jed hugged him, the man felt threatened by that closeness and hit Jed. This is a guy who had this type of physical reputation, right?

This walk with Jed, which his sister said was 28 minutes long, calmed his sister down. At the end of the walk Jed asked, “Can I give you a hug?” and she said, “Sure.” He gave her a big hug, and then he asked, “Can you feel it?” He was disembodied so, of course, she couldn’t feel it. In her wisdom she said, “I can feel it in my heart.”

The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road. What did I come to do? What is my purpose? What did I come to learn? Who did I come to love? From a psychological viewpoint, those questions can only be answered from deep within. Nobody else can ever answer them for you. I see this all as having many incarnations, many important relationships that come and go, and many important experiences including this intensive conference to which the same questions could apply. What did really I come here to do? You may not find the answer to that question until the conference is over or almost over. What did I come to learn, really? Who did I come to love? What did I come to love in myself, out here? What am I remembering and reconnecting by this emerging experience? The journey continues. Whether it’s a long weekend, or a marriage, or a career…whatever it is…if it did not go to waste, then it was part of your journey. There’s something now to remember and learn about it in order to bring it into consciousness and have it in the full circle of who you are. You can reclaim those things from which you have cut yourself off because of shame. That’s part of the learning experience: you might have compassion if you have compassion for yourself. You can then have compassion for others.

This is an amazing story, the personal myth business that we are all on. When that’s said, I think it’s an amazing story that we are in. We are here now. Humanity has the capacity to destroy this planet, the garden that we were given. I heard Robert Bly talk about the poem in which he presents men with the question: “What did you do with the garden I trusted you with?”

There has never been a generation of women the likes of which are in this room right now. The lives of 45 million American women over the age of 50 have been influenced by the Women’s Movement. They have therefore had responsibility, the ability to have major choices, education, the birth control pill, and reproductive rights that may be taken from us. Here we are, this generation of conscious people, spiritual people, disoriented people who have possibly something to do with the fate of the earth. I think so.

Something that has grown out of my work is the notion of us needing to be in circle where the spiritual center is egalitarian in order to admit the feminine principle. This circle is necessary for men as well as women to be able to talk about vulnerability, share stories, and enjoy the strength, connection, and depth of being human with each other. Because I’m of the generation of the Women’s Movement, I know that women together in conscious-raising groups have changed the world. It doesn’t seem at all strange to me to think that we could create a critical mass of consciousness from the hypothetical millionth circle which grows out of the hypothetical hundredth monkey (which was a story that kept the anti-nuclear activists going.) It is, as Malcolm Gladwell says, “a tipping point.” We should serve ourselves to have a support system of like-souled others who understand that the personal myth is something we are trying to live.

And so, I leave you with all of this as a transition because we are all in transition as a planet. We are in a transition as individuals. And we have a remarkable opportunity to make a difference. Every one of us who has gotten older and wiser can be a circle of influence in our nuclear extended families, our institutions and, really, the world. I think it matters a lot that we do spiritually oriented activism, political activism based not on anger and hate. Again, like the Beyond War people moved us with the anti-nuclear activist movement, it has to do with love of our potential and a wish not to destroy it. It may be, because we are born at this time and are here now, that we each have as part of our personal mythology to do something politically beginning now.