The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  The Tao te Ching says, “If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.”

  Embrace death with your whole heart? I remember the first time I read that line from Lao-tzu’s masterpiece. I thought: This is crazy talk. But I knew from the bottom of my heart that it was right.

  I actually knew of an Alzheimer’s patient who tried this approach. He took Alzheimer’s as his dharma. He walked the razor’s edge. OK, he was a very adept Buddhist meditator, and so maybe his whole life had been a preparation for this final effort. He belonged to a meditation community out West. He became famous for embracing his ordeal as dharma. His whole community participated in it with him, taking it on step by brutal step. His courage transformed a lot of people. It was a high-wire act of skillfulness and courage.

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  Krishna has something to say about all of this. He has a teaching that sheds some light on what we might call the built-in flaw in Mom’s declare-war-on-it strategy. But it’s a very tricky teaching, and it’s not for everyone. It is, indeed, one of the most complex parts of the Gita.

  Here’s the deal: Mom declared war on her situation, right? Now, if Krishna were sitting with Mom, he would explore this with her very carefully. What, precisely, was she declaring war on? They would talk about it. He would gently prod her to examine what she was feeling—to examine precisely what she was feeling.

  Mom would resist, of course—being Mom (or really just being a human being). But eventually—like Arjuna—she would relent, and begin to ponder Krishna’s questions. (I can see her in my mind’s eye—tilting her head slightly. Gazing into the middle distance. Taking the question seriously. What was she feeling?) Well, it wasn’t just one thing that she was feeling. It was a whole mix of thoughts, of feelings, and of sensations. Aversion. Hatred. Resistance. Denial. Horror. Repulsion. Anger. Rage. Betrayal. Loss.

  Krishna would ask her to explore these very carefully. And then he’d tell her something interesting about the whole lot of them. First, though, he’d have to get a running start by giving Mom his lesson about grasping. And then he’d reveal to Mom that yogi scientists discovered that grasping has a flip side. It is called aversion. Aversion is also known by its many other names, almost all of which Krishna uses at one point or another in his discourse with Arjuna. They are: hatred, disdain, anger, fear, revulsion, judgment. This was all very familiar emotional territory for Mom. She knew its peaks and valleys.

  Krishna would continue. He would teach Mom that grasping and aversion are twins: They are mirror images of each other. They both involve a rejection of how it is in this moment. The grasping mind says, “I long for that experience over there. That experience looks very pleasant. Let’s go there.” The aversive mind, on the other hand, says, “I hate the way it is right now. This is very, very unpleasant. Get me out of here!” The aversive mind pushes away the unpleasant.

  Do you see? Mom was stuck in aversion. “This Alzheimer’s will not stand. It will be war. I hate this. I reject this. I will fight this to the bloody end.”

  What’s the problem? Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that yogis, looking closely at these difficult aversive states, found that aversion has exactly the same deleterious effects on the mind as grasping does. Remember our friends disturbance, obscuration, and separation? Yep. The aversive mind is visited by each of them.

  It’s not hard to see how this happens. First, aversion disturbs the mind. Anyone can see this. Then, aversion obscures our capacity to see clearly. This, too, is obvious. When we’re hating something, we do not tend to see it clearly. We see the object of our hatred as all bad—not a mixture of bad and good and neutral as it really is. And finally, and probably most painfully, aversive states separate us from ourselves and from others. “I hate this moment. Get me out of this moment. I do not want it to be like this.” Aversion is a seat in hell. It separates us from now. When the mind is colored by aversion, we can never be at ease—can never have a moment’s peace.

  Aversion is a notoriously slippery creature. It can begin very, very small, with the simple internal act of moving away from the unpleasant. “I don’t like the way I’m feeling just now. I think I’ll turn on the TV. Maybe that will help distract me.” Avoiding the unpleasant: What could be more human? But this simple impulse to move away from the unpleasant can snowball. Krishna details the inevitable movement of aversive states: The impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression. Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.

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  So, Mom was caught in the vise of aversion. You might reasonably observe: Well, of course she was. Wasn’t that perfectly natural? We do not want these experiences of suffering.

  Absolutely right. But Krishna will point out a subtle distinction here. Mom’s problem was not her aversion to Alzheimer’s. That was perfectly natural. It was her aversion to her own aversion that was the problem. She hated the aversion. She hated the feeling of aversion itself. She hated the fact that she felt it. She was not comfortable with her anger, with her rage, with her disdain. Her proper WASP tool kit did not include the instruction manual for this level of aversion. She was ripped apart by it.

  The great Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this experience of aversion to the aversion “the pain of pain.” Pain is inevitable, of course. And aversion is a natural response to it. But aversion to the aversion? This is not inevitable, as it turns out. This part is optional. And the kicker: The aversion to the aversion is where the real suffering lies. As my friend the American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein says so often: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

  If Mom (in our imagined dialogue between Krishna and her) had finally opened her mind to this teaching, Krishna would have been able to help her quite a bit. He could had helped her with the pain of pain.

  Remember Krishna’s brilliant approach to working with desire? Go into the desire. Feel it. Explore it. Discover what exactly is in that stew of craving, of wanting. Maybe even find magnificent things in it, like aspiration.

  OK: It’s exactly the same teaching with aversion. Go into it. Go into your anger, your fear. Feel it in the body. Get to know it. Find the energy at its heart. Find the secret gift at its center. Don’t be afraid. Let it wash over you. Know it.

  All of the Eastern contemplative traditions stumbled onto this brilliant principle: When difficulties arise, give yourself to them.

  When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. This does not come naturally to us. Our instinct is to avoid discomfort at every turn. And we live in a culture that helps us to distract ourselves from discomfort’s every manifestation. No! counsels Krishna. Do not try to distract yourself! Try it just the other way ’round. Rather, go into the heart of the difficulty. Experience it. Investigate it. Take yourself into the center of the conflict. Learn to tolerate its discomfort without acting or reacting.

  And what do you find at the heart of fear, dread, loathing, anger, hatred? You find a surprise. You find a gift.

  A gift at the center of hatred? A gift at the center of aversion? Could it possibly be? I am skeptical. Show me just one person who really lives this way—diving into the burning heart of aversion. This would be one person in a million.

  Well, our next exemplar is one of those people. Her name is Marion Woodman. She is one of the world’s greatest Jungian analysts and teachers. She was squarely in the middle of a brilliant career when she was struck down with a virulent form of cancer. She was told she would die—indeed, that she would die a very painful death. Wham! So much for your brilliant career, Marion. So much for your dharma. And what was Marion’s dharma to be now?

  Marion did the unusual. She decided to take cancer as her new dharma. She walked the razor’s edge: She
did not declare war on it. She invited it in to see what she could make of it, and to see what it would make of her. She opened to the possibility that this experience could transform her in salutary ways. Marion lived with her husband of many years—Ross Woodman, a distinguished scholar and author. And Ross—heroically—took it on as well. They walked the razor’s edge together. And they discovered, eventually, The Gift at the center of cancer.

  Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then you will endure forever.

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  Marion Woodman is, as I have said, one of the world’s best-known Jungian analysts. She is a widely admired author of important books on feminine psychology and on the relationship between the psyche and the body, including such influential works as Addiction to Perfection, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, and Leaving My Father’s House. She has become well known for her lively collaborations with American poet Robert Bly, with Rumi scholar Coleman Barks, and with author Thomas Moore and others. She is a member of an illustrious family: Her brothers are the late Canadian actor Bruce Boa and the well-known Jungian analyst Fraser Boa.

  Marion and I have been friends for twenty years. We first met in 1994. I called her on the phone one day entirely out of the blue. Knowing her only by reputation, I called her at her office in Toronto to invite her to speak at a conference I was organizing at Kripalu. It was a conference on psychotherapy and spirituality. Marion had a reputation as a spellbinding speaker on the topics of women, feminine psychology, psychotherapy, and spirituality, and I wanted her voice at this conference.

  I was moved by our brief phone call. The voice on the other end of the phone was warm but commanding. It was much as I had imagined it might be, but softer, maybe older. “Well, Stephen,” Marion said after we had chatted for a while and I had laid out for her the parameters of the conference I wanted her to address, “I must say you have intrigued me. However, I have to tell you that I am not very well just now. I may not even make it to the podium.”

  I had no idea how literal Marion was being. She was hugely unwell. She was maybe even dying. She didn’t say—and I had no way of knowing—that she was deep in the middle of a life-and-death struggle with cancer, and had just finished a wracking series of radiation treatments. In fact, I would not truly understand what had transpired in that phone call until I read about it years later in her book Bone—published after she had narrowly survived her struggle. To this day I marvel that that she came to our conference. (She told me later that she was “listening to inner guidance.”) I told Marion on the phone that day that I understood she was “not particularly well,” and that we would be delighted to have her join us for the conference, and would consider it a bonus if she were able to speak. Just come, Marion, I said.

  Well, as it turned out, Marion did come, and she was feeling well on the day of the conference. She was able to speak. It was an unforgettable moment. Marion approached the podium slowly, regally. I had not yet seen her in person. She was of medium height, with beautifully coiffed graying hair, and warm blue eyes. I imagined her to be in her late fifties. She had a marvelous, chiseled, intelligent face and beautiful skin and eyes—the face of a Shakespearean beauty, I thought, and the poise of a diva. Had she been an actress, I wondered? Marion showed no sign of radiation-induced weakness, though I learned later how devastating the damage was, and how much pain she was actually in.

  That day on the podium, she was, as it turned out, right in the middle of taking her cancer on as her dharma. Of embracing it. Of opening to the journey that was cancer.

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  On November 16, 1993, deep into her career as a Jungian analyst, Marion was diagnosed with cancer of the endometrium. “Talked to Dr. Fellows,” she writes in her journal on that fateful day. “He made it clear that I have carcinoma of the endometrium, with a three-doctor check. I made it clear to him that I am not 70—that I still have things to do with my life.” I have plans, she said. Plans! (This is just what my father would have said to his Alzheimer’s doctor if he had been offered the luxury of such a conversation.)

  Cancer provoked an immediate crisis in both Marion’s personal life and her professional life. It wildly interrupted a perfectly sublime dharma. But Marion realized, overnight, that she had a new dharma. It was called cancer. She wrote in her journal: “When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.” Wow. Not much holding on there. It was an instinctive move: Recognize the winds of change at once. Move with them.

  Marion is a woman who is compelled to find meaning in experience. Indeed, the view that all experience has meaning is the very tenet that had drawn her to Carl Jung’s work in the first place. Now she insisted on understanding the meaning of her cancer. “I persevered,” she said in the preface to Bone, “in trying to experience its many shocks as symptoms attempting to bring healing—wholeness into my body-soul connection.”

  In Bone, Marion describes how she saw her illness as “Destiny.” (Her view of Destiny is really very similar to our notion of dharma.) “Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life.” All of life. In another journal entry, she writes: “These are strange days, knowing that I have moved into Destiny, knowing I am in exactly the right place, agonizing as it is.” No war here whatsoever.

  Marion rearranged her life to conform to her new reality. She realized that this process would take every ounce of strength she had. She made careful choices about her time. She began to wind down her analytic practice in Toronto. Over the months to come she would terminate with many of her longtime analysands. She was paring away everything that was not her new dharma. Frost pared his life down to “poet.” Susan B. Anthony became a guided missile for the vote. Whitman became a Soldier’s Missionary. And Woodman opened her life to the possibilities of cancer.

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  Marion Woodman has a fascinating dharma story. Until she was fifty years old, she taught English literature and drama at South High School in Toronto. In those years it must have been apparent to anyone paying attention that Marion Woodman was living her dharma. For twenty years, she brought Shakespeare and Keats and Beckett and Dickinson to life for generations of high school students.

  During these years, immersed in the world’s great literature, she nurtured a world-class mythopoetic consciousness, until finally at midlife she felt a new call—a call to investigate this consciousness more explicitly. At an age when most people are thinking about retirement, Marion packed herself up and headed to Zurich, Switzerland, to train at the Jung Institute.

  Marion studied with the top teachers in Zurich. She lived at the zenith of Carl Jung’s world. But she told me once that the real initiation into her new dharma came through her own personal analysis with a legendary Jungian analyst in London. In her book Coming Home to Myself, she writes about this experience:

  In his eighties, he was my analyst.

  I had been in England

  seeing him for six months,

  and was still trying to be efficient.

  On Christmas Eve I learned my dog,

  who was in Canada, had been killed.

  I decided not to waste my evening session

  talking about my dog.

  I arrived as organized as usual.

  At the end, he sat quietly,

  then asked me what was wrong.

  Nothing, I said, as I put on my coat.

  You have not been here, he said.

  I told him my dog was dead.

  He wept. Wept over my dog.

  Asked me how I could waste Christmas Eve

  chattering when my soul animal had just died.

  Suddenly his weeping made me feel

  what I was doing to my soul.

  We wept together.

  That’s when my analysis began. />
  That’s when my analysis began. That’s when Marion began what Carl Jung would call the “night sea journey.” That’s when Marion began pointing her sails into the wind of the unconscious, and made the journey into the parts of herself that had been exiled to the basement and the attic of her body and soul. With the help of her analyst, she made the irrevocable decision to accept whatever she found there.

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  The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness. It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.

  Marion taught me that in the process of the night sea journey we expose the shadow. “The shadow is anything we are sure we are not; it is part of us we do not know, sometimes do not want to know, most times do not want to know. We can hardly bear to look,” says Marion. “Well,” suggests Marion, “do look!!” It will be startling. (“Ourself behind ourself, concealed—should startle most,” wrote Emily Dickinson, Woodman’s muse.)

  “The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived,” writes Marion. “Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.” Marion discovered, of course, that Jung’s technique for discovering our exiled parts centered primarily around the analysis of dreams, which Jung called “the royal road to the unconscious.”