The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  Marion was endlessly fascinated by the capacity of dream analysis to reunite us with ourselves. And she was fascinated, too, with the structure of dreams. She was astonished to find in dreams the very same dramatic structure she had been teaching in literature and drama. And she came to believe, as Jung did, that at the heart of the unconscious mind there is a panoramic intelligence that is deeply connected with fundamental human consciousness. She came to believe that this was the only true guide for her soul.

  After termination with her analyst in London, Marion would henceforth let her life be guided by an ongoing analysis of her own dream world. “Once we know what the dream world is,” she writes, “to be without it is to be rudderless. The dream continually corrects our waking course.” Marion, like Jung, came to believe that dreams are the path—circular and meandering as it is—to a knowledge of the exiled self.

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  When Marion finished her training in Switzerland and her analysis in England, she returned to Canada with Ross and set up a psychotherapy practice, using Jungian techniques. Early on, Marion became particularly fascinated with food addictions and eating disorders, because she herself had wrestled with these very issues.

  In the early years of her analytic practice, Marion found herself struggling to understand the repetitive themes in the dreams of her addicted clients. This was for her a phase of deliberate practice. She was trying to find patterns in the psyches of her patients—trying to find new paths to healing. She was systematic about it. She says, “I put rows of dreams on the floor of my studio, organized and reorganized them by theme. I marveled at the overwhelming power of the unconscious and at the same time the intensity of its drive toward healing.”

  Marion discovered an underlying theme in her clients’ dreams. She discovered that her addicted clients lived divided lives—lives split between body and soul, between perfection and imperfection, between light and dark. Healing came about through integrating these “pairs of opposites.” She came into an understanding of the way in which longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.

  What a relief, then, she discovered, to learn to accept both sides of these pairs of opposites—not just the God in us, but the animal, too. Not just the transcendent states, but the realities of embodied life. “What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them to be,” she declared. She found that her clients experienced the same kind of relief. No matter how painful the truth may be, it’s usually a relief to acknowledge it.

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  Now Marion would use all of her Jungian analytic techniques—especially dream analysis—to come into relationship with cancer. She began a new phase of her dream analysis. Everything became subservient to this work. Marion told me that she would spend hours each morning in bed with her dreams. “A dream not understood is like a letter unopened,” wrote Jung. Now these letters—these dreams—were for Marion a matter of life and death.

  Her dreams began to teach her about her current state of mind and body. In her dreams, she became aware of feeling trapped. She sensed that light could not penetrate the darkness of her body. “My dark images are related to depression as surely as my cancer is related to dark imagery,” wrote Marion in her journal. “The connecting space is the subtle body, the home of the metaphor, the world of soul. That’s where I’m working now, visualizing radiant energy transforming into healthy cells. Jung knew psyche and matter were not opposites.”

  She had a growing awareness that she was somehow trapped—squeezed into too small a space. “I know that this death I am going through has to do with matter that cannot move as quickly as the consciousness that inhabits it. Too much light in too dense matter. My dreams have been telling me that for a year.” She had written often about this feeling of being trapped in too small a consciousness.

  In our dreams, we are trapped—

  In our home,

  In a tomb,

  In frozen water,

  In a sinking ship,

  In the stillness,

  In the darkness,

  In a prison,

  In a concentration camp,

  In a cave with a rock for a door.

  She was trapped in a consciousness that was not yet expansive enough to embrace her new dharma. Where was the block? What, precisely, was split off? What had she not yet gotten big enough to embrace?

  Finally, the answer came to her.

  What aspect of herself had she exiled? Death.

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  Marion’s dharma journey had brought her over and over again to a confrontation with the pairs of opposites: Body and Spirit. Heaven and Hell. Psyche and Soma. Now her dharma—what she liked to call Destiny—would bring her to the final pair of opposites: Life and Death. Could she embrace both life and death at the same time?

  This challenge, of course, is precisely the one facing Arjuna at the outset of the Bhagavad Gita. As he quietly surveys the great battlefield of Kurukshetra laid out before him, Arjuna realizes that he is looking squarely at the prospect of his own death. And in the face of this death, he folds. He drops to the floor of his chariot. I cannot fight this fight.

  It is at this point that Arjuna—terrified—begins “the wondrous dialogue” with Krishna. Krishna begins with a magnificent sermon (and here I paraphrase): “You see Life and Death as opposites,” he says to a befuddled Arjuna, “as if you had to choose one over the other. And of course you choose life. But don’t you get it? You have to choose both. Life and Death are not enemies. They are not opposites at all. They are inextricably bound to one another. You cannot really choose life without also choosing death.”

  “Death is inevitable for the living,” teaches Krishna. “Birth is inevitable for the dead. Since these are inevitable, you should not sorrow.”

  All of the Eastern contemplative traditions finally see a full-hearted embrace of death as the very bridge to full life. Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then your work will last forever.

  To our minds this makes no sense. Aren’t an embrace of life and an embrace of death mutually exclusive? Krishna teaches that they are not. They are not—not any more than light and dark, mountain and valley, psyche and soma are mutually exclusive. Indeed, holding them both at the same time is what is required. It is a sublime paradox.

  Paradox is, of course, Marion’s home territory. When she looked into the heart of her struggle, Marion discovered her aversion to death. She was trying to keep death out—out of her thoughts, out of her consciousness, out of her dreams. Just as Mom was trying to keep it out. And, alas, as Marion discovered, there is no way to pry loose from the horns of this dilemma but to embrace death fully. Remember that Keats came to exactly the same insight when he finally embraced death as “Life’s high meed.”

  Marion made the decision to embrace death early on in her dance with cancer. She wrote in her journal on January 12, 1994—just months before she came to Kripalu—“I decided if I was going to die, it was all right. Just have to adjust the focus. I realized that Ross and I are living with Death as a daily ally. Death is right here.”

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  Marion—along with Jung, along with Krishna—chose a remarkable view of difficulties: Difficulties—even death—are not an enemy from the beyond. They are not an alien force. They are part of the Self. Therefore, what appear to be difficulties are really invitations. They are doorways into a deeper union with split-off parts of the Self. They are opportunities. But in order to make full use of these opportunities, one must be willing to undergo what Marion calls “the initiation.”

  Marion’s awareness that cancer is an initiation—not an alien intruder—was a turning point in her journey. In her journal, she pondered the fact that many of the initiations in her life had come precisely through the body. “My body has always been the instrument through which I have been forced to
come to consciousness—heatstroke, eating addiction, car accident, kidneys, knees, cancer … Its agony forced me onto a new path, where I did not want to go … Always through illness God picked me up, dropped me on the new road, and said, ‘Walk!’ ”

  Marion saw in her struggle with cancer all the stages of initiation that she had taught for so many years. She describes these stages in Bone. Together they make up a stunning reframe of difficulty itself—making it into a path we can fruitfully tread. They include (and here I paraphrase Marion):

  • The invitation into the unknown

  • The placing of trust in the situation and in one who initiates

  • The loss of “the known” and the entry into “the unknown”

  • The loss of personal identity

  • The fear of the initiation

  • Facing the fear

  • Active surrender

  • The epiphany

  • The restoration of personal identity

  • The return to the “known world,” with more understanding and lived knowledge

  • The long integration of the experience into ordinary life

  I had heard Marion teach about all of this before, but none of it had come into such focus for me as it did now, reading Bone. Initiations are opportunities for us to grow larger. They are death channels. And they are birth channels. They allow us the opportunity to integrate more of our self—more possibility, more reality, more sensation, more feeling. They require everything we’ve got. They destroy us to re-create us.

  These initiations can be terrifying, disorganizing. Writes Marion: “We usually need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend time as forest dwellers, just surviving. Our journey to our old, new home is cyclical, [we must see] that we shall never move in once and for all.”

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  Marion teaches that we cannot undergo initiation until we learn to live in paradox. She writes: “We learn to live in paradox, in a world where two apparently exclusive views are held at the same time. In this world, rhythms of paradox are circuitous, slow, born of feeling rising from the thinking heart. Many sense such a place exists. Few talk or walk from it.”

  Carl Jung created a brilliant developmental strategy for standing in paradox: One must hold both sides of a paradox at the same time, he teaches, without choosing one or the other. Exiling neither. Privileging neither. In this way, we can gradually learn to tolerate living in the tension of opposites. Marion states the technique with stunning clarity:

  “Holding an inner or outer conflict quietly instead of attempting to resolve it quickly is a difficult idea to entertain. It is even more challenging to experience. However, as Carl Jung believed, if we held the tension between the two opposing forces, there would emerge a third way, which would unite and transcend the two. Indeed, he believed that this transcendent force was crucial to individuation. Whatever the third way is, it usually comes as a surprise, because it has not penetrated our defenses until now. A hasty move to resolve tension can abort growth of the new. If we can hold conflict in psychic utero long enough we can give birth to something new in ourselves.”

  Hold conflict in psychic utero. This is a skill that can be learned. But it requires a host of collateral skills that most of us in the West have not nurtured: the capacity to stand in mystery; the capacity to tolerate the unknown; the courage to live in the wilderness for a while; the love of the dark and the night and the moon; the wisdom of the circle, not the line. (How can we not hear echoes here of John Keats’s Negative Capability?)

  Marion teaches that part of our problem is that we try to speed things up—to foreclose them too early; to make them linear; to choose one side over the other. As a result, we do not get the initiation. Not having learned to hold the tension in “psychic utero,” we are destined to split the world: Experience becomes either acceptable or unacceptable, good or bad, Life or Death. The initiation fails.

  Marion’s view allowed her experience with cancer to be full of meaning, to be replete with possibility, and it enabled Death to bring her more deeply into Life. She got the initiation.

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  As I think back, I realize that unlike Mom, Dad actually did not go to war with his experience of Alzheimer’s. He surrendered gracefully to it. It occurs to me now that somewhere along the way he had learned Marion’s lesson. Stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Wherever did he learn it? Where had he been initiated into this mystery? Was it fighting on the beaches of Italy during the Second World War? As a kid growing up threadbare in an Ohio River mill town? I remember one night when he cried about his affliction—early on, before the disease was even officially diagnosed. I don’t think I had ever seen him cry. His heart was still open. He was able to walk straight ahead, even into Alzheimer’s.

  Dad surrendered. He opened the door and walked through it. After it was clear that he could no longer live at home, we took him to a very fancy Alzheimer’s unit—and then later to a more modest facility nearer to Mom’s home. Dad never went to war with this illness. There was some very large capacity in him to face reality.

  And I wondered, after his death, if Dad had maybe even thought about the possibility of Alzheimer’s—or prepared himself somehow for it. After all, Dad’s contracting Alzheimer’s should not have been a complete surprise. His mother, my grandmother Cope, had developed the disease, too, in her early sixties—before we even had the name Alzheimer’s. I remember my grandmother’s suffering all too well. Already deep into the ravages of this disease for which we had no name, she came to live with us for a short while in our little house in Ohio. They are weeks I will never forget. She—my beautiful, sweet grandmother who sang “I’ll be Workin’ on the Railroad” with us five kids tucked into her big walnut bed in the morning—had become paranoid, confused, disoriented. My family watched, terrified and helpless. One day she chased my mother around the house with a knife—in a fit of paranoid delusion. That very day, she was carted off to Apple Creek State Hospital, where she died—mercifully—just months later, of what the doctors then called “hardening of the arteries.”

  I remember my father on the afternoon she died—sitting, stunned, at the little telephone stand in the dining room, staring at the blank wall. What had happened to his beautiful, feisty, Scottish mother? She had died in a lunatic asylum. That is what happened, I guess, to Alzheimer’s patients before we had the name. On some level, Dad never got over it.

  What must it have been like for Dad, then, when he began to experience the same symptoms? What must it have been like for him when he began to forget things? When he could no longer remember how to get from his home to his office? What must it have been like for him, for Dad, who was famous—like his mother—for being always beautifully groomed and turned out? What must it have been like for him when he could no longer figure out how to wear his elegant wardrobe—his Italian shoes, and his English custom suits? When he began to confabulate in order to cover up the fact that he—the historian—no longer knew who was president of the United States?

  These questions are very personal for me, as one might imagine. Alzheimer’s can be a family disease. My grandmother had it. Then my father. Then my father’s only brother. It is probable that one or more of my siblings or I will get it, or some version of it. Will it be me? Maybe it’s already lurking there, tangling my innocent brain in knots. Will I be able to adopt Marion’s strategy? Should I begin to prepare for it now? Indeed, maybe I am preparing for it. Maybe that’s what this book is all about. Maybe my concern about living fully—the concern that I laid out at the outset of this book—is driven precisely by this. By death.

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  Marion survived her initiation through cancer. And I have taught with her many times at Kripalu in the subsequent years. She wrote at the end of Bone that she had “died into life.” And I believe it. Our workshops together are so much fun. They are full of dancing and singing.
They have included poetry readings with Robert Bly—digging deep into the dream world of participants and dancing with them to the music of Frédéric Chopin and Richard Strauss. Marion does it up grand: She usually emerges on the Saturday evenings of our workshops in a long gold lamé dress, and reads Emily Dickinson and John Keats and Shakespeare to the hundreds of participants. In our individual work during these workshops, Marion has participants digging around in the muck and the earth of their inner worlds. I have been transformed by the process of working with her. And my relationship to the dream world has never been the same.

  Marion looks older now. Months of radiation therapy have left damage throughout her body. One winter after leaving Kripalu she fell on the way home and fractured both legs—bones already weakened by therapy for cancer. She endured months of rehabilitation. Yet when she next appeared at Kripalu to teach with me, she was still dancing.

  “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” wrote William Butler Yeats, one of Marion’s favorite poets.

  An aged man is but a paltry thing,

  A wretched coat upon a stick, unless

  Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

  For every tatter in its mortal dress,

  Unless Soul clap its hands and sing! There is a way to live beyond the pairs of opposites—beyond gain and loss, hope and fear, praise and blame, fame and ill-repute. And the Soul already knows the way. We must follow. The sage who lives like this, says Krishna—the sage who lives beyond the pairs of opposites—“awakens to the light in the night of all creatures.”

  Initiation by cancer became for Marion a new birth canal. “Cancer has made me sadder and wiser,” she wrote, “and therefore richer. Because death is an essential part of life, to be fully alive is to be prepared for it. The gift of cancer is the gift of NOW.… Through failures, symptoms, problems, we are prodded to renounce attachments, redundant now. With the breakdown of what has gone before, the possibility of rebirth comes.”