“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver

On this episode, we have a conversation with Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and an internationally known author and speaker. Jean is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a former clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California Medical Center. She has been a board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the International Transpersonal Association, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over ninety foreign editions.  She is an NGO Permanent Representative of the Women’s World Summit Foundation to the UN. She is in three acclaimed documentaries: the Academy-Award winning anti-nuclear proliferation film “Women – For America, For the World,” the Canadian Film Board’s “Goddess Remembered,” and “Femme: Women Healing the World.

Highlights:

• Finding Purpose in the Second Half of Life
• Archetypes in Every Person
• How Children Carry the Un-lived Parts of Their Parents

Resources:

• The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self by Jean Shinoda Bolen
• Goddesses in Everywomen: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives by Jean Shinoda Bolen
• Gods in Everyman: Archetypes that Shape Men’s Lives by Jean Shinoda Bolen
• The Millionth Circle

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Poem Inspired By this Episode

Full Transcript

Adrian:

Wonderful. I’m so glad this worked out.

Thal:

How are you?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

I’m good. I emailed you, I didn’t know if you had a chance to read that. I realized that I was saying more in it than the questions I asked you on the phone.

Adrian:

I just had a read. Um with Mary Oliver and also a little thing of Lao Tzu. Yeah. Very nice.

Thal:

Oh she’s one of my favorite poets. Um, her passing away was a, um, it was like big news for me two weeks ago.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It was like losing a friend.

Thal:

Aw. Yeah. She helped me through some very dark times.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

There’s, there’s the nature part of what she writes about, but then at the end of several of her poems, she just says something so wise.

Thal:

Yes.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So are we being recorded as is right now or what? What do we do? Please help.

Adrian:

So we are officially recording, but we, we can officially welcome you to the show. So thank you for coming onto our podcast.

Thal:

Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, it’s an adventure always to have a potential depth conversation with people who are interested in such things. And I never know where the conversation will go. And I often feel it in such conversations, words come out that have never been, never come out before and link things together. So there’s an energy field between people. Uh, I know in my office as a Jungian analyst, the geometry of the space, it’s like two equal chairs and, and in between. And the invisible in-between is really the larger self or our soul. It’s a Soul space essentially. And, and a creative space because again, it’s just, it’s a conversation between two people, but it’s different than what you and I are doing because what I do in my office is the other person provides the information and the dreams and the thoughts and the angst and the losses and, and I receive and comment and back and forth. So I’m hoping that out of this intriguing sounding, program that you have, Soulspace. I actually responded to that. I thought oh, I know about different varieties of Soul space. Let’s see where this conversation takes us.

Adrian:

Well it’s a real honor. I, you know, when I, when I reached out on email, I didn’t know, you know, how busy you might be and whether you’d agree to come on. So this is a real honor for both of us to have this conversation with you.

Thal:

Thank you. Yeah.

Adrian:

maybe, um, I’m thinking actually right now what I would love to, to hear from you is actually how your journey began. I’m really curious what you were like as a young girl and how that evolved into, um, just early in your career and how your path brought you towards the work that you’ve done, the books that you’ve written and, and your current life. So it just the early experiences and um, I know it might be difficult to kind of condense the story, but I’d love to hear some of that.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well some of that it comes to me quite easily because I had been working on a memoir based book, which means I’ve thought about some of these questions that you raised. And my ancestry is Japanese American. Both of my parents are born in the United States of Japanese ancestry. So when World War 2 broke out, every person of Japanese ancestry on the west coast was to be rounded up and put into relocation camps or concentration camps. I had a very, uh, I had very good parents, uh, who knew something about making choices and, and gut and take going on paths that needed to be go going on in my, and my father and mother then worked to get us out of the state of California ahead of the martial law that Japanese Americans came under. And consequently, I didn’t, I wasn’t put in a concentration camp. They are referred to that. They were called relocation camps. Basically. They were camps in the desert with uh, armed guards and, and, uh, uh, hastily built tar and wood and paper barracks, really. So instead I left the state and we went to New York to Kew Gardens to Grand Junction, Colorado, to, to Blackfoot, Idaho, to Denver, uh, during the war years and returned back to California as soon as it was possible to come back. And that meant the war was over. Well, what has this done on many different levels is that one becomes as, as you might be as apparently Asians of… in Canada, you, and yet there’s this place of being, of the words I came across in my time in becoming a psychiatrist, somewhere along the line is the idea of positive marginality that you can, you can be with other people who are not like you and yet you’re not marginalized in the negative way. Because I was this upbeat kid, always. I was. I came in privileged to be loved and privileged to, well, just come in maybe with a sunny disposition. So I became in, in going from elementary school to elementary school during the war years, uh, I was accepted and yet, I was different. And so the consequences is that you kind of be in the space of, of positive marginality, which you then are able to see much more clearly because you don’t just drop into being unconscious with everybody. You actually are aware that you are different and yet it’s perfectly acceptable and the differences help you to make your way and to appreciate what acts on you and what is in you. And actually that’s a way into describing something about why I would have the vision I have of thattThere are archetypes in us, there are like talents are, I mean they are, they vary in strength and they act through us whether we know it or not. And if they are acceptable then we blossom. But what if what you have in you is an archetype that is not welcomed in your particular family or culture. Then you have… You’re caught between two. We all are between two, the archetypes in us and the projections and expectations on us. And essentially what the work of depth analysis is, is to find out from what the dreams are saying from what your life has taught you so far something about who you really are. And that combination of who you are inside and what you were expected to be outside. Being the conflicts that created growth experiences or real difficulties.

Thal:

It’s very interesting when you mentioned positive marginality. Um, I mean I am someone that comes from different backgrounds, um, African, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and I’ve been going through my own Jungian analysis the past two years and I’ve been thinking about those things and, and reading your books and just thinking about Jungian analysis and how it can also help people who are marginalized, but that there are not a lot of people that have explored that path that are from my background. So just listening to you, so reaffirming. Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

You’re welcome.

Thal:

Yeah

Adrian:

I have to ask you, so which archetypes for you were emerging that maybe didn’t play nicely with the surroundings when you were growing up? You talked about possible friction or conflict. Where there any that come to mind?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well the archetype that has been my strongest one is Artemis. Artemis is the Goddess with a bow and arrow and the moon. I mean, she’s the Goddess of the hunt and Goddess of the moon. And she is really the Goddess of Sisterhood. Um, she’s the only Goddess that all of her mythologies has a great deal to do with what the women’s movement is up to really because she looked after young girls, um, and during the time that they were under the protection of Artemis, they could, they could be free like an Artemis girl. They could, they didn’t conform to, um, early marriage and things for that one year that they were under her protection after which they were had to live up to conformity and all of that. But Artemis is the kid who starts out with this innate, uh, watching say boys allowed to do things that girls cannot do. The Artemis puts her hands on her hips, so to speak, at four years old and says, “that’s not fair!” There’s a sense of equality, there’s a sense of competency that is pretty innate. And in an Artemis person who also likes to go off the beaten path and has an innate sense of, of nature. Um, I was realizing my privilege, it is to appreciate nature. I was just in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and every time I go there, I think I should come here more often because it’s, there’s something of nature there. The sky, the vastness of the sky and the quality of the air and the panoramic views that art for me, it’s a soul energy field as where I live. I’m talking to you right now and let’s see now at over the Bay, I live on the south side of Mount Tamalpais in north of the Golden Gate Bridge and, and it’s beautiful. And there’s something about the archetypes that respond to beauty, and this is another one. This is Aphrodite who is mostly known for being the Goddess of love and beauty in ancient classical mythology. But like as patriarchy got more and more, um, judgemental about women and women’s sexuality, she got to be, she went from what was considered, uh, she was considered awesome and revered. Now you don’t usually think of Aphrodite as revered but in ancient days she was, and, and as Goddess of love and beauty, it was not just sensuality of the body, but it was appreciation of the sensuality of the world really in general. Moved by beauty. Not everybody is moved by beauty, but if you have the archetype in you, you are, and what happens with an archetype is you drop deeper into your soul space. That’s what the archetype does. Otherwise, you, you live, in Jungian terms, the persona. The face you wear for the world. And that is what needs to be acceptable to many families and cultures. Can you wear a persona that works? Well, I was able to do that. Um, I, I didn’t come up against, well, I was well brought up so I behaved myself. So it, and it didn’t innately just, uh, live from my archetype. There’s some people might and might get in for trouble with it as well. So archetypes in us, are patterns, like every talent is a human talent. Not Everybody has the same amount of artistic talent or, or mechanical talent or athletic talent. They vary their gifts. So I think of archetypes as basically as similar to the gifts that we come into and we either have an opportunity to develop them or we don’t depending on the possibilities of their main culture.

Thal:

Um, I think this is very important for us to understand as we had approached you where I’m coming from this new generation and there’s a lot of clashes that are coming up everywhere. So you talking about the role of myths and archetypes and helping us to drop in deeper and understanding ourselves better. I mean, even considering all the, um, the current resurgence in feminism and a lot of, um, sort of reactionary behavior, which a lot of it is also coming out of wounds that have not been, um, like not understood or not addressed. So, um, so how do you, how can we integrate mythology back into our lives? Um, in our current times?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

The archetypes, uh, are patterns, human patterns in us. They conform to mythology in many ways, but they exist without us knowing any mythology whatsoever. It’s what you know deeply in yourself that’s true for you and such things as what are you doing when you lose track of time? What are you involved in when you are so absorbed in whatever it is that it seems like three hours have passed like 20 minutes or 20 minutes has dropped you into a timeless zone. I mean, there’s something about only the person who lives in you can know what truly deeply feed your spirit. Uh, what is a soul space? And they are related to the archetypes and the sense in Jungian psychology is first if there is that persona, uh, that many mothers are, are especially concerned about that our kids, their kids go out in the world and are well brought up and acceptable, et Cetera, which helps the child to navigate the early world. But persona is the layer in its, it’s the, in theater, there used to be in ancient Greece, the smiling face and the frowning face representing the faces of the …. And they used to put on masks and go onto the stage. A persona is a mask of sorts. And if you, if you have a persona that really reflects you, then what you inside and the mask is not mask like, but if you have to conform to a culture or family that expect certain things of you, no matter what, then you create a persona that is not exactly who you are. And the more you identify with a persona, the more distant you get from what you are inside. So there’s persona, then there’s ego and that’s the part of us that that makes choices and speaks from the word I. And then there’s the deeper level of the archetypes, which, and these, especially the archetype that has to do with, with um, spirit or soul, or what Jung call the archetype of the self. See human beings do seem to have an affinity … an affinity for divinity essentially, that there is something in the human being that has worshiped forever as far as back as we can see images on in caves from thousands of years ago. I was just learning a bit about Mot, the ancient Egyptian goddess. And uh, you know, they go back thousands of years before the, the Greek gods goddesses. And it seems as if human beings have had a sense of awe and then from that, worship and then they’d been, the question about you, whatever it is, it is, divinity is so much broader than a human mind can wrap around that, that somebody will have a genuine experience of divinity and then thinks that that experience is the experience. And then if it’s a powerful male running something or other, you have a patriarchal religion that says this is what God is. And, and one of the interesting things about words and all is that when you own the words, someone can have a experience of divinity and not consider that it was until much, much later because when they were growing up, God was defined as this and the idea even of goddess, that there’s a feminine aspect of divinity, not in many religions. So what do you do with the experience that you have inside when the world outside has no words for it? One of the things is the more you have words for something, the more you can feel it growing in you and I had um, my own life trajectory has a lot to do with, with coming in touch with a sense of, of whatever God is and feeling, uh, the mystery of it. I mean, interestingly the word mystery, it comes from the word mystes, which in ancient Greece was the word of the initiates, the initiates who entered the Eleusinian mysteries and had a sense of, of, of a goddess actually then no longer feared death. And that is one of the things that actually does seem to happen to people, especially as they grow older and connect with soul inside in a sense of divinity out. That it doesn’t seem to be well okay, well there’s something on the other side that there, and this is the basis of all religions. Mostly all religions… And so each of us has accessibility to this. We don’t need a particular gatekeeper, which mostly most of the religions seem to feel and insist that they are the gatekeepers. They are the only way to the truth when built into each of us is our own ability to experience depth and soul and love for example. Um, I remember when when explaining things to little children. How do you explain God? Well, how is it that they know the word love? If you say God is love, oh that seems to be much more easy to grasp and yet that is just as difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t know it as it would be to describe God.

Adrian:

Yeah, that was beautiful. A lot of things come to mind when you were just saying that, um, I think it was Michael Meade where I heard him talk about the pathless path and how at some point we have to drop whatever maps that were helpful initially and go on her own individual quest. Um, what would you offer as guidance perhaps for a lot of young seekers who are maybe self initiated, you know, finding themselves in times of transition and kind of confused and overwhelmed. Um, to be honest with, with the information overload that we have with the Internet and access to, you know, as much knowledge as we want. How do we, how do we receive guidance and, and make sure that we’re discerning. You know, I think discernment is part of that question too.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

The Greeks had two words for knowledge, logos, meaning the mental apparatus, the intelligence and gnosis spelled with a g, like the Gnosis, but pronounced gnosis and knows this is what you know in your bones. So what to know at the soul level which is some kind of inner certainty or inner compass that says, oh, I feel at home here. I trust this person. And often we need to find some blessed solitude, actually, that’s how you kind of find your way. And one of the things about current culture is a bombardment of emails and there’s hardly any time unless you choose it to be by yourself or by yourself in nature. Um, and conversations. Who is it that you’re comfortable with without words? Um, where do you go to find peace? Where is your soul space? Now those are, that’s a gnosis thing. The intelligent mind, well, you know, can give you options and things, but only when you get to a place that feels safe, home, peaceful and then you stay in it. I didn’t do it. Meditation helps people who otherwise wouldn’t even create a space, but it’s also very natural for us, unless we have some heavy judgment in our head. And then the idea of concentrated meditation often allows a person to be in a space without the critic or the judge or the whatever that that makes internal comfort difficult. So there’s gnosis, trusting what we know in our bones about, about what really matters.

Thal:

This is definitely an important reminder. It’s like tuning into our internal compass to, to guide us.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

That’s true. And the poetic side of us is the gnosis side, by the way. Left brain right brain. Left brain knows a lot and it has details then it, and it… but it’s poetry that speaks to what we know inside, at a soul level. And so when, when I heard that Mary Oliver had died, it did really feel that I had another friend who died. Now, I’d seen her in person in San Francisco when she first made her first trip out of her life at Massachusetts in the, she read some other poetry and she was interviewed on stage. So I did have a sense of her in person, but mainly I knew her through her poems. And, and every once in a while there are words that come from her poetry that just is such soul knowledge. Um, there was one poem in which she wrote, and I may be paraphrasing cause I didn’t set out to memorize your poems. It’s more that they sort of sunk in. And so I can have access to some of the lines. It really has meant something to me. But one that said, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk through the desert for a hundred miles panting, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Now… What is that? What is that trusting…knowing…not confused part of us that we came into this world with and we got it diverted by so many dysfunctional families and dysfunctional cultures and especially for boys or is more than girls are trained to not be vulnerable. Girls, we make friendships through our vulnerability and from sharing things. Boys don’t. And so they’re much more apt to be cut off from the poetic side of their souls, or if they’re smart enough, they know to keep it sacred and not share it because somebody will belittle them, or will make fun of them. So they learned something who and with whom can they share their soul space? And often it is with a woman or if it’s a gay man with finally meeting another who has a soul space, as much as, as his own. So there, there is that. And then, then I’m remembering, uh, in one of my books, uh, Crossing to Avalon, I have a poem by Mary Oliver written, right, the whole poem is right in the middle of it. And it’s the one that is called The Journey. And it begins one day you finally knew what you had to do and began. That is when you start your individuation journey, when you listen to the inner compass. And I’m remembering also a quote from a man who rose to the top of, uh, his corporate work, he became head of Newsweek when Newsweek was very popular. And he wrote a line that said, he talked about the ladder that he climbed to the top and he got to the top of the ladder. He was made editor and chief of Newsweek and he said, I found the ladder had been put up against the wrong wall.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Because climbing a ladder is sort of like going on a journey and, and then, uh, there is the end of the poem in Blackwater Woods in which Mary Oliver says, to live in this world, you must learn to do three things: to love what is more mortal. So hold it against your bones as if your life depends upon it. And when it comes time to let it go, to let it go. That is real depth, soul and psychological wisdom. And, and uh, what I have been doing workshops, um, past couple of years, I haven’t, not on my schedule right now, but I took a line from a poem called A Summer Day in which she ends up saying, doesn’t everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? And I’ve taken the phrase “your one wild and precious life” as a way describe to describe, you know, being on your soul path. Individuating. Living the life you were meant to live. Um, as, as uh, with “wild” being what you came in with. I mean, uh, uh, wild is, is like a forest of virgin forest. Nobody has logged it. Why are these your natural instinctual itself? And so when you are in your second half of life, especially when you’ve lived the life that you were supposed to live and either succeeded at it or failed at it, I don’t know. But in the second half of life is when you start to wonder what really matters to you and will you have the courage to follow your heart. And courage comes from the word cor, meaning heart. And that goes back to what was innately you. That’s the wild part. What will you do with your one wild or you could say archetypal that would fit too, your one archetypal wild and precious. Precious is something you also have to really value that, that who you are and the energy you have and the time you have and the words you use. This is, this is all you have. Time goes by so fast. She, you really get to know it. As you get older, it’s zip! And you get to where you wonder, how did I get this old so fast? That happens through where I am right now. How did I get to be this old? Let’s see, I was born in 1936, so I’m, um, I’m 80… um I don’t like that. [laugh]

Thal:

[laugh]

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So, so and yet there’s a perspective on this.

Thal:

Hmm. It’s just amazing listening to you, you know, um, you’ve, you’ve led such a soulful life, so it’s so inspiring for us. Um, just listen, listening to you talk. Um, but you bringing up poetry is so important because, I’ve always felt that there was a poet in all of us. And um, when I was younger I started writing poetry. I published some poetry, but then I started the path of the academic path. And I, um, uh, I have a degree in English literature, my masters and I found that sort of the academy like academic path moved me away from my soul writing and now path of yeah. And, and now that I’m in my, um, hopefully individuating and in the path of healing, I’m going back to poetry and hopefully integrating that side of myself.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

When you listen to this or I do as an analyst to someone telling me something that is deeply meaningful and food are there and they have a vocabulary such as you would have with your academic background, what comes out is like poetry because it’s so true. And uh, in it unedited, we all tend to edit our stories as we tell someone else. But when you’re in analysis and you reach a deep place and you’re talking from your soul level about how awful it was or how deep it was or what the loss was like, it is like listening to a poet. Now I need to wait and stop for a moment because it says low battery. Okay. I need to go get a plug.

Thal:

Sure. No problem. No problem.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Okay. It’s good now. I didn’t think it would run out of juice, but it, you know, did.

Adrian:

That’s okay. That’s a good catch. Maybe it’s just the charge that we’re… Coming through our conversation. Jean, you talked about young boys. I mean, I can’t help it, you know, I was listening to you carefully there y’re about growing up in, in modern society and how we’re often encouraged not to be in our bodies, you know, the feeling body and be receptive to this poetic language. Um, and so for me, this is a very new territory. You know, it just within the last year, maybe two years to really explore, um, the essential aspects of being, you know, dropping out of my mind and the intellect, but not to demonize it. Right. Recognizing that’s been a gift along the way. Um, I love to hear you talk about the embodied spirituality. I mean, we, the new age movement has, has brought, you know, lots of different versions of spiritual life. And I feel like there’s something very important about highlighting the embodied spiritual path.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well we get to be so out of touch with depth of body and the depth of body being not only having feelings but like the heart is usually considered in the body. Certainly and yet there is the heart chakra or the heart center, which is in the same general area as the physical heart. But the more you understand and feel in your body, what that Heart Chakra is responding to, you learn something about what really matters to you and you’re move by it and over years what happens is you either constrict it and lose touch with what is meaningful to you or you find it being like a receiver that grows over time, that becomes larger because you are, you can love more, you can feel more, you can, you can have a sense of connection with more that is. So those are the, those are, that’s an embodied part of us. But when you go out into the world as a little girl or little boy and you’re, especially if your family expects you to be an of themselves and not who you are, that’s where things really get into difficulties. Because if you are supposed to be living out the unlived part of a parent or to be socially acceptable because it’s a tight issue for them, then as you go out into the world you need to conform to be that person. And if you’re a little girl or little boy, it’s like there are certain qualities that that if you’re an extension of some hope for… if you’re a cute little girl, then that may be really emphasized. Or if you’re a bright little boy, that might be really emphasized. Um, and then you enter a culture of school and school is interesting because when you go into kindergarten or first grade and there is a difference between the school yard and inside the school room. And especially for the little boys, the bigger boys that are a year or two years ahead of you are bigger and stronger and they have… especially if they’ve come from homes in which they have been bullied, what kids do, boy, kids especially is they turn around and they identify with the aggressor at home by beating up on little boys who they can beat up on. And so a little boy with some sense of what you need to do to manage on the school yard learns about you go along to get along.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

And so that’s why you have like boys watching the bully picking on a kid and nobody speaks up because you don’t want to be identified with the kid is being made fun of. And you just might, you know, and this, this pattern is actually is sort of, it was difficult to sort of call that patriarchy, but it is, it’s exactly the same as a later on. I mean, I saw the movie Vice recently, about Dick Cheney and the kinds of things that went along in Washington DC and it was like bullies beating up on weaker people. And the culture of the school yard begins that story where the boy learns to go along to get along to not challenge authority. And what happens is if they didn’t have, if a little boy kept saying things that were not welcomed. He often feels a lack of worth as he grows up too. And one of the things that little boys seem to have, um, difficulty with is saying the truth about how they really feel about something. Fortunately, often they can do that at home. Uh, with some families, uh, they also, if they can have a good friend, I think it’s very hard to be kind of just one of the kids without a really good friend going through elementary school for girls as well. And yet, you know, it is through… The question is, if you have suffered as a child and nobody gets through life without suffering, you’ll get your, your share of suffering all along the way. But what, what you do, will it grow you? Will it grow you to have more compassion for other people and for yourself or do you deny it and want to disidentify with anybody who is suffering something that you suffered from in the past?

Thal:

Yeah. All that you’re saying is so deep. It’s resonating deeply within us really. Um, and you talk about the young boy and the young girl, um, I realized that part of my healing is to heal the feminine within me, but it’s also to heal the masculine. Um, I know that it’s very, it’s using dualistic language when I say feminine and Masculine, but the truth is, um, they’re inseparable to heal the feminine is to heal the masculine and to heal the masculine is to heal the feminine. I mean,f I would love to hear what you think about that.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

There’s an interesting concept in near here in psychology about the tension of opposites. That the reason for often describing masculine and feminine as being separate and different is to be able to kind of label qualities. People, human beings seem to like to label things, but they’re all part of the continuum of being a human person essentially. So what is allowed on that big continuum? And uh, what Jung described as masculine and feminine in the unconscious, he called Anima and Animus. Uh when like when you’re a girl who, uh, girls these days are able to become whole people much easier than boys, at least in the United States for North America where education is so important and competition. I remember when my daughter went out for soccer at eight years old, you know, that’s a different … Teaching a little girl how to play soccer, play as a team member like competitively she is learning something, about physicality about teamwork and about the will to win, which is usually considered animus or male side. And, and um, education itself develops the whole right brain, left brain. And the more she goes up the the education ladder and in develops that side of herself and get some authority through that, the more she is, it isn’t her like, like there’s a place where you think “hey listen it isn’t my animus that’s doing the thinking. I am thinking clearly myself!” because you, you understand what the animus is when it takes you over, when is not who you are, when you are being defensive or something and, and you get out of relationship with the person you’re talking to because you really had been, there’s been stimulated. So then you are in your animus. I could recognize… I used to recognize and recognizing don’t do it as much when I’m in my animus versus when I’m just being me thinking clearly even though that is not probably my primary, uh, uh, I think I’m more feeling type than a thinking type, but the thinking type really get’s educated along the way. You cannot go through all the education I’ve had without really doing justice with the thinking type. And then that had happened then it happens to be who you become rather than some autonomous part of you taking over. That’s one of the things that are of value, to have an understanding of a concept that you could actually watch happen in yourself rather than watch happening in somebody else. But you can see it happening in someone else when they’re centered, when you’re centered and when something prods another part of you to come out and you behave in such a way that if you, fortunately have enough observing ego that you realize it’s happened at least afterwards, you can learn to change how you are behaving because you don’t happen to like that way of behaving.

Thal:

Thank you. That’s amazing. Um, I, I’m starting to slowly recognize when my animus is triggered. It’s pretty ugly. [laugh]

Adrian:

You mentioned, um, for females it might actually be easier in today’s society to be more whole. Um, can you expand on that a little bit? I’m actually curious, so, um, how, how is it possibly more challenging for males growing up in patriarchy type of a culture?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It’s because of the issues of power. And it being part of a culture. Um, I mean basically though the women’s movement and the education of women have made many parts of the world much more egalitarian in what a woman can aspire to and accomplish. This is fairly new and new on the other side that the gender with power, it has been men and so that’s been patriarchal. Well patriarchy is hierarchical and it’s a a sense of dominance. Who you have power over. It means that if you’re young and new at any of this and a guy, if there’s any part of you that is what has been suppressed in somebody higher up and you are showing what he sacrificed or judged badly and squashed in himself, he’s going to squash it in you too. And so the diversity within a person gets acted on by the family who can’t look at it and only likes certain qualities and culture says, you know if you, if you meet the stereotype, if you’re a boy who is naturally aggressive, who is extroverted, like this is an extrovert culture. So if you introduce a new ball or a game to five year old, six year old, eight year old little boys, it’s the extroverted kid who goes right in, wants to learn about it and the introverted boy. So he’s on the sidelines and watches and, and he’s nudged, he said, oh, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go in and play? His natural tendency and for the girl too is “I want to see what the rules are. I want to understand the game and I also want to figure it out by watching whether I want to even play the game.” But that is not acceptable in an extroverted culture when if you are there, if you wave your hand, “I’ll play, I’ll play, I’ll play!” and you go in and you play well and most of the games are pretty competitive and you do well then you really are a solid guy who’s gotten a lot of accolades for being an aggressive little guy and then the quiet guy who was taking it in and all doesn’t really see it. It’s like “what’s the matter? Are you shy?” Being shy is not a very positive word and yet the introvert has to be able to have some time out and time in in order to develop that side. So that’s some of the ideas of…

Thal:

it’s interesting when you, when you talk about the, you know, extroverted, introverted, and again, going back to the young boy and the young girl, I know I was brought up in a very patriarchal culture in the Middle East in the 80s. And I used to love to play soccer and I got into so much trouble because of that. And now that I’m a mom and my son is, I have a son, I tried to get him into soccer, but he just didn’t like it. He really refused and I kept trying for a good three years and he just does not like it. So..

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well you’re starting early to, to realize that, that what, what parents seem to want to do is to have their child be able to do those things.

Thal: Yes, absolutely.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

It was a child and you’ve got a who has a sense of himself.

Thal:

Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. What you had mentioned earlier too, the whole unlived life is really what started my inner journey and reading… Um, uh, I think it’s, I can’t remember his name, but reading a book on, on the shadow and parents carrying the unlived life and the children carrying that weight, um, really woke me up. Um, so… I don’t even know if I have a question around that, but you know, just hearing your thoughts is amazing. Really.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Yeah. The writing side of my life. Uh, yeah. Well they actually began with the Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self, but the book after that called Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman that followed were the ones that made it possible for somebody to read about and relate to a particular pattern which had happens to have a Greek God or Goddess name. And then there is an insight like “oh, this is why I’ve had so much trouble with my father or my mother or why I am who I am” and, and the idea of valuing who you are and not accepting the other choice, which is to conform to what it is your parents wanted you to do. Up to a point. It actually is adaptable to conform up to a point. But then it’s like you get to Midlife, you’ve lived out the life you’re suppose to.. you see, you individuate earlier if you don’t manage to do it just right the way your family wanted you to do. If you happen to be the archetype or the psychological type that fits the pattern in your first half of life, everybody says good for you, good for you. You know, and, and it’s easy. Except that you get to midlife and the sense is “is this all there is? Okay, you know, I got my education, I’ve got a good job, I got married and got kids. Is this all there is because I feel empty inside and this is why Jungian work is often second half of life work. It’s because there is a whole unlived out part. But then if you are nonconforming, you couldn’t be the boy your father wanted you to be or the girl your mother or father wanted you to be like you were introverted in an extroverted family. I remember working with a, uh, a young woman who was quite herself introverted and she was in this large extroverted Italian family and it was pretty difficult to be her.

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Or if you, if you, uh, are interested in things, your, your, your family is all into sports and corporate advancement and you are into the arts, uh, well in certain families that’s okay. But in other families you drop it, you don’t follow and you don’t do that which you would naturally gravitate to and.. Or you fight to do it. And when you fly to do what you start to individuate early. If you cannot conform which many gay boys have found true, they could not confirm. They would have liked to have conformed. Some of them managed fairly well to conform, but if they didn’t conform just to be who they were and have other people pick up on it meant that they were bullied, meant that they felt terrible about themselves. Except that now the environment is changing. It’s like for women in the 70s, for the first time there was uh, uh, the, the first woman’s was second women’s movement really first women’s movement was 1848 with the, when there was a whole issue about voting, but it was, it really in the late sixties and seventies, when the women’s movement that we know of people like Gloria Steinem coming in and seeing and expressing and then opening the doors for women to do, uh, what has been unacceptable before you could do now?

Thal:

Hmm.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

So the, the world has in, in in many places is a bigger world where we can grow into more of who we are and we can make more mistakes too. This is what happens to people also, when you have choice, you want, you can make mistakes or not. Maybe they were just, I like to use the labyrinth as a model for the path, not, not a straight line. And in the labyrinth you think you’re moving towards your goal and then, oops, there’s a u-turn. There was a block, there was a pain, there was a loss. Well, you’re still on the path and what will come next keep shaping you.

Thal:

These are very important things to, to um, listen to, especially for our generation because we’ve been brought up to just, you know, everything is so goal oriented. Um, once we are on the path, well, when am I going to become enlightened or when am I going to know myself better? Um, so keeping that in mind is, is very important.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, it’s important to remember, uh, when you’ve had it… it’s like if you can, if you can hold on to the best of each of the stages you’ve gone through, you know, you, you’d start out holding onto the kid self that had a sense of wonder, you’re going to hold onto wonder and take in a new experience or a person or something with a sense of wonder. And then you go into adolescence where were there really did a lot of idealism in adolescence. Can you hold on to that? Can, the maturity that comes later and the wisdom that comes along the way. The whole integrated person has an inner child, an inner adolescent, an inner masculine, an inner feminine, an inner wise person, a connection with divinity, however you define it. And with it, with that part of divinity, you have a sense… You have a sense of soulfulness in yourself. You have a deep sense that you matter of some level, there is something called grace. There’s something called the divinity. There’s something called mysticism that you have experienced and you have been blessed and all you can do is say thank you. And as soon as you have a sense of gratitude, of privilege that I, I now see that, you know, relative to say that the other kids in my family, or when you meet people who are disadvantaged and you start to realize that you’ve been privileged, you had no reason to feel superior, you have more reason to have gratitude. This starts to be soul shaping as well. And it could be that the whole work we have if we come into this world as a soul, and I think we do, I think we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not go on a spiritual path. So we come into the world as a spiritual being in a helpless little baby body into our version of dysfunctional family, in our version of dysfunctional society. And somehow this life that goes by so fast must be a major, major opportunity to grow soulfully to make a difference to others, to do something that makes you feel that you are doing what you came for and that sense of right rightness when you are doing something that you know is being true to who you are inside that is that you can’t, it isn’t a sustained thing, but you dip into it and you feel, oh this is who I am. This is what I came for. I am living my own soul journey. Which if you talked to Joseph Campbell in a way you’re living at personal myth and you are being true to it. And that’s a shorthand way of saying what individuation is about. Jung uses so many technically sounding words like individuation, anima and animus but underneath it all is such a deep evaluation of what it’s like to be human. And the opportunity for you have to be human, maybe, especially now, it’s the responsibilities of being human. I think about how I went through the nuclear stuff, uh, earlier when, when, when it seemed like people were right on the verge of pushing the button. Well, there are a lot more nuclear weapons in the world now than then, but now we’re looking at the environmental crisis, which could it end it for us as well. And so if you come into the world as a human being during a time of crisis, the responsibilities or the opportunities to make a difference are much greater. And for now, to be a woman at this time in history is both an opportunity and a responsibility. Like my major activism is to support feminism within the United Nations to have a fifth women’s world conference, and I now have a sense that it, that it will not, not be sponsored necessarily at all by the UN, but they will come into it, but it will be created in India in 2022. So I’ve had these buttons saying five WCW India 2022, because when you bring women together who have Artemis, the sisterhood architect as part of who they are, and we have the technical ability to communicate by all kinds of devices, we could have a, the rising up of a quality of feminism that feels like siblings with men, because this is Artemis also not patriarchal, but brothers and sister. Cause Artemis was the firstborn of twins. Apollo was her twin brother. And what she went in, her mythology she was concerned about she came to the aid of her mother. She came to the aid of children, um, and she did develop your own skills with a bow and arrow plus a sense of, Goddess of the moon means that there’s an element of mysticism. There is an enormous mystical element in nature if you tune into it. So I think that this, I would love it to see that, see more and more Artemis rising and so I’m doing that at the moment too.

Thal:

Amazing.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Activism is soul work when you’re doing it from a space in which it’s your journey and you’re doing, helping others.

Adrian:

That’s so beautiful. We just had the honour of chatting with Andrew Harvey last week and you know, he talks about sacred activism. So as you’re saying this, you know, it feels like there’s such a hunger right now. Um, I think for this type of energy to emerge in larger numbers and also for, for, for the elders, right? For, for the young seekers to connect with elders such as yourself and to make sure that there’s wisdom isn’t lost, you know, that we don’t have a disconnect with, you know, just this lineage of, um, of experience and wisdom that’s been passed down, uh, just to, to bring things to an end. Is there, is there anything you’d like to share as sort of last words, um, for, for the next generation, you know, of, of activists and seekers and, um, and, and, and curious souls?

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Well, yes. In the last year I started signing off on my emails with “love, hope, perseverance, trust and gratitude”. And I think as it is, we kind of a mantra. Love then hope are certainly obvious energies. Perseverance seems to be required to do anything that really matters to you. To become a doctor and a Jungian Analyst or psychiatrist. I mean it took a lot of persevering through subjects that were hard or not interesting. Again, the Artemis idea that you have, if you could aim at a target that is far off, but if it’s your target and you aim for it, can you tolerate what it takes to have setbacks, to have to do hard work. So perseverance and then trust is much more in the spiritual world. It’s the word that means that you trust that it matters what you do with your one wild and precious life. You trust that there is a world of invisible spirits that you can call upon that support you, through some difficulties you can count on prayer, you can count on a sense that there is a divinity that has…that you have access to. Even if you don’t know very much about what it is that it doesn’t mean, it doesn’t exist. Oh, are there people that have died? Then the whole tradition of the other side, if there are there, what are they? Angels? Maybe they’re angels, but then there’s this whole world is cares about what we do here too. That is trust. And the last thing is the motivation that can make us appreciate what we have, and that’s gratitude.

Thal:

Thank you so much. That’s so beautiful to hear. Thank you.

Adrian:

Yeah. With gratitude. Thank you.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:

Thank you. Namaste.