Coming Alive by Barry Michels

Author:Barry Michels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

THE MOTHER INSIDE

But what does it mean to “look within”? One of the very first guides to the inner world was Carl Jung. Roughly one hundred years ago, he studied the language of the unconscious as it emerged in dreams, art, and mythology. Jung felt that the images and stories that emerged were the product of invisible forces he called archetypes. Many of the archetypes represent inner resources you never knew you had. One of the most universal—and easiest to relate to—is the archetype of the Mother.

The archetypal Mother is the source of absolute love and support in the cosmos. She loves each of us individually and wants us to grow into our highest potential. This is easiest to understand if you look at what a human mother does for her infant. When an infant is hungry, she feeds them; when they’re tired, she rocks them to sleep; when they’re cold, she warms them. In essence, a human mother removes physical threats to her child’s continued growth.

The archetypal Mother plays the same role in an adult’s life, but the threats she removes aren’t physical, they’re emotional. What keeps most adults from growing emotionally is demoralization—we give up on ourselves and lose faith in our own future.

What makes the Mother such an invaluable resource is that she never loses faith in us; she sees the best even when we’re blind to it. With her infallible optimism, she has the power to lift us back up when we get knocked down. In the previous chapter, you learned that your body is limited—it needs an infusion of energy from something beyond. In this chapter, it’s your mind that needs help. When your hopes are crushed, you need an infusion of optimism from something beyond—that something is the Mother. When the writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Night presses round me deep and deeper still, / And yet within me beams a radiant light,” he was evoking the Mother. She restores your faith in your future, not by making promises about it, but by lifting your mood in the present.

It would be nice if this happened automatically, but it doesn’t. In fact, it requires a lot of effort. That’s because without your realizing it, Part X has trained you to reject the Mother’s help. Behind every false hope—a relationship, a pile of money, or a child who gets into an Ivy League school—is the belief that once it’s attained, you’ll never have to regulate your mood; you’ll never need the Mother. Unwittingly, for most of your life, you’ve placed your bets on attaining your false hopes instead of creating a relationship with her. That’s why people feel so bereft of inner resources when their false hopes are crushed. It never occurred to them that they would need the Mother.

To accept her love, you must admit you need her, now and for the rest of your life, no matter how well or poorly things go for you. She will never turn you down, but you must approach her as a responsible adult.

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