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Home > Blog > Heal the Individual, Heal the Collective
Heal the Individual, Heal the Collective
Posted: August 17th, 2010 @ 10:17pm
Here we are, well into the "Dog Days" of summer, where temperatures...and tempers...are at their height. I don't know if you've considered it, but, lately, there seems to be almost an epidemic of people "losing it" in some manner -- from the woman in Ohio who punched out a McDonald's window because they weren't serving McNuggets, to the passenger who set off the flight attendant on JetBlue. And then, while perhaps it didn't make national news, I just got word that a former colleague, the Assistant Vice Principal of the school where I used to teach, was arrested for shooting up her husband's truck after learning of some upsetting news. Fevers have reached a pitch, as it were.
It goes without saying that we are living in increasingly turbulent and uncertain times. The confluence of global crisis (be it economic, environmental etc.) often has a "trickle down" effect energetically, wreaking havoc on the personal level in myriad ways. As far as I'm concerned, the recent news stories provide a frightening testament to what is happening on the level of the collective unconscious.
Rather than focus on the fear of a Doomsday scenario, however, we can use these disturbing windows into the universal psyche to redirect. Jung certainly believed that a larger shift on the collective level was the result of smaller shifts on the personal level. Granted, there is always some interplay between the two, but our only real and viable option is to begin at home.
The practice of Ho’oponopono and the work of psychologist Hew Len have wonderfully significant implications for the crisis we now face. Dr. Len worked in a Hawaii State hospital for the criminally insane more than thirty years ago. He assumed that whatever disharmony he saw in his patients was also alive in himself. His method, then, was to simply heal that wounded place inside his own psyche. And guess what? His patients got better.
We, of course, often do just the opposite. We hear a story about someone "losing it" and we say, "Wow, I would never do that." Maybe we joke about it. Or perhaps we point the finger more overtly. In essence, we distance from it; we relegate our own potential for darkness to the bowels of the psyche where it is left to fester.
The current climate is certainly ripe for doing shadow work -- for learning to look at and transform those less-than-flattering "inner demons" in the name of creating a more loving world. But it's still summer, and a lot of us like to "go on vacation" during these sultry months -- if not literally, then figuratively. If you've been living off of your psycho/spiritual "reserves" recently, then perhaps it is time to start replenishing the proverbial account.
As we gear up for the Autumn Equinox next month (which, in Greek mythology was marked by Persephone returning to the Underworld to live with her husband Hades), I invite you to begin your descent into shadowland terrain. Think about it as an "inner service project," if you will, where you'll be working to heal the parts of yourself that create discord in the outer world. What a magnanimous endeavor!
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