dancing in the flames ~ marion woodman

The fear is expressed by adding more and more stuff, stealing more and more from the earth.

The union that they don’t find in making love, they find in another kind of sexuality. But the union that they yearn for, that total coming together, they can’t find because they concretize the concept and it kills them.

Emily Dickinson saved my life, no question about that in my mind. She went through the same kind of trauma as I did… I had nobody to talk to, everyone thought I was overreacting to everything. But when I found Emily, she had the language I needed… Memorizing her poems was my therapy.

Then I realized that the emotional part of me, the feeling side, was not operating at all. I loved the work, but that was it.

I was too heavy, my weight was too heavy, and you know, I wanted to be the most beautiful on the stage. And so the year in teacher’s training was really the year the anorexia started.

I learned the kind of perfection that was essential, and I lost about 70 pounds that year. I was really sick. Only, I discerned infinite passion, and the pain of finite  hearts that yearn. It’s a lovely balancing of the yearning for the infinite, and having to be satisfied with the finite. That’s basically what being an analyst is. You sit in the chair and you listen to the depth of the passion that is driving someone.

In any addiction, I would say having worked at it for so long and looking at our world now, there’s a killer. Any addict knows that death is the end of the addiction.

“Who was your killer?”
Oh, I would say it was God.It was a desire for that kind of perfection, where the desire for perfection rejects life.

All my work is about trying to hold both of those, because I know if the gypsy dies, I die. So that energy has to be continually given a chance to speak, to dance, it has to be expressed or it is a killer. There’s a rage in it because I see what’s happening to the planet. I see what’s happening to religion, and people not paying any attention to ritual and all of the things I think are essential to a human life. And they’re just laughed at! What is there to worship? So we find ourselves on a planet where most people in power make the earth into an enemy.

Even our educational system would kill the body if it could. The way we treat the body in our culture, is just drug it, anything wrong just take the drugs and you’ll be silent. You won’t be better, but you’ll be silent and your body will be silent, and that’s what it should be. Shut it up.

Those archetypes that seem to be carrying death are often the ones that the birth is right there, ready to leap out.

So you grow up if you stay with it, and the archetypal journey takes you to another place in the marriage. Ross and I say we’ve had four marriages, and we have because we came to the end of accepting the projections we had on each other. And that kept changing.

There was an instant recognition of somebody that wasn’t putting on an act, wasn’t trying to be nice, wasn’t trying to show off. Just somebody who was really interested in what I had to say. Not any cover up on my part either. Who are we?

We didn’t make the vows, but there was something hovering in the air. There was destiny afoot. It was then, as it were, a fate. But it might in time become a destiny. (Marion and Ross talking)

I think people who reject getting married and say, “what’s the point?” …The soul doesn’t have a chance to make the passover, so it’s still stuck at a place where you cannot bring yourself to stand on the line and say “I accept this. This goes, whoever I was there is finished and a new person is being born through this ritual. I put myself on the line, and I stand to it.”

I’ve always believed that my mission in life was to find the feminine. And to help other people, and I say people, not women… What is that relatedness that is the feminine? What is that emotional vibrancy that comes from the body right through the whole being? Men have to find this too. I’m talking about an energy like a wind that blows through the whole body, all of the musculature and the nerves of the body, and that sensibility and sensitivity is the reality of the person.

I started out with the anorexic addiction, and in order to heal, I just went step by step myself, basically. I knew I was out of my body because every time I became sick it had to do with spirit going so high, it couldn’t be held in the body. It couldn’t deal with the grief.

My motivation there was that I felt proud of myself when I was creating from myself. I felt there was somebody inside that was doing those pictures or writing. My way of working with addictions is to try to find where they are creative? Where can the real light come in?

Then I began to have dreams of this black goddess, and she was very noble, and I could never see her face but I would make my face into her, and she would say “lower.” I had to bow lower. I was already on my knees, I thought “how does one get lower?”

I really felt the blackness and the moss, and it was good… You have not yet learned humility, girl. You must lie flat on the ground and feel the living pulse of the earth and know that you are part of that pulse and not experience it as demeaning, but as a lesson that had to be learned on the way to knowing that feminine presence.

The dark feminine to me is the earth. We live on our mother. And this globe going around in space is our mother who feeds us physically… The perfume, the color, the shapes, and the soul rises to the spiritual dimension. All our senses come alive in her presence.

I was very aware of God the spirit, but I had no sense of God in the earth. I believe that we are going to be forced into a recognition of the feminine as divine. And again, love the earth, recognize the creation that is the earth. This! Earth! And the child that can be born from that Earth. That is Black Madonna for me, but it’s not only Earth, it is the spirit that’s in the earth, and the glory and the beauty of all those living things. This experience of moving lower, smelling the earth and feeling its energy and opening my own body as part of that earth, that was a new experience but very exciting. I felt a new energy coming in.

There is a destiny that shapes our ends, refute them how we will. I knew that there was something in me that was wild and determined to live or die. I didn’t care which. And so as I grew older, and coming up to 40, this other side said “I am going to live, Marion, whether you like it or not.” And so.I went to India. And that’s where I certainly met the Black Madonna. It was that earth, the glory of the earth, the creation of the earth, everywhere you looked you couldn’t miss it. I found it extremely terrifying and equally exciting.

At the bottom of the dysentery I decided that I had to start relating or I wasn’t going to make it. So I got dressed and went down to the foyer of the hotel, and I was feeling very shy and very frightened so I sat down in a couch right in the corner, and this woman came along. She was a very large, very dark woman, and squeezed between me and the couch. There was a whole couch she could have sat on, but no, she squeezed. And I of course had to move over to make room for her. I wasn’t sure how I felt, and she pushed with her arms against me… This warm arm came down my whole arm, she didn’t say hello or anything. I thought, “It’s so lovely to feel her warm arm on mine.” So I just pushed back and really took in the feel of relaxing into a beautiful black mother. And she was lovely, but she never spoke to me and I didn’t speak to her. Gradually, she touched my whole body and every place she touched me, I was alive again. Then I realized we were at the other end of the couch… And I thought I should go up to my room because the container was starting to break, I couldn’t hold it.

This happened maybe 5, 6 times, day after day. Then a man came to me, an Indian man, and he said “My wife won’t have to come and see you anymore.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “because you’re not going to die. I saw that you were dying in the foyer the other day so I sent my wife to sit with you. But you’re going to be living.” That was my first experience of the Black Madonna. That woman, unquestionably at the calling of her husband. I think it was extremely important that he saw the situation and set up the opportunity for healing.

It was paradox all the way. Something had to be destroyed in order for me to give up my ego demands. I had to give up the perfection and give up what I would call now that golden spirit world that wanted whatever I thought perfection was. I had to completely let it go.

She had to break me in order to make room for the genuine feminine and the genuine masculine to come through.

It sits over there in silence, but it’s a living entity, I can tell you. And that’s the thing that changed my life, that journey. I was one person before I went, and a very different one when I came back.

I couldn’t relate when I came back. And fortunately, again, destiny: My husband had a fellowship in England, and we went to England and.I was able to find Dr. Bennett, a Jungian Analyst. It was through the work that I did with him that I was able to find some kind of meaning that would connect me to life here again.

I can’t tell you what it meant that somebody could recognize this huge part of me and say “it does make sense, and you are not crazy by paying attention to this.” We worked very hard on the dreams, and I realized that this was my gold. The pattern of the dream showed me where the energy was trying to go… The last little part of the dream is where the energy is trying to go.

If we think of the dream as taking energy in the metaphor, in the picture that is the dream, what is the energy that that picture is releasing if it has a chance? If you don’t work on it, it will never be released. If you don’t use the material that your body and brain creates, if you don’t work with that, you’re throwing the gold out. The healing power is in the metaphor.

All these senses are brought into play, and that’s true with trauma. You can cover it up but sooner or later you have to be strong enough to endure the impact of imagination, intelligence, and feeling for the totality.

Every time I came home I was stranger and stranger.

He got thinking, and wanted to have the marriage in a new way. He was lying on one couch and I was lying on the other, and our beautiful dog, Samantha, was lying in between. And he said, “Marion, would you repeat our wedding vows?” And knowing that something must be up, I said “what is it that you want me to say?” And he said, “I promise to love, honor, and obey.”

Ross: “That quiet ‘no’ did not settle easily. It was like a bullet to the brain. That moment, I felt I had lost you, which is to say I had lost a certain image of myself in relation to marriage and in relation to you. Which was really behind a certain power over your decisions and movements, that I somehow expected that you would sacrifice or at least surrender to my will. It felt like I had been seeing through a glass darkly, but now I was seeing face to face, and I didn’t know if I liked what I saw.”
Such an electric charge went off in our living room that I could hardly believe what happened. There was no sound, it was just this terrific change of energy.

We both said, you know a huge animal sacrifice has been made here. We have got to really take it in and comprehend it, and change it.

I had to have my freedom to make my feminine choice.
R: “And when I realized that what I was in love with was your free soul that could stand to its own truth, I began to see what you meant by the masculine as not power, not patriarchy, but the new masculine. I would say that was his birth.”

Masculinity and patriarchy are not synonymous. The true masculine is not the enemy of the feminine. It is not into power.

Reconciling those opposites is the key to a new birth… Father and mother I would see as soul and spirit. Mother as body, black madonna, earth, embodied soul. And spirit is that swan, that light energy that is so powerful you can’t take it for very long. It comes in, drops its sperm, and new life is possible. So we’re dealing with what Jung says is the inner marriage.

We went through a huge crisis when I got back from Zurich because I was doing my best to fit into an old situation, and it was not working. I like to get up in the morning early so I was by myself in the living room. He got up, came up to the kitchen, had on his old black watch and I was sitting in the chair in the living room, he was trying to put one egg in the egg poacher. So he looked at it and the whole thing fell apart. And I just thought, “I could have done better than this. I could really have done a lot better than this.” And then I was watching him just sort of in reverie, and he went over to the other side of the cupboard and he was cutting bread, and that hand that I truly loved was holding it, and I could remember planting tulips together, seeing the hand planting tulip bulb, seeing the hand with our animals, seeing the hand making love. And there was the most incredible flood which came up in me. No questions asked, this is the man I love. And he felt it. And he turned around and looked at me, and he said “Marion, would you like some coffee?” And that was the end of, “will we or won’t we stay together?” From that point on, we were going to work it out.

We’re both working on the unconscious layer by layer. It’s bottomless, but that’s life. I mean ,that getting to know the soul, each on their own and with the other on the deepest level.

The big lesson [with cancer] was once again, surrender.

I knew that there was stuff in that dream that I had to pull out, and then when I got really sick the next year, I thought “I’m going to go back to that dream. That’s where I’ll get the energy to heal myself.”

She brought back that “I can do it,” and “let me come in and live that reality that is in my bones.”

I had been working for 6 months trying to pull that energy into my cells, and I couldn’t see any change for 6  months. But when the moment arrived, I was ready.

We got to the threshold, and behold, here’s a man in a tomato colored suit and big lapels playing a tuba in the door. It was wondrous to behold, and behind were 12 other instruments, all horns, all dutch, they came into the house and the house was just shaking. But they were playing the music that I danced to in Northern Ontario. .. I was so excited by this, that this energy came up with me that said… “I am going to dance”.

Something was just discharged into me, and somehow I was able to overcome the fear, and it’s never returned. The ego surrendered to the soul, and therefore this incredible love of life as it is.

It’s very humbling to go through that kind of anguish and pain and to come out.on the other side so glad to live, I am just, I mean, I have, I mean I died into life. Things have to die, if you’re going to have any progress in the world you’ve got to get rid of what is dead. What has died for me? What no longer has meaning has got to be let go to make room for the new life.

If you’re going to grow, you’re going to accept the death and accept the birth. And feed the birth.

That’s where I am, perched. And it’s terrific, I love it. It makes me experience every moemnt.

In my own life, as in everyone’s life, there have been many little deaths. When I look back on these experiences, each one of them made way for a new life.

If we can embrace the shift consciously, creatively rather than negatively, we will see new life stirring within us.