“Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
-Carl Jung
My aunt texted me this quote about loneliness on Sunday, and it struck me in a very particular way at that moment. Several people had just expressed this same sentiment at our subscriber gathering: the absolute necessity of having people around who share in your reality, when the news is overwhelming, seemingly every moment of the day.
We need people around us who share in our reality—in this reality—and are not turning away or letting it drive us into fear or hopelessness.
The theme of this monthly gathering was expanding the container, a psychological approach to exploring how we respond to the onslaught of news, suffering, empathy, and information. We grow along with it. We mature alongside the grief. We find a way to stand in love instead of fear or hate.
I read a short quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 piece, “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” I felt drawn back to this essay last week and could have read it all on Sunday. In ways I don’t think I was able to articulate clearly, this essay is speaking into this moment of racial backlash, in which the KKK is incarnate yet again in ICE and countless racist policies seek to re-establish a fantasy of white supremacy instead of a reality of human equality. It’s such a fucking humiliating, unnecessary, nightmare from which we have to wake up, and wake each other up.
A few lines I did not read, but that really move me now are these:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
(The quote I did read aloud is below.)
Here’s what unfolded on Sunday:
I spoke about the relationship between the ego and the soul, or Self, and what it means for the ego to be strong enough and sturdy enough to handle everything being pulled up from the unconscious and piled on from cruelty these days.
I offered various metaphors for understanding this idea of the container and encouraged everyone present to explore which one struck them personally.
I read this James Baldwin quote, which I also quoted very briefly from in my book. It’s a sentiment I think of often, as I try to make sense of what matures us and what, inadvertently, can keep a people immature.
I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.
We then took some time to journal or just sit in quiet meditation to observe what arose for each of us individually from the reading and the various metaphors. The loose prompts were:
How are you growing psychologically, within yourself, to meet this
moment?
What container do you need to hold all that is
arising?
How do you expand the container?
We then had the bounty of sharing from everyone else. I was, as always, deeply moved by what was expressed. In addition to the truly generative experience of community, the result was an actual list of ideas about how to expand the container to hold what is arising. And it was a remarkable list of wisdom. I’m still sitting with all of it.
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