Marion Woodman: The Kore of Matter: Psyche/Soma Awareness
According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity, we cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way around. —Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
Body awareness has become an important focus in my analytic practice because of my experience with both women and men who, despite earnest commitment to their dreams and to their own growth, are still unable to trust the process.
Their souls are dislocated in bodies so wounded that the ego’s willingness in itself is simply not enough.
Failure in travailing life’s junctures is not necessarily the failure of the ego to adopt a new attitude toward the Self by sacrificing the old.
Many of my analysands have what I believe to be appropriate ego attitudes; their bodies, however, have at some point been traumatized.
While their egos can be approached through confrontation, challenge or humor, their bodies cannot respond.
The more quickly the ego moves ahead, the more terrorized the body becomes.
The task then is to find some means of going back to the point of wounding to reconnect with the abandoned child. The body, like the child, tells the truth, and tells it through movement or lack of movement.
A trained observer can discern whether the soul has taken up residence in the body, or whether the body image is so intolerable that the flesh is barely inhabited.
The body can be so retarded that it cannot even imagine itself as an adult. If, as James Hillman says, “the image by which the flesh lives is the ultimate ruling necessity,”
then some means must be found to create an adequate image—physically as well as psychically.
Body awareness, as I understand it, has nothing to do with the technology of the body. It is not fitness or longevity that is at stake, although these may be byproducts.
What is at stake is the integration of body, soul and spirit.
So long as we are in this world, the psyche is enacted through the medium of the body.
William Blake described the body as “that portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses.”
The soul is, of course, much more than the bodily “portion” of itself.
It is not limited to manifesting in the physical body; it manifests also in that infinite body which constitutes the “body” of the imagination, a body that includes the entire visionary world of the arts—music, sculpture, painting, poetry, dance, architecture.
Each of these visionary or imaginary worlds may be thought of as larger human bodies, or a single giant human body.
That it may act in another world, of which the arts are an expression, is one of the oldest speculations about the immortality of the soul, and art as an expression of it.
The soul, then, manifests in a multiplicity of forms.
While it is on earth, it must have a body image as its home, as its primary medium of expression.
The soul will not naturally reject its body image any more than the mother’s breast will naturally reject her baby. The body mirrors the soul.
Where rejection occurs, something has gone seriously wrong.
But no matter what went wrong, the soul will do everything in its power to correct it.
How then do we explain the blockage of the body as the soul’s medium of expression?
Seen from this point of view, anorexia nervosa and bulemia, for example, are the result of an abnormal release of psychic energy in an effort to overcome body blockage.
Obesity is a manifestation of a soul that has more energy than the body can deal with.
Blocked bodies, metaphorically (sometimes literally), have hardened arteries, arteries blocked by too much cholesterol that makes it hard for the heart to pump blood through the system.
They place mounting obstacles in the way of psychic energy.
The result is that the energy has to find other modes of action, other modes of expression.
Some of these are very creative and make for brilliant careers in the professions and the arts.
But always, people whose psychic energy has had to carve out other channels of expression because their bodies were blocked, are haunted by their refusal, conscious or unconscious, to permit their souls to take up residence in their bodies.
The result is that, without quite understanding what they are feeling or why they are feeling it, they are possessed by homeless souls who wander like ghosts in a bleak twilight zone where they cannot find shelter or rest.
They are haunted by their own wandering souls that hover somewhere near the earth, crying in vain to be let in.
Refusing them entrance into their own bodies, such people become the enemies of their souls.
They unconsciously realize that they have sentenced their souls to perpetual exile.
For this reason, they find no real satisfaction in the other outlets, however creative, that the soul in exile from the body finds for itself.
Temporary release from despair through total immersion in work leaves them, when the work is done, in ever deeper states of despair. Indeed, in certain cases the creative work leads to suicide. ~Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 55-56
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