Spiral
Life
“You
never, never come back to the the same place. Avoid compulsive
repetition. Life is not a circle but a spiral around a central place,
and we are working our way up and working our way down. Bad times
give us strength to move into good times with a whole new vision of
what life is about.”
Marion
Woodman
Sometimes
it seems we keep circling the same pond for ages, decades. We come
back to the same issue, the same tripping-up place, and sure enough,
we trip again. For many of us that stumbling block occurs in
relationships with other people. We try to figure out how to live
life cooperatively without being either too aloof or too enmeshed.
How can we keep our individuality and yet move easily and comfortably
into “we.” Some of us swing between the poles of that divide for
our whole lives, especially if we're unconscious of our own
participation in them. That is a circular path where no matter how
many different relationships we have, they all seem to end up at the
same place.
A
spiral path is a nice image for a conscious life. With each new
level, you bring the lessons learned in lower levels and use them to
inform your forward and upward progress. When you see a pattern of
behavior in yourself—a compulsive repetitive pattern—rather than
projecting that outward, you take the time to assess what gets you
there. Sometimes we can recognize repetitive patterns by the
questions we ask ourselves: “Why does this always happen to me?”
“Why does everybody treat me this way?” The answer: “Who's the
common denominator?”
Edith,
the middle Crawley sister on Downton Abby, is a case in point, and a
good example of the spiral pattern. In the first few seasons, Edith
was jilted at the altar by a man she desperately perused until he
relented, and then couldn't go through with the wedding. Then, she
fell in love with a married man, abandoned her own sense of decorum
and spent the night with him, but she lost that lover, too.
Throughout these episodes she was whiny and sorry for herself and
went on about feeling helpless, “Whoa is me!” Then she discovered
she was pregnant from her one-night-stand and went through all sorts
of machinations to hide the pregnancy and then to hide the child, and
predictably, all of them blew up in her face. Finally, she decided to
take hold of her life and guide it herself. She had no choice but
move forward, so she did. In doing so, she gained a real life,
discovered her own capabilities and her own mind. And now, desperate
no more, she may actually make a survivable union.
Each
level of the spiral is designed to teach us skills needed for the
next one, but we only learn the lessons if we're aware of our own
participation in the stumbling blocks. Life is not something that
happens to us, we are actively engaged in its unfolding. We can go
round and round in a circle, repeating the same old patterns, or we
can wake up and become conscious learners. We'll make it to the top
if we do. Lord knows, if Edith can do it, anyone can.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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