Imagination in Career Counseling

The Number One Factor in Successful Career Counseling Outcomes

 “The way we imagine our lives is the way we will go on living our lives.” ~ James Hillman With imagination, the sky’s the limit In my experience as a Jungian career counselor, the clients who engage their creative imaginations more effectively during the time I work with them are more successful in the career counseling […]

Too much career advice

Why Good Career Advice Isn’t Always Good

  I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” ~ Oscar Wilde If you are in the midst of a career transition, one thing that can really interfere with it is an abundance of good advice. And there is no shortage […]

Meaningful Work

Why Having Meaningful Work is Essential: Insights from Depth Psychology

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky According to Carl Jung, when we lose what he called the ‘symbolic’ dimension of our work and understand it only in economic terms, we experience suffering. What Jung calls symbolic, Dostoevsky, in the quote above, calls ‘meaningful work’.  […]

Evolution and Introversion

The Evolutionary Value of Introversion

One of the questions that I received during my webinar, Networking For Introverts, last Wednesday was: “What is the evolutionary value of introversion?”It’s a great question and I wasn’t very satisfied with the answer I gave at the time. So here are some of my further thoughts regarding this: Two of the characteristics associated with […]

Don't Skimp on your inner work

The Importance of Inner Work

Outer Work Most of the attention that we give to our work goes to things that are external to who we are as individuals. Our working imaginations are primarily concerned with such things as wages and benefits, the daily commute, our interactions with co-workers, and the tasks with which we are charged. When we think […]

Why You Won’t Find Your Passion

Larry Smith: “No matter how many times people tell you, “If you want a great career you have to pursue your passion, you have to pursue your dreams, you have to pursue the greatest fascination in your life…you decide not to do it.”

Work is a call to adventure

Quotes About Vocation

Image courtesy of khunaspix / FreeDigitalPhotos.net “Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do. With such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.” ~  Vincent Van Gogh  “Work is love made visible.” ~ Kahlil Gibran  “We work to become, not to […]

The Dream of One’s Life

Here is a nice little promotional video by mythologist Michael Meade for his book, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul. I am not yet familiar with that book, but I have read his book The Water of Life and the anthology of poetry that he edited with Robert Bly and James Hillman.  I have also heard Meade speak. He is an engaging storyteller and his work is well worth knowing.

Some take away quotes from the video:

"The question isn't, 'Do I have a calling?'  The question is,  'Have I heard it?'"

"One of our key responsibilities in life -- separate from career, separate from family, separate from anything else -- is to live out [our] dream, to respond to [our] calling, and to unfold our life from within."

Here is the video:

Follow Your Bliss

Here is a video of David Kudler, publishing director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, remembering the impact of the Power of Myth series with Campbell and Bill Moyers. Kudler reminds us that there was a time when the phrase "Follow Your Bliss" was not found on anyone's refrigerator. It is a reminder of the deep value of the idea of following your bliss, which is not an easy path but rather a challenging and rewarding journey.

As I often point out in my talks on How To Hear Your Calling, Campbell is not talking about basking in the glow of pain-free, trouble-free happiness and light.  His formula was not “dwell in your bliss”, but “follow your bliss,” that is, risk the adventure of following the call of your deepest self.

An Empty Stillness: The Challenge of Creative Work

A friend posted a very nice video on Facebook recently of Ira Glass discussing the challenges of the creative process. The point Glass makes is that when someone is developing their creative gift, the work that is first produced is generally not very good. That is, it doesn't live up to the vision the creator sees in his or her mind. According to Glass, this is a normal stage of creative development that is overcome by doing as much work as possible. As Rodin once said, "Travailler, travailler, travailler." Work, work, work.

Here is the video:

On the surface, this looks like very simple advice about the value of practice. A more encouraging and supportive version of "practice makes perfect." However, I think there is more going on here.

Marie-Louise von Franz in her book, Creation Myths, discusses the creative process in language very similar to Glass, albeit in a much less supportive and more sarcastic tone. 

"People in a pre-creative stage are inflated; they are identical with their inner conception and filled with its glory and beauty and its load of energy. But generally when the work is finished, instead of being happy they feel a bit deflated and sad...It is one reason why some people never get down to do something creative, especially men of the puer eternus type, also women of the puella eterna type. They never step down to do something creative because they feel vaguely, or foresee intuitively, that if they produce the thing they have in mind it will be much less good than what they conceive inwardly. They do not want to go through this process of creative deflation but prefer to remain all their lifetime would-be artists, or would-be geniuses, on a very great scale rather than the producer of a humble product on a very much lower scale."

The valuable point here, I believe, is the equation of  the "pre-creative stage" -- Glass' beginners -- with inflation, and that of humility and deflation with true creation.  This makes sense from the standpoint of Jungian psychology, as the true source of creativity is understood to be the unconscious, just that part of the psyche least accessible to ego.

The ego's need to be the "would-be artist" must be relinquished so that the creative unconscious can bring forth it's gifts. For Jung, creativity involves a lowering of consciousness, which he describes as "an empty stillness which produces creative work."

My own experience is that sitting down to write or engage in some other kind of creative work always starts with a struggle to get my thoughts and desires--that is, myself--out of the way. Sometimes this can be a real battle as I keep trying to force the issue, trying to come up with some clever line to begin with, each one more embarrassing than the last.

Almost inevitably I feel like quitting. Sometimes I do. Sometimes, however, if I stick with it, I enter into what I can only describe as a state of alert listening. I am tempted to call it an almost Satori-like state, though perhaps that's a bit inflated. Out this listening a few words emerge on the periphery of my awareness and if I can follow this faint trace, something good appears. It is a challenging process, but it can be an exhilarating experience.

Allowing the deflation, allowing the lowering of consciousness--the empty stillness--is hard work. I am often surprised at what resistance I put up again and again to the creative process. The ego doesn't like to cede its place.

Ira Glass' advice to "do a huge volume of work" is as much about affecting a transformation in the individual as it is about improving one's work. This makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. It is an alchemical process: The transformation of the material being worked upon produces a transformation in the one performing the work. Perhaps in this way, we become what we do.  

"Throw yourself like seed," says the poet Miguel de Unamuno. This is his image for the creative deflation, which is really a deflation of the ego. It is both a call to throw one's self-centeredness away as well as to throw oneself into creative work. He reminds us, in words very similar at times to Glass, that:

to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts 
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Healing for de Unamuno is to move forward into creative work, to become your work. Healing does not come from looking back and you should  "not let the past weigh down your motion."

From this point of view, our life task is not to figure out who we were or who we are, but to actively participate in our own becoming. And the path to this becoming is work, for

from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.