In my previous two posts I have written about the call to adventure and the journey to find one’s own voice that follows that call. In this post I want to talk about what it means to begin speaking out and the courage it takes to do so.
At the conclusion of my post Hearing The Call, Finding Your Voice, I wrote:
“The quality of your life, your engagement with the world, and finding your voice are all connected, all of a piece. It is essential for each of us to be able to speak our own truth, if we are to find our place in the world.”
Once we have opened our mouths and spoken in this new voice, we have come full circle and must now face the necessity of hearing the words we have just spoken. Putting thoughts and feelings into words and speaking them aloud transforms them.
The words we speak are not the same as the words that we hear silently inside. Speaking is the necessary last step in truly hearing our authentic voice.
Speaking Out and Responsibility
Speaking out loud is an undeniably physical act. The poet David Whyte describes how we take the breath of the outside world into our bodies, and when that breath returns to the world carrying words, it is colored with our very being. The words we speak, then, are embodied words, solid and undeniable.
Words once spoken are no longer only inside us where they remain indistinct from the rest of our being. Spoken words are words with which we must come into relationship, because they now stand outside us and confront us with their reality. Our responsibility for the words we speak is more concrete and unavoidable than it is for the words that go unspoken.
Whyte connects this kind of speaking out with the art of poetry. He suggests that if it is authentic, our speech will introduce us to new or forgotten aspects of ourselves.
“Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.” ~ David Whyte
Betraying The Inner Voice
Another transformative characteristic of speaking out is that it connects us to other people and to the world. Because of the physical mechanics of speech mentioned above, our speaking is literally the place where self and world meet.
In the attempt to communicate something to another person, it is essential that we understand precisely what we are trying to say. As we speak, we hear as if through the ears of the other and think, “Does this make sense? Is this really what I mean?” The moment in which we speak to another person becomes the moment we either embody or betray the inner voice we have heard.
Photo courtesy of *~Dawn~*(CC Attribution)
According to Whyte, the betrayal of the inner voice is like turning our face away from our own reflection, a reflection beheld deep inside in the mirror of the soul.
It takes courage to stand by one’s self, and often it involves breaking a promise made early on to the others in our life: the promise to be only what they wanted us to be, to show of ourselves only what it was safe to show and what would ensure the continued love and security of those around us.
Courage is further required because the moment to speak authentically comes and goes quickly and the temptation to let it pass by is strong. Whyte describes this succinctly in this passage from his poem All The True Vows:
Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years
in my own voice,
before it was too late
to turn my face again.
Speaking Out and Jungian Therapy
In one sense it is simply this—the desire to speak in one’s own voice—that brings a person into therapy. People turn to therapy because there are things happening in their lives that are preventing them from living in the way they want to live, from being the people that they would prefer to be.
Often one’s own voice has been put away and denied in order to simply survive. Speaking with an authentic voice meant danger, the possibility of losing the love of one’s caretakers. But the denial of one’s voice does not eliminate it. Instead, it dramatically increases the need of the voice to be expressed, the need for speaking out. Often the only outlet for one’s deeper voice is through the symptoms that bring an individual into therapy.
Jungian Therapy and Jungian Career Counseling are both about finding and speaking out in one’s unique voice. When we do finally stop to listen to our own voice, to hear it—perhaps first in the therapeutic setting—it is often so large and insistent that it can be overwhelming.
There can be so much force behind our new-found voice that we don’t have the strength at the beginning to contain it, to match it, to live up to this expression of our deep soul, which is the subtle matter of our being.
Because our voice feels so big, it is necessary to develop a kind of subtle-body muscle strength to really embody it fully, to ground it and support it. To this end, poetry, dreams, and story–anything that develops the deep imagination–is particularly helpful. It is one of the goals of Jungian Therapy to strengthen this aspect of the soul.
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