Of Lady Liberty and Marriage to Animus
Your blog about Lady Liberty, Stephen, brought to memory again my loving encounter with my anima (Jung's term representing the feminine intelligence). If you've read my professional bio you know this about my history: I was raised in an extreme right-wing religious family which revered a masculine god and grossly devalued the feminine. I didn't realize until reaching my middle 30s how crippling that masculine-dominated belief system was for me. My healing transformation came with keeping a dream log, using Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy as my guide. Through that process I discovered my feminine energy and her equal importance relative to my masculine. Not only did I come to see her as equally important to my animus but a dynamic vital, and oh yes, erotic complementary opposite.
Almost immediately after engaging in my dream work I was pleasantly shocked to experience a great surge of creative energy. Before my animus' loving marriage with my anima I had shown brief spurts of creativity here and there, but my new psychic coitus brought a natural flow of high creativity. It was like my masculine and my feminine would get together, make love, conceive, and out popped baby creative ideas and concepts I could put to use in my everyday life, personally and professionally. The new babies came not only through vivid dreams but during the day as well.
An example of the latter, and there are literally hundreds I could give, during leadership workshops and teambuilding meetings I facilitated I would often receive parasensory communications about what was going on beneath the group processes on the surface. To illustrate, in one heavy teambuilding meeting in a off-site hotel meeting room, I saw a couple of "psychic bullets" fly across the room from a very quiet Vietnam War vet to another member of the group. That alerted me to the fact that a difficult time was about to erupt. Within just a few seconds the vet exploded with a vitriolic verbal attack on the other individual. Needless to say, perhaps, the appearance of the psychic bullets alerted me to the extremely difficult time ahead and I was better prepared to help the group cope with the trauma.
Another illustration: During a management workshop I noted a dark blob of energy move from a female participant to a male with whom she had been having difficulty. In private I asked her why she had sent the energy form to him. She exclaimed, "You saw that!? I didn't think anyone would see it." She said she had sent out a "piece" of her energy to work on him when she had become frustrated with his bias against her. We then discussed other options for working through her issues with him.
In still another leadership workshop I saw a mask which looked like a fierce black buffalo's head emerge from and cover the head of a male participant. As it didn't appear to have anything to do with the group process in which he was involved, I waited until break to ask him about it. He told he had been taking training from a shaman who had taught to use the buffalo as a familiar spirit. He said he was just practicing with the buffalo spirit and didn't have anything in particular in mind relative to any issue in the workshop.
Thanks to my anima-animus team, I've had numerous experiences of "early warnings' like the first illustration, as well as metaphoric cues about blockages within group members that were keeping them from expressing their true feelings, and still others like the last instance. Such intuitions come via any of my five parasensory channels paralleling my regular senses: sight, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting and are available to me through the joint action of my anima and animus intelligences. There is no doubt in my mind that the key to my long success in transformational organization development over the course of forty years is directly attributable to the loving cooperation of two. I have often thought of the two being like poles on an electric dry cell battery: accept only one pole and we stay in darkness. Accept both and energy springs forth to bring a special light and energize our minds and bodies.
To shorten a very long story about my dramatically increased creativity, before the marriage of my animus to my anima I had not published anything. Since that time I have published over seventy articles in journals and magazines and have custom-written thirty-one books for clients, not to mention a hymn I composed for the Unitarian Universalist Association. And here I am hale and healthy at age seventy six and my Lady Liberty and animus' new ideas and concepts continue to flow into my consciousness. And I feel like fifty or so. Need I say more?
