Renowned Jungian Psychoanalyst James Hollis Has the Strategy for Cutting Through the Noise to Find What Your Soul Is Crying Out For
When life feels chaotic, uncertain, or challenging, it’s tempting to look outside ourselves for answers. We scroll. We strive. We distract ourselves with any number of vices.
But what if the clarity and comfort we’re craving is within us, and has been all along?
That’s the question at the heart of Living With Borrowed Dust, a new book by James Hollis, PhD—renowned Jungian psychoanalyst, teacher, and bestselling author. In this collection of essays, Dr. Hollis invites us to explore what it means to be human in all its messiness: to grieve, to love, to age, to awaken. As he writes in the book’s preface, his hope is that these essays serve as “a companion, a summons, a guide, and a reminder that we carry within what we are so anxiously looking for in the crazed world out there.”
This week, The Sunday Paper sat down with Dr. Hollis to ask him how he turns inward, and how all of us can begin a dialogue with our own souls to live less reflexively and more thoughtfully and authentically.
A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES HOLLIS, PHD
In your new book, you offer tools we can use to have deep conversations with our souls. Why is this soul conversation important?
As children, we learn that our dreams are coming from some part of our psyche that knows us better than we know ourselves. Because we’re tiny, dependent, and vulnerable, we have to adjust to the powers and principalities of the world outside of us. As a result, we lose contact with those inner sources telling us what is right and wrong for us. And understandably, we defer to the authority of parents and to the various systems we have to report to in the outer world.
I wrote this book to help us find and access the insights that our own nature has already begun telling us about how to conduct our lives. Then, we have to find the courage—or sometimes the desperation—to try to live that in the world.
A theme in your book is understanding our inner callings and using them as inspiration for personal growth. How do you listen to your inner callings?
I think from childhood on, we ask large questions—questions that are essential, like, Who am I? Who is this other person? What is the world asking of me? What is it that my own inner life tells me is right for me?
I lost contact with that source within me, and I did all the things I was supposed to do—create relationship, have a career, prepare professionally. And then at midlife, I had a very crushing depression. I had to ask myself, Why has my own psyche withdrawn its approval and support from all the things I’m doing? Because I’m doing what I was supposed to do! Why did this depression come? That’s what sent me to my first hour of therapy.
I began to realize two things. One, there was a lot of unfinished business from childhood, which, to some degree, we all carry; and two, there were some large decisions that I needed to address in the outer world, which is what ultimately sent me from life as an academic to training as an analytic psychologist.
You say you were “blessed” with depression at midlife. Can you explain?
I use the term blessed today. I didn’t feel so at the time, because depression was robbing me of my energy. But it was also calling into account how I was conducting my life.
From an analytics standpoint, we don’t say, Well, how quickly do we get rid of a person’s symptoms? We’d rather ask the question, Why have these symptoms come, what changes are they asking of us, and how might I respond to this in a proactive way?
Early on in life, we’re tiny, dependent, and vulnerable, and we don’t have the capacity to live our own journeys. A child can’t pack a suitcase and move out of town. But somewhere along the line, we need to recover a sense of permission. Is this your life or not? If it’s not your life, what are you going to do about that? We have to come back to the drawing board.
Like most of us, I had lived the model in the outer world of professional and social development. But I wasn’t yet living out of what was most profoundly true for me. In fact, a lot of what I was living was a defense against that. And so, one of the most important things I learned in several years of analysis was that what you become—namely a series of adaptations and deals we make with the outer world—is now your chief problem, because it separates you from you.
That’s why, when we look at our symptoms, we ask the question, What is this trying to call our attention to? What changes are necessary in my life?
When we get those answers, what do we do? Do we write them down? Sit with them in meditation?
Most of us never spend any quiet time in the course of any given day to reflect on what our choices are about. If we don’t have regular appointments with ourselves, we’re going to be living mostly reflexively by the condition patterns. We don’t rise in the morning and say, Well, today I’m going to do the same stupid, counterproductive things I’ve done for decades. But chances are we will, because we have so many autonomous, reflexive responses to life’s stimuli.
So, one starts by paying attention. Where was that coming from? Inside of me? Where have I been here before? Historically, what is this a defense against? What is really wanting expression in the world through me? These are not narcissistic questions. These are questions of self-respect. There’s a huge difference there. It doesn’t diminish the quality of our relationships with others. In fact, it can improve our relationships for the simple fact that we’re a more evolved and more authentic person than a person who’s simply been well-conditioned to fit in and adapt to the conditions of life.
It sounds like this work makes us more trustworthy in relation to others.
Yes, because it means you’re living with integrity as opposed to what history imposed upon you and the various adaptations that you had to make as a child or as a young adult. It means you live less reflexively and more thoughtfully, more consciously.
There’s a price for that, because it does often mean leaving our comfort zone. It means moving in the direction of more authenticity. Our task is not goodness, as many of us were told as children, it’s about wholeness. And what that really means is that I must recognize I have unfinished business. We all do. We all have a shadow—that is to say, parts of ourselves we would prefer not to have the world know about or that we don’t even want to look at ourselves. But under no circumstance do these parts disappear. They continue to infiltrate our relationships.
The best thing I can do is present to the people around me who I really am, with respect to boundaries of course, and to whomever they may be as well. Again, this is not about self-absorption. It’s about accountability for the integrity of one’s own soul.
You say that there’s “another other” inside of each of us that knows us better than we know ourselves. Why is it important to listen to that other?
Most people—and I say this without criticism, I say it with sympathy—lead lives that are on automatic pilot. They avoid conflict, stay out of harm’s way, and try to get their needs met as best they can. All understandable.
But what if this way of being conflicts with something that is wishing expression through you in this world? That’s where we’re called, particularly in the second half of life, to ask, What is this life about? What am I really here for? What wants expression through me?
You have to seize hold a permission to ask those questions, because early on, you learned that was not particularly safe. But these questions lead to a certain humility. You’ll likely find yourself living in service to something that is very deep within you. If you don’t do that, you’re living reflexively.
There is a question at the end of our journey: Did I live my journey, or did I live reactively? Now, I say again without judgment, only sympathy, most people live lives responding to whatever the pressures are in their environment, which is understandable. And at the same time, it widens a deepening gap within each of us, and that’s what makes us ill, psycho-spiritually speaking.
For those who’d like to live thoughtfully and consciously rather than reflexively but don’t know where to start, what is the first step?
I think you can begin by asking, What is it that has always fired my imagination? What has stirred my curiosity? What is the talent or interest that I’ve always set aside because I didn’t have time, or I didn’t think I could afford it? The more honestly you address these questions, the more your psyche will start giving you some responses over time.
Psyche is the Greek word for soul. It’s all about purpose and meaning. Jungian analytic psychology is really about addressing what is most meaningful in your life. More people suffer pathologies of one kind or another because they’re disconnected from a meaningful journey. And what often evolves from that disconnection is their own treatment plan, which could be avoidance, busyness, investment in popular culture with all of its distractions, or self-medication of some kind. All of those are, in the long run, betrayals of the soul. Ultimately, one has to ask: What is it your life needs to be in service to? To some degree, the answer will involve serving the commitments we have to our relationships and to our work. That’s all legitimate. However, if you’re not serving something very deep within you, you’re going to be serving something that ultimately is trivial or about someone else’s life.
Life in America feels very heavy to many of us right now. Would you say this is an especially good time to go inward and listen to our deep wisdom?
This is, in fact, a chaotic and dark time. There’s no avoiding that. Apart from whatever you can do as a citizen to express your point of view, you have to realize that who you are is most defined by your values. What are your values? What really matters to you? Civilization, families, children depend on you continuing to serve your values in difficult times.
The world depends on parents being parents, and carpenters building the houses, and nurses helping people recover. So, continue to do what you do as a calling—not just as a job or duty, but as a calling. But also realize that whenever your own values are at stake, it’s time for you to show up in the way that makes sense to you.
James Hollis, PhD, is a Washington DC-based Jungian psychoanalyst and the author of 20 books. To learn more, visit jameshollis.net.
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