09/03/2025
Good Day to you, dear Readers! Since this is a bit of a deep and mindful read, I'll just leave this here for us all to to ponder, as we will, today! Pick and choose what you are ready to dive into...these questions are all gifts to us, in any order!
Some Essential Questions: A list from Jungian therapist James Hollis.
Let's begin:
1. Where has life, in its unfairness, stuck you, fixated you, caused you to circle back and back upon this wounding as a provisional definition and limitation of your possibilities? Why do you continue to cooperate with the wound, rather than serve something larger, which serves you in return?
2. Where has life blessed you, given you a gift? And what have you done with that gift? How have you accepted the responsibility that goes with it?
3. Where are you blocked by fear, stuck, rigid, resistant to change?
4. What is the fear beneath the fear? The fear that intimidates you only gains its power from the wiring beneath it, the wiring of history, which leads to a deeper fear, a fear from your past. This circuitry activates the old message that this fear, this issue, is larger than you, and so you ignore the conscious, empowered adult you have become since then.
5. Where was your father stuck, and where has that stuck place shown up in your life? Where was your mother stuck, and where has that stuck place shown up in your life? Are you repeating their lives, their patterns, or trying to overcome them by compensation, or treating the problem in a way that brings harm and further self-alienation? Is this the legacy you will pass on to your children?
6. Where do you avoid conflict, the necessary conflict of values, and therefore avoid living in fidelity with who you are?
7. What ideas, habits, behavioral patterns are holding you back from the large journey of the soul? What secondary gains do you receive by staying mired in the old—security, predictability, validation from others? Are you now tired enough, hurting enough to begin to take the soul’s journey on?
8. Where are you still looking for permission to live your life? Do you think that someone else is going to give it to you? What are you waiting for, someone else to write the script of your life for you?
9. Where do you need to grow up? When will this happen? Do you think someone else will do it for you?
10. What have you always felt called toward, but feared to do? Does this possibility still summon you, symbolically if not literally? What new life wishes to come into being through you?
Why is now the time, if ever it is to happen, for you to answer the summons of your soul, to live the second, larger life?
Hollis offers that it should be uncomfortable, if not even painful, to answer some of the questions—that those feelings of deep discomfort are clues that you’re onto something worth wrestling with. In many ways, these questions are a path to your vocation, what you’re truly here to do—but living the questions requires growing yourself up.
As he writes in in A Life of Meaning: “Vocation, for example, is one of those summonses of the soul. We all do jobs to earn our living, but what is our vocation, our vocatus, our ‘calling’? Our calling often requires commitment, discipline, courage, consistency, and persistence. It’s not about comfort, fitting in, being normal at all.” He continues, “We were all born knowing what is right for us. It was called instinct, but when we were tiny, dependent, vulnerable, at the mercy of the world around us, we had to adapt to the fate into which we were thrown. As Jung often mentioned, most of our troubles come when we have lost contact with our guiding instincts, that energy within each of us that’s in service to becoming who we are in the world.”
May we clear the hurdles to reconnect with those guiding instincts on our path to wholeness. And may we grow ourselves up to fill the shoes we were meant to walk in as well.
~James Hollis: Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.
~ This post copied from the wonder Peter Brouwer (Thanks, as always, Peter!)
~Art: Unknown but appreciated
