Struggling to be

[NikNik]

Much respect!  *passes you some oil for the cogs*

Just reading your great writing and use of language, it seems like your cogs are turning just fine. And I must say this degree seems like a good fit for you!

[PeppiPatty]

Dearest @Appleblossom

How are you?

I'm waiting in Hungry Jacks for my hubby.....using my computer!!

So special!

I think that stuggling in one of those words that is trying to get out of an amotion??

Ive started my paper on Feminism for women who lives in 2015

I want to focus on compassion and empathy but need to get the subtitles together so can write the paper. Ive got some interesting  reading from .....The Awakenings Doctor and ...Oliver Sacks...he just passed away :0( 

Stephanie Dowrick a book that @Aonaran suggested that cant thinnk of right this moment...by the poet Robert Fry me thinks??

Shame....Love love love what people wrote....

Simone ....the singer who sang that wonderful sone called.......Jeepers, the jazz song, the song has slipped my mind......

I thought Ide write about the emotion of that one song.

Ive written up some notes on the range of emotions.

Dear @Appleblossom..Isabella,

Please dont leave your home , its a bit like a self fuffilling prophecy and your son can have it is this is what you choose. honey, you are doing good in his life right now. The world has changed and what you have gone through is an example of this.....we need to learn how to manage our own lives. Look what you have done...wasn't even your ex husband suffering times of mental ill health?

My kids get......nothing. Probably My hubbies home .....if we keep together which will happen.

[PeppiPatty]

Dear @Aonaran

I want to study creative writing....are you going on open university?

I would L.o.v.e. to have you gift of language.

[PeppiPatty]

Perhaps Oscar Wilde did have something to do writing that long long poem in jail, gave him something to do @Aonaran

Im so psydo intellectual........all from books.

[Appleblossom]

I am going through a quite jittery phase atm. I feel like I am crumbling.  I went to recorder and choir by public transport.  Teacher was nice but I am upset by some personality clashes .. I wasnt concentrating very well at choir .. but enough to get by. Thanks for asking about me @PeppiPatty.

I like Adrienne Rich as a feminist and poet. Wrote about her Plath, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson ... in another world before kids.

I read Musicophilia by Sachs and liked the movie Awakenings.  The wards were like when I visited as a child and my father was in hospital .. my style in many ways...sad he died.

[PeppiPatty]

Dear @Appleblossom

How are you my friend?

Thinking about you.

Can you write about what jittery feels like?

you have been working so hard on memories of your past.....placing them more and more in context for others to read and understand.

Your writing flows more.

You write  of identiftying with homeless people and 

you write of catching buses.....

my thought......is bit like a homeless person.

But my friend, Isabella. you are clever and you did care for your children very much, very well.

Ille look all that stuff up....

[Appleblossom]

Jittery for me ... pre the shakes .. pre panic attack .. pre tears .. pre confusion .. exhausted and at wits end. I can do simple things but slowly. Got up at 10am to answer door. Napped for 15 mins.

Today I also dug in garden, shopped and cooked and organised tickets through try booking for my concert Sunday week. I know I am not lazy even though I am on a disability pension.  My neck and back are borderline too so very much not able to take any little straws ...

Dear @PeppiPatty thank you for engaging. I dont mean to be a whinger.

[CherryBomb]

Hi @Aonaran

My apologies for taking some time to get back to you. Life has been hectic and I have not properly been on the Forums until now.

How have you been? Ugh, it seems that since I was on here last, winter left, and then it came again, and then went again, does it seem this way for you too? It feels like a season has passed since being on the Forums last.

I should prefice that I've only read the last post that I was mentioned in, so I'm very sorry if I'm missing parts of the conversation that has already unfolded. Time seems a bit sparse tonight so I'm doing a quick scan across the forums. There's a bit to catch up on, but things will settle soon, and I'm looking forward to having more quality conversation soon..

The book you mentioned by Robert Bly sounds fascinating. I don't know much about archetypes, but I would love to know more if you or @PeppiPatty care to share. Can you tell me a bit more about them or send me a link with some info perhaps? The idea of the erosion of archtypes sounds like something similar to what I was reading last year (by sociologists, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), which suggests that there has been an erosion of institutions. Consquently, people no longer have a stable anchor to ground their behaviour them. Instiutions once provided a guide about how people should live their lives, but without them today, people are increasingly required to construct themselves. This places both freedom, and a burden on individuals. It means that people turn inwards and place a greater emphasis on individual responsibility, and sometimes (for those that like to embellish) talent, braggery, self-entitlement and so on.  I guess this idea is bit different to Bly's archetypes, but I do think there are some similarities in that both ideas try to explain some behaviour that we see today. What are your thoughts on this? Is it similar to Robert Bly's views or have I misnderstood?

The course I did was presented by Nikos Papastergiadis, who speaks and writes a bit about cosmopolitanism and how people are represented in the media. You can read an interview about it here if you are interested.

I heard on the grapevine that you're studying? Is ok of me to ask what you are studying? How's it going?

Very much looking forward to chatting with you.

CherryBomb

[Aonaran]

Hiya @CherryBomb CB!

Yes, Robert Bly's work seems very similar to the work of Beck and Giddens as you describe it, so I don't think you've misunderstood at all.  Bly's vision of it is based on the model of the tribe, with female elders and male elders represented metaphorically by the institutions and authorities we had previously turned to for guidance and moderation of our lives, but from which we are now rebelling and which have shown themselves to be lacking the benign side we once trusted them to have.

You may have noticed I tend towards the metaphorical (no, really?!), so I'm very drawn to the imagery of Bly's work.  It has parallels in the work of women like Clarissa Pinkola Estés (who wrote Women Who Run With the Wolves).  Bly feels -- and it certainly rings true for me -- that we have lost a lot of the rights of passage through stages of our lives, and discarded the meaningful ritual as foolish or embarrassing that once gave people a psychic structure for how to regard our role relative to events around us.  More than anything, we've discarded our mentors who taught us how to conduct ourselves *and* provided the guidance (and chastisement, when necessary) for how to learn.  We've banished the "Please teach me" and put "How dare you!" in its place.  It's a poor bargain.

Archetypes.  Okay.  (Please feel free to chime in on this, Anne @PeppiPatty !)  The idea was formulated by Jung, and can be thought of as ... okay, themes in a story.  We're each a story, and a story has some elements in common to all -- an opening, a plot development, the influence of other characters, a resolution, a conclusion -- there are things we see in all stories, regardless of their genre or style of writing.  That's like the collective consciousness that Jung envisaged, an underlying awareness that all humans share, with its shared hopes, expectations and sorrows.  But stories all have themes that shape the way the story runs -- it might be a heroine or hero story, or a poor innocent treated cruelly, or someone who uses her/his power for malice, or star-crossed lovers -- these examples are distinct themes that make the story run differently, but are identifiably common to all human storytelling.  You can think of archetypes like that -- as the themese that manifest in our personal stories.  And although they are shared, they show up differently from one story to the next, and each theme won't appear in every story.  In a real sense we have no conscious control over which archetypes manifest in our lives;  they come from the collective unconscious, after all.

There's some recognition of these concepts in modern transpersonal psychology.  Most of us have at least heard mention of the Inner Child and the Inner Critic, and there are whole workshop industries sprung up around learning to appease them and trying to get them to play nicely and support our conscious desires.  (I'm not so sure about all that, though you'd probably have a better chance of success than praying to Jaysus for a Cadillac.  Or, famously, a Mercedes Benz.)    But in a sense the archetypes are a little like astrology, in that what's in your makeup is in the stars when you were born.  (I'm being metaphorical again.)  You get the spread of archetypes in your life that you were dealt;  there may be some aetheric system at work, analogous to the gene lottery of DNA, but we're oblivious to it for now.

(To get serious for a moment, all this is one big reason why I get antsy with people telling other people how they "should" be;  if it's not in their archetypal colour palette, how can they be what's demanded of them?  It's an ego-driven gesture of cruelty.)

So, a couple of websites that might give a bit more useful grounding in this:

http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/tp/archetypes.htm talks about the four basics as Jung envisaged them, though they're really more the aspects of consciousness and self-perception.  In Jung's hands, thy hadn't yet taken on the "themed ride" aspect that they quickly developed as others latched onto the concept and expanded it.

http://www.soulcraft.co/essays/the_12_common_archetypes.html talks about one perspective on the archetype-as-life-focus approach to the subject.  Particularly in the US, the idea of archetypes have solidifed as behavioural and personality traits.

CB, many thanks for your link to the interview with Prof Papastergiadis.  I found it a very interesting read, and even though I'm convinced a lot of it went over my head, it did reassure me in at least one sense:  I had assumed that "cosmipolitanism" was a push for the abolition of cultural distinctions and differing values, so it was useful to realise that was my ignorance at play and that people like the Prof are focussed on "negotiating differences" rather than pushing for universality.  (I'm very bothered by the "cultural imperialism" that is apparently implicit in the "global market".  Yeah, I'm very bothered by a lot of things.)

Got to take a break for a minute, and this "failed authentication" the website keeps throwing at me is driving me nuts.  I'll back with some more in a wee while.

Best regards,

Aonaran

[CherryBomb]

Hello hello @Aonaran!

How are you? Hope this finds you well, and I hope that you have managed to stick your nose out of the cave to get few warm rays sun with spring starting.

Thanks for explaining archetypes to me and sharing the links. I've heard about the concept but have never really been able to fully grasp it - not that I feel like I'm fully grasping it now, but I feel like I understand it a bit better. Your last post had so much to it, that i feel like I have so many questions to ask.  Bly's work resonates me with, in particular his ideas about abandoning female and male elders as guides and moderators. I often think about how far we are moving away from our authentic roots as we move forward into (contemporary) time, devoid of traditions, rituals, and traditional institutions. I wonder if the so called 'freedom' we have from our traditional roots today is actually freedom? Or are we just fish floating around in a glass tank, seeing beyond, but unaware of the clear facade that traps us (I'm also a metaphor junkie ).

It's kinda got me thinking (and I'm still struggling with understanding the archetypes so please bare with me if I'm off the mark here) if we have a collective conscious of roles or themes buried deep within our psyche, does it mean that we have a shared common humanity? Like a common understanding of living and being in the world through having a shared awareness of hopes, expectations and sorrow? Or are we moving further and further away from that, which means that we are more at odds with ourselves and in turn each other? I don't expect you to answer these questions, I'm more sharing my thoughts out loud. 

May I ask you - and anyone else reading this - what of the 12 primary archetypes you relate to most? For me,  at this point in life the sage and the innocent stood out for me. Do they change over time or are they constant? And are they something that we should nuture or attempt to resolve?

After reading about the 12 types, I think I can see what you mean when you say:

"To get serious for a moment, all this is one big reason why I get antsy with people telling other people how they "should" be;  if it's not in their archetypal colour palette, how can they be what's demanded of them?  It's an ego-driven gesture of cruelty."

I'm not sure I could easily become 'The Rebel' just because someone says I should. When thinking about archetypes, I think here's a deeper reason behind behaviour, emotions and thoughts.

On this note, I've been learning a bit about yogic philosophy of late. And one thing that stands out for me is the idea that we inherit emotional blockages. We have stores of emotions in our bodies that sometimes don't necessarily belong to us. It could be from our parents, ancestors, or perhaps a collection conscious. Anyway, the idea of (traditional) yoga is to release these blockages through movement. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this? I don't necessarily see it as the ultimate truth, but more another prism to understand ourselves.

I have rambled yet again... so it's time to get off the computer.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

CherryBomb