Crisis As A Turning Point The Gift Of Liminal Time
hey
thank you
[Applause]
people come to see a psychiatrist or
jungian analysts as i am
when they are in crisis
you go along with life and it seems to
be the way it is and then
suddenly something changes that’s very
painful a relationship ends
you’ve thought of yourself in great
health and you
get a blood test back and it says you
have something very very serious
or it happens to someone close to you
or you’re in an automobile accident you
were perfectly fine
five minutes before the accident now
you’re going to spend a lot of time
in rehab and in hospitals this is what
life is
like it goes smoothly and then
crisis and i’d like you to think about
the many crises that you have had in
your life
i don’t think you can get through life
without at least
a couple dozen of them there are major
crises and then there are smaller ones
but each one is
very similar in the way
that what was
is no longer
you can’t go back to what was the
relationship really is
over or you were fired from your job
or you failed a course in school and
suddenly
you are in a
crisis and crisis brings on something
that
is good to think about as a liminal
space
because that’s where during this
pandemic
global pandemic caused by covid
19 we are all now in this liminal space
where we can’t go back
hundreds of thousands of people have
died they’re not coming back
people are out of work their jobs are
over
the businesses are done
you can’t go back to what was
and you don’t know what is coming next
because during a liminal time
and the word comes from the latin word
for threshold
threshold is in between in between what
was
and what will be or what next
one way or another we are in this in
between
space where life is not the way it used
to be
but there is a gift to liminal time
when you are examining
and feeling and sharing it
and you don’t know what’s coming next
that’s when there is space
in your psyche mostly it’s an inner kind
of
experience and you think
is this all there is and there is a
a kind of dishearten out of touch with
what is authentically you and that
is when the work
of listening to one’s dreams of
remembering
what your what your hopes were
when you start examining and feeling
from
inside out you’ve been so busy trying to
please other people or
or live up to or whatever it was that
you have spent so much of your energies
doing
and now in the middle of the pandemic
life is not quite the same
for many people it’s really really not
the same
and somehow in that kind of liminal time
that we all find ourselves in we start
to
remember what we forgot
that mattered to us and this is one of
the richest times of the gift of liminal
time you start to remember and have
dreams and think about
what it was that was important to you
before
long before maybe so in the liminal time
of being in between who you used to be
and who you might be becoming this is
when
the dreams can have an enormous ability
to evoke
that part of yourself that you
suppressed
and it may be for example a talent you
had
that from the very time you started out
interested in that people around you
said ah
you can’t make a living doing that
except right now you might be in a
liminal unemployed time when you might
think about what it is you really love
to do
and you might think about what is it
that you do that you get
so involved in what you are doing that
you actually lose
track of time and only you can say
when you say yes to something is it
going to be meaningful to you
will it be fun for you
it may be really a lot of work but when
you do that
when you try learning that you are so
engaged
in it that for you it’s fun
and the other thing is what you are
drawn to do
motivated by love love
of the space you get into when you do it
love of being with that person and what
that person represents
it’s a very inside out kind of decision
to make about how you spend the energy
of your life
the idea of a crisis is a turning point
and i’m remembering the labyrinths that
i’ve walked
and how it is you think you’re going in
a straight line and then
oops turning point
and you the path that you were on
suddenly
moves you in yet another direction
but if you stay on that path because it
is your path
you’ll have many different turning
points but it is the way your life
unfolds through the turning points
of crisis through the times when you
stop and
feel and follow heart and soul
and make decisions sometimes
it’s unexpected and a positive thing i
think about how it is that i
turned out to be a doctor in part
because i
was a surprise because in high school
and
what i was on track to be was to go into
law
but i went up in the mountains one
summer just before becoming a senior in
high school
and i thought about my birth injured
brother who never even learned to talk
i could have been him there’s no reason
why
he came into this world and had to
suffer
his impaired life and i was a star
of the family there was just at that
point a deep sense of humility of
that i had done nothing to to be the
spared child
it was a a sense of
deep humility and a sense of wanting
to know what i should do with my life
and in that mountainous area
i got the strong interior message that
you should be a doctor
and i promised i would i was never that
great in the
the sciences and so i said well maybe i
made a mistake
and then i started to work with people
and i had a sense
that helping people was really what my
assignment was
there’s something about this liminal
space between what was
and what will be where synchronicity in
the form of what i call
the dandelion effect that you
pick a dandelion and you blow out
the seeds and the winds take them
it’s a it’s the internet winds carry
the words that i may speak
out somewhere and the idea is
that people need words to understand
what’s going on inside
because they need to to have a sense
of why they are motivated from inside
out
to do what they are doing and if i
say something and it goes out on the
internet winds and it lands in a fur
in the fertile soil of a soul that just
needed some justification
the right words just to say this is who
i
am this is who i was meant to be and
this liminal time of being in crisis
is an opportunity the chinese word for
crisis the pictograph
it’s made up of two pictures danger and
opportunity
and that’s where we all are in this
liminal time in this time of pandemic
where things are not the same but one of
the things that most people
are doing more than they used to do is
that they are dreaming more
that they are feeling more and
remembering more
of what it was in their path
on their path that brought them to where
they are now
where they are in a moment of choice
about what they will do with their lives
now in liminal time there’s the
opportunity
to decide what you’re going to do with
your time
what is your dream saying
and might this be a time not just for
you personally
but for humanity in general there is a
global pandemic going on there’s a
global
warming going on in california anyway
where
i live we’ve had wildfires there was a
day when
the sky was orange
it was like the end of end of time
so we are in an extraordinary important
liminal time where every person
can contribute something to shift it
one direction or another and i have been
writing a number of things and
i put a memoir out into the world
and then i got interviewed for a
lifetime achievement award recently and
and they have a whole bunch of questions
and one stood out what do you want your
legacy to be
i’m 84 this year and i thought
i’m not done yet and so i pulled the
memoir back
because i am not done yet
and that’s the kind of inner feeling
that that doesn’t come from outside and
to pay attention to what’s
inside that’s saying what it is
and that’s what happens when you are in
a liminal
time and you’re receptive to being who
you are
synchronicity comes in and invitations
or possibilities come in and pay
attention
because you have an opportunity to shift
not only your course
but to contribute to the humanities
course
and i’m thinking about how it is
that we have this this time
this liminal time to make a difference
in the jungian world we have an
understanding of a collective
unconscious that we
are actually linked in some way that we
can’t
totally understand because it’s not
entirely visible and tangible
trust that you came into this world
with something to do here somebody
something to love here
trust that that it matters and trust
that there’s an invisible world that
supports you
it goes back to to that realization that
my handicapped impaired brother
who died young could have been me
and as i look across the world and i see
people that are part of the human family
not just my personal family
but all the people that are born under
terrible circumstances in
hardship places why wasn’t it me
it could have been me it could have been
any one of us but we are here
and it does matter
we in a liminal time what we do here
matters we can make a difference on the
world
in our families and become true to
ourselves
in the doing of it
and when you are true to yourself there
is something about
becoming who you were meant to be that
just from
inside out means that over
and over again you say yes
from inside there are three questions
will it be meaningful
will it be fun and lastly
isn’t motivated by love the other day
i was reading
three lines from real kay who said
i live my life in widening circles
that go across the world
i’m on my last one i don’t know
when it will end but i am committed
to see it i’m not done yet
thank you you