Recently, a friend loaned me the book, SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology, by Robert A. Johnson, a Jungian psychologist. SHE is a commentary on the archetypal Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. I opened immediately to this passage and nearly bumped into a tree while reading it:

“Psyche immediately wants to drown herself. As she faces a series of difficult tasks, Psyche wants to kill herself. Does this not point toward a… relinquishing of one level of consciousness for another? Almost always in human experience the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing–the old way of adaptation–and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin. When a woman is touched by an archetypal experience, she often collapses before it. It is in this collapse that she quickly recovers her archetypal connection and restores her inner being…

Psyche goes to the river to give herself up, perhaps with the wrong superficial motives but with the right instincts. Pan, the cloven-footed god… dissuades her. But why Pan? He is the god of being beside one’s self, wild, out of control, near-madness, which the ancients thought so highly of and we regret so bitterly when it seizes us. We derive the word panic from his name. It is this very quality that saves Psyche. If we can find the god Pan in the right way, that is if we can be driven out of ourselves into something higher, that energy can be used for our benefit… A fit of weeping is a Pan experience. Although it is humiliating… dissolving into tears can take you quickly to something greater than yourself.”

The book is beautiful and enlightening. I highly recommend it. It captures the many ways in which women’s particular passage through emotional suffering is often the very energy that leads to awakening, and there is some hidden wisdom in allowing the “falling apart” to happen, moving into it rather than away from it, and refusing to pathologize or numb it, as psychiatrists do. There are cultures, particularly Native American ones, in which periods of suffering are actually invited through vision quests for their transformative power, and in many traditions, the “dark night of the soul” is honored as a doorway to awakening (see Dark Nights of the Soul, by psychotherapist Thomas Moore, another excellent book).

During a period of intense suffering, I actively sought a psychotherapist who would support this approach to suffering and found only the opposite, which was counter to what ultimately healed me. Those healers who did come into my life, fortuitously and synchronistically, helped me tremendously. Of Dark Nights of the Soul, Publisher’s Weekly writes that it:

“…considers loss, pain, conflict, confusion, anger, excess, deviance and other disturbing feelings and behaviors not as devils to be exorcised but as angelic opportunities for deepening and altering the self… The idea is not that suffering per se is good for the soul, but that to regard such visitations merely as suffering is to miss their point and meaning. Art and religion feature more prominently here than psychology, which Moore, a Catholic monk turned therapist, finds too mechanical and fix-it oriented to serve the soul.”

Despite the darkness and pain that passed through my life, there was never any real danger. Love never ceases to hold and guide us. Adyashanti says, “Everything is always okay… even when it’s not. Especially when it’s not.” I say that not as a spiritually-enamored person attached to faith but as a former athiest who, after years of scrutinizing the mind and heart, had to concede the deeper layers of reality that govern what happen to us in the here and now.