Jonah and the Whale
The Jonah and the Whale story is much more than an imaginative adventure, it is a Jungian's dream. Rich with symbolism and the call to transcend — this week’s theme will give you the chance to assess a life choice, possibly a vocation or even a relationship, and give you the time and space to return to an inner knowing.
Excerpts
— Jonah and the Whale is from the Nevi'im (also known as the Book of Prophets) in the Tanakh. The story begins with Jonah a Jewish Prophet instructed by God to go to the city of Nineveh with the intention of warning them to change their evil ways lest the city be destroyed. But Jonah desperately did not want to go to Nineveh, he wanted, he disobeyed God’s wishes and and jumped onto a ship heading for Tarshish — hoping to flee from God.
— The story of Jonah and the Whale doesn’t have to be about vocation, it can be about a spiritual practice, it can be about whether or not to have children, become a monk, a priest, open a business, move countries, change your gender. And I encourage you to use the parable in anyway that feels right to you. Although, I will focus on career because it is most likely how many of us approach the idea of “ignoring the message of what God wants for you in this life.” When it comes to doing the Yoga Nidra experience, you can do it as many times as you want for as many questions as your have. But don’t over do it. Like anything in life, you gotta live a little.
— So, God wants something of you, and you say no. God gives you a gift, makes you a prophet, asks that you use your skills, you run away. Where do you run to? A marketing job? Get into coding? Find yourselves briefly enamoured with the views and possibilities, maybe you drink the company cool-aid and think you could really change the world with this product, and finally you find yourself tapped out. Lost for any feeling of awe or curiosity that comes from somewhere deep within you. In the This Jungian Life episode I mentioned, they beautiful describe the sailors as the creative faculties of Jonah. Jonah, the ego function, is trying to get this energy, or to use Jung’s language, libido, to move in the direction of his choosing, but God comes along, after all this isn’t what he wanted for Jonah, or to say it in a more secular way, this isn’t inline with the gifts that Jonah has been given. No offense to people who were born to be in marketing or born to code, I know you exist, I grew up with a sibling who was putting computers together at 6 years old with absolutely no help or external inspiration. Anyway, your creative gifts — the sailors — get tired of this and throw you overboard. What does this mean? They shut down and so do you. Depression, anxiety, numbness, loss of aliveness. The conscious mind shuts down because when we continue to force ourselves away from the path we are meant for, we get exhausted. Too much work is being done.
— We can see this symbol in the story of Jonah, his acceptance of his refusal and its consequences, his return to original source, his effort to align with a path that is uniquely his, is a powerful and truly relatable symbol of the transcendent function. This process of bringing together the conscious and the unconscious, the unconscious in this case can be seen as God, although I would love to hear someone’s interpretation of the sailors being the unconscious function.
— The work needs to be done. Andrew Solomon describes depression as the noon-day demon, and I invite you to demand that it let you do your work. The amount of times numbness and sloth will find you, will be uncountable, but each time you are able to return to your destiny and do the work, you will achieve so very much, and find so much value and esteem for your life that you will gladly thank the sun and the city, the whale, and the storm, the means and the calling.
Understanding the work of Jung requires that we understand one of his core concepts, the balance of the tension of the opposites, Jung believed that this is crucial to the process of Individuating. Life, the experience of this human existence, is a long process of balancing the tension of the opposites. This is so core to life, that it will come up again and again, and I will illustrate it’s importance now through a story on rebirth.
— This contradiction, this tension of the opposites is that you are trying to access a space that will generate a transcendent function, a calling to a more aligned path forward, while accepting that you have no control, your obstinance to shift your life towards this path is likely not your control either. You didn’t control me to give you this prompt, to create a yoga nidra, of maybe you did will it into being, because a part of you was so desperate for something to call you back, to redirect you. Either way, what matters is that we answer the call, and do the work. The rebirth is out of our hands. The experience we expect to feel is not up to us. The control is always imaginary. Take great comfort in that.