Once upon a time there was a student who wandered in a forest to find a guru who could teach her what she was hungry to learn. When the student came upon the master teacher she said: “What should I study?”
The Master replied: “If you ask me what to study, I would say to study yourself. If you ask me again, I would still say to study yourself. Why? Because you are valuable, you are beautiful, you are wonderful, you are amazing, you have intelligence, you have connection, you have everything you need … and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!”
In a world of people who refuse or neglect their right and responsibility to know their own self, we’ve created systems of control to impose authority over the self. And this won’t do. For the self will rise up in revolt. This is one result of not studying the self and learning to walk in self knowledge — a world of disempowered people trying to manage other people who have lost their way, too!
Throughout his entire opus, Carl Jung demonstrated that human beings not only have their conscious ego, but the psyche as a whole is governed by a centre, which he called the self.
This “something” is strange to us and yet so near, wholly ourselves and yet unknowable, a virtual centre of so mysterious a constitution that it can claim anything … I have called this centre the self … It might equally well be called “God within us.”
The beginning and the end of our life is inextricably rooted in this central point. During the middle — or the muddle(!) — it seems we are designed to purposely strive back to and toward it. Call it self or call it God, either way it will not be denied. It is a psychological fact.
Self study is a holy work of wonder when one realizes being in touch with our primal experience is what charges our life with meaning. This primal ground upon which all women stand is giving us a great task today, which I regard as the Sophia salvanda — the way of redeeming feminine wisdom from within.
For whatever the challenge of change, the power in woman is greater than anything she is facing. The work is learning how to channel it.
Question for Reflection:
Am I ready and willing to receive the life I've been given so I may learn how to move into my own true story?
Magdalen Bowyer
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