Angie Fee, a Psychosynthesis Trust Trainer, revisits one of the central Psychosynthesis teachings – the paradox of the individual and the universal – bringing their own experience from personal and professional work, and the challenges faced in holding both.
I think it’s always worth revisiting one of central Psychosynthesis teachings – the paradox of the individual and the universal.
It’s been my experience in my personal and professional work, how challenging it can be to hold both.
Chichester (2018) describes how one part of us pushes us towards wholeness and connection with the universe and another part pulls us back, separates us from the universe around us, often feeling disconnected and distant. She names this the communal paradox.
I experience this played out in therapy where the instinct for self-preservation and individuality is in battle with the part that longs to let go and feel held by something bigger than ourselves. And it’s not about one winning over the other.
There’s is nothing wrong with this, it can be easily dismissed and called resistance – this can be often heard as a judgement in that we shouldn’t be struggling against ourselves. Instead, can we explore this tension and see it as a necessary part of the dance. It’s not to be resolved. This duality lives in us all.
I’ve noticed in our need for security and survival we can develop beliefs that we can take control of our lives and shape our future. There grows a sense of entitlement and great expectations. Everything needs to be understood, explained and made sense of, we have to find meaning in everything. There leaves little space for chaos and mystery and meaninglessness, loneliness. Everything needs to be resolved to feel secure once more. We often make an unconscious deal to swap aliveness for restriction so we can feel safe and no pain. This becomes rigid and fixed, unyielding.
As Alan Watts (1992) comments, ‘we seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet, we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time’. He points out the contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. Yet that is what we do.
Psychosynthesis framework describes how we are called upon by Self to let go of what we know, allowing something new to emerge, to take a developmental step. But we often hold tightly onto what we have, the status quo. The call of Self brings people, situations, books, pain, crisis, a chance meeting, any number of events into our lives to see something about ourselves that has been hidden from ourselves – often spiritual growth is dressed up differently to how we imagine or expect. Call of Self most often does not fit into the image we have ourselves, the lives we have structured or the relationships we have invested in with jobs, people, ideas, values.
This inevitably can result in our strong identifications and identities being challenged or threatened and our reaction can often be to strengthen them. This doesn’t just happen on an individual level but also on a collective level.
One of the ways I see this manifest is the reaction to the emergence of identity politics in the 80s and 90’s and ongoing.
Identity politics generally refers to groups of people who identify with specific categories such race, sexuality, ethnicity, with a shared history of injustice, discrimination and oppression and often taking forms of activism. These arose out of social movements, in specific contexts such as Black Civil Rights Movement, feminism and gay liberation of the 60’s and 70’s and developed over the years since, as a strategy of resistance and is a response by individual marginalised social groups to pre-existing social groups who have held unquestioned power and privilege. Dominant groups in society becomes so normalised and internalised they are considered to be natural.
The term ‘woke’ has emerged alongside this, becoming more mainstream and generally relates to becoming more aware of social injustice and the marginalisation of specific groups. (Woke being used since 1930s as an African-american synomyn to refer to awareness of social and political issues affecting african americans. This term has entered merium webster dictionary referring to issues of racial and social injustices, gaining momentum in 2014 as part of black lives movement.)
The term woke is also being weaponised to criticise and demean, it can silence people and keep people in their place specifically as new identities evolve and struggling to find their place at the table. When our cultural norms are subverted in the rise of so called ‘woke’ culture where this term is used as an insult as a reaction to changes in ways we think about various things. Much the same as the term ‘politically correct’ has been used in the last 30 years.
Many times, I have heard people ridicule the idea of being asked to use different pronouns or being asked to use new vocabulary or listen to someone feeling offended by various language regarding their race, ethnicity, religion, class, to name a few social identities. This process emphasises the importance of identification before disidentification. The space needed for people in marginalised groups to be able to experience their identity and be seen and heard in their identity before it can become a part of a larger whole.
Equally I can argue that when there’s such a strong identification with the whole idea of identity politics, it is easy to lose sight of the wider idea of universal unity and connection. However, for the purpose of this article, I am choosing to focus on the importance of wokeness, to stay awake to the inequalities around us.
Understanding how the power of language shapes people’s realities and destabilising familiar language is necessary in terms of imagining a new world. This kind of challenge makes certain demands of people, including one of the most difficult demands of all: namely that they think differently.
When the normalised structures that create order and meaning are disrupted, messiness and chaos are created, our entitlement to security and control fights back. Part of this messiness can be experienced as the censoring of free speech and people fighting against feeling silenced by these new evolving terms and belief systems.
Can we see social movements as a process of individuation, emphasising the significance of identification as a way of beginning to integrate into a larger whole. Seeing it as an evolving thrust towards marginalised groups becoming part of a larger whole, the inclusion of changing societal and cultural stories – at the same time making room for the differences and tensions that this brings, which keep the process fluid and dynamic instead of getting caught up in a static idea of what wholeness and unity mean. Instead, seeing it as a life force.
This asks us to think and imagine differently.
In other words, going beyond our familiar personal boundaries, moving beyond what is I and mine, towards a greater depth and expansion.
In service of contributing to the larger world we live in.
In service of Self.
Joan Chichester We Are All One: Reflections on Unity, Community and Commitment to Each Other (New London, CT: Twentieth-Third Publications, 2018,) 1-2.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1st pub 1954, this edition 1992) Rider