The Imagining Heart
This was my second unsuccessful commercial venture. Really, I just wanted an opportunity to study depth psychology and imaginal practices. Which I still did.
Let’s look at some insights and applications from that process.
Jung’s work is rich in insight. Even if you don’t take seriously his more metaphysical conclusions, given a lifetime of working with dreams, one might naturally notice some interesting patterns.
One such pattern is the balancing function of the unconscious. By exploring the architecture of your personal dreams, one can find things they already know. A more secular way of expressing the same statement is that an unmet need is known to the unconscious before it is known consciously, and metaphor is the bridge between the two.
Doing dream work with a client, we found a balancing function. When he dreamt of women, which was rare, they would be kind and gentle; loving and fair. He himself was harsh towards himself. Do you see that something from inside of himself was offering balance, and all he had to do was look and listen?
What you need can be found through introspection. This insight into the balancing function of the self doesn’t need to challenge the paradigm of scientific health optimisation a la Huberman. Whilst the two worldviews can co-exist, the recognition of the value of dream, mystery and the unknown is often triggering to hear for scientific rationalist purists.
Ironically, it is exactly this ardent belief in the exclusivity of science that has born our modern world into being. When we hold its truth in our heart, we bring it bear on the world. Careful what you wish for.
Himma is the name of this “bringing to bear” concept, first described by the Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, and later by third generation Jungian Psychologist James Hillman.
For Hillman, the attitude of the heart is the center of our world. In this book, The Thought of the Heart, he describes a variety of heart postures; including the “anatomist’s heart” who first saw that the heart has two halves, and in doing so, created a divided world. He goes onto describe the Lion’s heart, for whom action, thought and feeling are one and the same. In this way, the Lion heart is “compulsive”, but powerful. Their behaviour is infused with the energy of their whole being.
As someone naturally much more in the analytic, “anatomist” attitude, this was highly insightful. This insight has opened many new ways to explore movement and psychology. Instead of constantly reflecting and dividing, what does it mean to trust in the immediate?
Can we allow ourselves to be impulsive? Can we trust our first thought? In the context of sports performance, our first impression is usually correct, and when we hesitate, our performance and decision making degrades.
This runs counter to the scientific psychology of Daniel Kahneman, which advocates doubt and hesitance as the primary engine of behaviour. Instead, becoming more “lionhearted” is to believe that “what you see is what there is”. This is something that can be practiced socially and in movement.
Furthermore, Himma may be explored through embodied imagination. Using the attitude of another person as an anchor to move through. This yields significant progress in movements like acrobatics, as it allows you to tap into the embodied experience and insight of another person, without having to learn these things intellectually.
Lastly, during this research, I looked at some of Rudolf Steiner’s work, also titled the Thought of the Heart. Steiner’s work is a mixed bag for me, because one sentence will give you the most cutting insight into the ceiling of human development, and the next will talk about the lost civilisation of Atlantis, and the existence of gnomes.
What particularly stood out to me was Steiner’s work on Inspiration. He analogised the experience to its namesake: the inhalation. Before we inhale, we exhale; we empty. In the same way, to experience inspiration, one needs to diminish their own mental talk and mental image.
Steiner shares practices for this, which I have since shared in a workshop setting, which include the imagining of a flower growing from a seed and then withering away, followed by an abrupt stop in this activity. The point of this exercise is to experience the silence followed by the cessation of imagination. Personally, this skill of cessation has been helpful to me in getting to sleep, which I used to struggle with greatly.
In workshop settings, this work on inspiration has taken the shape of groups of two or three taking turns to move on a space, and seeing how tightly they can connect what they do to what the person has just done. Truly, the more empty one is of intention, the more satisfying is the experience of movement. What is interesting is how deep the connection between the partners feels after this experience, and furthermore, how long one could go on for with unlimited time.