ROUGE AWAKENING
The pull toward soul feels like an earthquake in the midst of your life…. In the western world, many are called, but few respond. Entry into the life of the soul demands a steep price.
BILL PLOTKIN
Soulcraft
From 2006 through the spring of 2009, I joyfully and somewhat skillfully surfed the wave created by my first book, The Red Book. I offered Redvolution talks and workshops at respected retreat centers around the country and was interviewed on TV and radio shows. By April 2009, my feature film, Redvolution: Dare to Disturb the Universe, was 80 percent shot, and I had just completed a book proposal outlining my plans to write my second book, The Red Book of Spiritual Superpowers, introducing energy and metaphysics to the modern woman. Professionally, I believed I was living my purpose. My social life was also booming. I was learning a lot from my forays in the Red light district of divinity, and I was continuously “working on myself” via workshops, books, and weekly sessions with my energy teacher. However, something began to feel “off” at the beginning of 2009, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
In April 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing the eighty-something-year-old Jungian analyst Marion Woodman for my film. Marion’s visionary work focuses on reawakening the feminine — in our psyches, in our bodies, and on the planet. I was thrilled to be interviewing this supernova whose work I had been reading since high school, and I had dutifully prepared a long list of questions.
But something totally unexpected happened at the beginning of the interview. When Marion began answering the very first question, I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop crying throughout the entire interview and for the rest of the day (and night). Interestingly, Marion wasn’t fazed one bit by my wet face. In fact, I think she knew exactly what was going down that day. You see, my strong emotional response wasn’t due so much to what Marion was saying, because I was very familiar with her subject matter; rather, it was due to what I was experiencing — a woman who had embodied her soul.
In Conscious Femininity, Marion Woodman describes soul a few different ways:
Soul, to me, means “embodied essence,” when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity — part animal, part divine. Healing comes through embodiment of the soul. The soul in matter is what I think the feminine side of God is all about…. The feminine soul is what grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality.1
While there are exceptions, the soul is often described as being feminine. In Dance of the Dissident Daughter, author Sue Monk Kidd wrote:
When I use the term feminine soul, I’m referring to a woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural instinct, guiding wisdom, and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is. Connection to this inner reality is a woman’s most priceless experience.2
While it is difficult defining exactly what the soul is, most of us do know when we’re feeling it and when we aren’t. Sitting in front of Marion that sunny spring day, I felt the difference between us. I had a Rouge Awakening: Although I had passionately studied, filmed, experienced, talked, and written about feminine spirituality for years, I had not embodied my feminine soul. In fact, I couldn’t find or feel my feminine soul, at all. I suddenly woke up to the reality that part of me was missing, and I was feeling the loss of this essential piece of me for the first time in my life.
How did I let this happen?
THE SOUL LOSS SYNDROME
Although initially I took my soul loss quite personally, Marion firmly believes that most of us are disconnected from our soul. In fact, even her mentor lost his soul. In the early 1900s, the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung was a successful doctor and leader in Freud’s psychoanalytical movement, when he suddenly realized that his studies about the soul could only take him so far and that his soul needed to take him much further. Problem was, he couldn’t find his soul. Shattered by this realization, on the eve of November 12, 1913, Jung opened a blank journal and wrote the quote that precedes this second half of the book:
“My soul, my soul, where are you?”
Jung faithfully documented his in-depth process of finding his soul in what is now known as The Red Book (published posthumously eight months after I met Marion Woodman and three years after I published my own Red Book) and came to a startling conclusion: Soul loss was a modern wound everyone suffered from. While soul loss can be witnessed everywhere, it is oddly prevalent in the area that should be championing it the most: spirituality. Jung noted:
People will do anything to avoid facing their souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could come out of their own souls.3
Marion concurred: “The problem is too many people in our culture try to skip over this step [incarnating the soul] and go straight up to spirit. Overspiritualization is a real danger.”4 At the time of my interview, I was overspiritualized up the wazoo. Reality check: most “spiritual” people are.
Here’s another perspective I found helpful during this time, offered by Bill Plotkin, author of the masterpiece Soulcraft, which makes the distinction between spirit and soul: soul is our unique core, while spirit is that which we all have in common. Marion defines spirit as ethereal, transcendent, heavenly, immaterial, perfect, “out there,” “above” ordinary life, and … masculine.
Marion and Plotkin believe that we grow in two different directions: ascend toward spirit and descend toward soul. The spirit path takes us on a journey to the upper world — a boundless, timeless union with the transcendent or God — whereas the soul path takes us on a journey to the lower world — a meandering make-out session with the immanent and our individual selves. While the spirit path often feels like a flash of bright light in Forever’s frying pan, the soul path often feels like a slow, bloody crawl through thick, dark mud. However, Plotkin warns us about becoming too focused in either direction:
People who live excessively upperworld lives take a transcendental view of everything. They tend to see light, love, unity, and peace everywhere. They are attracted to the Course in Miracles or aspire to “enlightenment” via an ungrounded approach to Buddhism…. They want to exist above it all and are encouraged to do so by many approaches to spirituality…. People who live excessively underworld lives see the world dark. They tend to see hidden meaning, mystery, and the undoing of things everywhere. They gravitate toward the occult and the paradoxical. They prefer the night or the shadows and they prefer the gothic or the arcane.5
Ideally, we don’t want to wear too much white clothing or too much black eyeliner. We don’t want to become too air heady or too bottom heavy; we want spiritual proportion. We want to be well-traveled in both upper and lower worlds. We want to high-five spirit and shoot the shit with soul. As depth psychologist James Hillman hilariously said:
Soul likes intimacy; spirit is uplifting. Soul gets hairy; spirit is bald. Spirit sees, even in the dark; soul feels its way, step by step, or needs a dog. Spirit shoots arrows; soul takes them in the chest. William James and D.H. Lawrence said it best. Spirit and soul need each other like sadists need masochists and vice versa.6
Although paradoxical and seemingly opposite, upper world and lower world jaunts support each other beautifully. They are two necessary paths to our wholeness. Both are meaningful and mysterious, transpersonal and divine, but it’s critical to note that spirit is the most popular and public “face” of spirituality. More often than not, soul has been relegated to the moldy basements of the clean and bright McMansions of mainstream spirituality.
SHOCK WAVES
The days following Marion’s interview, I lay on my hotel bed, stunned, as my spiritual past ran buck naked across my inner screen. Incredulous, I realized that for most my life, I had plugged into spiritual paradigms and practices that fed my spirit but starved my soul. Although I could see how my soul had been trying to get my attention for years (especially in college and graduate school), and even though my body had rebelled against most forms of traditional and even New Age spirituality and I had even fallen in love with a Red feminine divine, I still knew Her and loved Her mostly “up there” or “out there,” as a Cosmic Being or Divine Feminine Force via spirit. I didn’t know Her and love Her “down here” (on this earth) and “in here” (in my body) via soul. As Sue Monk Kidd explained, “Women need to understand the Sacred Feminine in our heads, but most of all we need to ‘realize’ her in our souls.”7
As I wept on my hotel bed, something became heaven-shatteringly clear: I could not be of service to other women and this planet and the Divine Feminine to the degree that I needed to be until I was up close and personal with my own feminine soul. And, as you will soon read, it has not been easy getting so up close and personal to my soul. In fact, it’s been extremely painful and incredibly humbling to dig deep and recognize all the subtle ways I have consciously and unconsciously fucked over my soul, and even more terrifying to then act from and for my soul.
It has changed everything.
Something else I noticed during my interview with Marion: Her mental and spiritual realizations were integrated in her physical body. Her voice didn’t come from her head (or from her “higher chakras”), but from her belly. (Interesting side note: in traditional Chinese medicine, the energy center that connects you with the core of your being is located in the belly, called Tan t’ien, which literally means “cinnabar” or “red field.”) Although I had powerful body-centered experiences of the Feminine Divine (especially through Touching others), and even though I had studied, written, and talked about the importance of the body within spirituality for years, the reality was that all that knowledge, all those mystical experiences and erotic encounters and gung ho goddess grrrl verve had not anchored below my neck. I had never gone downtown to get my belly pierced with the Divine Feminine. In other words, there’s a big difference between knowing something and living as that something.
The shock waves continued …
After the interview, I realized that not only had I repeatedly abandoned my soul in favor of spirit and not yet fully embodied my feminine wisdom, but also that much of my exciting, career-making, spirituality-driven “way of living” was actually a “way of avoiding” my ordinary life — a way that kept me detached from intimate relationships, my body, my psychology, and this very earth. Marion tells us, “You don’t want to transcend your life, you want to move into your life.”8 I suddenly saw myself and my life from this entirely new, highly uncomfortable, and downright horrifying perspective: I had been keeping a safe, “spiritual” distance from the lower world and the ordinary world (what Plotkin calls “the middle world”) — both of which have been broadly linked to the “feminine.” How ironic.
A new label for this common tendency is “spiritual bypassing.” This condition has become an epidemic in today’s spirituality arena, and it isn’t limited to newbies. In Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, Mariana Caplan warns us:
The ego can, and does, co-opt spiritual ideas and practices by attempting to bypass, rather than work through, the wounded, confused, and even damaged aspects of our psyches. Spiritual bypassing operates at all levels of spiritual development, from beginning seekers to advanced yogis and spiritual masters. Access to spiritual truth, when not integrated, is a very dangerous weapon whose primary hazard is that we can effectively fool ourselves into believing we are more realized than we are and miss the deeper possibility that is available to us. And if we are in a position of power, we are likely to bring this confusion to other people.9
This Rouge Awakening felt even more shocking — er, humiliating — since its implications leaked out of my personal life and spilled directly into my public career. It was so damned cliché: I had been teaching what I most needed to learn. My previously “solid” and “successful” reality broke apart as I realized where I had unconsciously traded my humanity for my spirituality. As Marion claims, “Many people don’t want to be human; they’d rather live on idealization and perfection. They don’t want to take responsibility for their lives because it’s much easier to fly off into spirit…. Psychologically we call this inflation, and the only end is to crash down to earth.”10
Bottom line: Although I looked and preached the feminine part, I was an undercover spirit addict, and it was blaringly clear that my healthy passion for the feminine wasn’t a strong enough remedy to counter my unhealthy, life-long addiction to spirit. I needed to be cut off. It felt like I had smashed against a glass ceiling, and there was only one way to go from there:
Down.