At some point last year, after an extended period of trying to access all of the different and disparate parts of my psyche, it felt to me as though I were still separated from a critical part of myself by a large wall.  I eventually came to recognize this was a wall around my heart chakra.  I envisioned it as being made of stone, and despite having the psychic equivalent of Mjolnir at my disposal, I was unable to knock it down or even make a hole in it.

Later it occurred to me to try and transform the stone into something equally hard but still easier to deal with: ice.  It also felt better to think of myself as having a frozen heart than it did to think of myself as having one made of stone.  A stone heart is dead: a frozen heart just needs thawing.

I thought of my frozen heart as being like that of certain frogs who have the ability to completely freeze in the winter and then thaw out in spring, coming back to life.  I envisioned it encased in slowly thawing ice, one drop of water at a time.  I felt at first I needed to let this proceed slowly, so I did.  I would inwardly check in on the thawing process, visualizing my icebound heart, or the frog, very, very slowly dripping.

Then last January, perhaps due to the wake of a minor post-holiday episode when I crashed and felt really angry, I felt enraged that it seemed like I was afforded so few opportunities in my life to experience good emotions as opposed to so many times I had to experience negative ones.  In my mind, I picked up the Hammer and wasn’t able to control the impulse to smash the ice surrounding my heart to smithereens, internally screaming the entire time about how sick I was of almost never feeling anything but anger (SMASH) and pain (SMASH) and sadness (SMASH).  The ice fell to the ground in large chunks and I smashed those too until there was nothing left but slush and shards.

The whole time I was worried I was doing something potentially harmful, but I didn’t seem to be.  I could see my heart kind of hanging in the air in front of me, still dripping a bit of water, and could see it start beating, very very slowly.  For several months, that’s how it was: still very cold and dripping, but slowly beating, almost imperceptibly faster each time I checked.

In real life, this translated into a slightly more elevated ability to respond emotionally to other people (like my husband, *sigh*).  I felt a little less cut off and separate from everything.  This ability and these feelings have increased over time, corresponding with a warming of my visualized heart and a speeding of its beating.  It still beats more slowly than it should, it’s colder than it should be, and it beats irregularly when I’m fearful, but at least it’s no longer a giant chunk of glacially hard ice.

This has manifested physically as a sense of fullness and warmth in my chest area, but one that I can tell is incomplete.  I sense that something important that was missing has been put back into place or at least reactivated, but as I said, the process is as yet unfinished.  I used to feel an emptiness or a tightness in my chest along with occasional pains, but that has greatly reduced, and when it does, I just have to do a little emotional exploration to find out what’s causing the tension in that area.  I also visualize flooding my chest cavity with pinkish-green light, which symbolizes love and the heart chakra.  The effect is quite palpable.

I have not read enough of Dr. Carl Jung’s rather complicated works to understand the mechanisms behind this kind of directed visualization when applied to either psychology or my somatic work, which is obviously connected.  All I know is that by determining what the imagery in my mind symbolizes and then manipulating that imagery in the manner of a lucid dreamer, I effect change in my psyche as well as my body.  By transforming something that symbolizes something bad into something that symbolizes something good, I actually transform the bad thing into a good thing.  Furthermore, I do so far more quickly and effectively than would ever be possible with traditional therapeutic methods, such as talk therapy.  In fact, directed visualization and somatic work have been far preferred methods to me for dealing with my worst baggage than actually talking about it, which would actually be rather traumatizing.

It’s a shame that Western psychiatry shunned and abandoned Dr. Jung’s theories in the middle of the 20th century in favor of an attitude that judged the manic and the psychotic to be “untreatable” from a therapeutic standpoint and that the only thing to do was to invent drugs to control what was viewed as aberrant viewpoints and behaviors.  While drugs are a powerful and sometimes necessary tool in controlling the more severe mental disorders, there are other ways to treat people with these disorders that can result in healing, which means a reduction in their symptoms.  Whether this translates into a reduction in their medication is irrelevant, what matters is reducing their suffering.  Reducing their suffering eases the suffering of the people around them, which is what Western psychiatry seems to be so focused on when treating such people.

It was my opinion following my awakening five years ago that the Universe had broken my mind in such a way as to simultaneously give me the tools to put it together again, if that makes any sense.  The multiple and crippling layers of baggage and judgment that had been placed upon me up until that point in time were shattered into pieces that surrounded me, and while that shattering deeply affected the kind of person I am and how I view the world, it also gave me the ability to pick up each one of  those shattered pieces and examine them one by one for their worthiness.  Some were discarded after gleaning their lessons, others were kept, and yet others require repairing in an ongoing process.   This process involves a great deal of the same kind of visualization involved in seeing The Icebound Heart.

Western psychiatry calls these visualizations “hallucinations” because it fails to distinguish between outer visualizations in which people actually perceive what is not in the real world with their physical eyes and ears, and inner visualizations and “voices” that take place on a psychospiritual level in a kind of “inner landscape”.  Perhaps the only real distinguishment between the two groups of people is that one realizes what they “see” in their minds isn’t taking place in the real world, while the other does not.  That doesn’t make the inner world any less “real”, though, and by working with it, one can affect great change in one’s actual “real world”.

Operating within the paradigm of Western psychiatry is isolating and frightening, which is why I only engage with it for the purposes of maintaining my necessary medication while volunteering as little information about myself as possible, because I know what will be said, or worse, not said and accompanied by The Look of Concern.

On the flip side, operating within the paradigm of Jung’s psychospiritual analysis is, well, fun!  I have a whole universe in my head, a playground in which I have absolute power over anything that can hurt me, in which I can build my self-confidence as I battle those things and transform demons into angels.  This is a land of Dragons and Direwolves, of Ships that change form to suit conditions, of Magic Trees, Gardens, Forests, and Mountains, of Elves and Music That Never Ends.

Did my mind create this world in an effort to deal with the horrors of my life and the real world?  Possibly.  Yet this also falls under the heading of “gifts I was given in the process of being broken”.  I don’t think it matters if my inner landscape can be pathologized by Western psychiatry.  What matters is that it works and that by engaging with this landscape and manipulating what lives in it, I’m getting better, and it’s reflected in the mental imagery I see.

I began this mental journey five years ago, visualized by a canoe going down a canyon river.  That canoe went many places and turned into many different kinds of boat, even ones that flew.  Recently I saw the boat again (a fishing boat this time), loaded with people that represent all of my different inner parts, and we were headed to final port so we could go Home.  I feel this is accurately reflected in my real life as I settle into a new life in a new place and set about continuing my work of individuating and learning the symbolic language of my True Self, thereby healing myself, just as Dr. Jung predicted.