JUNG and THE MEDICINE WHEEL

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What I appreciate about CG Jung is that he was so wide-open to Spirit. And that is what I also love about Shamanism. Jung was able to enter traditional cultures in Africa and the USA and understand things from their point of view. This was highly unusual at a time when westerners looked down on such cultures as primitive, and tried to understand them from a western rational, scientific standpoint - their so-called 'objectivity'.

The Native American Medicine Wheel, which sees life as a circle and therefore as a totality, is a typical mandala symbol, which Jung pointed out are found all over the world in religious symbolism and in dreams. Jung painted mandalas himself.

The particular connection I want to make in this piece is between Jung's psychological types and the Medicine Wheel. At a seminar I attended, the well-known psychological astrologer and Jungian analyst Liz Greene pointed out that the 4 psychic functions that Jung described - Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation - corresponded so closely to the 4 elements that we find in astrology (in which Jung had a strong interest) that he must surely have drawn inspiration from that source for his typology. These elements are Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

JUNG'S ASTROLOGY CHART

Liz Greene related how she asked Jung's daughter if it was true that Jung sometimes drew up astrological charts for his patients. His daughter replied no, Jung got her to draw them up because he wasn't very good at maths, but it was for all his patients! That is a measure of just how intuitively - or we might say divinatory - Jung was. But he had to keep this hidden, because he had a reputation as a scientist to protect. And as any astrologer, or tarot reader, or anyone who talks to spirit guides will know, the intuition (used loosely) is a quick way in to the essence of what needs to be addressed.

JUNG

Fundamental to astrology are the 4 elements, in the same form that they are used in the Medicine Wheel. They come before the signs and the planets and the houses, and I sometimes think it would be good practice to spend quite some time looking at clients' elemental balance, working it, seeing what can be drawn out of it. The reason is that when something is basic and experiential - as the 4 elements are - then as symbols they carry a lot of power, because we feel close to them.

And herein lies the power of the Medicine Wheel. It is based on these same 4 elements into which we can unfold our lives, into which we can look at our lives, and get to know the different elements in ourselves and bring them into a deeper harmony: that is the ultimate purpose of the exercise. And these 4 elements can become living presences in our lives. And they are all around us in the Sun and the Wind and the Rain and the Earth. The outer world reflects our inner world, in a deep sense it IS our inner world, for we are nothing but what we see around us. Imagine an eagle looking down at us, this precious individuality of ours would just be one more speck among many.

So there is a clear correspondence between Jung's psychological types and the 4 elements as found in both astrology and the Medicine Wheel. There are many wheels, and they put the elements in different directions, but as far as I am aware the elements still carry the same basic symbolism.

So using Jung's typology, we have Air corresponding to Thinking, Water to Feeling, Sensation to Earth and Intuition to Fire. The particular Wheel I use works very well with Jung, because Jung put his types into pairs of opposites, and the same elemental pairings are to be found on that Wheel.

And what characterises these Jungian pairings is that if one of them is strong in you, then the opposite is more challenging. And one of the 4 will be your leading function, with its opposite being your weakest. So if you are primarily a thinking type, then knowing what you are feeling, and consciously acting from that, will be your weak point. The other pair will also tend to be imbalanced in you, but not to the same degree.

Just as a knowledge of the Wheel can bring symbolic elemental power to Jung's typology, so can Jung's typology perhaps bring awareness of where we can look for imbalance in our ongoing journey around the Wheel.

A classic imbalance one finds among 'spiritual' people is along the Fire-Earth axis - or what Jung would call Intuition and Sensation. I call this axis Inspiration and Incarnation. 'Spiritual' people have often experienced the inspiration of the East, but then incarnating that can be the challenge. Hence Jack Kornfeld's book 'After the Ecstasy, the Laundry'. As a young man, Kornfeld went to the East and became a monk, and returned to the US, planning to be a teacher. It all fell apart, and he became a taxi-driver in New York. He did end up as a teacher, but he had to do the journey of Incarnation, of arriving on the planet, of engaging with the world-as-it-is, first. When people use their spirituality to avoid incarnation - maybe to avoid experiencing woundedness - it is also termed spiritual bypass.

Jung's collaborator Toni Wolff also had this imbalance: she was highly intuitive, a gifted guide to the unconscious, but quite otherworldly too: when Jung asked her to gather some chives once, he was aghast when she dug up the whole plant instead of just cutting some.

These imbalances usually need addressing, but they may also be just the type of person we are. So 'balance' is in this sense misleading. Yes we may well need more Feeling/Water if we are a Thinking/Air type: but we will probably always remain primarily Air.

It's probably truer to say that we need enough of the lacking element/function to move towards the unique wholeness that is ours to find. There is no centre to Jung's typology (though I think it is there by implication - the Jungian Self), but the Wheel has a Centre, which is us, here, now, and it is the most powerful place of all: it is the place where the elements come together in that blend that is unique to ourselves. There are often crises along the way, because adding say a bit more Earth to our Fire, or Sensation to our Intuition, is not usually a simple matter: it is usually about addressing a deep-seated way of being that needs to move on, and life will often of its own accord bring us to that point. And it can take some years.

So I have described the Fire-lacking-Earth imbalance. The other way round is the simple materialist Peter Bell for whom, as Wordsworth put it, "A primrose by a river's brim, A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more." Many people are happy to live their lives in this imbalanced way: if they are fortunate, the things that gave them a sense of meaning will at some point cease to do so, and again there can be a crisis until the voice of Fire/Intuition is listened to.

The Thinking-Feeling/Air-Water axis often (but by no means always) divides into men and women/masculine and feminine. And this imbalance often starts to naturally remedy itself in the second half of life. Many imbalances are like this, we do not need to worry about them, for life will take care of them as we age.

THE MAD SCIENTIST: THINKING DIVORCED FROM FEELING

The Thinking imbalance is well expressed by the line John Lennon borrowed "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Its opposite pole, Feeling, brings us more into the present and into experience. Plans hardly ever work out exactly as we'd hoped, and that is because they are often an abstraction in the first place. It is much better to go with what is happening, trust in that, and the next stage is often obvious. It is natural for many people to have this imbalance, but it can be exacerbated where there is early trauma and the thinking function is used to avoid the feeling function. So sometimes these imbalances are natural, and may or may not move on, and sometimes they are pathological and need to move on, and maybe for most of us they will be a mixture of both.

The Feeling imbalance roots us one-sidedly in subjective experience, as though what we feel tells us all we need to know. Bringing in Air/Thinking, treating other perspectives as real, even though we may not having a feeling relationship with them (yet), but which do have an undeniable truth to them, is one way of balancing this. In a way it is childish to treat our own feelings as absolute, and adult to have other perspectives, and this relates to the Elder-Child axis of Air-Earth on the Medicine Wheel.

So returning to Jung, his typology states that we will have a leading function that will reveal our primary weakness in its opposite function. But the other pair will also be imbalanced, though not to the same degree. So if you are an Air/Thinking type, you will probably need to consciously address Water/Feeling, but also either Intuition or Sensation, depending which of these is stronger.

And this adds another layer to how we can think of ourselves. I would say I am a Thinking-Intuitive type. Addressing Feeling has been a long and slow process, and it wasn't until my mid 50s that I began to feel adequate, I had always been aware there was something missing. I have always had to push myself a bit with Earth/Sensation - I would rather be living in a world of imaginative stimulation - but Earth came earlier and more easily than Feeling, and there are ways also in which I relish Earth, particularly certain practical tasks, or walking on Dartmoor, where I live. But in both cases, there are ways in which life has pushed these imbalances towards me and helped me take care of them.

Both Jung's typology and the Medicine Wheel are systems, and so not to be taken too literally or rigidly. We always need to come back to our ongoing experience of ourselves, outside of labels. And that is when we are at the centre, and there can be a joy to that, a dynamic synergy.

It is also worth asking other people for their assessment of your typology. Jung regarded himself as a Thinking type, whereas a biographer I read recently took issue with this, and made a case for him being a Feeling type. Maybe there is no definitive answer with these things, and maybe that is just as well.