We begin a new journey into a New Book, Feelings into Matter by Fred Allen Wolf and he begins by using an excellent metaphor that has left me pondering quite a bit and has been for most of my life as long as I can remember.
He shares the story of Narcissus who dies at the edge of the river gazing at his own reflection. He further says that each of us suffers a similar ” malady” (and I put that in quotation marks because the word means a disease or ailment.) as we gaze intently at the images we call our bodies. So think of the definition and the implications of that word for a moment. We dont however just don’t sit there like Narcissus obviously staring at our image, we must move on. We move on to the day to day matters of our everyday lives. However he says all the while we miss the echo of our soul our spirit calling to us. We live in continued stress from the anxiety of the ongoing battle between matter and spirit ( body and soul). But ironically it’s this battle that makes life worthwhile and leads to the wonderful experience of our everyday reality should we choose to see it that way.
I have as long as I can remember felt this battle within myself . I have always felt and have memories as a child of this sense of spirit and a greater longing within my being for expression. And yet here I found myself in this vehicle called a body and living a reality of me living in my family and the world I currently was in. Now I didn’t have a very traumatic childhood. I was raised by loving parents who had their share of issues as everyone does and can’t say that I had many complaints. We experienced as a family in my teenage years my brother going through mental health issues which emotionally affected us but I think this experience is what propelled me further to explore that stirring inside of my being for spirit to express itself more fully.
As I sit where I am today facing the challenges of today, I feel even more strongly this calling of spirit and reminding me of I am not just this body . Through this journey of beginning this book we will begin to see how as he magically weaves how coming into feeling , bringing mind into body on the one hand gives us the experience we call life, and the other hand provides each of us with a sense of loneliness or separation from all others. But as we shall see this is not what we have to believe and accept because as we begin to identify with the true nature of our being, our feelings our minds , our bodies , our lives begin to change
Maria Jacques