In this new episode of the podcast I continue with the theme of illness and healing that I began in the previous outing with Healing and the Unconscious. This time out I discuss the difficult experience of “spiritual dryness.”
This topic brings us into the realm of the psyche’s religious function, for it is one instance of giving careful consideration to what Jung calls “the irrational facts of experience.”1 In this case, however, it is an encounter with a painful set of facts that involve us in the most personal way because it is an experience of feeling psychologically depleted — a sudden and drastic restriction of motivation and will power.
Jung describes the experience this way: “One feels like lead, because no part of one's body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy.”2 He compares this to the idea of “loss of soul” found in many indigenous and shamanic traditions. This image can help us to feel into the specific quality of the experience more fully.
As I note in the episode:
Loss of soul points to both a loss of vitality, a sudden lack of some animating or motivating force in one’s life, as well as a quality of no longer feeling like oneself, a sense of feeling disconnected from one’s familiar experience of being.
It is in the Christian tradition that we find the experience of spiritual dryness most fully elaborated. It bears a close relationship to that much discussed ordeal known as the “Dark Night of the Soul.” In her masterful book, Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill compares the experience of the “Dark Night” to the developmental challenge of late adolescence when a new, mature personality is struggling to be born — a new state of being that one does not yet feel ready to inhabit. She writes:
“The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second or adult life.”3
At first, all that fills one’s consciousness of the experience is the “break-up of the old state of equilibrium.” It is, as I note in the episode, a wounding, a moment when we find our power to act has evaporated, such that we are “thrown back into the arms of life.”
To illustrate this experience, I turn to the story of Tristan and Iseult. I narrate part of a famous scene in which Tristan, suffering from an unhealing wound, takes to the sea in a boat with no sail and no oar in the hope that it will bring him to a land where he can be healed. It is a scene about entrusting oneself to the power of a larger Life, when one’s own small reserves have been exhausted, a theme I explore in depth throughout the episode.
I hope you enjoy this latest offering from Digital Jung. You can find this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts or simply by clicking this link: When the Soul Retreats.
Thanks for listening, and take good care!
Remainders
The phenomenon of spiritual dryness is one that occurs with some regularity. As Jung notes in regard to the work of individuation, “there are indeed a considerable number of arid patches to be worked through.”4 It is imperative, then, that we learn how to allow this experience to be part of the rhythm of life, particularly in the context of our inner lives.
In the following quote the religious writer Baron Friedrich von Hügel addresses just this necessity. Von Hügel, of course, is writing about the practice of prayer within the Christian tradition, but his underlying point pertains to any activity of creative living, be it in religion, psychology, science or the arts.
“If, then, spiritual dryness is indeed inevitable in the life of prayer, we will be much helped to bear these desert stretches, by persistent recognition — hence also, indeed especially, in our times of fervour — of the normality and the necessity of such desolation. We will thus come to treat desolation in religion as we treat the recurrence of the night within every twenty-four hours of our physical existence; or as bodily weariness at the end of any protracted exertion in our psychic life.”5
Upcoming Events
I’ll be presenting an online program this weekend for the C.G. Jung Institute of New England. I hope you’ll join there:
On Board the Pequod: Moby-Dick as an American Myth
C.G. Jung Institute of New England, Saturday, May 13th, 2023. For more details visit: www.cgjungne.com
The Undiscovered Self in ‘Collected Works, vol. 10’ by C.G. Jung
Concerning Rebirth in ‘Collected Works, vol. 9i’ by C.G. Jung
Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill
Selected Letters by C.G. Jung
The Life of Prayer by Baron Friedrich von Hügel
Wonderful episode! And the synchronicity so timely. Having recently been injured and having all of my plans on hold, there are so many unknowns, and the idea of submission you speak of is profound. Thank you so much for your important work. I am loving your book, Religious But Not Religious.
From 2013-15 I underwent a Jungian analysis for a severe neurosis. My analyst was a gifted soul and amplified my dream symbolism from his seemingly endless knowledge of mythology, alchemy, religions, literature, poetry. One of the symptoms of my repression was a complete loss of smell and taste. Almost two years to the day a resolution of my conflict resulted in the completer restoration of my sense of smell and taste. Needless to say I was ecstatic and thankful . I am a lover of honest food, wine and cooking. Then in late 2019 I experienced a sharp pain in my right ear and this virus (?)again obliterated my sense of smell and taste. I am back in therapy with another therapist. My first therapist with whom I had a special transference died of cancer in 2017. My current therapist is a fine person but the spark is not happening. I am venting so I hope that you do not mind. I can not really adapt to the anosmia. I must endure it. It takes a lot of joy out of life and has led to deterioration of our marital relationship of over 50 years.