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Inner Man, Inner Woman An Interview with Marion Woodman Copyright © 1993, 1997 by Bert H. Hoff  Bert: Why is Men’s Work important? Marion: I think that we are in an evolutionary state in consciousness. Women need to do their work alone, and men need to do their work alone, in order to come to a new understanding. Women, of their own femininity and men, of their own masculinity, in order for the sexes to come together at a new level. I think that all the work that we are doing separately is in order that we can eventually talk to each other and understand each other at a new level. Certainly, in working with women’s dreams, as women become more conscious of their own femininity a very new masculinity develops within women. I think this is equally true of men, that as they work on their masculinity they are beginning to find a new femininity. The dialog is very different from what it was, even five years ago. Bert: The inner dialog? Marion: Not only the inner dialog, but as within, so without. When you do start to interrelate, the outer dialog is very different. Instead of coming from a place of judgment or blame, we’re beginning to understand what love is. We’re just beginning to have some understanding of what soul meeting soul is. Fifteen years ago I tried to do groups together, and both the men and the women asked to work alone. They couldn’t find their own center, so long as they were trying to work together. But now they want to work together. People who have done their work on themselves alone are very, very happy and anxious to work together in a brand new way. Bert: So that’s what happening in the On Men and Women series, and the other Applewood conferences you do with Robert Bly? Marion: Yes. We’re trying to bring the dialog into a new level, where we can genuinely share what is deepest in our own hearts. That means you can’t be judged. The minute you feel you are being judged, you are no longer being yourself. Bert: As my wife and I do our dialog, it reminds me of what I saw on the Applewood videotape. You talk of spirit meeting spirit and soul meeting soul, yet no matter how much we try to do that, other stuff comes up and it turns into almost an explosion against each other. Marion: Yes, that’s true. I think that there’s a lot of stored anger and grief in our bodies. It comes not only from our own generation, but from past generations. Until that is released at a personal level, you can’t get beyond it to what I would call the soul level, or the transcendent level. That personal anger has to be recognized. If you try to leap over it, eventually it will come back and impede the dialog. I call it soul work, because as long as we relate only on a sexual, biological level we’re really not conscious of what genuine love can be. We’re still working in terms of need, of dependency. I think that what we’re moving towards now is a love that is far more encompassing than at the biological level. When the inner eyes are opened, the inner ears are opened, we become aware of a a sensibility and a sensitivity that is way beyond what was known twenty years ago. That’s not true for everybody, of course. Some people have always been at this more evolved level. We’re all evolved at different levels. But as a culture we’re beginning to realize that there’s something new evolving. Bert: I think we can see that when Robert Bly’s Iron John and Clarissa Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves top the New York Times bestseller list. There seems to be a cultural hunger to dive into this level. Marion: Yes. I think people are much more aware of their own inner partners. They are recognizing that if they can set up a genuine relationship with the inner partner, then this is the creative source in their own life. That’s what Jung calls the Royal Marriage -- the Inner Marriage where you’re married to your own inner God or, in the case of men, your own inner Goddess. But the recognition of that leaves the personal relationship with the real man or woman on the outside free of the God or Goddess projections. Then you don’t demand far more than the human person can give. The human person doesn’t have to try to be perfect. Bert: Does that mean that we shouldn’t marry early, before we have developed the inner relationships? Marion: I don’t know. I think that some people, even if they do marry, can still keep on working on the relationship. I’ve known many couples that have worked a lifetime on the same relationship they began with, in their early twenties. But the marriage they have now is not the marriage they started out with. Bert: So they awaken and become alive together. Marion: Yes. The great danger is that one will move faster than the other in the relationship. For periods of time they will seem to fly right past each other. That’s where a great deal of patience is required. Bert: I think I’ve seen a lot of that, where one partner grows and the other partner doesn’t. The result usually is that they need to grow apart, and leave each other. Marion: That’s right ... for a period of time. Or, it may be that they have to separate forever. If they’re not both working on themselves, then one will have to go on alone. Often, however, if they have the patience to hold, and if they’re both working, I find they do come back together after a separation. Because they’re coming back to a new person. Bert: One of the themes in your book Addiction to Perfection is that as women are taking a more active role in the outside world, they are robbed of their femininity through the pursuit of masculine goals that are in themselves a parody of what masculine really is. "Perfect job, perfect house, perfect clothes, so what? What does it all add up to? There’s got to be more than this." You seem to describe the stress and the emptiness that men describe in our Wisdom Council circles. Marion: I see patriarchy as a power principle, wanting to get control over one’s self, another person or over nature. I think that men and women are equally damaged by this, because it sets up the perfectionist goals of ambition, competition, moving most efficiently. If one persists in that, the heart goes out of it. You become a mask, doing the best you can to fulfill your goals. But then when you go home at night you are so exhausted that you haven’t got time to develop what I would call the feminine values. I’m not saying that you should have the feminine values at home and the masculine values at work. Ideally, there should be a balance of masculine and feminine in both realms. But if it’s not at home, if it’s not in the personal relationships, you just feel empty. Men are no different from women in that. Bert: My boss is not paying me to do soul work at work, But when I come home, I guess I need to be doing the soul work in my non-work time. Marion: Don’t you think, though, that even at work, as you work with soul work, more and more you perceive the real person? Bert: I think that’s true. I’m open to seeing things in the relationships at work that I had not been seeing before. Marion: It’s a kind of space to work in. It calls forth a different kind of expression of the soul where you are working, as well as in the relationships around you. And I think that other people pick that up. If you’re conscious enough to be seeing their reality, they respond to you in a different way. Bert: In Addiction to Perfection you point out that perfection is defeat. You go on to say that living by principles is not living your own life. Care to talk about this? Marion: Perfection is not a human attribute. We are not perfect. Wholeness is what most of us want. We want to find our own totality. So therefore, to put perfection up as the first order is essentially to say, "I am not a human being, I can be as a God. And I will not have any truck with human lust, human greed, human filth. I am better than that." That puts you into what I call a suicidal expectation, because you cannot live up to that. That’s where addiction comes in. Because the addict may have tried to reach that kind of perfection, and found himself or herself more and more closed off from the human condition, more and more centered on perfection. This will end up in death, because you cannot be perfect. In trying to escape from your imperfections, you get into an addiction, which has a death wish at the center of it. Because you are continually failing. Bert: I feel more open to accepting human lust into my own life than human greed or filth. But I imagine I need to recognize the inner shadow and the human greed. Marion: The thing is, Bert, that if you try to be perfect you’re going at a terrific speed. Because you’re trying to achieve the impossible. And our body instincts cannot keep up with that speed. So the natural satiation point is never achieved. That’s where the greed goes completely out of control. That’s the American consumer society, as I see it. In normal circumstances, people eat what they need, buy what they need, and live by their instinctual need. But if your body is going so fast that it can’t recognize when it’s satisfied, then all those instinctual drives go out of control. And there is no satisfaction, anywhere. Does that make any sense to you? Next Page http://maxpages.com/marionwoodman/woodman5 |
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