Tension and Transcendence

By Amanda Moreno

I’ve spent the past six weeks more than 3,000 miles from home, staying with a teacher-friend on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Here I am, a week and a half after the fact, still trying to get some traction in integrating whatever happened — because it was a time of such incredible growth. And so once again it’s time to use my tools.

Photo by Eric Francis.
Photo by Eric Francis.

These days I’m thinking a lot about Jung’s theory of the transcendent function.

This theory basically says that when consciousness is engaged in tension — when it’s torn between seeming opposites — the transcendent function is what arises in an attempt to bridge the two.

It is the source of incredible creative energy — just as polarization is the source of incredible destruction. These days, I feel like I’m existing as a mess of seemingly irreconcilable opposites — and so I just keep reminding myself to hold the tension, and I try to do something constructive with the energy. Or I just cross my fingers and hope for the best.

My heart has longed for total immersion in ‘healing’ work for some time. My time in Florida was the closest I’ve come. But now that the thirst for immersion has been somewhat satisfied, my creative juices are flowing full-force whenever they want to.

There lies one source of tension, because when my body is sitting in an office (at a very worthy non-profit that serves my direct community, mind you), creative energy is pulsing through me. Although I’m grateful for that baseline paycheck, and can maintain a positive attitude at my job, I long for the freedom to focus on my passion, and to incorporate what I’ve just learned in work with clients.

So what DID I uncover?

I learned that after five years spent separating myself from my fixation on the myth of soul mate, I’m ready to revisit it and bring it into my professional work.

I realized that when someone told me that my genius lies in understanding the complexities of the human heart, they were onto something.

I discovered that I have so much to learn about karmic patterns of relationship dynamics, energetic boundaries and kink and everything sacredly sexual — and that I’m really frickin’ excited about all of it and want to explore it all NOW; but I also want to build containers of trust in which to do that work. Which takes time.

I learned that life is truly wrapped in synchronicities, some of which [re]-introduced me to Sophia, divine wisdom, and a new understanding of the myth of separation — just as the asteroid Sophia (which, natally, conjoins my Leo ascendant, squares my Scorpio Moon, and opposes my Aquarian Sun) was squaring my nodes: something unfinished is being revisited. I began working with asteroid chart delineation and found a whole maze of wonderful discovery that’s sent me plunging into the study of Gnosticism and lineages of hidden feminine wisdom.

I learned that the modality I’m being taught by my Floridian teacher, Deep Memory Process is the absolute perfect application of the combination of evolutionary astrology, depth psychology and shamanism. It’s a form of cathartic past life regression therapy and soul retrieval that is both transcendent and deep and is geared towards healing trauma in a way that gives me hope for the world. Understanding the depth of my commitment to this work brought me to tears one day — and, oh: the power of being connected to purpose.

I broke up with the tarot deck I’ve been using every single day for the past six years or so at the same time as I decided to go on a divination fast. Well, a tarot divination fast. The quest to trust my intuition has taken a new form, and not relying on the cards for personal insight is strange. And liberating.

I’ve also started coming to terms with the fact that while my soul is calling out for a simple, deep, long-term intimate connection with one other person, it is also voraciously questing for autonomy, freedom, exploration and variety. I don’t in any way find those seeming-opposites to be mutually exclusive, but they feel irreconcilable at times, especially because most people don’t have the framework to be constructive listeners when I need to talk about it. Or perhaps it just feels like a daunting task to find one partner, let alone several, who can understand and support those needs. And so I’m just holding that tension, hoping for the best.

New understandings about my needs in relationship are rocking the foundations of my beliefs about family and relationship and intimacy. Not because my thoughts have changed that much, per say, but because my emotional body has changed — my felt sense of knowing what I want.

Due to super-whammy Saturn transits, a deep restructuring of everything I am has uncovered a felt sense of my own vulnerability, rather than just the rational understanding that it must be there. Work with my inner child has uncovered a need for trust and intimacy alongside a deep-seated belief that there’s no way relationship won’t end in betrayal or sudden loss (thank you, Uranus in Scorpio square the nodes from the fourth house).

And yet… for the first time in my life I do have a sense that intimacy and depth can happen — that familial bonds can exist without traumatic endings. That hope feels like a sunlit, powdered quartz beach in Florida. With dolphins. It feels like my heart is thawing out. But it also feels scary.

As someone who prefers to engage non-monogamous relationships, I’m finding that I’m questioning my wants and needs. And because they seem to be flitting between polarities, I’m reminding myself that part of the work of handling paradox — of engaging the transcendent function — has to do with holding the tension without succumbing to the urge to cling to one side or the other; rather, waiting until a third option comes forward. Waiting until something new is created.

And right now, it just feels like so much is being created, which is exciting and yet horrifying. So I rely on some laughter and my shiny new motto, which is: we’ll just see what happens.

9 thoughts on “Tension and Transcendence”

  1. I’m so heartened with how often I’m reading about the desire for continuity and deep relationships and fulfilment – creating and mending and holding space.

    It seems to imply regeneration of whole personhood (maybe even the spark that will grow to renew our culture/society?) rather than fragmentation or disillusion.

    I loved too what HS wrote last week…

    xxxp

  2. I feel this. I’m going through something similar in regards to being in the middle of two seemingly opposite relationship needs/desires. I’m in a monogamous relationship, and I feel the need to explore the depths of this relationship to see where it goes. On the other hand, I like variety. I’ve explained this to my partner, more than once. It’s a conversation we’ve revisited a few times over the past year. It’s never an easy conversation to have. What I’ve found is that just being able to talk about the possibility of having sex outside of the relationship has done wonders to relieve the tension I live with. When it seems almost unbearable for me to abstain from sex outside the relationship, we’ll talk about it, and then I’ll sort of re-think things. For example, the last conversation we had about it, she said she was ok with me sleeping with someone else. She laid down some specific guidelines, and I agreed. You would have thought I would have been jumping for joy, and immediately making arrangements to have one of the sexual escapades I’ve been fantasizing about. Wrong. Instead, I started questioning, “is this really what I want?”. I don’t have a definitive answer, and I don’t think I have to have one. I think it’s enough that the door has been opened. It’s enough that my girlfriend and I can talk about it, and that she understands.

  3. Alexander – I’m quite familiar with that cycle. It creates quite the conundrum when it comes to having faith. Sorry for your pain!

    And goatwool – that’s quite the compliment. Many, many thanks!

  4. In the realm and sensibilities of the sacred, ( of which lately I personally need to weave sacrifice into the meaning of sacred ). Your blog post is one of the sexiest string of words I have read in a while. Thank you for your personal expression and sharing and giving.
    I also relate to the process of fasting from routine soulful and spiritual practices at times.

  5. Hi Amanda. Just to add that I heartily wish you the fulfilling outcome you seek in your relationship life. I hear you and am in EXACTLY the same space. I thought a few short weeks ago that it had arrived – alas, yet another painful karmic lesson beset me. The time for healing, rather than quenching, of painful longings is well overdue.. the time is now! 😀

  6. Aqueryass- you’re welcome! And I’m not done with Tarot cards all together. I simply had to give up my Thoth deck (too sticky, too much history) and decided to use the opportunity to cut back on using it as divination for myself. I’m just looking at a card (or two. or three. ahem.) a day from the Voyager deck in order to keep “learning” the deck, and have changed the way I do readings with clients to try to work on the whole “intuition” thing.

    HuggingScorpio – thank you, once again, for sharing. I can relate in many ways, one of which is that I had a moment about 2 weeks into my trip (ok, it was more like 24 hours) where my longing and general anxiety surrounding separation from my lover was fairly incapacitating. I finally decided to lay down and do some journeying to try to get guidance. But it wasn’t working. And then the thought occurred to me – why don’t I just CALL my lover and talk to him? So I did. And the communication that resulted was so much more helpful. How novel! 😉

    And thanks for the book recommendation.

    Alexander – thank you so much for chiming in there. I’ve never really used tarot as a predictive tool, but a compulsive quality of seeking outside information had crept in to the way I was using it. It is still one of my most valuable tools, but I did need to step back a bit, as I mentioned above. I’m still using it for clients, but am relying less on spreads than on just flipping cards over as the client is talking in order to see what pings into my consciousness, what images come to my attention, and then going from there. My first experience using it like that happened Friday (well, my first four experiences) and the readings all went really well.

    That interplay between “fate” and “free will” never ceases to amaze me.

  7. I wanted to make an observation about tarot here… simply because it has been much mentioned in both article and comments. If we think of The Magician’s relationship to the suits, which comes into play immediately after The Fool begins his journey, we recognise something definitive.

    The Magician has a choice of Cups, Wands, Swords or Pentacles to work with in the card. Because of the linearity of our frames of cogitation, we tend to set these exclusively as ‘ors’. But in reality, we would ideally work with all suits simultaneously. It is likely however that this remains beyond our neuropsychological capacities at this juncture of human evolutionary consciousness.

    Coming back to the magus we can readily see that working even with exclusive choices there are many possible ‘next steps’ in our decision making processes and actions in the immediate, shorter and longer term future.

    Imagine yourself as many different selves, existing in parallel ‘multiverses’, each one contingent upon personal choices. Now recognise how your emotions even can shift within minutes and the perceived universe that is apprehended subjectively quickly shifts along with it!

    We rarely perceive our metaphorical multiverse shifts! Tarot however responds to us according to our situatedness within subjective frame. It reflects, NOT an objective world of ‘happenings out there’ so much as how our current interiority would outwork into a particular exteriority, predicated upon The Magician within’s choices.

    Amanda, I take it that your laying down of tarot is a reflection of the healing you seek within your psyche. And this is, of course, deeply liberating.

    Tarot will always reflect your inner conditions back to you. The point may seem to be ‘outcomes’ – Google ANY card as ‘love or relationship outcome’ and you will see endless evidence of this – but really, any divined outcome is really in some senses ‘Who am I at the end of a certain sequence of cause effect, in terms of this question, based upon the real world choices my interiority would lead me to make IN THIS MOMENT’.

    You know you are growing once you can both clearly see and hold onto the fact that the outcome is always somehow within you. We may wish to imagine factors outside ourselves that we cannot control, having a bearing, but truly it is our choices that always determine our ongoing and flux-ridden life outcomes. It can be no other way!

  8. This really hit home for me Amanda, thank you. I commend you on your healing journey and all the fruit it yields and will continue to.

    I recently had what I would call a relationship opportunity. Although, that is probably not the first word I reached for. After I got back from my vacay (and frankly most of the summer for that matter along side my girlfriend) feeling disoriented, drained and totally out of balance with my sense of self and purpose. It was fun and no doubt enjoyable to spend this time with her. But I pretty much ended the relationship last weekend. I faced some really interesting aspects that I can only describe as utterly confusing and tormenting. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted. I thought maybe I wasn’t attracted to her, or that I was lying to myself, or that I was some psychopath completely cut off from my emotions.

    I needed some deeper insight. I meditated, did smudging prayers, visualized etheric cords being cut, did positive thought processes, saw my Reiki master, etc. I was pretty sure my boundaries were all messed up and that I couldn’t think or feel what I needed to feel because I was so clouded by someone else’s pain.

    Even Tarot was giving me two meanings on things!

    But something occurred to me throughout all of this. The intense crying and pain I felt had a different nature to it than if I was really trying to free myself of something negative. It felt like I was throwing away something good for me that wasn’t at all broken.

    Today I did more meditation and asked for clarity and signs that reflected how I really felt. That I could put myself into alignment with my feelings and be open to seeing the truth was my intention and that I am freeing myself of any beliefs that are holding me back. And after responding to her to communicate openly, I went over to meet.

    We had a good talk and I really spoke strongly about my concerns. I asked her what her expectations were of me, what I needed, my fears, etc. I needed to feel free somehow. Not in a way that was non committal, but in a more less-attachy kind of way, if that makes sense. I was pretty emotional and it felt more like my heart was opening up in all of this. I have a lot more clarity because I felt good about being there, that it – all of this – was good for me.

    You nailed it: our emotional guidance system is the most important thing of all. Thank you.

    Btw, my mom is reading a lot about gnosticism and the Sophia myth too. You perhaps know this book already but if not, it’s one to get. It’s called “Not In His Image” by John Lash.

    http://www.amazon.ca/Not-His-Image-Gnostic-Ecology/dp/193149892X

  9. Wow, sounds like an intensive course on healing! Thanks for sharing your tools. I may have to try a few out. But, I’m hanging steady with my Tarot cards as they are singing loudly and I like the tune.

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