| Transformation during turbulent
times A Body, Mind, and Spirit Conference Preview: An Interview with Jacquelyn Small by Tim Miejan She's an author, minister, licensed psychotherapist, speaker, teacher, consultant, addiction counselor and professional trainer. But Jacquelyn Small perhaps is best described as a down-to-earth guide to human beings. For 30 years she has written, taught and spoke on soul-based psychology and personal transformation, and her work is not over. She continues to find new ways to explain unchanging principles that guide us from the shadows into the light. She will present a talk entitled "Transformation During Turbulent Times" and a workshop, "Healing the Human Shadow," during the Body, Mind & Spirit Conference October 11-12 at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie [see end of interview for details]. Jacquelyn has written eight books, including Becoming a Practical Mystic, Embodying Spirit, Awakening in Time and Becoming Naturally Therapeutic. She is a regular columnist for Science of Mind Magazine. She has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, America's Talking, Wisdom Television and Radio, New Dimensions Radio, NPR's People's Pharmacy and a CNN's series on Alternative Healing, and she is the founding director of Eupsychia (pronounced u-si'-ki-a) Institute, which means "good psyche" or "well being" in Greek, a not-for-profit professional training and healing program in Soul-Based Psychology and Integrative Breathwork. With her staff of dedicated, experienced spiritual therapists, she conducts workshop intensives throughout North America on a regular basis. She spoke with The EDGE by phone from her home in Texas about her upcoming events in Menomonie. What message do you want to leave with people who attend your talk? Jacquelyn Small: When things get rough out here in our outer life, especially situations we feel we have no control over, such as the economy, decisions that are being made for the whole United States, and then you bring all that down into how that affects the individual family life, stress can get so high that people can become obsessed with looking outward for the answer, looking out here somewhere for something that can make them feel better. A lot of times that is what causes people to start drinking a lot of alcohol or taking a lot of medications or people will get depressed and don't know what to do about it. Perhaps a lot of temper will come up and we'll get irritated with people around us. I think the worst thing we can do is start projecting on other people and other things as being the problem. You know, there's some truth in all of that, because things that happen in our outer life are hard for us to deal with. You get fired from your job. Your money runs out. You've got a kid who's become an addict. Life is tough. What our work represents, and what I've been doing for 30 years now, is learning a whole lot first of all about myself and taking my own self through a lot of processes that can wake me up internally to who it is I am inside me. And having done a lot of that work with literally thousands of people, what I see is that we can put a process in place that gives us a way to work on ourselves all day and to turn inward, rather than spending so much time outward. We turn inward and look at what is in the self, which I possess within me, that I can utilize now to give me strength and to give me hope. We've learned some principles about life that just simply are true. There's a mental attitude you can develop, especially if you will come and study and work with groups so you get feedback and get to hear from other people besides yourself. Group work is very powerful at a time like this, because, first of all you will discover that you're not the only one who is having these feelings. You feel like you belong to a group, instead of just being this poor, little, miserable individual who doesn't know how to live life. So there's support there when you begin to realize you are not alone. That's an important key: Find groups of like-minded people who you can relate to, so you can share from your heart what's going on with you and be met by people who have some good ideas or have some compassion. It's just simply so you can be heard. We call this work personal transformation. People start learning that the Self is greater than its conditions. No matter what happens to you in the outer life, you can look around the world and you can see heroes. You can see that in people like Martin Luther King, or in people closer to that in your life, who gut it up and make it through some really horrible things, even worse than what you've gone through. So you start wondering: What is it in that person that gives them the strength to carry on, even though one of their sons just got killed in a car wreck or they lost their job and could no longer pay the mortgage on their house? What is it that gave that person the power to go forward. Now, some people find that kind of help through their religion. They have a faith in God or a faith in a higher power that can lead them through times like that. There are other people that really religion doesn't do it for them. They tried going to churches and tried believing certain religious beliefs and wind up going, "Uh uh. That doesn't do it for me." We try not to make judgments about what people decide to believe in. We feel everyone has a right to religion and whatever kind of psychological school they are going to believe in. We do know that there are some keys. Whenever you can remember to put a process in place that can keep you focusing inward during the day, rather than every time something horrible happens to you, then you get all hooked in it and caught up in it. We teach people to get up every morning and start the day out with a willingness. Just say, "I am just willing to be here in the world today and do whatever I can do to make it a better day for myself and a better day for others." That's called an invocation. You invoke that type of attitude. An invocation is a technique that's been around forever. Some people call it affirmations. Some people might even call it prayer. We take our power back, rather than letting the world become the power that comes in on us. We stand tall and take our power back. We say, "No matter what's going to happen to me today, I'm going to bring more love everywhere I go, or more truth or I'm going to be more peaceful or I'm going to be less selfish and think more about the people I am with rather than focusing on myself. It depends upon what you want to do. It's everyone's choice. There's an invocation you can do every morning that will start your day out where you are in more control of it. You become more self-aware. Small: Absolutely. And the interesting thing is, it works kind of like magic. When you start deciding to accept life as it is, rather than always trying to struggle through with feelings of low self-esteem or feelings that there's an enemy out there who's coming after you -- and accept the fact that you're a self like everyone else who deserves to have as good of a life as everybody else -- it seems like opportunities come to you that you might not have even noticed otherwise. So that's one of the processes we share with people now. We're going through a very troubled time right now in the world. The other thing we teach people to learn how to learn with is the concept of knowing that everything that happens to you is not just personal. We're living also in a transpersonal world, meaning a world that is beyond just the personal. Humanity itself is going through a big transformation right now. We, as a species group, are changing. That means the human psyche is being imploded now with a lot of new thoughts, a lot of new fears, a lot of need to learn to live perhaps in a different way than we ever had before. There are cycles of death and rebirth that whole species go through -- and whole nations and whole cultures. Frankly, and you'll probably agree with me, I feel there's a whole lot of that going on right now. Indeed. Small: There're just certain ways that we've lived here in the world together that aren't working anymore. So we've got to be willing to go inward, to find the creativity within us to bring forward our part in whatever we can do to make this a better world. How does your workshop on Healing the Human Shadow fit into that? Small: In our process, we put a lot of emphasis on what we call shadow work. Every single one of us has a dark side. By that, I don't mean it's evil. I don't think the shadow is evil. The human shadow is just the part of you that is still unconscious. Think of the psyche as a sphere of energy that sort of rules our life. It's our thinking processes, our heart, our inner life. If part of my inner life is filled with light and consciousness, that part of me is going to behave very well in the world, because I'm going to be very aware. But there may be a part of me that is still living in the dark, a part that I don't even know about. That could be for two reasons. One, I may still be innocent about it. I have never been tested in that part of life before so I don't know I have this problem, or this piece of unconsciousness, that lives within me. Or it can be that I was damaged as a child. I may have really been wounded by parenting that hurt me, then I repressed parts of me that never did get known about. Those parts of me are living in the unconscious part of the psyche. When one of those parts of me gets activated, I tend to act out in a way that's inappropriate. You might say something to me that's just a perfectly normal thing to say, but I want to bite your head off. And not knowing why I am doing it. Small: I might not have a clue why. I might decide that all men are dangerous, so I refuse to have a relationship with a male person. Or I might decide that I'm no good and I can never be a leader and can never make it as a successful person. So I'm living a life where I never get any of my own goals met. With shadow work, we just bring it right out. We go inward through such processes as guided imagery to music and we allow people to get an image of that little person who is still living inside of them and is not getting noticed and wants to be known. And I tell you, some of the most interesting things come out. You'd be amazed at some of the things people have hidden in their unconscious minds. Rarely is it ever a demon or a devil. A lot of times, it's a little wounded child -- or a part of you, like a dancer or an artist or a leader, that never got to develop. The shadow can be a positive part of yourself that never got a chance to develop, because you never focused on them or paid any attention to them. So in just a two-hour process, we won't have a lot of time to do some of the things we do in six-day workshops, but I'll have enough time to give people a concept of what the shadow really is and to help them to start walking through life noticing the times they have reactions to things. Any time I have a reaction to something, when I get strongly angry or strongly upset or have a strong need to defend myself or to prove that I am right, we call that reactivity. Any time I have a reaction, it's warning me that there's a part of me I don't know very well yet. Shadow work enables us to withdraw our projections and learn how to live with a great sense of integrity, owning our own way of being, owning our own weak spots, owning our own places where we sometimes make mistakes. We also learn that there's forgiveness that goes with that, and also acceptance. Everybody has a shadow. Once you start learning to own your own shadow and just realize, "Hey, I'm not perfect and I'm not a fully enlightened individual," then you develop a lot of compassion for other people when you see them caught up in their own shadow and doing things that aren't working in their life. The shadow is a very sacred part of the psyche. In terms of our collective shift right now, do you see us headed toward a time in which we are all living more empowered lives, with integrity? Small: Yes. In the past, we've been taught to give our power away to authorities outside of us, like a doctor or a preacher or a teacher or God or an angel or whatever. We're taught that everything is outside of us, that we're supposed to look up to. That fine and I hope we have learned that, especially in areas of religion. It's good to know that you have an inner guide or a God that you can believe in that's bigger than you are. And it's perfectly fine to give your power away to something like that, if it really is an entity that is bigger than you are. But co-dependence happens when we start giving our power away to each other. If I go to a psychic and the psychic tells me how I should be leading my life, I might say, "Well, you know, even though that doesn't feel right, I guess she said it so I better do it." That's not going to help us much. I think the shift that we're making is to learn to turn inward now and to quit being so obsessed with the outer world. We need to turn inward and find that piece of us that's very whole, because we all have a True Self that lives inside of us -- a wise being. After all, we're all a little divine spark of the big bonfire that created us! And no matter what language you want to put that in -- you can put it in religious language or you can put it in the language of consciousness -- we're really all one soul that's split off into all these little pieces. And I tell you, people are absolutely amazing when they start turning inward and focus more on bringing out what it is they have to give the world and who it is they are, in truth. If the focus can shift that way for a while, I believe we're all going to remember that we all love each other and that we don't want war and we don't need to be better than everybody else. The keynote for the new world is unity in diversity. That's going to give us exactly what we need: the remembrance that we're all one and everything we do to harm someone else really harms us. And at the same time, it gives everyone the right to be unique. I don't have to be mad at you because you come from a different country and you have a different God than I do. I don't have to be mad at you because you have different traits or characteristics that you've been raised with. I can accept that your culture, your nation, your part of the world, your DNA code, gave you something that I don't have. You're unique. I'm unique. We're all unique. There has to be an honoring of that, as well. I think the shift from outer focus to turning inward and finding the empowerment that is rightfully yours and the true self that lives in you is the change that we're having to make. And interestingly, instead of that leading to selfishness, I think it's going to lead to more acceptance of everybody being who they are. The Body, Mind, and Spirit Conference unites regional healing practitioners with nationally acclaimed healers to engage participants in experiential sessions oriented to healing the whole person. The pre-conference workshop, Embracing the Sacred: From the Mountain to the Soul, features Dave Andrae and Chuck Rainbow, will be Friday, Oct. 10. The Conference will be October 11-12 at the Memorial Student Center, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Menomonie, Wisc. For registration or more information, call (715) 232-2693 or e-mail conference-solutions@uwstout.edu or visit www.1ness.org/bms Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com Copyright © 2003 Tim Miejan |
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