• The physical and spiritual components of brain cancer.
• The psycho-spiritual path to wholeness.
• Finding the inner strength to discover meaning in suffering.
• Finding creative ways to contribute to the healing of numerous other souls.
Jean Benedict Raffa: An extended family member who is a self-employed writer and public-speaker. She has also served on various college faculties. She has her doctorate in curriculum and instruction and now pursues her interests in psychology, religion, women’s studies, and mythology.
From a February 2005 Letter
This experience has both a physical and a spiritual component. You are doing such an excellent job of attending to both. Your recognition of the need for more alone time is right on, and your determination to honor this is also right on.
I know it takes a lot of courage to do this, especially when your life has been defined up to this point by acting and doing and producing. But, in listening to your body and inner voice and giving yourself time to be alone with them, you are honoring all those other aspects of yourself that were lying dormant while you immersed yourself in your work in the outer world.
Uniting the outer with the inner in this way is the work of the individuation journey, the psycho-spiritual path to wholeness. I know you've always been on that path to a certain extent, but now you've really entered it full time.
Interestingly, Carl Jung said that this is exactly what the second half of life (i.e., past the age of 35) is for: self-discovery, self-knowledge, and integrating the opposites into a more complete whole. I don't know how old you are, but I do know you're on the right path. My thoughts and best wishes are with you so often.
From an August 2005 Letter
I do wish the news about your surgery had been better. Of course I'm thrilled that you can walk and think and read and write, but I wanted to hear that they got it all and that your problems were over. I have to remind myself that this definition of healing (i.e., where the physical problem is entirely cured and eliminated) is the automatic preference of the human ego, but it is not the only definition of healing, nor is it always the most desirable one from a cosmic point of view. What I mean is that from the ego's point of view, illness always appears bad; however, if we enlarge our individual perspective to encompass the historical or the spiritual, (to mention only two), we can find positive meaning even in the worst of tragedies.
For example, every authentic mythic or historic hero/leader/benefactor who has ever inspired humanity and improved the human lot (from Dionysus and Persephone of Greek myth, to native shamans, to Jesus and the saints of Western religion, to powerfully influential social and political leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill) at some point undergoes a crisis, often life-threatening, which furnishes the courage and wisdom to bring new healing life back to the community. This is the archetypal hero journey and it speaks to a spiritual truth which the deeper soul readily recognizes but the ego finds very difficult to accept. No one wants to suffer, but everyone eventually does. Those who discover the inner strength to find meaning in their suffering, and to use it to improve the human condition, are the true heroes. Through experiencing a traumatic fracturing and consequent healing of their own souls, regardless of what happens to their bodies, they find creative ways to contribute to the healing of numerous other souls.
From what I know about you, from what I sense about you, and from what I've seen about the open, honest, and courageous way you are dealing with your illness, I can't help but wonder if perhaps your soul has chosen to take the hero's journey in this lifetime. If so, then I hope you understand that it is the highest, most noble and worthwhile calling that a human soul can have.
Let me close with something I once heard from Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst and writer who is on the hero's journey: "The depth of your crisis is a measure of your genius." I find this enormously comforting.
