A mid life crisis is a moment in someone's life, usually experienced between age 40 and 50, when change is happening a lot faster than normal. It's as if the individual's psyche or spirit is ahead of their rational mind. Something overwhelming happens; men find themselves buying sports cars and leaving their wives. Women are traditionally less expressive - in the UK anyway - and may descend into a quiet invisible depression. Some people gently begin to do things they have always wanted to do - work in Africa, run their own business, emigrate to Australia. Many people characterise this moment in their lives as being summarised by the question "Is this it? Is this all their is?". It can fell pretty bleak, and it's easy to rush into it,lurching from one new activity to the next, with nothing really seeming to 'solve the problem'.
Another way of looking at this period is to see it as an incubation. Imagine a tortoise slowly burying itself for the winter, then reappearing in the Spring with a refreshed shell and renewed vigour, ready for all manner of lettuce. Jungian analysts refer to this as a controlled regression. For me it feels like a period of reclusive incubation; I'm giving birth to a new self. Did I really say that? Sounds batty, but it's how it feels.
I'm in the middle of this right now. Maybe it's like a mini-breakdown. I haven't got any interest in friends and socialising but I'm reading like a demon. I've got the energy for huge long walks - doing 12 miles in a morning - and really enjoying being outside and breathing in the trees and the sky. My work is a practice=ground for me. As a consultant, I can observe how I am changing the way I work; I'm more potent, straighter, more grounded. I feel as if I know what I'm doing (a surprisingly new sensation, given that I've been operating as a consultant for over 15 years).
When I read Sylvia Brinton Perera's book "Descent to the Goddess" I turned a huge corner, and her words enabled me to turn a lingering depression into a crystallising process. She talks about intellectual women who have identified more with their fathers than their mothers suffer a basic fault. I am one of these, although not particularly intellectual, I definitely grew up valuing correctness and precision with words. Perera says that these women do not have an adequate sense of their own embodied strength and needs. We need to travel back to the underworld, experiences the passions and rages which lurk there and search for the deep feminine. This has to be done in a non-verbal way and will probably feel pretty weird. I hope to keep you posted as this all progresses. The first step features my tattoo...
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