Oh my! This site went off-line yesterday just as I was composing this post on Marion Woodman (1928-2016), which frustrated me no end . . .  the uncanny resonance, and even resemblance, that I feel with her, has me utterly riveted. As if we are members of the same soul group, with similar missions, among them: 1) to continually recognize the shadow and work to integrate the opposites wherever we find them; 2) to honor our own bodies and their connection with the earth mother as locus of not just physical illness, but via illness,  great wisdom and healing (i.e., the body as basically coterminous with the unconscious); and 3) this one delighted me, as I’ve never heard anyone speak this way except me — to view embodied life as an experiment, something that I concluded when I was 24 years old.

How it happened: I had been an unusually obedient, even “saintly” Catholic girl. Then, in graduate school, after coming across Skinner’s behaviorism, I decided to do an experiment, which was to NOT attend Sunday Mass three Sundays in a row. I figured that if the “guilt” I expected to feel was simply the result of operant conditioning, then it would recede. Well, guess what? I felt not one iota of guilt after the very first Sunday! “Wow! I’ve been duped all these years into thinking that if I disobeyed I would feel guilty?” This recognition floored me: right then and there I instantly generalized: what if I viewed my entire life as an experiment? Which I have done ever since, over 55 years now.

Other uncanny similarities with Marion Woodman: 1) lack of appropriate mothering, with grave consequences later on; 1) teaching abstract concepts via stories from my own life, 2) chronological ages when big changes happened, 3) willingness to step off cliffs and trust the universe, over and over again; on and on. I won’t bother to list them all here. Suffice to say that though I never read any of Marion Woodman’s books, from my 40s on (the same age that she entered the Jungian world in Zurich), I was steeped in Jungian thought, and while living in Jackson Wyoming, I knew a local female psychologist who had attended several of Woodman’s week-long programs. Thus, even from afar I could appreciate her more grounded, embodied approach to Jung’s largely theoretical depth of focus on the personal and collective unconscious.

I was going to look at her astro chart here, but will save that for another day.

Here’s the video that held me, all the way through. Thanks to SophiaCycles on twitter.

And in case you want to get a fuller perspective on her life from someone who knew and worked with her:

https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2022/03/28/meg-wilbur-marion-woodman-and-embodied-life/#.Ylgwi9PMLep

By the way, nice title, eh? She uses that phrase, “The Sun rises in the evening” several times in the video lecture. Originally a Zen koan, I see it as the story of my life; so that now, in the “evening,” in my crone years, my own Sun is finally rising, shining high above nearly 80 years of continuous, what she termed, “blossoms blooming in the fire.”