Living Smart with Patricia Gras: Finding Our Authentic Path *
“I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all that we can be. A longer for what is real.” - Anne Hillman
When I was a young adult I had certain expectations about who I would become as an adult and what I would do with my life. Then one day, decades later, I realized none of it had come true. Then I picked up some books on Carl Jung and began to understand myself a lot better. That’s why I invited Dr. James Hollis, PhD, the director of the Jung Center Houston, to Living Smart. I found his books enlightening and reasonable. One of his books, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, is a guide to individuation. This usually happens in the second half of life when we are forced to reflect on who we really are and what we truly want. We ultimately have a choice to become authentic or, literally, sick.
Hollis, a Jungian analyst sees a lot of patients confronting mid-life issues. “That’s my work, helping individuals arrive at a better place in their life. No one happens to just sort of drop in to have a chat with me. They are usually there because their road map does not apply anymore or the good efforts they’ve had managing things are just not as effective as they are or as they once were and so often there is a sense of disorientation or defeat or confusion and you know… Frankly that’s the beginning of wisdom because that’s what forces us to begin to reexamine our lives from a different perspective.”
Hollis explains there are ways we recognize something is wrong with the way life is going. “When we get off track our psyche protests and we call those protests symptoms. Sometimes they turn up in our relationships, sometimes they show up in our body and sometimes they show up in emotional storms that we have such as depression or anxiety disorders. And sometimes they come to us in troubling dreams and the psyche is always speaking, it’s always expressing its point of view, and our tasks as individuals is to try and say… I do, I read the symptomatic response and perhaps I have neglected certain things in y life and I have to sort of bring that into greater play in my choices.”
I asked Hollis if it was difficult to live an authentic life. He explained to be authentic you must be in contact with a deep source within you. “There is something that is inherently true for us, an instinctual truth or your inborn truth or even your should, if you will, trying to tell you something and how do you separate that from all the messages that are coming to you from the culture, or family of origin, even from your own history. Ask yourself, which messages are more in touch with my own inner life or with my own nature,” says Hollis.
Living Smart is a weekly, half-hour interview and news magazine television program focusing on personal well-being. Living Smart covers spiritual, financial, personal, mental, physical, emotional, and educational aspects of well-being. Living Smart airs on Sundays at 3PM and Thursdays at 1PM. Go to http://www.houstonpbs.org/livingsmart to learn more about the show.
Patricia Gras is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, and the senior producer and host for “Living Smart with Patricia Gras.” Visit http://www.patriciagras.blogspot.com for her insights into smart living.
* This article is written by Patricia Gras and can be found in June 2008 issue of 002Houston Magazine at http://002mag.com
When I was a young adult I had certain expectations about who I would become as an adult and what I would do with my life. Then one day, decades later, I realized none of it had come true. Then I picked up some books on Carl Jung and began to understand myself a lot better. That’s why I invited Dr. James Hollis, PhD, the director of the Jung Center Houston, to Living Smart. I found his books enlightening and reasonable. One of his books, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, is a guide to individuation. This usually happens in the second half of life when we are forced to reflect on who we really are and what we truly want. We ultimately have a choice to become authentic or, literally, sick.
Hollis, a Jungian analyst sees a lot of patients confronting mid-life issues. “That’s my work, helping individuals arrive at a better place in their life. No one happens to just sort of drop in to have a chat with me. They are usually there because their road map does not apply anymore or the good efforts they’ve had managing things are just not as effective as they are or as they once were and so often there is a sense of disorientation or defeat or confusion and you know… Frankly that’s the beginning of wisdom because that’s what forces us to begin to reexamine our lives from a different perspective.”
Hollis explains there are ways we recognize something is wrong with the way life is going. “When we get off track our psyche protests and we call those protests symptoms. Sometimes they turn up in our relationships, sometimes they show up in our body and sometimes they show up in emotional storms that we have such as depression or anxiety disorders. And sometimes they come to us in troubling dreams and the psyche is always speaking, it’s always expressing its point of view, and our tasks as individuals is to try and say… I do, I read the symptomatic response and perhaps I have neglected certain things in y life and I have to sort of bring that into greater play in my choices.”
I asked Hollis if it was difficult to live an authentic life. He explained to be authentic you must be in contact with a deep source within you. “There is something that is inherently true for us, an instinctual truth or your inborn truth or even your should, if you will, trying to tell you something and how do you separate that from all the messages that are coming to you from the culture, or family of origin, even from your own history. Ask yourself, which messages are more in touch with my own inner life or with my own nature,” says Hollis.
Living Smart is a weekly, half-hour interview and news magazine television program focusing on personal well-being. Living Smart covers spiritual, financial, personal, mental, physical, emotional, and educational aspects of well-being. Living Smart airs on Sundays at 3PM and Thursdays at 1PM. Go to http://www.houstonpbs.org/livingsmart to learn more about the show.
Patricia Gras is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, and the senior producer and host for “Living Smart with Patricia Gras.” Visit http://www.patriciagras.blogspot.com for her insights into smart living.
* This article is written by Patricia Gras and can be found in June 2008 issue of 002Houston Magazine at http://002mag.com
Labels: 002 Houston Magazine, Authentic Path, Carl Jung, Enlightenment, Living Smart, Mental health, Patricia Gras, PBS
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