C.G. Jung wrote, "The artist's relative lack of adaption turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path" (CW 15, 131). So seemingly easy it is to tell someone to walk their own walk, to follow their own path or to casually expect it of ourselves. A person came in for depth therapy and said, "I have to bust loose out of this family of mine. They're killing me, my soul. Whenever I'm around them I feel horrible." Little did he know what "busting loose" would involve. To walk far from the beaten path demands psychic courage and no small degree of wherewithal.
It's one thing to talk about being an independent soul, quite another to do it. Everyone seems to go the well trod direction, with the tide, with mass thinking or professional opinion. To be politically correct, professionally pc, and personally likable all the time is a potent draw, and it is lethal.
The man who entered depth inner work ended up having to take leave of his family of origin. Dream material pointed the way to this decisive act. "I was walking down the path, away from them and they were heckling me. My mother was yelling and screaming obscenities. I shook my head and walked on away from them."
He went on to relate, over many months and years later, how he still wondered about his decision. "Going my own way was harder than I thought." It's no small task to go our own way, to cut our self free from that which constrains so that we can breathe with soul and live our own story.
A blog post on Enchantment Learning and Living (9.15.16) shared, "Let your stories breathe like you can now. And find their own homes when you set them loose like birds to the sky. In their own time. In their own way. And remember that your real home is never behind tightly-cinched cloth wrapped whale-bones or mortared stone.
How long did it take you to remember that your home is in the earth and in the sky? That the roots of trees and flowers will always be your welcome bed and the wind is there to sweep away the last cut ribbon from your cage."
http://www.drpauldeblassieiii.com/soulcare/2016/8/25/far-from-the-beaten-path
