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“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
—
You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.
James Hillman (via abiding-in-peace)
Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled, but these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.
Instead of saying “This is my child,” they should ask “Who is this child who happens to be mine?” Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for where the kid’s destiny may show itself– like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses, so they set up some psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptom may be the most crucial part of the kid.
James Hillman on parenting, via the Sun Magazine (via artlivefree)
Where you are is as important as where you came from. What you do every day is as important to the soul, to the revelation of the soul, as what you parents did to you, or what you were like when you were five or ten. Every move you make, every bite you get, every word you say, is inventing yourself. We think the soul is already made by what happened early on, and we’re always trying to fix it, to adjust it. But suppose I’m making it now, as I talk?
James Hillman, via the Sun Magazine (via artlivefree)
Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory
“Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind’s thinking in images, imaging ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas of little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha cakra whose dominant color is a smoky-purple-blue.”
~ James Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis” from
The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (Routledge, Oct 31, 2013)
“Psyche’s first trait, and the way we know her first, is neither by her labors, nor the work of soul-making, nor by her sufferings for love, nor in her oppression in lostness—the absence and deprivation of soul. These all come later. We know Psyche first by the primary characteristic given with her nature: Psyche is beautiful.”
— James Hillman, ‘The Thought of the Heart’
Nurse The Soul 