Urban Mystic - Pisces QA - w/ Skip Jennings

Attachment and Flight: the tale of Apollo and Daphne in Love - Thomas Moore

Excerpt from Soul Mates  - by Thomas Moore.

A lovely book looking at love, relationships and the soul.

The fight or flight impulse our adrenalin system experiences when reacting to stress or emergency reminds me sometimes of the problems that we can experience in our intimate and inter-personal relationships. This is a topic I'd been thinking about lately and had been asking questions about. Namely, how does one stay true to themselves whilst intimately connected with others? How do we retain our connection with our higher soulful self amidst the influence, expectations, and attachments we experience in our day-to-day relations with others. Married, single, attached, with family or not, this can be a dilemma, regardless of the variances in cultural and social expectations we may experience in the East or West - in which stereotypically, the role of the individual is either seen to be subjugated for the greater good, or is a point of personal evolution that indisputably we all should aim for, going so far as to include this 'right' in our government constitutions.

(Image: Barbara Kruger)

If 'soul' were a star sign, I wonder if it would be Pisces. The two fish, like yin and yang, always together, but wresting with an innate tension - a duality of opposites that forces them to want to pull apart from each other - I think is an apt metaphor for how Moore looks at the nature of our souls - in love and in relationships.

Our job, over the course of our lifetime, is to come to an understanding and peaceful reconciliation with the inner tension that exists within, and to marry-up our simultaneous desires for soul attachment as well as resistance to attachment in our relationships with others. As with all such endeavors, it’s important to look first within, acknowledge our natural instinctive selves and to be gentle with our souls. I find this especially appropriate a topic for Cancerians, but for all of us in general. The urge to nurture, reach out, and connect with others is an instinctive drive - biologically deterministic - or otherwise - and characterises us as human. Digging deep into the well of love, care and nurture, over a long period of time can become less and less possible should we dig too deep, and one day come up empty and dry. Water is the natural element associated with Cancer, as well as Pisces. Yet another appropriate metaphor.

The story of Apollo and Daphne looks at the idea of pursuit, whereby one plays the role of the hunter, the other, the hunted. Apollo, seeking connection with Daphne pursues her to the point where, at the last minute, and at a point of desperation for freedom and escape, she turns into a tree. Is it the case that Apollo's attempt to capture her - her essence, her energy, whatever -  an attempt to possess her or was the frightened Daphne fleeing from the prospect of intimacy itself? Thus, we arrive at an interesting intersection on our journey of the soul.

(Image: Apollo and Daphne by Bian Lorenzo Bernini)

Moore on Attachment:

'By definition, the soul is attached to life in all its particulars. It prefers relatedness (edit) to distancing. From the point of view of the soul, meaningfulness and value rise directly out of experience, or from the images and memories that issue modestly and immediately out of ordinary life. The soul's intelligence may not arrive through rational analysis but through a long period of rumination, and its goal may not be brilliant understanding and unassailable truth, but rather profound insight and abiding wisdom.

This penchant of the soul for the complications of life play a role in personal relationship...Relatedness means staying in life, even when it becomes complicated and when meaning and clarity are elusive. It means living with the particular individuals who come into our lives and not only with our ideals and images of the perfect mate or the perfect family. On the other hand, honouring the particular in our lives also means making the separations, divorces, and endings that the soul requires. The soul is always attached to what is actually happening, not necessarily to what could or will be.

A first step, then, in tending to the soul in regard to our relationships is to understand and honour the soul's particular mode of being. It may help to realise, as tradition has taught for centuries, that there are two pulls in us, one upward toward transcendence, ambition, success, progress, intellectual clarity and cosmic consciousness, and another downward, into individual, vernacular life...

As we work through difficult family relationships, struggle with the dreams of marriage, apply ourselves to the job we're doing, become settled into the geographic region fate has chosen for us, and continually sort through the personality issues that never seem to change or improve - in all these areas we are gathering the stuff of the soul.* The soul wants to be attached, involved, and even stuck, because it is through such intimacy that it is nourished, iniated, and deepened'.

*(Note: the author distinguishes spirit (somewhat more transcendental) as different to soul (that which seeks attachment) - 'just as there is spiritual practice in search of the highest and most refined reaches of human potential, so there is soul practice in pursuit of the juices and nutriments of life's entanglements'. 

Spirituality and Detachment - The Flight from Attachment:

For any of us spiritually inclined, there is a tendency to want to 'clear the decks' so to speak, in order to escape everyday worldly concerns  in order to 'xplore fully the realm of the spirit. How then, do we reconcile the desire of the spirit, with the soul's desire for more worldly experience.

Moore, a former catholic monk, brings some interesting comments into this based on his background, noting that, at an extreme, living too much in one realm or the other can have its pitfalls, where the 'other' can become fetishised to the point of almost pornographic - or obscene. An emphasis on religiosity for example - which may place rules, priority and emphasis on cultivating the relationship with 'god' over our intimate relationships with others - can be dangerous. Subjugating our natural sexual identity leads to displacement of that energy - whether it becomes an obsession with morbid aspects of sexuality, or is filtered into zealous hatred of one kind or the other. Simply living a spiritual life - either be it religious, or dedication to a particular cause is in itself not problematic, unless, like Daphne, we are seeking to escape that within which makes us uncomfortable. Avoiding our appointments with the doctor, for example, means avoiding possible confrontation with some part of our reality that we do not want to face. Doing so may provide temporary relief, but in the long term may not be in our health's best interest.

Closeness and Distance in Relationship

Moore suggests that our relationships with others are more likely to be harmonious and soulful when we embrace the prospect of 'living fully' with the attachment/freedom duality - or in relationship speak 'separateness and togetherness'. It may be the case that our lifetimes will favour attachment and freedom in cycles - and that, like nature itself, is fine. In fact, it’s normal.

Interestingly, his suggestion, when experiencing discomfort or anxiety in relationships is rather than try to escape, is to sit still and 'tend better' to that which is causing trouble. Feeling confined by marriage for example, could be overcome (but not limited to) reimaging one's concept of marriage and partnership - in order to overcome what is likely  to be a limited understanding of that concept - whether derived from the influence of family, society, culture  or otherwise. For Moore, it is a matter of asking ourselves whether or not the idealised grass on the other side really is that much greener - encouraging us therefore, to see the divinity of the grass on the other side as something we have in our own backyard already. There are times when this is not always the case, and to that we must learn to honour discernment and the ability to decide when it is better to leave than stay.

Perhaps here in SoulGarden, meditation is but one of the tools at our disposal that can assist us in contemplating these ever-present issues.

Ultimately, the point is to accept and to honour our inclinations for both attachment and freedom - giving both of them room for expression rather than favour one tendency to the exclusion of the other.  

 Says Moore:

'...For the rest of us, a strong dose of individuality can be the best quality to bring to a relationship. That nymph in your heart who runs away at the first sign of love, sex, and commitment might be doing an important service to the soul, which needs flight as much as its needs embrace. On the other hand, the proud spirit that rushes into relationships at the first twitch of Eros is also important to the soul. Without Apollo's impetuous desire there may be no intimacy...'