The Riddle in the Mirror: A Journey in Search of Healing

Copyright © 2012 Jayni Bloch

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-5940-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-5941-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-5942-1 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919279

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/19/2012

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Lineage

History Is Important

2. Climbing the Mountain

Inner Sight. Watercolor by Jayni Bloch, 2004

How It All Started

Tuning In

3. Finding My Drop-of-God

What Is Truth and Where Do I Find It?

The Complete Collapse of My World as I Knew It

4. Once More into the Abyss

The Beckoning

A Haunting Dream

Significant Signs Symptoms and Synchronicities

The Bridge Appears

5. Healing Principles

The Principles

Expect Feedback and Signs

Practice Awareness by Contemplating Observations

Accept What Is

Distinguish between Human Ego and Divine Self

Practice Love and Unconditional Acceptance

Prune and Weed Out Old Conditioned Ideas

Understand the Bigger Scheme

Heal through Partnership

Know When to Say Yes and When to Say No

Know that God-You Is the Only Authority

Ask Questions

Get To Know the Archetypes

Dance between Opposites toward Wholeness

Share and Witness Stories of Growth

6. Conceptual Model of the Meaning and Purpose of Life

Understanding Duality

The Anatomy of Archetypes

Personality Types and Archetypal Themes

Examples of the Psychological Defense-Mechanisms as They Connect to the Personality’s Interpretations of the Archetypes

The Multi-Dimensional Idealist

The Healing Process of the the Multi-Dimensional Idealist

The Connector

The Healing Process of the Connector

The Performer

The Healing Process of the Performer

The Champion

The Healing Process of the Champion

The Observer

The Healing Process of the Observer

The Skeptic

The Healing Process of the Skeptic

The Entrepreneur

The Healing Process of the Entrepreneur

The Courageous

The Healing Process of the Courageous

The Moderator

The Healing Process of the Moderator

The Personality and Its Many Ego-States

The Drop-of-God in Us

Repetitive Conflict Cycles

Healing Practices

Appendix: History of South Africa

The Earliest People

The Cape Frontier Wars

The Great Trek

The Battle of Blood River

Natal and the Battle of Isandhlwana

Rhodes and the Jameson Raid

The Anglo-Boer War

The 1913 Land Act and the ANC

Mohandas Gandhi

Afrikaner Polarization

Black Workers, White Workers

Birth of the Nationalist Party

ANC Youth League, Natal Indian Congress

Apartheid Entrenched

The Defiance Campaign

The Freedom Charter

The Sharpeville Massacre

The Rivonia Trial

June 16, 1976

State of Emergency

First Democratic Elections

Bibliography

List Of Illustrations

Vairocana Buddha (means light all over) Royal Ontario Museum Toronto

The eight-pointed star-blanket, sacred North-American Indian symbol

Table 1 Left- and Right-Hemisphere Functions

Figure 1 Inter-dimensional Human and Spiritual Faculties

Figure 2 Yin-Yang Symbol

Figure 3 Personality with Many Ego-States

Figure 4 Personality with One or More Ruling Ego-States

Figure 5 God-Self Felt as the Drop-of-God

Figure 6 The Repetitive Conflict Cycle

Figure 7 The Healing Response

To my loving and supportive husband, Gerald, who is my inspiring partner in my healing journey and to my son, Anton, who is the continuation of this voyage.

We find that the unconscious connects us to other people and to our entire environment; therefore when we focus a great deal of energy within the inner world, a parallel energy often arises in the people or situations around us. In this way, we can do healing through our inner work that we never could have done through external means.

—R. A. Johnson, Inner Work

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life."

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

INTRODUCTION

Contemplation is the ability to reflect on experiences. The mirror or any shiny reflective object, like the moon or a pool of water, symbolizes this ability. We see another dimension of experienced reality in the reflection. The formal reality of the visible world serves as such a reflector, a mirror that symbolizes a meaning beyond our human mind’s interpretation of what we experience. In this way we then connect to the true story of an eternal dimension of life and not the subjective dimension only. This reflected dimension is truer in a spiritual sense because it gives us perspective on a bigger universal reality of our being’s evolution as a part of a bigger whole.

A mirror is the symbol of imagination and consciousness. Dreams, symbols, and synchronicities resemble the reflective qualities of a mirror and put us in touch with memories, the unconscious, and the universal aspect of life. The Riddle in the Mirror deals with our connection with the universal principles of life, using knowledge of archetypal symbolism to understand how our life events, dreams, and synchronicities inform us about our healing processes. Such contemplation opens our awareness to the collective reality that extends our rational thought and ego-only awareness, so that we can find meaning in our challenges.

When we reflect on life and our experience as a metaphor that indicates our current position on a dynamic map of evolution, our latent inner spiritual side awakes. Before this awakening, our lives are completely involved with material ambitions where our past conditioning by family and society dictates our behavior and motives by fear and need. Our spiritual sides are unconscious because of our conditioning to perceive only our subjective impressions. Our spiritual sides try to reach us by communicating through our physical symptoms and uncomfortable emotional sensations. It is amazing how much we occupy ourselves with cognitive thoughts and ideas that shut down our inner voice with its ability to illuminate deeper meaning. The process of self-reflection is a vital one for finding our true self, life purpose, and destiny. Finding our inner voice is tricky because of the determination of our ego structure that revels in maintaining its socialized identity. While any extreme personal circumstance can trigger awareness of our spiritual dimension, the favorable times for our self-reflective ability seem to occur as an awakening around the age of twenty-eight to thirty-five and again around the age of fifty-five to fifty-six. We can however intentionally seek our awareness of our deeper self through practicing self-contemplation. Once we know how to reflect on our lives, self-reflection becomes a healing tool. We find direction and purpose once we connect to the truth of our being by reflecting on the archetypal symbolism of experience.

Every day, I experience the astonishing reality of how the reflection on the symbolism of events brings the truth to our attention in powerful ways. We often block our ability to understand true meaning by our clever ability to use rationalizations and defense mechanisms in dealing with emotional unhappiness. Our personality usually circles a dilemma from all the possible cognitive angles and comes to some great theory to explain the happening. We can even formulate possible solutions for the issue, but most of the time there is no sensation of resolution. A click, the sensation of resolve, happens when our reason connects to a deeper soul truth. Life becomes that mirror in which we access the truths of our soul’s need to heal when we look at life from a symbolic angle. To do this, we need an understanding of the collective and archetypal principles of healing and spiritual growth.

Our experience of the visible and cognitive world reflects a universe of spiritual truth beyond the visible and cognitive world. Usually, the arrangement of symbolism in experiences or metaphors in dreams and circumstances opens a collective perspective that illuminates the logical information and provides answers to questions that our mind struggles to solve. Before the insight, which feels like a click our emotional challenges usually feel remote, as if outside circumstances are responsible for making mistakes that cause our misery and suffering.

We even blame ourselves for our circumstances instead of contemplating deeper growth challenges. There is no mistake as far as the unconscious goes. Our challenging experiences bring us awareness of our hidden wounds, which we would otherwise not detect. When our logic and our collective side agree with a solution or understanding, the click happens in our sensory body. The illuminating insight strikes with tremendous relief, despite its painful truth. Everything makes sense, and the true therapy can begin because the ego has no defense against the truth. Rationalization is redundant when we know what we need to do to heal.

Digging through the defense mechanisms to our soul’s truth and the meaning of the challenges we face is no easy task. To find our true self, purpose, and destiny, we realize that all challenges serve as indicators for the truth that will set us free from the reparative ambush of conflict and life’s emotional discomforts.

Challenges are the riddles to our rational selves. These riddles are life’s mirror. The Riddle in the Mirror will help you look into the mirror of your life with the intention to perceive the universal symbolism that clarifies the true meaning of your struggles for the purpose of your growth and healing. Sometimes, the meaning in the struggle has nothing to do with what we rationally think of as practical solutions. Our soul’s truth surprises us with its obvious simplicity, yet our reason resists this knowing with all its might. Our soul’s truth is always unique to us; it does not necessarily apply to everyone, and brings forward a deeper reality about our human wounds that we usually try to hide from others and ourselves.

Rational analysis and practical problem-solving still apply, but they do not stand on their own. We cannot ignore the underlying shifts in attitude we need to adopt in order to complete our responsibility to emotional growth and spiritual evolution through completing our healing processes. The challenge to change relates directly to our conscious participation in personal spiritual growth and development. Our personal participation supports all of life’s development. This is the only way we start to change and heal humanity.

The Riddle in the Mirror is partly a memoir that comes as the result of living the healing process through self-reflection on my own life experiences and observing and learned from other healers and therapists as well as my clients in my counseling practice over thirty years. This book demonstrates how we identify the healing opportunities in the challenges we encounter. Although personal, our challenges are part of a collective journey of healing. Our personal challenges are never isolated from our familial, cultural, or ancestral histories. These