Bobbe Tyler - Searching for Soul: A Survivors Guide

searching for soul

B O B B E T Y L E R

a survivors guide

FOREWORD BY LUCIA CAPACCHIONE

Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

2009 by Ohio University Press

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16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

A slightly different version of chapter 17 was first published in Quadrant Journal:

The C. G. Jung Foundation of Analytical Psychology 26, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 6583.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tyler, Bobbe, 1932

Searching for soul : a survivors guide / Bobbe Tyler ; foreword by Lucia Capacchione.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8040-1118-1 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8040-1119-8 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Conduct of life. 2. Wisdom. 3. Friendship. I. Title.

BJ1581.2.T95 2009

158dc22

2009014796

To my children:

Jamison, Christian, and Cort,

who teach me still in all things.

Thank you.

A century ago, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others breaking new ground in the field of psychoanalysis were forming somewhat similar theories about the unconscious part of the human psyche. On one thing they could all agree: if more people could diminish their suffering through an exploration of their unconscious, the world would be a happier and healthier place to live. So much progress was made in the ensuing hundred years that today most people value (if not urgently) a need for self-awareness in their own lives. We have also learned by now that there are dozens of ways to achieve self-awareness and that not all of those ways require the expertise of a therapist or a facilitator (of which I am one). If ever a book described the joys of living life as a result of coming awakeespecially when the author had been cursed and desperate and blessed with her need to find the meaning of her self and her lifeit is this book.

Searching for Soul is timely, arriving at a seemingly long historical moment of collective problems that cast their pall over all of us individually. Yet Bobbe Tylers story is uplifting and encouraging. She believes that we must all participate in our lives fully conscious of our personal principles and valuesfirst to find our own specific meaning and then to live with it in joy, because in living thus we change the entire world for the better. It is rare that one conscious person will change the world all at once, but I agree with Bobbe that at the very least each self-aware individual has the power to change the life of anyone who is in her or his orbit.

As an art therapist and an author, I have dedicated my life to sharing the healing power of writing with my books; Bobbes work is a wonderful example of the results that can be achieved by writing about ones experiences. As I read her life story unfolding layer by layer, my heart was touched. The rigorous honesty and pleasing humility with which she looks into the mirror that is the written page inspires self-reflection. Though individual and personal, this is a universal tale of a woman finding herself by living the examined life so worthy of her work and by learning to accept the mystery of what is.

Bobbe delves deeply into spirit and psyche as she follows a labyrinthine path through the many phases of her life. Speaking to women and men of every age, she writes of the search for her spiritual center during her troubles with marriage, of addictions (her fathers and her own), of loss and learning in relationships, of a beloved sisters shattering problems with schizophrenia, and finally of the wisdom and aging that became the keys to her happiness. Yet the circumstances of her outer life serve only as a backdrop for a long, rich story about her inner lifehow her psyche, fragile and abandoned to begin with, was transformed over time into the inner strength and beauty that mark her life today.

Her wise words inspired me to contemplate the cul-de-sacs in my own life, moved me to go deeply into myself and contemplate where I have been, where I am now, and where I am going. Some books appear at exactly the right moment in a persons life. I hope this is one of them for you, dear reader, and that Bobbe Tylers story will lead you to write your own. May you treasure the wise counsel and healing words in this volume as much as I do.

Lucia Capacchione, Ph.D., A.T.R.

Art therapist and author of

The Creative Journal: The Art of Finding Yourself and Recovery of Your Inner Child

For as long as I can remember I have searched for and read books just like this one. They were the straws I grasped to keep from drowning, the voices that prayed with me in the night, soothed my fears, and made all the difference in the world. Books like this were my manna in a time when there were fewer distractions in our culture; television, the Internet, cell phones, and iPods had not yet come along to divert one from the serious business of individual survival. Had that not been the case, Iwho was shy and introverted and utterly lost as a childwould surely have foundered on the shoals of so much collective time-consuming culture. As it was, I searched for, or was given, or lucked into always just the right bookthe one whose story told of possibilities I could not have imagined, of loneliness conquered and the happiness I might one day feel. As I grew older, the authors of my survival became my family of choice. My tribe. My delight. My uncommon wealth.

I have always been a writer, yet before I could tell my own story, I first had to live my life. Not until my Gordian knots had all come unloosed and I was finally whole and healthy in mind, body, and soul would I be qualified to write what was my lifelong burning desireone of those just right books that used to regularly save my life. The book is in your hands today because synchronicity influenced destiny to set my story telling in motion. As part of her research into the nature of wisdom, a friend pressed a set of life review questions into my handsThe Harvesting Wisdom Interviewand asked me to respond to them; her only instruction was, Take as long as you like and go as deep as you can. I knew soon enough that I was writing an intimate discourse on self-discovery, a re-creation of an inner journey whose full meaning and substance would be revealed to me when I had finished my work. And so it was that in exchange for my considerable time and effort, I now enjoy a rare and valuable gift: my lifefully deciphered, whole, and comprehensible in all of its layers. Probing my past, plumbing my depths, I set about reliving the peaks and valleys of my story from seventeen different starting points and discovered that it was not just my story but your story, too. By diving as deep as I could go into the heart of my own particular darkness, I found again and again the essential meaning and purpose of every life. We are unique, so our stories will always be different on the transparent surface of life, yet the deeper I probedbeyond the particular to the level of soulthe more I was certain we are all one at our core.