I understand. When you’re young, you’re trying to please or impress parents, teachers, coaches, peers. Please or impress. Ends of a spectrum.
A masculine side of a personality wants to rebel and escape. A feminine side of a personality wants to bond and belong. Both are high-energy animation by spirits that battle the worldly pressures of impressing or pleasing which seem to seek boxing us in.
Ask a child or adolescent: They never – EVER – get what they want.
From cookies to car keys. The world boxes them in.
Extraversion wants to be in control of attention. Introversion wants to be left alone, which is its own form of autonomy and attention control.
Seek approval. Avoid disapproval. Fit in, inside the prison adults build around us.
Not so fast. Adults construct our box with bars. Peers? With impenetrable concrete.
Not so fast. It isn’t just youth. Find an adult who has experienced job dislocation, disease, divorce, disability. The sense of imprisonment returns. Lost control. The dimensions of personality – feminine, masculine, extroverted, introverted – beep loud red.
Loss of control.
Was there ever any?
Really?
Did we want control? Didn’t we want freedom from control? Both? Maybe freedom from not *having* to control. Self, or others?
Animators bring cartoon drawings to life. Carl Jung called the masculine “side” of a female, her “animus,” and the feminine side of a male, his “anima.” “Anima” is the Latin word for soul. Your soul is what gives life to the matter that makes up your body. The soul is meant to refer to the force that animates you.
Our souls know what freedom is. The Greek word for soul that means *breath* or life is “psyche.” Carl Jung was a psyche-ologist. “Gnostics” believed the soul was imprisoned in our body. And so it is; we are each embodied soul. Look how that flips the notion of a good force that animates our body, and draws attention to our bad body.
Our souls “know” what freedom is. With no breath, there’s no voice. Our souls give breath to the voices that protest the prisons of pressure in this realm. Our souls bridge our realm of body to a realm of spirit. Souls “know” in extended ways. The prisons of peer pressure and parental pleasing – and all the measures of control we “know” – are constraints on our “Wind-breath-fire-cloud-water-wine-dove…”
[https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-spirit-of-christ-within-us/]:
“It’s better that I go away so that the Spirit can come,” [he] said. If he were physically present and visible, our focus would be on [him] over there, right here, out there … but because of his absence, we discover the Spirit… right here, in here, within.
“[He] describes the Spirit as another comforter, another teacher, another guide—just like him, but available to everyone, everywhere, always. The same Spirit who had descended like a dove upon him will descend upon us, he promises. The same Spirit who filled him will fill all who open their hearts….
“The Bible describes the Spirit with beautiful and vivid imagery: Wind. Breath. Fire. Cloud. Water. Wine. A dove. These dynamic word pictures contrast starkly with the heavy, fixed imagery provided by, say, stone idols, imposing temples, or thick theological tomes. Through this vivid imagery, the biblical writers tell us that the Spirit invigorates, animates, purifies, holds mystery, moves and flows, foments joy, and spreads peace…
“At the core of Jesus’ life and message, then, was this good news: the Spirit of God, the Spirit of aliveness, the Wind-breath-fire-cloud-water-wine-dove Spirit who filled Jesus is on the move in our world…
“In the millennia since Christ walked with us on this Earth, we’ve often tried to box up the ‘wind’ in manageable doctrines. We’ve exchanged the fire of the Spirit for the ice of religious pride. We’ve turned the wine back into water, and then let the water go stagnant and lukewarm. We’ve traded the gentle dove of peace for the predatory hawk or eagle of empire….
“We need our hearts to be made incandescent by the Spirit’s fire. We need the living water and new wine Jesus promised, so our hearts can become the home of dovelike peace….
“When we open up space for the Spirit and let the Spirit fill that space within us, we begin to change, and we become agents of change…. So let us open our hearts. Let us dare believe that the Spirit that we read about in the Scriptures can move among us today…
From cookies to car keys to ___, It already has, is, will.
Fly on.
.
[Neil D. 2026-05-30]
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