“There is a good thing on top of that mountain. I will make a straight line for it.” But the archetypal way is not like that; it is a serpentine way that wriggles and spirals its way to the top. We often feel defeated by it and brought to a standstill. It makes most people terribly impatient and even desperate when nothing happens and they get nowhere. They feel hindered all the time; they don’t understand that this is just as it should be, that it is actually their only way of getting to the top.
C.G Jung, The Visions Seminars, Book Two, p.295
For Jung, the journey or ‘the way’ was a path not to material rewards, but to The Self. The Self in Jungian theory is the centre of human personality, and the ultimate goal of the path to The Self is wholeness. The true path to wholeness is a spiral one, not a straight line. It returns and returns to the same point, the same experience, the same joy, the same crises, and yet each time the perspective is different because you have ascended a little more of your spiral path. With each turn up of the spiral you understand a little more. It is a path of paradox and often deep uncertainty, but stunning insights and magical vistas.
So to, the body has its own journey on the spiral path. It moves and responds and unwinds in treatment in much the same way, yearning and reaching for its own wholeness. How often are we troubled by the same pain, the same injury, the same restrictions? But the body holds the key to its own recovery, if you are able to listen and hear it. Each time you bend around that spiral pattern particular to your own body, can you recognise where you are? Can you feel a little more, understand a little more about what it is, and what it is trying to tell you? And from there, ultimately change and move up that spiral towards wholeness?