Join us as we continue our rising resilience series of interviews with amazing women entrepreneurs and explore soul making as a spiritual practice with the insightful and delightful Christina Becker. Whether you’re an entrepreneur facing the pressures of business or life challenges, or someone seeking deeper personal understanding, this episode offers valuable wisdom and inspiration.
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INTRO
As well as an astute, nonprofit advocate and consultant trainer, and founder of the Canadian Non Profit Academy, Christina’s a renowned Jungian psychologist and author, known for her expertise in guiding individuals through the complexities of personal and spiritual growth.
In this conversation, we explore the essence of resilience through Christina’s lens of Jungian psychology, as well as her personal experiences using soul making as a spiritual practice. Christina shares her journey of soul making and where the phrase originates, as detailed in her upcoming book, Soul Making: A Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery. We discussed how resilience is not just about bouncing back, but about transforming challenges into personal meaning and growth.
Christina also shares insights from her private practice, including the power of dreamwork and how aligning with one’s true purpose and leveraging soul making as a spiritual practice can lead to a more fulfilling and resilient life.
INTERVIEW
Today I have Christina Becker with me. And I’ll let you introduce yourself in a moment. So welcome to the Leverage Business Podcast.
CHRISTINA: Oh, so delighted. So delighted.
JAY: So I have the title of rising resilient and then tackling challenges and changes in your life with confidence, compassion, and courage. What was it about this particular theme that jumped out for you, and made you say yes to this interview?
CHRISTINA: Well, I think that resilience is such a big, big topic, especially if you want to take on big things, right? If you want to live big, if you want to take on a big problem, if you want to make a difference in the world, I think you have to talk about resilience. I think you have to figure out how to put those things into place, which will ensure your resilience.
Because, I’ve suffered burnout more than once, I call it past my best before date. I’ve never heard it described that way. Yeah, and I can tell when it’s coming, you know, I have these tell-tale signs that says, okay, either I need a break or I need to give myself a couple of days off or whatever it happens to be.
And also because I was really curious about the book and soul making and taking it from a Jungian perspective. You know, how do you put those things into place that actually are meaningful.
JAY: I really felt there was a lot of resilience rising and falling and rising and falling your memoirs when I was reading the drafts. And just tying it back to like resilience and what we mean by that, what does it feel like and look like for you?
CHRISTINA: Yeah. I actually renamed the book because this idea of resilience kept showing up in so many different places. The podcast the theme for one of the newsletters that I follow their theme for 2024 was radical resilience.
And I went, that actually makes a lot of sense because I think that is in essence what the book is about, is how can we use Jungian psychology and the myths and the ideas and the framing of that, towards resilience in a meaningful way. So I retitled it: Soul Making a Journey of Resilience and Spiritual Rediscovery.
JAY: Love it. Love it.
There’s been a lot happened over the last few years as well but obviously your book spans several, several years. That’s a lifetime.
So [for context] tell us a little bit about the work you do and your background and you know how you help people that you help etc.
CHRISTINA: For sure. So, I’m a Jungian psychoanalyst. I trained at the CG Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, which was the only Institute that Carl Jung actually founded, which he founded in 1948. It’s changed a lot since I’ve been there, but still that’s kind of the pilgrimage. And I have a small analytic practice. My work really helps people try to connect with their authenticity, trying to connect to basically what is their life about?
How do you create meaning? And how do you align yourself with that kind of deeper thread or the deeper path or river, whatever your metaphor is that says, yes, this is what I’m here to do. This is where I’m the happiest. How do I live my full true self in a meaningful way that makes me happy.
JAY: It’s kind of the Holy Grail, isn’t it? Yeah, it is.
CHRISTINA: Yes, it’s totally the Holy Grail. I mean, talk about big. Yeah, I mean, where do you start with someone when they’re trying to find themselves and find life’s meaning.
Well, usually you start with clearing away the limiting beliefs, you know, the things that get in the way, the obstacles, you know, people don’t come into analysis because they’re like feeling happy.
Most of the time people come into analysis because they are suffering in some way, and there is something in them that calls them to move through the suffering, and to find a different path. That for me is like a total mystery, why some people actually take the call and some people just like don’t do anything and sit in their misery.
But, usually people have to clear away their early childhood wounding limiting beliefs the stories that they tell themselves as little kids, then they find kind of, that voice inside themselves – it could be an intuition, it could be a dream. It could be a number of things – that actually says, Hey, well, what about this? Let’s try this or whatever.
I always think about the poem by Mary Oliver, which I use a lot in my practice. And it’s called The Journey. It’s actually a brilliant poem.
“And the end is, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world determined to do the only thing you could do determined to save the only life you could save.”
That’s the last stanza, but that really says it all like that kind of that clarity, and I think that’s really what my journey has been about like just increasing clarity. Yeah, I mean clarity is such a pursuit for everything, isn’t it? It’s like you can’t take action unless you have a clear set of options or a clear path or really understand yourself.
JAY: Yeah. What you said about why don’t the people sit in their misery, like, if you’re suffering, or there’s something kind of coming up for you. Because I think that’s the opposite of resilience, isn’t it? It’s like, you’re not going to have resilience if you sit in your misery, but then they could say, well, I’m okay in my misery, like, you know, leave me alone.
CHRISTINA: The way to think about this is a victim psychology, you know, Michael Beckwith, who is a kind of new age spiritual teacher out of California, he has like four stages of spiritual development. And the first one is really the victim. And it really is: life is happening to me. And that’s really like this helplessness or powerlessness or this lack of agency and people will often sit in that for like a good long time. Sometimes they don’t know what it is that they need to do to get out of that space.
There are so many influences in our life that are out of our control, right? A whole bunch of stuff that is out of our control. And yet our major piece of empowerment is our mindset and how we approach it. And how do we live our life in the midst of a ton of uncertainty, you know, craziness, war, whatever, like, you know. The world is an unsafe place and it’s an uncertain place. And how do we live that and live our best life?
And I think that has to do with how we approach it, and that is that we have ultimate say in how we view life. We can view it in a positive way, optimistic, hopeful, and meet the obstacles that come to us, right? Or we can go to our beds and put our covers over the head and say, you know, world go away. Now I have done that.
Oh, we’ve all done that. We’ve all done that. I mean, it’s how long you do that for?
CHRISTINA: Yes, exactly.
JAY: Is it like a couple of hours, a couple of days?
CHRISTINA: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Enough. Enough. Yeah.
Yes, exactly. Cause at some point, you still have to live your life.
From the perspective of the book, this idea of soul making, the idea was actually first quoted by John Keats, who’s this romantic English poet, right? And he called it soul making. And then a number of Jungians actually picked it up, like James Hillman picked it up, and a couple of other people picked it up. Keats said:
“Call the world if you please the vale of soul making, and then you will find out the use of the world.”
When he wrote that he was actually quite young. I think he was in his early 20s. And London was just, had this outbreak of a whole bunch of diseases, it was like 1819, and all these people died, and he was working in the hospital, and he was really struggling with what he felt at some point was random, meaningless suffering. You know, the, why did these people die? What is it about? Right?
And his idea is -and I think this is important for all of us in terms of our resilience – is that suffering is woven into the fabric of our lives. I mean, it’s about the human condition. You have to, right? We just, that’s what it is.
But it’s also where the soul is forged and refined because of needing to clear up limiting beliefs or earlier conditioning, so that you do get to that clarity of voice. So he was battling against the prevailing Christian notion of the time that, you know, redemption happens when you die and you go to heaven and everything is right as rain. But actually, the redemption is actually sought in self-knowledge. Right?
JAY: Yeah, this is very deep, and obviously sometimes when we get hit with stresses and strains and challenges as entrepreneurs and, as humans, you know, even outside of business is like, we’re not suffering in quite the way that some areas of the world are suffering. Does the extent to which the suffering is, like, the environment, the situation, does that influence our resilience?
Or is it just reminding ourselves our little challenges sometimes compared to the big challenges that people are facing trying to feed their family or find water. It feels like a different, like, scale or order of magnitude. Psychologically, do you feel we still have to harness the same tools?
CHRISTINA: Well, I think so. And I think your point is really a good one because our environment does actually impact. I mean, you and I are very fortunate that because we work at home and we have the tools and the affluence to actually create our environment, and there’s less than 1 percent of the people in the world get to do that.
But at the same time, there is what Jung would call meaningless suffering and what is called meaningful suffering. And I think about meaningless suffering as a kind of a dukkha suffering using the Buddhist idea, which all has to do with the self-talk in our head.
Right, like, my life is hell or, you know, it shouldn’t be this way versus what am I going to do to feed my family? What am I going to do to, to keep myself safe in the face of bombing? You know, that is true human suffering. And it doesn’t minimize the tragedy of it, but often what we tell ourselves about it has a lot to do with the quality of our experience. Right?
So, that that’s how I would make the distinction.
JAY: Some of the areas that we’re exploring, it’s about how we get in our own heads. I think there’s a physical resilience in the situations where there’s some physical threats and suffering, as you said. And then there’s the stuff we do inside our heads, which is self-induced suffering.
Sometimes we overthink, we overanalyse, the self-talk you just talked about super important to kind of get on top of that and get support to minimize that because you go in this sort of negative spiral don’t you all the way down yeah if you’re so inclined and being able to cut that off and send it in a different direction I think a lot to do with the psychological side of therapy. It’s very hard to do for ourselves.
CHRISTINA: Totally. Because often we actually have to get another voice or we have to get another perspective.
You know, often that self-talk comes from very early on, that comes from the age of 3, 4, 5, 6, you know, it’s early stuff. Little kids, they’re primarily emotional beings. The logical part of their brain hasn’t actually come online. So, they’re reacting almost exclusively from an emotional perspective.
And so, something happens and their survival mechanism kicks in. They can’t say that they’re caregivers are terrible people and you know whatever because their survival depends on it so they put it on themselves and they say I am bad or I’m not good enough or whatever and there’s nobody to say no that’s not true, you know, like a parent to say I made a mistake or it’s not your fault, to relieve that kind of responsibility.
And so, 40 years later or whatever, however long and now they’re in the therapist office and they’re trying to deprogram their own conditioning because of what they told themselves at five years old, based out of survival.
And I think that’s where the spiritual component comes in? We have to get oriented to something larger.
JAY: Yeah, to sort of tether us somehow to ground us to something that is meaningful again.
I think the other thing that comes up a lot for entrepreneurs is around balance. So not just resilience and like dealing with past traumas and things that we’ve talked about in the past, it’s a lot to do with how do you keep that sustained, high achieving, pushing all the time when you’re an entrepreneur. I mean, we’ve had lots of coaching conversations about this. And as you said earlier, it’s sometimes you can feel when you’re heading towards burnout when you’ve got the balance wrong somehow.
I don’t know if it’s related to like how we show up and how we think about ourselves and the self-talk again, but it feels that that’s the biggest challenge is how to build in the self-care, the self-management into that high achiever mode.
CHRISTINA: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
JAY: Do you have any perspectives?
CHRISTINA: Well, there are two things. Having a dog really helps. It really does. I mean, because how I structure my day involves how many walks she gets. And so, it’s really good for me to go for a walk and clear my head. Often also because if I do a shift between, you know, my practice and then my other business, it’s really good just to go for a walk.
And that just kind of gives me a little bit of a break in my day or in my brain, and that really, really helps a lot. And I try to do, like, for me, I try to do 10 or 11 thousand steps a day. My dog needs that. So that feels really good.
And whatever the science says about that. I think they say that walking is actually pretty good. And that’s my prime form of exercise.
The other thing I start my day with a meditation and I have for about 10 years and you know, 20 to 30 minutes. And during that meditation, I try to set the intention for the day. Like, I try to approach the day from positivity, if I can express a purpose for the day. And by and large, I can usually go through my day in a fairly positive way.
Life still whacks me every once in a while, and I still have to struggle out with all of that. But I think there are those things really help. You know, eating well. I’m actually also pretty obsessed about my sleep. Ever since the question, you know, what’s the one thing you can do to increase your productivity? And, throwing out all sorts of different solutions and stuff and it’s sleep. Yeah. Yeah. So having a good sleep.
JAY: I think the other things you mentioned actually contribute – the eating, the walking meditation they’re -all kind of conducive to that. It’s interesting because you said right at the beginning about taking a break when you start to feel like you’re running out of energy or moving towards burnout. And then there’s the daily things that you build in regularly as well so that maybe then you don’t get to the point where you just collapse and need a break. That’s why I hear about it a lot.
And it’s also about habits that stick. And when you’ve got a dog, you can’t say: Oh, I don’t feel like going out today because my doggy needs to walk. So that I can understand you saying.
CHRISTINA: It helps even in Canada where it could be like, minus 15 and like, still up to your eyeballs. Right? Dogs still have to go out for a walk.
JAY: When you were writing the book and you were going into your own journey to soul making and resurrecting some of your own experiences and trying to dive into those and understand them -and I think part of it is you’re finding yourself on you so that’s what you mean by soul making- what were the biggest surprises in all of that for you?
I suppose there’s two ways of asking it. What were the things that you expected to discover and what were the biggest surprises?
CHRISTINA: Yeah, it’s interesting. When I think about the book, I think about it as more of a demonstration of soul making in action. Because as I was writing it, often I would get the pieces of information that I needed through an intuition. I think that really surprised me. For the longest time, I was just stuck in this two-year period of my life, that was really awful and, as I wrote about it, it had to do with my youngest brother’s mental illness and his struggles with the law and, you know, just goes on and on and on. But ultimately ended with my father’s death and prostate cancer and a number of things.
It was really, it was really intense. And there was just something about the process, I just got stuck there. Right? And, as I was writing, more of the story or more of my way of working through it came available to me.
That’s why I think it’s about demonstration in action. Because I remember first that I was telling somebody about everything, and I was telling about my reaction to it, and how difficult it was. And somebody said: Oh well, you lost your connection or you felt betrayed by Jungian psychology, which was very true. It was like that was my philosophy. That was the thing that was supposed to hold me. And I went, Oh yes, that’s actually right. You know, I didn’t have the thing that held me and I think that’s why we need some kind of spiritual lens or spiritual container that actually holds us.
Because if we don’t have that, then life feels random and meaningless, and we can easily fall into the victim.
So, I talk a little bit about Sophia, who is this Gnostic goddess, who is very much about the feminine and she kind of comes to us in this idea of intuition. And it’s like if we’re open to those messages, those intuitions, those questions, as Sam Kean would talk about the questions of our life, we kind of go, Oh, what about that? Maybe I should think about that. And those were the things that led me to filling out the story.
So, for instance, the whole thing about Sophia came because I was sitting in a lecture of a friend of mine who was writing about Sophia and I had really didn’t really know very much about her. But there was something that she said that referred to a piece that I had already written. And I was aware that the piece that I’d written wasn’t quite complete, there was something missing, and she just made like one line or two lines in this lecture and I went, Oh, oh, there’s the missing piece.
And so it was almost like I got help. Right? I got help from the universe or I got help from the world to complete the pieces. I think when we do get hit by a huge piece – a big thing, like a big, big, like life really hits you to your knees – like, that’s the kind of attitude or perspective that is required to find our way out.
And then as a result of that, I created a whole number of spiritual practices that I have implemented in my day, pretty much like on an ongoing basis and they give me meaning and they contain me, but they’re quite uniquely my own.
Like the story of Peru, the water spirit, you know, in the morning said you’re too much in your head. And then that night, the pipe bursts in my room and I’ve got a huge flood happening. And how to treat that kind of symbolically.
JAY: Universe telling you something. Yes.
I go back to what you said the questions of our life and I think it’s very difficult for people to formulate those. Yeah. I mean it seems extreme to have to write a whole memoir to discover these things. What would you advise to people to make a start with this for themselves? To take the soul making for themselves and go on this journey of discovery and find those missing pieces when you don’t know what questions to ask.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, it’s a really great question and I think that it’s about asking empowering questions. And I’ll give an example, because when you ask a question, you are on a quest. Right? So, if you ask the question, like: why is this happening to me? God, like, railing to the universe, railing: why is this happening to me? That’s a question you’re never going to get answered. Mm hmm. Because there’s no rational explanation for why this is happening, you know.
JAY: There’s no agency in it, as you were saying earlier as well, yeah.
CHRISTINA: Exactly. And, you know, if you ask that question, it will still see meaningless and random, right? That will just kind of go, there’s no order in the universe.
JAY: And you feel like a victim again when you ask those kinds of questions.
CHRISTINA: Exactly. So, if your perspective is such that and a number of spiritual teachers talk about this, is that life happens for you, like whatever happens in your life is for you, and whatever materializes in your life, that is the thing that you have to work on. So, whatever is in the way is the way. So whatever obstacle, it’s kind of Ryan Holloway’s The Obstacle is the Way. Right?
Then the question becomes – and this is a little philosophical question, but the question becomes – who am I that this is happening to me and what is it that I have to learn? Where is my growing edge? How do I have to move out from who I know myself to be, to who I need to become?
JAY: Yeah. Who I need to become. Yeah. Be, do, have. I’ve heard that before. You have to flip it.
CHRISTINA: And that is about being so who are you being – and in your being – if you’re being a victim. Yeah, then you’re going to do the same things over and over again. Right?
JAY: Yeah. And I was thinking how people are well, why can’t I be like her? Or why can’t I be like that person? If you want to be successful, like that person then you have to do the things that person does.
CHRISTINA: Exactly. Yeah.
JAY: People don’t want to do the work. So yeah. I mean, that’s a whole different discussion.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, because then we’re right back to the whole self-talk, right? Do people feel like they deserve it? Or: oh, I can’t do it or whatever. And then we’re all right back to the mindset piece.
JAY: think we could talk about this for a lot longer. We’ve just scratched the surface quite literally. You’ve mentioned a few things, but what would you say is your positive superpower for rising resilient that you also use to help your clients. Could you name it?
CHRISTINA: Well, I think the superpower is about perspective, and not so much a positive, but an empowering meaningful perspective. Often, I feel like with when I’m working with my clients, my biggest job is just to add a different perspective. Yeah. Whenever I get from somebody: Oh, I never thought about that. Yeah, yeah. That’s actually really great because then something is opened up, and that they can then think about something different.
And you know, I do a lot of dream work and I love the dream work. And so, I would also say that one of my superpowers is working with dreams, helping clients really understand that there’s an energy in them that wants them to grow, and be all that they can be, and be at peace and content. That’s our natural state of being, to be peaceful.
JAY: It’s worth remembering that, isn’t it? It’s worth reminding ourselves of that, because it feels like the opposite sometimes. Oh, for sure. When you just go on kind of moaning and whining and complaining, you feel that that becomes the norm.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, exactly. But that’s not the norm. That’s just about, oh, this shouldn’t be happening. Things should be different. I’ve got all these expectations that are not being met. Well, that’s dukkha suffering [in Buddhist thought]. That’s just making yourself miserable.
If you assume that like peace and content is the norm, and then the energy comes to you and you can grow.
JAY: I love that perspective, that empowering perspective. It’s not about just being super positive all the time and like pretending, it’s what are the questions I can ask that will empower me to grow and to bring the energy in a positive way so I really really like that.
When’s the book actually coming out? When can people, because I’d love anyone that’s listening, it’s like watch out for this book because it will take you on a journey. I’ve read it in the draft form and it raises a lot of questions. So, my question to you about how do you get into all of this? You know, do you start journaling? Do you write your own memoir? Just going on, as you said, a demonstration of someone else’s, it starts to help you, I think. So when’s it coming out? When can we get our hands on it?
Well, I’ve got it out to a couple of publishers, I’ll hear in a couple of months, we’ll see. However, if people are interested, I’m doing a whole day workshop with the CG Jung Foundation of New York, which will be largely based on the book, and we’ll have some opportunities for people to have some practical experiences.
This book feels like it’s larger than just the Jungian community.
JAY: That’s why it’s just been such a pleasure to get you on the show and talk about this and like create an episode around it. And as I say, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface, so lots more to come. Thank you so much for joining me.
CHRISTINA: Oh, thank you. That was good.
JAY: It was good. I felt that we can go in all these different directions. I think it’s just threading through the focus of what came up. Because it was very loosely just around journeys in soul making. But that word empowerment that you used. I think the main thing as well is getting people to ask those questions, but how do you find the right questions to ask? That’s when you need the therapy, right?
CHRISTINA: Yeah, or a coach, like I have you my coach, I have a spiritual counsellor, I’ve got my analyst, and everybody provides a different perspective, and I need that to get out of my own way, right?
JAY: And there’s no right or wrong. So those different perspectives, seeing it through a different lens and all of that.
CHRISTINA: Exactly.
JAY: The empowering questions I think was at the centre of it and you can’t get to those without some of the other things that you were talking about, the meditation and clearing your space, having the energy to find those questions, and to, like, explore the answers for yourself as well.
CHRISTINA: It was really amazing for me because in these kinds of situations, I really am able to pull together a lot of things. It’s really good.
JAY: Very good. That’s awesome. And thank you so much again for your time, Christina Becker, everyone. It’s been a pleasure.
Ready for Transformation?
Read and learn more about Christina’s work and soul making as a spiritual practice:
- Website: cjbecker.com
- Read Christina’s blog: https://www.cjbecker.com/blog/ and specifically Soul Making as a Spiritual Practice
- Work with Christina: https://www.cjbecker.com/services/
Mentions:
- Carl Gustav Jung – a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology
- John Keats – poet
- Sam Kean – questions that we live by
- Michael Beckwith – phases of spiritual development
- Mary Oliver – the Journey poem
- Ryan Holloway’s book “The Obstacle in the Way”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetypal_psychology
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