Jean Shinoda Bolen: A Heart-Connected Activist
Dr. Mary Liepold
by Mary Liepold, Editor in Chief
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D, is a psychiatrist, a Jungian analyst, and an internationally known author and speaker who draws from spiritual, feminist, Jungian, medical, and personal wellsprings of experience. She is the author of The Tao of Psychology, Goddesses in Everywoman, Gods in Everyman, The Ring of Power, Crossing to Avalon, Close to the Bone, The Millionth Circle, Goddesses in Older Women, Crones Don’t Whine, Urgent Message from Mother, and Like a Tree, which will be released on Earth Day, April 22, by Red Wheel/Weiser.
Dr. Bolen is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and a past board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women and the International Transpersonal Association. She was a recipient of the Institute for Health and Healing’s Pioneers in Art, Science, and the Soul of Healing Award, and is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She has served on the Peace X Peace Advisory Council since its inception.
I interviewed her during the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meetings in New York earlier this year.
I’ve seen the resume, but who are you, Jean?
I am an author, an activist, a Jungian analyst having a good time in the last third of my life. It IS a good time, a good time to tap into spiritual resources and nature and heart connections. I’m a heart-connected activist, and all my work comes from that source.
I’ve written 11. They’re all still in print, and Goddesses in Everywoman is out in 24 languages. In a bookstore or a library they would be in different sections, because they’re all on different subjects. The newest one, Like a Tree, tells how trees, women, and tree people can save the planet. The books appear to be unrelated, yet through them all, the thread is running from an intuitive feeling depth in myself with the intention that the book will go out and do some good, touch someone’s life. With every book, as I write it, I have a sense of who it might help. The books last because people feel they were written to them.
The first book was on synchronicity, and that’s a thread too. CSW this year has been full of synchronistic meetings. It always feels like the universe takes an interest. It does, whenever the work, the writing, the energy connects to the big-S Self. When you are living that way you engage the synchronicity principle.
My assignment right now, or part of it, seems to be my role as an advocate and poster child for the 5th World Conference on Women—5WCW, for short. After quite a few years, it suddenly feels like everyone is receptive, so maybe the time is right. I see it as growing the way strawberry plants proliferate. The runners go out, and where they land in fertile soil you have another strawberry plant that does the same thing. Soon you have a whole field of strawberries. People talk about ideas going viral, but strawberries make a nicer image, don’t you think?
I love that image. What’s your greatest personal strength?
Optimism, coupled with perseverance. I’m stubbornly optimistic. That’s what will have me stick with a patient or with a cause, like the 5WCW. It was born in 2002, so it’s been almost 10 years now. I’ve honed it and learned more as I went along. This year I’m pushing the buttons, nice big blue ones that say 5WCW. This cause needed a logo. The first buttons said 2010, but I’ve given up having a date. It will happen.
The way we individually know peace is by being it. The Brahma Kumaris say “Om Shanti,” I am peace. Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. When you’re peaceful, you’re happy and also grateful; you have a sense of being part of something and being at home in it. It’s a sense of Tao, oneness, great mystery; a sense you are not alone. You’re a solitude, but also in a deep way part of something.
People have the experience of being at peace and being peace, but it’s hard for people to be in that state when they’re afraid and they have reason to be afraid. The most impressive people are those who practice nonviolence based on a state of inner peace in conflict situations. I meet them, and they amaze me.
Which of the world’s conflicts or evils affects you most?
I am most appalled at how children are sometimes treated. The callousness of human beings who can treat other human beings … to sell people! Little girls trafficked at four! The men who can pay for this, and go home to their own little kids! That’s truly evil. If the maternal principle decided things, all the little kids would be looked after. A woman, especially a woman who has had children, knows that every child wants what she wants for her own child. She can imagine a world where that callousness that allows people to maltreat other people is not tolerated.
The second thing that bothers me, hurts my heart, is that many people who have been abused believe they must have deserved it. Their innate sense of justice, that sense every child has, works things around to that. Fortunately, as a psychiatrist, sometimes I can help.
Where do you find your own strength, then?
This isn’t a predictable or a safe world. A good friend in my women’s circle was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and was hit head on. She was in a coma for two months. Things happen, and I think often that we only have the choice of how we respond to what happens. To use the title of one of my books, Crones don’t whine.
Gary Zukav calls this place Earth School. My son graduated Summa Cum Laude from Earth School, dealing with complications from the disease that took his life. I tell that story in Close to the Bone—the only one of my books I ever revised.
Of all your accomplishments, which one gives you the greatest satisfaction?
The most personal accomplishment has been my writing. Other things I’ve achieved have been done with lots of other people. Even work as an analyst is something you do with the other person. People often compare writing a book to having a baby, but your kids are their own people. A book actually is something you shape. And the satisfaction is twofold: the good feeling when it’s done, and then seeing it go out into the world—though you have to help it make its way at first, like you help a child. Yes, writing is definitely the greatest personal satisfaction.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
Did being a woman ever make things harder?
If I had wanted to be an astronaut, maybe, but becoming a doctor was possible then, especially becoming a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, or an internist. If I had chosen a specialty like neurosurgery it might have been harder. As it was, there was support.
This is a prime time to be a woman, to be creative, to do any kind of work you’re drawn to do. And also to be able to have a child or children, to have the amazing experience of birthing new life. It is participation in a miracle.
My ambitions as a child had no specific direction, but I always had a clear sense of possibility. I wrote about my career in Crossing to Avalon. I was a high school star, hot stuff, and I was set to use my talents as a debater and speaker to become a lawyer. Then I had a major turning point, and that turning point was humility. It was the difference between thinking I deserved my accomplishments and realizing I was blessed and the only way I could say thank you was to help people less fortunate. Being a doctor seemed like the most help. My mom is a doctor, but it wasn’t about her footsteps at all. I came home from camp and told my parents all of a sudden.
I loved history, art history, all the liberal arts. I had only taken the minimum required math and science courses in high school. I went to a college, Pomona, where pre-med was very serious, and I struggled through it. I knew it was going to be hard, so I made a deal with myself when I applied to med school that if I wasn’t accepted it was all off. But I got in.
What happened is that Cal offered a pre-professional physics course that could be done in one summer, in two sessions. I had imaginative teachers, and I fell in love with the symmetry of the universe. The Cyclotron project was going on there, so it was an exciting time. I was actually enrolled in nuclear physics for two weeks before I realized that was a romantic notion.
In fact, the real thread in my life is the thread of seeking and finding meaning in what I’m doing here, and then having my path supported by synchronistic events. The synchronicity affirms the meaning.
What’s your big, hairy, audacious goal?
To end patriarchy and balance the world in time to save humanity. When the feminine principle comes into balance with the masculine, the potential is enormous. Human potential IS enormous! It can’t be developed if people are terrorized and all the resources go into war stuff and greed stuff. We have to move to the tipping point with the conviction that girls and women cannot be treated this way. Creative, educated, comfortable women who have the opportunity to develop fully can save the world.
Yes! And Amen.
Jean, you’ve been watching Peace X Peace grow from the beginning. How do you see its future?
Peace X Peace has already created a presence and a vision and made connections that could be grounded in the Middle East in the hearts of women there and women from the US, forming bonds that continue through virtual circles, conference calls, and other means. I would like to see Peace X Peace creating ongoing, deep bonds between the true stakeholders in the culture of peace, and these are the women.
Since its inception in 2003, Peace X Peace has had a history of connection and interaction with Muslim and Arab women.
I talk about the maternal principles and mothers being sky mothers or earth mothers. The sky mother has a longitudinal overview of the child, the need for education to develop particular talents and arrange connections. She has a sense of helping the child grown into a man or women who will grow into the world and be of use to the world. The earth mother hold the seeds, grounds reality, is present to the child, providing a sense of security in a connection that is reliable and ongoing.
Peace X Peace is first of all a feminine organization, but I see it as more sky mother than earth mother in bridging distances, creating ongoing circles, and bringing women from one country to sit in circle with those of another.
The Middle East is where your founder Patricia Smith Melton’s energy has been planted. This is where Peace X Peace has laid down its roots. I want to see those roots go deeper into the ground side, especially now that there is so much ferment in the growing democracies about women’s rights and human rights—one of which is to live in a democracy.
Someone told me there were a million women in Tahrir Square in Cairo yesterday! While all this is happening, Peace X Peace has an established presence in the field, including the morphic field that I often reference. When women have heart connections across boundaries, and something happens in that other place, the sense of relationship remains and they feel each other’s disasters and success.
I also want Peace X Peace to become a UN-affiliated NGO that attends and brings delegates to the 5WCW. I’ll see you all there!
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