The Unshuttered Heart: Opening Aliveness/Deadness in the Self

by Ann Belford Ulanov

Aliveness and Deadness are processes that cannot be captured, only symbolized within the precincts of psychology and religion.Opening under the shadow of 9/11, our new century must reassess the preciousness of life and what we are living for, what we love, and what we find worth dying for. In the face of loss and absence, we must again ask what makes us feel connected to the source of aliveness. Yet, we must also understand that feeling fully alive means that we must come to fresh insight about the contrary of aliveness, which is deadness. Both aliveness and deadness are part of the same fabric of being. But how do we talk about them? Or do we leave these unnamed? For Ann Belford Ulanov, aliveness is to make something of what we hear, and to hear what we hear makes of us. Working on oneself enlarges; thus, society as psychological work and spiritual practice form a kind of social action. Our heart becomes unshuttered making new depths possible for the self and others.

250 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Elizabeth Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every year or so I need a good dose of Jung. THE UNSHUTTERED HEART was this year's fix, and while it lacks the cohesion and eloquence of Ann Belford Ulanov's other work I found the ideas here to be her most sweeping, integrative, and provocative. Most of these essays were written after 9/11, so she's addressing Jungian psychology and Christian theology in the context of collective tragedy and virulent evil. Jung's genius, she writes, was to locate our search for aliveness in the "inner conversation between ego and the Self." When we attend to this inner discourse--what she calls the "original conversation"--we "make oxygen for everyone else." In other words, our private healing participates in our corporate healing. Ulanov doesn't have to take this on faith; she has evidence.

I've posted her words over my desk: "Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us." These are good words to create by and better words to live by. I'm so grateful to participate in this broad, generative conversation!