Breathing - Letting Go and Letting Come

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman challenges what he calls the ‘parental fallacy’ — that is, the belief that ‘we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behaviour of our mother and father’. It is the mistaken belief that, just as the body emerged from the parent’s making, so too does the child’s soul and spirit. But, says Hillman:

The question eclipsing all others is: how does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?

For ‘growing down’ is the task of childhood — coming to earth, entering the world. So, for instance in the Zohar, we find the injunction to the unborn soul: ‘Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.’ It is not only an ancient Jewish idea; Plotinus writes: ‘being born, coming into this particular body, these particular parents, and in such a place, and what we call external circumstances … form a unity and are as it were spun together.’ Or my daughter could say, ‘Before I came down to the ground I already knew my friends — then I was born and I found them again…’

We do not bring our children ‘up’, or ‘raise’ them. We help or hinder them in growing down; and this impulse in children to grow down pre-exists. So how do we help and not hinder? Hillman is uncompromising:

Parents’ deficit attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the sole reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon [your individual human spirit]. To set the civilisation straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own.

This is what teenagers mean when they call us hypocritical — they see we are not true. To become our true selves — this is the example each of us has to set, so that our children are inspired — a word meaning ‘to breathe in the daimon’ — not to necessarily become like us, but to become themselves. Their selves.

Parenting thus implies a ‘lightness of touch’ — a ‘letting-go’ and a ‘letting-come’, rather than cultivating the claustrophobic environment that results from excessive parental control, or the metaphorical agoraphobia that is a consequence of under-parenting. The life processes are present as world processes, and our first parental responsibility is stewardship of this offering out of the world. It begins with air and light, with a fragrant breeze of open spaces, with both movement and stillness. Systole, diastole… Breathing…

So breathe easy… But not negligently — let your child go, let the world come, but be mindful of the quality of the breathing. Do not stifle, but do not let the gale blow in… Make a home —in that place between ourselves and the world…