No, not that kind of “letting yourself go,” which is a phrase used to disparage someone who pays less attention to their appearance than they used to.
We’re in the Keeping Still section of Cancer season, so I’ve been reflecting on the Chinese wu wei sort of letting go. Jung described wu wei as “the art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself.”
The Keeping Still hexagram of the I Ching is a doubling of the mountain trigram. It correlates with introverted feeling (Fi) per Chinese Jungian analyst Chenghou Cai: “For Fi, deep feelings are seldom articulated, but are powerful when they are expressed. At this level of introverted feeling, one is like the person who has mastered the art of Keeping Still as taught by the I Ching.”
One is at rest, not merely in a small, circumscribed way in regard to matters of detail, but one has also a general resignation in regard to life as a whole, and this confers peace and good fortune in relation to every individual matter.
The I Ching translated by Richard Wilhelm
The opposite of introverted feeling is extraverted thinking. The United States is an ESTJ culture and one-sided in extraverted thinking. Jung said extraverted thinking is the only kind of thinking recognized by Western culture.
Extraverted thinking (Te), which compares to Thunder in the I Ching, acts with directness and authority and has little use for wu wei and Keeping Still.
Since the Aries eclipse this spring, followed by the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus, and then all the Gemini energy, it sometimes felt like it has been a never-ending parade of extraverted thinking, extraverted sensation, and extraverted intuition.
Now that it’s Cancer season with its introverted feeling energy, hopefully some of how we let ourselves go can be in the “Calgon, Take Me Away!” kind of way.
If the waters of Cancer ever get too choppy, here’s Marion Woodman’s reminder about stillness, with its introverted feeling undertones:
To find the stillness at the center of the whirlpool, the eye of the hurricane, and not hold onto it with the rigidity born of fear, is what in analysis we struggle to reach. That center I call Sophia, the feminine Wisdom of God. It is not the masculine standpoint, the highly-principled “Here I stand.” … It is an invisible center encountered only in a creative process, at first not consciously recognized, but gradually revealed as the process unfolds.
Addiction to Perfection by Marion Woodman
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