Let the Pendulum Swing!

Dear friends,

I’ve just spent an incredible month in San Francisco, and something has been clarifying itself - something I want to share with you as we step into this new year together.

I believe the work of life is about holding seeming opposites and making room for it all. The part of us that wants freedom and the part that wants security. The part that craves expansion and the part that needs containment. The impulse toward lightness and the pull toward depth. We may experience these as internal conflicts. We can feel stuck between them, believing we must choose one or the other.

But what if the work isn’t choosing? What if it’s allowing the pendulum to swing?

Here’s what I’ve been learning - to let the pendulum swing! When we have internal permission, relational support, and the capacity to experiment - to actually move and try things - a profound life alchemy happens. The movement creates transformation. Not resolution. Not one or the other. When we have the freedom to inhabit different poles and we let ourselves need seemingly opposite things, we discover something new - something that emerges in the movement between those polarities.

This is deeply Jungian territory. Jung wrote extensively about the alchemical process - and the alchemists weren’t trying to eliminate base metals. They were transforming them through process. The heat, the dissolution, the recombination. The work was in the vessel, in the holding, in allowing change to happen.

Jung’s concept of the transcendent function speaks directly to this - it’s the psyche’s remarkable capacity to hold opposing forces and create something new from their union. Something new is born, not from either/or but from both/and. From the willingness to swing, mix and experiment. Hilma af Klint painted this understanding in her series “The Ten Largest” - in Childhood and Youth, we see spirals of color swirling and moving, never static, each stage of life holding its own pendulum swing between expansion and containment, lightness and depth. I’ve included two of my favourites here, above and below. When I saw them in person at the Tate modern a few years ago, it was an incredible experience. Nothing prepares you for the size, the vibrant colour and the impact of these pieces.

Spirit and Soul: My Geography

A literal example of all this from my life is England and America.

I grew up moving. When I was a child, I wasn’t empowered with choice - I moved when my family moved. I couldn’t listen to my inner promptings, to my desire to feel the spirit of the American south-west or the deep green soul of English soil. It was one or the other - and the opposite polarity often felt lost to me.

Now I can listen and I can move more freely. This freedom has been profoundly healing and has been preparing me for this next chapter of my life.

Through a conversation with my mother recently, we discovered we both feel the American Southwest holds the element of spirit. There’s a lightness there. The big skies open you to possibilities. Inspiration lives there. Imagination expands.

For both of us, we feel England hold the soul.; the depth, ancestry and heart.

Spirit and Soul feel different - one explores imagination, the other heart. One reaches outward, the other reaches inward. Both feel so essential to me..

The freedom to move between them, to let the pendulum swing, has been opening something in me. The false binary is dissolving - I’m discovering I’m more spacious than the either/or mind told me. And in that allowing, something is becoming possible that I couldn’t have accessed from either place alone.

The Permission We’ve Been Denied:

As women, we’re often taught to fear the pendulum swing. We’re told our “mood swings” are evidence of instability, that changing our minds makes us untrustworthy, that moving between different needs or desires means we’re flaky, selfish or scattered.

The patriarchal script insists we be consistent, predictable and always available - that our value lies in our steadiness as caregivers and our ability to focus on others. But Jung understood that the Self cannot develop without honoring the shadow - all the parts we’ve been taught to exile. For women, this often includes our changeability, our need for solitude alongside connection, our right to say “I needed this yesterday but I need something different today.” The pendulum swing doens't make us "hysterical women" or emotionally unstable - it’s the psyche’s natural movement toward wholeness.

When we prioritize connecting with ourselves, we’re not abandoning our capacity to care for others. We’re refusing to collapse into the role of eternal caregiver and claiming our full humanity. The false binary dissolves: we can be deeply relational and deeply sovereign. Both. The swing between them isn’t a flaw to be corrected, it's the very movement that keeps us alive, whole and true.

What Jung Knew About the Swing:

Jung understood enantiodromia - the principle that things transform into their opposites when pushed to extremes. The pendulum naturally swings. For instance, try to stay only in spirit, only in expansion, only in possibility - and eventually you’ll crave ground, embodiment, the weight of soul. Stay only in soul, only in depth, only in feeling - and you’ll hunger for air, for horizon, for the spaciousness of spirit.

The work isn’t preventing the swing. It’s allowing it. Having the internal permission and the relational support to say “I need the other pole now” and trust that you’re not abandoning anything - you’re completing the circuit.

Jung’s alchemical marriage, the coniunctio, is about the union of opposites that creates something new. Not compromise. Not the flattening of both into a lukewarm middle ground. It's a genuine third thing that holds the full charge of both poles.

The angel gracing the Temperance card keeps pouring water from one vessel to another, endlessly mixing, blending, finding balance not through force but through flow. This is the image that’s been with me - transformation through movement, through the willingness to let things pour and mix and change. For me, it's about trusting the process rather than controlling the outcome.

So as we begin this year together, I’m holding these truths:

That wholeness includes both poles
That I’m more spacious than the either/or mind tells me
That movement itself can be healing
That different places, relationships, modalities, ways of being can be alchemical vessels for becoming
That the cage of either/or was never locked

I experimenting with:

Moving beyond the tyranny of either/or thinking in whatever area I feel stuck
Giving myself permission to need seemingly opposite things
Finding and deepening the relational support that aids this experimentation
Identifying where I’ve been trying to “resolve” tensions that might instead want to be held and moved between
Letting the false binaries dissolve

Perhaps you relate.

This is the work I love to do - whether in therapy, coaching, or collaborative tarot sessions. Creating the vessel where the pendulum can swing safely. Witnessing the alchemy that happens when you discover and allow the wholeness of who you are.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to explore it with you.

With love,
Hannah Green MFT

Hannah practices depth psychology in Cornwall and San Francisco, working with individuals and couples through the lens of Jungian analysis, attachment theory, and psychospiritual development. She offers therapy, coaching for healing professionals, and collaborative tarot sessions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​