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The Quickening: Waiting, Transformation and the Threshold of Change
Manage episode 502732400 series 3635318
Why life speeds up before transformation: Jill Marshall explores the quickening through stories, Jungian psychology and lived experience.
Why does life feel as though nothing happens for ages and then suddenly everything arrives at once? In this episode of The Download, Jill Marshall explores the archetypal rhythm of the quickening, that moment when long periods of waiting give way to sudden acceleration, synchronicities and transformation.
Drawing on her work mentoring fiction editors and as an author, Jill shows how the pacing of novels mirrors the psyche’s own cycles. Her mentees are at the final stretch of their training, moving from slow, steady exercises into the rush of a full professional edit, and their experience becomes a mirror of this larger pattern.
Jill connects this to Carl Jung’s idea of enantiodromia, Marie-Louise von Franz’s reflections on the unconscious, and her own recent experiences of events clustering together in uncanny ways. She explains how times of stillness are not wasted but act as a gestation before the sudden rush forward, and how the appearance of opposites at these moments is part of the transformation rather than a regression.
Whether you find yourself in a season of waiting or in the swirl of too much happening at once, this episode offers perspective, encouragement and practical wisdom for recognising and navigating your own quickening.
00:00 Welcome to The Download with host Jill Marshall
00:34 Exploring the quickening in stories and life
01:08 The final stretch for Jill's fiction editors
03:47 The archetypal pattern of quickening
07:11 Personal experiences of quickening
10:41 Embracing the quickening and what it means
13:53 Congratulations, conclusion and farewell
If you’re curious to go deeper into these rhythms of waiting, transformation, shadow and integration, you might also enjoy: Letting Go of the Log, where we release survival patterns; The Invisible Child Archetype, where we sit with the shadows of self-abandonment; and Patterns Within Patterns, which explores the hidden cycles that weave through art, psyche and daily life. Those episodes sit right beside this one on the same journey.
Find out more about Jill’s best-selling fiction and storyworlds on girlpowerpublishing.com.
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