Choose A Sacred Tree — What Your Instinct Reveals About Your Deepest Roots | Carl Jung

[00:00:00]You've been cut before, not with a blade, not with anything physical, with words, with silence, with a specific kind of abandonment that leaves no visible mark, but changes the entire shape of how you move through the world afterward. And here's what nobody ever told you about that. The tree that survives the storm does not survive because it was never damaged. It survives because something happened underground that the storm could not reach. Something in the roots held. And today we are going to find out what is holding in yours. Because Carl Jung spent his entire life studying the human psyche, and he arrived at one symbol above all others that he said captures the complete truth of what a human being actually is. Not a mirror, not a key, not a door, a tree. And the sacred tree you choose in the next few minutes is going to show you something about your own roots that you have never been shown before. Jung did not choose the tree symbol casually. He did not select it because it was poetic, or because it was ancient, or because it appeared in mythology and religion across every culture on Earth. Though all those things are true, he chose it because of something he observed in his patients again and again across decades of clinical practice. When people went deep enough into their own unconscious material, when they moved past the surface layers of memory and emotion and personality and reached the very foundation of who they were, they did not describe what they found in terms of thoughts or feelings or experiences.

[00:01:28]They described it in terms of roots, of depth, of what was feeding them from below ground, and what had been cut off from below ground, and what needed to be restored to below ground before anything growing above it could come fully alive.

[00:01:41]Jung said the psyche is a tree, and he meant it with the full weight of everything he had learned about what human beings actually are beneath everything they have learned to perform and present and protect. The tree is the oldest sacred symbol in the history of human civilization. Not one of the oldest, the oldest. It predates every written religion. It predates every organized spiritual tradition. It appears in the sacred mythology of cultures that had no contact with each other on opposite sides of the planet separated by oceans and mountain ranges and thousands of years. The Norse had Yggdrasil, the world tree whose roots reached into three separate realms of existence and whose branches held all the worlds together. The Celts had the sacred oak, so holy that their priests the druids performed every ceremony within sight of one. The Hindus had the Ashvattha, the sacred fig tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

[00:02:36]The tree that is described in the Bhagavad Gita as the imperishable tree whose roots are above and whose branches are below. The Egyptians had the sacred sycamore, the tree of the goddess Nut from whose branches the souls of the dead were fed on their journey through the underworld.

[00:02:51]The Japanese had the sacred cherry blossom whose annual flowering and falling was understood not as loss, but as the most honest teaching about the nature of existence that the natural world has ever produced. Jung studied all of these traditions. He read everything that had ever been written about the tree as a sacred symbol and he came to conclusion that is both simple and profound enough to spend an entire lifetime unpacking. He said the tree is the most complete symbol of the human psyche that exists because it is the only symbol that contains everything simultaneously. The roots go down into the dark, into the hidden, into what cannot be seen. The trunk stands in the visible world, solid and present and real. The branches reach upward toward light, toward possibility, toward what is not yet fully arrived. The tree does not choose between these dimensions. It inhabits all three at once. And Jung said the psychologically whole human being does is the same. They know their roots. They stand solidly in their present, and they grow towards something. In a moment, I am going to describe five sacred trees to you. Five trees that have been revered across five completely different ancient civilizations for thousands of years.

[00:04:08]Each one of these trees carries a specific relationship with the human psyche in Union psychology. Each one reveals a different truth about where you are in your own growth, your own rootedness, your own process of become the person you were always meant to be.

[00:04:24]And I want you to do just one thing. As I describe each tree, I want you to notice which one does not just interest you, but move something in you, something below your thinking mind, something in the place where your roots actually are. That movement is not random. That movement is your unconscious speaking the language it has always spoken, the language of symbols, the language of the sacred, the language that knows things about you that your conscious mind has not yet been given permission to say out loud. Here are your five sacred trees. The first tree is a Celtic sacred oak. Picture most ancient oak you have ever imagined. The trunk is so wide that four people holding hands could not reach around it.

[00:05:08]The bark is deeply furrowed and dark, carved by centuries of weather into something that looks less like bark and more like a landscape. The roots are visible above the ground, massive and gnarled and spreading in every direction, disappearing into the earth with a confidence of something that has been here longer than memory. The canopy above is vast and dense, blocking out the sky entirely directly beneath it, creating its own world of filtered green light and deep shade. Mistletoe grows in the high branches. The Druids believed mistletoe growing in an oak was the most sacred thing in the natural world, the place where heaven and earth met in a single living point. Ancient Celtic knotwork has been carved into lower trunk by hands that disappeared thousands of years ago. This tree has survived things you cannot imagine and it is still here. It is very much still here. The second tree is a Japanese sakura, the cherry blossom tree, pictured at the exact peak of its flowering. Not a single blossom past its prime and not a single blossom still closed. The trunk is dark and elegantly twisted. The bark smooth and fine-grained quality that looks almost like it has been polished by time rather than weather by every branch is covered in clouds of blossom so densely white and pale pink that the branches themselves are almost invisible. Petals are falling continuously, gently, absolutely without any effort or resistance. They are falling. They drift through the light in a way that is simultaneously heartbreaking and completely peaceful. In Japan, the annual blooming of the cherry blossom, the hanami, is one of the most significant cultural events of the year, not because it celebrates permanence, because it celebrates the opposite. The Japanese have a word, mono no aware, which means a bittersweet awareness of impermanence. The cherry blossom is the most honest teacher of this truth in the entire natural world. The third tree is the Norse Yggdrasil, the world ash tree.

[00:07:08]Picture something so vast that the word tree barely contains it. The trunk rises from roots that reach into three separate wells, the well of wisdom, the well of fate, and the well of the dead.

[00:07:20]The roots themselves are inhabited.

[00:07:22]A great serpent gnaws at them eternally from below. The branches reach into nine separate worlds, each containing a different dimension of existence. Two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, perch in the upper branches and fly out each day to observe everything that happens in all the worlds and return to whisper what they have seen into the ear of Odin. A squirrel runs continuously up and down the trunk carrying messages between the eagle at the top and the serpent at the bottom, between the highest realm and the lowest, between what aspires and what undermines. This tree does not exist in the world. This tree is the world.

[00:08:00]Everything that exists is held within it or connected through it or fed by it or threatening to destroy it. And it stands anyway. The fourth tree is the Hindu sacred banyan. Picture a tree that is also a forest. The banyan begins as a single tree but sends aerial roots downward from its branches. And these roots reach the ground and become new trunks and from those new trunks new branches spread and from those new branches new aerial roots fall. And over centuries a single banyan tree becomes an entire ecosystem that can cover acres of ground while remaining a single living organism connected through its original root system. The oldest banyan trees in India are estimated to be over 3,000 years old. The original trunk of some of them has rotted away entirely but the tree lives on through the hundreds of subsidiary trunks that grew from the roots that grew from the branches that grew from the original.

[00:08:52]Sacred red threads are tied around the main trunks. Small oil lamps are placed at the roots and lit each evening. The banyan in Hindu tradition is the tree of immortality not because it does not die but because it has found a way to keep living that does not depend on any single part of itself remaining intact.

[00:09:11]The fifth tree is the Egyptian sacred sycamore fig. Picture a tree of surprising beauty growing to the very edge where desert becomes farmland on the precise boundary between the barren and the fertile. The bark is smooth and pale almost golden in the late afternoon light with a natural warmth to it that makes it look less like wood and more like skin. The canopy is wide and generous casting shade that feels genuinely cool even in Egyptian heat. Ripe figs hang heavy among the leaves. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the sycamore fig was a tree of the goddess Nut, the sky goddess, and also Hathor, the goddess of love and beauty and the dead. The Book of the Dead shows the deceased being fed water and food by a goddess emerging from within the sycamore tree at the threshold of the afterlife. This tree exists exactly at the boundary between the living and the dead, between the desert and the garden, between what has been lost and what is still being offered. It grows where nothing else grows, and it feeds people the exact moment they need feeding most. Have you chosen your tree? Hold it in your mind.

[00:10:17]Feel the particular quality of whatever moved in you when you recognized it. And now, let us go down into the roots of what your choice is really saying. If you chose a Celtic sacred oak, your unconscious is speaking about something Jung identified as a foundational psychological task of what he called the first half of life. And he meant this not in terms of age, but in terms of psychological development. The Celtic oak is the tree of endurance, of surviving, of having roots so deep and so wide that nothing above ground, no matter how violent, can ultimately reach them. And the person who is drawn to this tree today has been tested not once, not in a single dramatic episode, but repeatedly, consistently, across a long enough period of time that endurance has become the primary mode of their existence. You have learned to survive things. You have become very good at surviving things. The roots you have developed in response to everything you've had to weather are real, and they are deep, and they are genuinely remarkable. But here is what the oak is asking you today, and this is where the Jungian depth of this choice becomes most important. Jung observed that the capacity to endure, when it becomes a dominant psychological mode, begins over time to crowd out something equally essential, the capacity to grow toward light. The massive Celtic oak casts so much shade beneath itself that almost nothing else can grow directly under it.

[00:11:43]It endures magnificently, but it also, without meaning to, blocks the light for everything around it. The question your unconscious is raising through this choice is not whether your roots are strong enough. They are. The question is whether you've given yourself permission to stop surviving long enough to start actually living. The oak does not just have roots. It has branches. And your branches have been waiting for light for longer than your roots have been waiting for water. If you chose a Japanese sakura, the cherry blossom, your unconscious has chosen a tree that you most directly associate with what he called the wound of attachment. And I want to explain this with great care because this concept is one of the most personally significant in all of Jungian psychology. And the person who chooses the cherry blossom almost always needs to hear in its full complexity. The sakura blooms for approximately 2 weeks each year. That is all. 2 weeks of extraordinary, overwhelming, heartbreaking beauty, and then it is gone. The Japanese do not mourn this.

[00:12:45]They celebrate it. They understand that the brevity is not the tragedy. The brevity is the teaching. That beauty is not diminished by its impermanence. That love is not lessened by its temporaryness. That the 2 weeks of full bloom are not made meaningless by the 50 weeks of bare branches. They are made more precious. The person who is drawn to the sakura today has a very specific and very deep relationship with loss.

[00:13:12]Not the dramatic, single event kind of loss, though that may also be part of your story. The quiet, accumulated, continuous kind of loss that comes from having loved things that did not last.

[00:13:24]People who left. Versions of yourself that were outgrown, dreams that bloomed and fell before they fully ripened, phases of life that were beautiful while they lasted and then ended with a finality that surprised you even when you could see them ending. And somewhere along the way you learned, as a form of self-protection, to stop fully blooming, to hold something back, to not commit completely to the beauty of what is present because you already know it will fall. The sakura is asking you today whether protection is costing more than the loss ever did. The petals fall whether you hold back or not. The only question is whether you were fully open while they were still on the branch. If you chose a Norse Yggdrasil, the world tree, your unconscious has made a choice that Jung would recognize as a signature of a very specific and very rare psychological type.

[00:14:15]The person who cannot help experiencing their own life in terms of its relationship to everything else, not in abstract or theoretical way, in an immediate, felt, continuously present way. You do not experience yourself as a separate individual moving through a world of other separate individuals. You experience yourself as something more like a node in a network, a point where multiple threads cross, a place where different worlds, different people, different dimensions of experience meet and interact and are in some way held together. This is not a metaphor for you. It is your actual felt experience of being alive and it is exhausting in ways that are almost impossible to explain to people who do not share it.

[00:14:58]Jung called this quality participation mystique and he identified it as both a profound gift and a significant psychological challenge. The gift is that you understand connection in ways that most people only theorize about.

[00:15:11]You feel the roots of things. You sense the underground networks between events and people and patterns that appear unconnected on the surface. You carry a natural understanding of how everything affects everything else that makes you an extraordinary presence in any situation that requires seeing the whole picture. The challenge is that the world tree in Norse mythology is always under threat. The serpent gnaws at the roots.

[00:15:36]The worlds it holds are in constant conflict, and the person who carries Yggdrasil energy often lives with continuous low-level sense of responsibility for things that are far beyond the scope of any individual human being to actually hold. The tree you chose today is asking you one direct question. Who is tending to tend the worlds? Who is feeding the roots of the one who feeds everything else? Because even Yggdrasil needs water. If you chose a Hindu sacred banyan, your unconscious is speaking about something that Jung spent the second half of his career trying to understand and articulate. The psychological phenomenon he called individuation through multiplicity. Every other tree on this list grows in a single direction, upward, outward from a single point of origin. The banyan grows differently. It grows outward and then it grows downward, and then the downward growth becomes new upward growth, and the whole organism expands in every direction simultaneously, while remaining a single living thing connected to invisible underground roots. The person who chose a banyan today does not have a single self. They have many, not in a fragmented or unhealthy way, in a way that is deeply complex, deeply experienced, deeply layered person naturally develops multiple genuine dimensions of who they are over the course of a life that has been fully lived. You have been many versions of yourself. Some of those versions would barely recognize each other if they met. The person you were 10 years ago, the person you are today, the person you are with your family, and the person you are with your closest friend, and the person you are when you are completely alone. These are not performances of a single self. They are genuine expressions of a genuinely multiple interiority, and the world around you has spent a considerable amount of energy trying to get you to pick one, to be consistent, to be legible, to stop being so many things and become something simpler that other people can more easily hold in their minds. The banyan is your unconscious telling you something that Jung discovered in his own long life of extraordinary multiplicity. The original trunk can rot away. The tree survives through all the other trunks that grew from all the other roots. Your complexity is not your instability. It is your resilience. If you chose the Egyptian sacred sycamore fig, your unconscious has chosen the tree that grows at the boundary, and that is the most significant thing about this choice, not the tree itself, not the species, not the mythology, though the mythology is extraordinary. The location. The sycamore fig in Egyptian sacred tradition does not grow in a garden. It does not grow in the desert.

[00:18:18]It grows exactly between them, on the precise line where barren becomes fertile, where death becomes life, where the journey of the soul crosses from one realm into another. And the person who is drawn to this tree today has been living at a boundary for a very long time. You are between something that has ended and something that is not yet fully begun, between who you were and who you are becoming, between the life you've been living and the life that is waiting on the other side of a threshold you have been standing at without quite crossing. Jung wrote extensively about what he called the liminal space, from the Latin word limen meaning threshold, the psychological territory of being between, between identities, between chapters, between the known and the unknown. He said the liminal space is the most creative and the most dangerous place in the entire psychological landscape. Creative because when the old structures are dissolved and the new ones have not yet formed, anything is possible. Dangerous because the human psyche, which requires structure and identity and continuity to function, is profoundly uncomfortable in between.

[00:19:25]It wants to rush back to what it knows or rush forward to what it can construct. It does not want to stay in the between. And Jung said that the people with