Winifred Hodge Rose
Assigned reading:
Primary runes in this bind-rune: Raidho, Uruz, Mannaz, Sowilo, Wunjo, Nauthiz, Ehwaz, Dagaz.
Mod and Hugr: Motivating Forces
Mod and Hugr have many similarities: their Midgard focus, their influence on our character, emotions, modes of thought, actions and reactions, and the connections between Mod’s deep-root of Will, and Hugr’s deep-roots of Desire, Longing, Yearning. These are primary motivating forces in our lives. Mod and Hugr can express themselves in very positive ways, and in negative ways, as well. One of the main things we do, as we grow and mature in Midgard life, is to become more aware of these souls as they express themselves through us into Midgard, and work on shaping their attitudes, actions and powers to work beneficially rather than counter-productively in our lives.
First, the Context
I want to emphasize that, in my understanding of Heathen soul lore, these soul-forces that motivate us are not divided into Christian-influenced ‘good versus bad’ motivations or inner personas, pictured as the influence of devils / demons versus guardian angels. The psychologist Sigmund Freud, and many after him, divided our ‘self’ into a subconscious or Id, and a super-consciousness or Conscience, and pictured the human character and deeds as a battleground between Good and Evil, where everything we fear and hate is stuffed into our subconscious and invisibly influences us, while our Conscience struggles, and often fails, to counteract these tendencies.
These observations perhaps have some accuracy, because this view of Good versus Evil is the perspective of Western society, and that cultural influence shapes people’s characters, ethics, thoughts and deeds. Medieval people believed in literal angels and demons influencing their inner choices, while modern, more secular people take a psychological approach; both of them base ethical systems upon their assumptions. But if you look at these approaches carefully, there is not that much difference between them, in the sense that they are both focused on an interpretation of Good versus Bad as the axis which shapes (or perhaps tortures) humans and the human world around us.
My exploration of Heathen soul lore leads me in a different direction, toward different conclusions. I don’t characterize Mod and its Will, Hugr and its Desires, as either ‘good’ or ‘evil, bad’. These inner forces are what they are: I believe that Hugr and Mod are individual soul-beings within us, who should be respected and understood, just as we try to do with other people around us. I don’t think they should be labeled, insulted, deformed, beaten into submission, or stuffed into a dark box and denied. Nor should they indulge themselves in orgies of self-gratification, exploitation of others, or uncontrolled envy and rage. Just as with any member of a household or a community, there needs to be a balance between pursuing one’s own will and desires, versus the needs of other people and the environment, including the rest of our own souls, our Lichama, and our relationships. In order to reach these understandings, our Mod and Hugr need to learn by example and experience, just as children do—that is, just as the Mod and Hugr within each child learn to do, or should learn.
It gives a great sense of inner freedom to leave behind this ‘good versus evil or bad’ dichotomy, and instead take a more nuanced approach to the soul-dynamics that lead to the development of our character, temperament and behavior. This approach can be considered as ‘functional’ rather than ‘prescriptive’, based on the Heathen idea of ethics as being something that humans develop, maintain, and adjust as necessary, based on the always-evolving needs and wellbeing of their community, rather than based on laws cast in stone.
So, this is the context within which I’d like us to explore the motivating forces of Mod and Hugr within ourselves: by taking an objective view of these powerful souls and how they shape our lives, with the understanding that there is always room for change, growth, development, and that self-knowledge and self-respect are the basis for a healthy and worthwhile life in any culture, place and time in the world.
Exercise 8-1: Observing your Motivating Forces
We’re going to look at Will and Desire here, the roots of our motivations, and I want to emphasize taking an objective, non-judgmental position as you do this. The point of this exercise is to understand ‘what is’, within you: what is actually going on. If you impose value judgments at this point in the process, that will introduce distortions and lack of clarity in both the expressions of your motivations, and your reactions to them. Right now, you’re like a scientist studying certain phenomena, in order to understand how they work.
I suggest pursuing this both during meditation, and as much as possible also during ‘real-time’ in daily life. We’ll start with meditation. Gather your awareness and open a space within your spiritual perception of your heart and throat, guts and jaws, your whole body. Sit quietly for awhile and allow any knowledge or feelings to arise within you, relating to wanting, willing, longing, wishing, needing. Write or record in your Daybook as this is going on, because there may be a long list, and it may be jumbled and confused.
Work on refining and clarifying this list of inner drivers: ask your Hugr and Mod which are the most important, the most fundamental, the ones that shape and influence your other, more superficial desires and will. Try to reduce it to a short list, working in your Daybook, but remaining tuned in to Hugr and Mod.
The next step is to take one thing at a time, one underlying motivating force in your life, and explore how it has expressed itself throughout your life. How has it influenced your choices, actions, emotions, behavior?
Personal Example
Here’s a personal example, which is rather long because I am trying to illustrate the process of this life-examination. (I hope you’ll forgive me for talking about myself in these study guides; it seems to me that offering examples of the exercises I’m suggesting can be helpful for you to get started on your own. But of course, you’re welcome to skip this and all the examples I offer.)
Perhaps because I grew up as the daughter of a US diplomat and we moved to different countries every couple of years, and then I moved and traveled a great deal during young adulthood, I’ve always had a longing for a particular sense of ‘my own home’. I have an inner sense of the qualities that make up ‘homey-ness’ to me, and the determination to achieve such a place has been one of the drivers in my choice of career, in how I manage my finances, and many other choices, actions and patterns in my life. I’ve harnessed my Mod’s Will and determination to work through many years of difficulties and sacrifices in order to pursue this desire of establishing a home. Sometimes this driving need has led to choices that overlooked other important factors, leading me to decisions that, in hindsight, I might have made differently if I had been more aware of these matters.
Further, I’ve come to realize that my true ideal home isn’t even a physical place, so in addition to my efforts to obtain and maintain a physical home, I’ve worked for years to understand my own need for a metaphysical or spiritual home. Finding Heathenry and Heathen spiritual practices, and in earlier years my work in founding and leading Heathen organizations, has given me a deeper sense of spiritual homecoming.
Even so, there is always an inner longing for more, a longing to come closer to some unreachable ideal of ‘true home’. This feeds into my care and deep concern about nature, habitat and the environment, which provides homes for all people, animals, landwights and other beings. I can never feel completely at home myself, when other people and beings are being made homeless. This perspective drove me toward my career in watershed management and landscape ecology, focused on improving and protecting habitat for other beings: helping them have homes, too. Due to many difficult circumstances, it took me almost two decades to achieve the university degrees that qualified me for this work; my Mod (though I did not recognize it at the time) kept me on track and didn’t allow me to give up my goal, no matter how difficult the challenges.
Mod’s Will was tuned in to Hugr’s longing; both of them drove me powerfully, using not only determination but courage, strategic planning, intelligence, strength and stamina, and other qualities of Hugr and Mod to reach this goal. In this driven process, though, some other good things were overlooked, given up, chosen against, that maybe I would have done differently if I had been less driven, or driven in a different direction. The stress and strain also had long-term impacts on my health. Some things were gained, some equally good things were lost or diminished. I can’t say that these deeds of my Hugr and Mod were either ‘good or bad’ here; they led to choices based on my needs and values at the time, and they shaped my life accordingly.
This inner longing for myself and all beings to have true homes is a desire that can’t ever be fully satisfied: it is a rooted part of my being that continues to shape many aspects of my life, my choices, actions and reactions, and my worldview. It even shapes little things that I enjoy and long for. For example, I love containers of many different kinds: pottery jugs and jars, decorative boxes, storage chests, and chests of drawers, from tiny to full-size. As a child, I loved dollhouses, aquariums, terrariums, large and fancy pet cages, and ‘fairy houses’ (well, I still do). All these containers are symbols of little ‘homes’, tempting me to acquire more things than I need or can afford and take care of, in my ongoing quest for the ideal quality of ‘home’.
Observing Hugr and Mod
This is what we’re working on here: coming to understand the roots of inner longings and desires, along with the will and determination to reach toward those desires, and seeing how these things have worked, and continue to work, to shape the circumstances of our life, our choices and actions. We do this without blame or shame, criticism or guilt, without getting bogged down in regrets, resentments, justifications. We just observe, objectively and compassionately. As we do this, we are coming into awareness and recognition of our own Mod and Hugr. Once we’ve learned this skill of honest and compassionate observation by practicing on ourselves (this must come first), we can apply it to enhance our understanding and improve our relationships with other people, with their Mod and Hugr souls, as well.
A note as you pursue this: I expect you will want to keep many of these musings to yourself as you work through these exercises; I know that I do, myself. The example of longing for a home and how that motivated aspects of my life feels alright to share, but there are many other aspects of my Mod’s Will and Hugr’s longings that I’d rather keep to myself: actions and choices I wish I had done differently, that I find embarrassing or regretful, that put me on a track I didn’t want to be on, that affected others around me in ways that could have been better, etc. We still need to work through all these things, but it isn’t necessary to display them to the whole world. It’s essential to take an honest and self-compassionate look at the whole picture of your Mod and Hugr’s natures, but much of it you will want to keep private, using it to nourish the deep growth of your own wisdom and life-experience, and to nourish your compassion and understanding towards yourself and others.
Exercise 8-2: Observing Mod and Hugr in Action
At the beginning of the previous exercise, I mentioned that it’s good to pursue learning about your Mod and Hugr in two ways: through deep thought focused on the exercise, but also through an underlying awareness as you go through your daily life. Once you’ve worked through some of your main drivers, your underlying desires and will, in the previous exercise, then it’s time to extend that awareness while you are in action.
The first step in doing this is to try to be aware of what you learned through the previous exercise, and notice how it plays out in your daily life. As often ask you can, briefly stop and ask yourself: what is motivating me to do / say / think this right now? When you do this, don’t get into any long, meditative, analytical answers; you can’t be interrupting yourself to that extent in the midst of your daily activities, and the deep-thought approach leads to one kind of awareness, but closes off another kind.
For this daily-life exercise, when you ask yourself that question about what is motivating or driving you at the moment, let the knowledge ‘appear’ to you, without thinking and digging around the way you did in the previous exercise. Instead of thinking, just open your awareness to how you’re feeling: your senses and other-senses, your emotions, attitude and mood, how your body feels—tense or relaxed, ‘in the flow’ or feeling a lot of resistance, etc. These non-rational experiences will tell you things about your Hugr and Mod that you won’t get from thinking. You don’t need to do anything with the insights you gain this way; you are simply building more levels of recognition and awareness of your Mod and Hugr, and how they shape your daily life and character.
Exercise 8-3: Wiliness and Frustration
Up until now, we’ve been proceeding as though Hugr and Mod are transparent, reasonable and cooperative beings. And they usually are, as long as things are going their way! But as we well know, life is not always like that. Many circumstances occur, every day, that anger, frustrate, upset and disappoint us, making us feel that nothing is going our way, and that we have little control over our circumstances. These feelings are triggers that flip Mod and Hugr into reactive stances of defensiveness and uncooperativeness. Another cause for such flipping is challenges to Hugr’s established world-view or framework of thought, or to the underlying logic and acceptableness of Mod’s driving motivations.
How do Hugr and Mod react when they shift into defensive mode? This is something for each of us to explore for ourselves, but there are two very common stances to be aware of. Hugr tends to become wily and manipulative, to rationalize and excuse its words and actions, to practice self-deception (that is, misleading and working around our conscious awareness) and deception of others. Mod tends to behave with a lot of frustration, anger and acting out. I’ll be exploring both of these tendencies in more detail later on, but let’s begin with this starting point.
Among the best and most important ways to get to know your Mod and Hugr is by recognizing their negative behaviors in yourself: what triggers those behaviors, and how do they manifest? It’s quite challenging to pursue this, because Hugr and Mod are being defensive and will try to prevent you from becoming fully aware of what they / you are doing. They are protecting their own self-image, their self-justification for their actions, attitudes and reactions. They feel they have a ‘right’ to their reactions and behavior, and don’t want to be called out. (Keep in mind: these are your own feelings and attitudes, too. It’s very difficult to use the right words, when talking about our souls who are also, collectively, our Self! I hope I am being reasonably clear….)
So in fact, you are not going to confront Hugr and Mod and try to call them out; if you do, they’ll just work around you and make things worse. All you need to do in this exercise is simply observe what’s happening within yourself when things go wrong during your day, either due to outside events, or to your own negative thoughts and emotions. Don’t try, at this point, to change anything, don’t put blame on yourself or others, and don’t get caught up in your Mod-self’s anger and frustration, or your Hugr-self’s rationalizing, manipulation and self-justification. Just step back and look honestly at yourself / Mod / Hugr as if you were an outside observer. Again, this is going to be happening in the thick of your everyday tasks and activities; you won’t have time or patience to analyze and meditate while it’s happening. A fluid awareness and acknowledgement of what’s happening is what you need.
So that’s it, that’s what you do here: just observe honestly and learn, without making excuses, rationalizing, laying blame, becoming angry and frustrated, or trying to confront and control Hugr and Mod.
The effects of honest observation
It seems like this constant observation would make your defensive Hugr and Mod really annoyed and even more prone to being frustrated and making excuses, but the funny thing is that it doesn’t work that way, at least in my experience. What happens is that Hugr and Mod realize that you are actually honoring them by your effort to become aware of and understand them, including understanding what makes them upset, frustrated, angry, defensive, and how they express those things.
By becoming aware of them, but not dictating to them about how to behave, you are treating them as real beings worthy of respect. Once this foundation of respect is laid, which comes about with ongoing practice of honest and compassionate observation, then you have a basis for your Hugr, Mod, your conscious self, and other souls too, to work together on making whatever changes you all agree on. There is now mutual trust and respect between your everyday consciousness and all your souls, which provides the necessary foundation and safe space for negotiations and the resulting actions and changes to take place.
Hugr and Mod want to be effective in your Midgard life, want to achieve their goals and desires. Once they understand that some behaviors are counterproductive, or don’t fit well with the character and the life your whole soul-household is trying to create together, they become more willing to shift into a different mode of action. They come to value strength, courage and wisdom over defensiveness and frustration. All of the activity I’ve discussed here is part of building character: becoming a person with strong and well-developed souls and soul-powers, guided by wisdom, self-knowledge and self-respect.