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The image for this post is one I made in Midjourney in tandem with having a significant dream. I was trying to create a picture that mirrored the way I was feeling and when I finally got the image right it was so satisfying. I made up a new word for the feeling: “Raveldrift” - An emotional unraveling and the feeling that you are coming loose from your moorings, untethered from reality, uprooted from the place you were planted, and are drifting away.
Marie Louise Von Franz, one of Jung’s most able analysts, talks about the idea that some dreams contain seeds or a “germ” of an issue – physical or psychological – that could grow into a large-scale problem if left unidentified. She urged that special attention be paid to such germ images in dreams because it allowed the dreamer to take a proactive approach to the inner conflict, and by making it conscious it relieved the need for the body or mind to become ill in order to get our attention on the problem.
Do not ever dismiss your own dreams as being insignificant. They will always carry some message from your deeper, wiser self to your waking consciousness, and they may also partake of aspects of “Big Dreams” that are relevant to your family, your community, your nation, your planet. You are intimately connected to the center and whatever you nurture and allow to bloom from your center, blesses all.
We live in an era unlike any before. The old dream-books are fascinating, but they cannot suffice. The task now is not so much to predict harvests or expose repressions but to discover the sacred within the human heart. In this sense, we are pioneers, standing on the frontier of a new sacred geography.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” So said C.G. Jung, one of the foremost interpreters of dreams. He counseled that nightmares can be worked with actively; not merely decoded, but dialogued with. The moment when a dreamer turns to address a disturbing dream figure is the moment the alchemy of ego and shadow can begin.
Feed the life that is yours to live, says the dream. Say no to what starves you. Bring your energy back to the table of your own work and life.
Underwater - in the unconscious - life continues, but differently… creatively… secretly. This is the psyche’s way of saying: “Even in oppression, something in us remains unconquerable, imaginative, and in defiant communion with others.”
Across the centuries the theme persists: the self must be grown, built, defended, celebrated. The mystics prepared the way by carving inner chambers; Mary Wollstonecraft turned the self outward into politics; Elizabeth Cady Stanton universalized solitude as the basis of equality; Charlotte Perkins Gilman sang the self into being; the feminists of the 1970s rediscovered the tiger by the tail, and we today must hang on and ride the tiger to its cave where the new birth is to take place.
There comes a moment—perhaps at forty, or fifty, or beyond—when a woman looks at the path behind her and sees the footprints of everyone she has carried. Children, partners, aging parents, colleagues, friends. The echo of countless responsibilities. She sees meals cooked, appointments kept, crises navigated, the invisible labor of love and duty stretched like a long, winding road. But where, she wonders, are the markers of herself?
Confidence is not a monolith. It moves in different ways through different arenas of life. Here are the four major pillars where confidence plays a vital role—and how to strengthen them.
The quest for clarity presses upon us like an urgent drumbeat. If only we could be certain—of what is true, of what is good, of what we want. . . If clarity has a shape, it is a crossroads. There are four great signposts—questions that haunt our days and nights, that shape the map of our knowing. . .
Some forms of courage leave no footprints in the ash, no ripples on the water. They are the quiet, invisible forces that shape a life from the inside out. . .
Is there a way to escape when all seems lost? This is what a dream told me.
Last night and this morning I have been doing calligraphic meditations on the Zhun hexagram, CHALLENGING BEGINNINGS from the I Ching. In times like this when so much seems to be ending abruptly, it is good to remember that every ending heralds a new beginning . . . even when it is not yet visible.
What does it mean to Follow Your Bliss? Is it a relinquishing of worldly ambition? A turning away from daily life towards something more esoteric? Or is it a subtle shift of perspective?
So much of the time we are dying to be in control of what happens to us, when we would do better to let go of that vanity. When I am feeling stuck in the doldrums I think back to that moment and am reminded of the power of simply saying Yes! to life. ..
This is one of the curious ways that the religious impulse follows us into secular society - In front of the computer screen most of us are brought to our knees - worshipping at the altar of Techne.
The most enduring and important insight of this “riding the wave” experience was the deep sense of having been truly and fully alive – being neither in the remembering past nor the hopeful future, but in the immediacy of the present, I knew myself to be alive, to be unique, and to be joined to the great surge of Life itself…
The serendipity of an unexpected meeting; a book falling open to just the right page; a missed train that allowed you to finish a conversation with radical results . . . any event or series of events that gives you the feeling that an invisible hand is helping to play this round in the game of life may be a sign of serendipity.
Jean Erdman Campbell, wife of the famed mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and a famous dancer- choreographer in her own right, passed away at age 104 on May 4th of 2020. Although she is now eclipsed by her more-famous husband, for the greater part of their marriage it was Jean who was the famous personality. Hopefully, her own enormous contributions to the world of dance and theater will come to the fore again as we remember a century of glorious creativity…
My belief is that the soul - another word for the psyche or the totality of the self - communicates most readily and most frequently through the nightly journey into the realm of dreams. It is no wonder that Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious or that Jung spent intense hours unfolding and amplifying the meaning in his own and clients’ dreams. It is because dreams are so valuable for receiving messages from the soul that I encourage all my clients to keep dream journals.
I have a sense that the American worker in the pandemic and The Great Resignation are linked in the same way that a frog is linked to the proverbial pot of slowly boiled water: There does come a tipping point when the frog notices the heat and reacts by leaping out of the pot. The pandemic gave us the chance to lift our heads long enough from the desk to notice we were uncomfortably warm at work… and we’ve jumped… and we’re still hopping!
I suggest we need look no further for a diagnosis of our current mental and emotional predicament than this environment in which we are flailing and failing to flourish in a flood of information: a digital data deluge!
I believe in love at first sight:
I once bought a book for its cover. . .
I was trying to think of how to explain the loss of the so-called "feminine values" - all that is YIN as opposed to YANG in our current times. It feels like an important exercise - like protecting an endangered species…
How many of us have turned away from the great American past time of “real life monopoly?” How many millions of us have snuck away from the table where the winners are taking away houses and building more hotels and sending other players to jail, never to pass go, never to collect another paycheck. We resigned from that game and we’re outside in the twilight of the American dream…
Isn't it curious that there is one relationship – that with our family of origin – which it's considered a failure if we do not eventually move out and leave them. While another relationship - marriage - is considered a failure if we do move out and leave them.
The peace of great prairies be for you.Listen among windplayers in cornfields,The wind learning over its oldest music... (from Harvest Poems - Carl Sandburg)
The Peace of Great Cities – A Response to Sandburg