Last time I described two steps toward healing the masculine and feminine aspects of the soul. In this post I’ll address two more that can transform your inner invalids into empowered Kings and Queens.
Step #3. Exercise. When exercising a horse you always train both sides of his body and brain. For example, after you walk, trot, and canter him clockwise around the pen you repeat the same actions for the same length of time in the opposite direction. You do the same when you exercise your body. You wouldn’t lift weights with just the left arm and neglect the right.
So it is with your mind’s muscles. To get the most out of your brain power and boost your psyche’s immunity to toxic input you need to train both sides of the brain. Reading, writing, taking classes, and studying are all vitally important, but unfortunately they use mostly left-hemisphere skills and neglect the right hemisphere. What I’m suggesting is that you pay attention to the thinking processes you use most often and engage in new ones that will develop both sides of the brain and bring more balance between them.
Exercise your left brain by taking classes, jotting down notes, keeping a journal, noticing details, and making careful distinctions between things. Seek advice from your most logical friends. Deliberately think choices through without automatically succumbing to habitual behaviors, strong emotions, or instinctual needs. Think before you speak. Practice expressing yourself more clearly and succinctly without rambling. Stick to the point. Use logic and reason. Back up your opinions with facts. Cultivate calmness and objectivity without getting overly emotional.
Exercising the right brain means taking your inner life and relationships seriously. Connect with your inner Beloved as much as the outer. Listen more than you talk. Receive as much as you give. Notice your needs and feelings and use your imagination to find respectful ways of expressing them. If you love to write, don’t just record factual, linear events. Make up stories, analyze the reasons for your feelings, come up with original metaphors, create sensory images. Art, music, and body work also engage the right brain. Draw, paint, sculpt, take photographs. Make up personal rituals, dances or songs. You won’t have to look far for inspiration. It’s there in every waking life situation and every nightly dream.
Step #4. Diet. Medicine and exercise can strengthen and heal your body, but you won’t stay healthy without a regular regimen of nourishing food to maintain and re-energize it. Similarly, a spiritual practice like meditation, yoga, prayer, or dreamwork quiets the mind and redirects attention to the inner life, re-vitalizing the soul on a regular basis with an increase of personal meaning, compassion and consciousness.
You already know my pet practice. Through the years my nightly dramas have depicted the wounds of my inner opposites in loving detail; watching and learning from them is the manna that sustains my soul. In fact, my personal mini-myths have been so crucial to empowering my King and Queen that I wrote the book, Dream Theatres of the Soul, to show others how to work with their dreams. As my final response to your question, Annette, I’ll outline my method in my next post. I wish you and all my readers the very best with your own healing.
Healing the Sacred Divide can be found at this Amazon.com link and Larson Publications, Inc.
Kris Kristofferson: Midlife Mentor
At the age of 35 I had a wonderful family, good health, a comfortable lifestyle, and a master’s degree: everything a woman could want. Right? You’d think so. But I felt painfully unfulfilled. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just be happy? I felt like an ungrateful wretch.
0 Responses
wow, jeanie, this is such solid practical advice, distilled down to really understandable and do-able practices!
this art of creating ourselves can seem so overwhelming sometimes. and there seem no end of well-meaning folks handing out complicated formulas for increasing inner harmony and well-being. your four steps here are so straight-forward and universally applicable, we can all benefit from them by bringing our feminine and masculine halves back into balance….
thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom!
all the very best,
william
William,
And thank you for blessing my efforts with your profound insights and magnanimous spirit. It is a true honor.
Gratefully,
Jeanie
How I honor your both/and approach to working both sides of our fractured brain– such sage advice — not always easy to follow, but well worth the effort if we can pull it off.
Again, thank you not only for your wise reflections but for the marvelous images you find to illustrate each of your postings.
Namaste and love,
Sally
Hi Sally,
No, it’s not easy to remember to notice and balance our brain’s functioning. Habits of a lifetime are difficult to break, but you can practice strengthening the less well-developed side and the results really pay off. For me the most noticeable payoff is greater creativity. For example, I know lots of people who think in images and I wish I could but I’m strictly a left-hemisphere abstract word and idea thinker. As a writer I’ve found that visualizing and writing descriptions of dream images helps ground my writing in physical reality, making it more interesting and creative. I didn’t realize that would happen when I began dreamwork; it was just a natural development. And frankly, I didn’t have that in mind when I began my blog either. I just knew I wanted to include some really beautiful and relevant pictures because images and symbols are deeply important to my process of creating meaning now. I’m so glad you’re enjoying them too.
Blessings,
Jeanie