Recently I shared a dream from many years ago (Seeing Through the Mist) of a sacred garden where a puppy playfully grabbed my hand as if inviting me to follow him. Who was this puppy named Prince? What was he doing in my dream? Where did he want to take me?
Hello my dear friends. This post is going to be different from the others. Instead of using the written word to share my passions with you, I have a video for you to watch. It’s an interview about my new book, Healing the Sacred Divide, which was conducted on June 6th at the Book Expo America. It’s just come online and you are among the first to see it.
The imaginative and symbolic way I perceive dreams and ordinary life is somewhat different from the way we are normally taught to think in school. I assure you this is not just sloppy thinking, but a conscious choice I’ve made to use more of my brain’s potential.
Many of us have felt our spirits quicken through glimpses of something ineffable in the mist beyond normal awareness and longed to pursue it. But habitual assumptions are not easy to overcome. Moreover, the daily demands of life are so compelling that we usually defer our journey into the deeply alluring recesses of the forest until another day.
I spent the first half of my life in a mist, blind to all that is sacred. A spiritual seeker from the age of 17, my ideas about what was sacred came from other people. Only very rarely did I actually experience the sacred. But then I discovered the symbolic meaning in dreams and myths.
As a child I learned to ignore uncomfortable emotions, or ones which, if I expressed them, would earn the disapproval of my family. By the time I entered junior high school, instead of responding authentically to each situation as it came, I automatically — and completely unconsciously — processed my reactions through a filter of how I thought I was supposed to act, which was calm, nice, reasonable, and, above all, unemotional.
The Self is our Beloved, the core energy in every psyche that compels us to grow into loveable, empowered, authentic, enlightened beings. Our egos often reject the Self’s guidance but it never gives up on us. In its aspect as Dream Mother it reveals itself in symbols and actions based on six basic attributes: wholeness, centrality, unity, love, pattern, and the life-giving force.
When our behavior is motivated by an unconscious compulsion to get our way, and when we place the best interests of others secondary to this need, our relationships grow dysfunctional. When we experience and act on tender feelings and a patient willingness to respect the differences of others, our relationships heal.
Just as individuals experience a painful struggle between opposites in their journey to individuation, so does every dynamic, growing relationship between two individuals contain a certain amount of stress and tension. By its very nature, the essence of “two-ness” is conflict. Whenever the perfect isolation and solitude of a single soul is disturbed or influenced by the presence of another, there is bound to be tension.
At one point, when the marital struggle has reached a point of frenzy — when the full force of the joint family neurosis has hit like a bomb — all that remains is the sense of burned-outness and death. From all this darkness a new capacity for relationship emerges, hardened like a metal that has been switched time and again back and forth between the fire and the ice-cold water.
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