The 52nd Week: My Year-End Rituals
I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It has always stood out from the other 51 weeks in a year like a peaceful Zen garden, a special oasis where I attend to soul needs that require annual closure.
Sacred Laws of Psyche: The Law of Love, Part I
Today, too many people scoff at subjective inner experiences that can’t be proven. Some even scoff at love. Humanity is paying a big price for our obsession with divine reason.
The Feminine Symbolism of Vessels
Vessels accept, contain, protect and preserve the birth/death/rebirth cycle of life at both the physical and metaphysical levels. Our planet Earth is a living vessel whose life cycles mirror the soul-making processes of psychological and spiritual transformation.
Do Parables and Dreams Serve the Same Purposes?
Yesterday I received a text from a dear friend. Attached was a picture of two pages from her Bible’s study guide. They were about how to understand parables and she wondered if it would work to insert the word dreams wherever the word parables was used. It occurred to me that my response might make […]
The Thanksgiving Gift of Two-Way Partnership
Most people think working with horses is a one-way form of communication: the human does the training and the horse does the listening and learning so it can serve the human’s needs. Most riders and trainers love horses very much and train them with kindness and patience; others believe they need to “break” horses with bullying and brute force. Either type can achieve great success…from the perspective of the human ego.
Learn Your Story: Write Your Myth
“Just as dreams do not conceal something already known, or express it under a disguise, but try rather to formulate an as yet unconscious fact as clearly as possible, so myths and alchemical symbols are not…allegories that hide artificial secrets. On the contrary, they seek to translate natural secrets into the language of consciousness and […]
Dream Mother Sends Me Some Reassuring Dream Mothers
Everything young grows old, all beauty fades, all heat cools, all brightness dims, and every truth becomes stale and trite. For all these things have taken on shape, and all shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust—unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark […]
My Assignment This Time Around
It’s beautiful, cool, and refreshing in the Smokies. We’ve had a lot of company and I’ve enjoyed it. But I’m feeling tired these days. I caught a cold from one of our visitors and spent most of Monday and Tuesday in bed. That’s why I didn’t write a post last week. For the first time […]
Animal Medicine: Developing Body Awareness
When it comes to body awareness, my horse Shadow was a genius. In this respect, he was the opposite of my conscious, cerebral self, which tends to be so inner directed and one-track minded that I can be oblivious to what’s going on in my body and the world around me. Have you ever known someone who can be feeling vaguely uncomfortable for hours before realizing she’s cold, or hungry, or has a headache? Or who can be standing directly in front of the object she’s looking for and simply not see it? That’s me. Or it was me before Shadow.
My Horse: My Teacher About Emotions
“No one can teach riding so well as a horse.” ~ C.S. Lewis “No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.” ~Herman Melville Note: Thank you for the wonderful response to my last post about what my granddaughter learned from her horse. I’d like to continue that theme with this post I wrote several […]
