Why Most Dreams End in Obscurity
For decades, I was enamored by dreams and faithfully recorded them, hoping for insight into what they were attempting to tell me. But, most of my dreams remained elusive in meaning.This changed at age 39, long after I had earned my Ph.D. in psychology. I was fortunate to find a gifted dreamworker who opened the astonishing world of dreaming to me. Here I share a few insights that have rescued my dreams from falling into obscurity.
Breaking the Spell of Time
Living myths are always nearby waiting to be rediscovered. They are able to reveal truths that shed light upon the past as well as illuminate the present moment in time. Myths are intended to break the spell of time and release us from the immediate pressures and limitations of daily life.
Do We Benefit from Dreams?
There are varying schools of thought from, at one end of the spectrum, the notion that dreams don’t do anything for us at all to the idea that dreams are a piece of unfinished process that moves us forward only when we revisit the dream and allow it to complete. The middle road is the notion that dreams are useful in and of themselves but are more beneficial if you work with them in some way.
The Yearning to Create: A Universal Impulse
One of the most interesting recognitions we discovered is that, at its most basic level, creativity is an attitude.
Walking the Path of Individuation
Jung dedicated his life to understanding the nuances of the psyche, the typical patterns and dynamics that influence each of us on personal, collective and archetypal levels. Like the psychopomps of mythology, Jung’s work guided me deeper to my soul, and I believe he can for others as well.
The Head and the Heart
Join master psychotherapist and spiritual mentor John Prendergast in the course Sense of Inner Knowing, where he will gently help you open your own heart. In seven vibrant sessions, John guides us back to the deep intelligence available through our bodies. Every class includes a guided meditation based on somatic ways of inner knowing. You’ll experience how to recognize subtle signals of resonance or dissonance. These signals can guide your choices and help you navigate life’s challenges.
Jung, Astrology and the Structure of the Psyche
Each one of us is a completely unique mix of characteristics and conflicts, wounds and abilities. Many of those traits and tensions are opaque and slippery. Carl Jung found that consulting a patient’s astrological birth chart helped him see exactly which tensions were at play and what larger archetypal forces were coloring them.
Reflections on a Worry
Often, we imagine our natures as tainted, and that somewhere lies a norm or ideal, to which we must conform if we wish to be made whole. We can learn the “right choice,” and turn away from the voice of the suffering soul. This turn is however almost invariably outward. Seldom do we consider that the difficulties and struggles that we endure in the process of living and becoming, the wounds that we bear, are a part of the process of life forging a new reality through us.
Why Coaching Requires Continuous Personal Development
Coaching teaches us about true companionship. It asks us to: be present, open and inquisitive, and embody the experience with the client so that the Soul can reveal itself. Tending to this process of personal development—individuation—of the client and the coach is the biggest gift that coaching offers.
How to Overcome Codependency?
‘Working in the helping profession—as a psychology lecturer, trainer, and coach—has helped me to recognize and deal with my codependency. But it has been a long journey to give up the role of the ‘savior’. Luckily this journey has brought a great sense of freedom in no longer feeling a need to help others all the time.’
Four Roads to the Creative Self: Musings in Process
Our soul’s creative impulse originates in a desire to imitate/participate in the original act of creation—that of a God or Gods creating the cosmos. Creativity is as well an attitude of seeking wholeness, not completeness. Our creative life is risky business; but it is also immensely rewarding.
An Aesthetic Arrest
Tracking our subjectivity in the helping profession is good practice. We can ask ourselves how our experience in the presence of another, might hold information for the other person’s struggles.