Awareness And The Evil Eye

There are major haters in life. And, they will get to you and drag you down if you let them. The problem is, we often close our eyes, dim consciousness, regarding the reality of haters and the phenomenon of the evil eye. Then, we're vulnerable, the psychic immune system having been compromised.

 Melanie Klein, grand dame of psychoanalysis, explored the violence associated with envy. Jealousy desires what the other has; envy not only desires what the others has but seeks to taint or destroy it for the other. That's the phenomenon of the evil eye--envy seeking to appropriate then destroy the good that another has.

The evil eye, envy and its destructiveness, is a potent psychic force that dates back to ancient times, It is a nefarious aspect of human relating and interacting. Awareness of the reality of the evil eye strengthens the psychic immune system.  Psychic immunity generated through awareness acts as a spiritual prophylactic much as ancients from Egyptians to Native Americans believed in the use of amulets for protection.

Awareness, therefore, acts as an everyday spiritual ritual. It can protect against the influence of the evil eye. We are reminded that people are largely mixed bags, a confluence of positive and negative emotions and energies. In the spirit of healers from shamans to the ancient Greeks to Melanie Klein and Carl Jung, we can have insight, raise consciousness. Envy, the evil eye, can and does happen. There are haters in life and they can direct hate our way. When it comes, its best to see it coming and enter into the daily spiritual ritual of awareness.

Snakes, Fears, and Dreams!

Carl Jung wrote, "Whenever the snake symbolism appears in dreams, then, it is always representative of the lower motor centers of the brain and of the spinal cord, and our fear of snakes denotes that we are not fully in tune with our instinctive lower centers; they still contain a threat to us."

The message in Jung's insight is that of fear and potential. When we're afraid, there's room for healing and growth. Snakes appearing in dreams inevitably frightens folks. I've never had a patient in depth psychotherapy who has welcomed a snake in a dream. Typically, fear hits or repulsion sets in. Once we have a chance to look at the dream, get a sense of what the snake is about, the patient is able to see what  they couldn't see before, begin to face the fear that the snake symbolizes.

Without a doubt, after a certain level of stability and healing, continued growth is what is most feared. One individual stated, "If I go deeper, then who knows what might come of my life. If I just stop here and stay put, then maybe I've got it all under control. I won't let myself dream anymore." That night in a dream, the snake came. It wrapped itself around him and he cried out, awakened in a cold sweat. Life spoke and told him that he must pay heed.

As the snake wraps itself around the caduceus of the physician, so the snake wrapped itself around this gentleman. Opposing the forces of the deep unconscious is senseless. It will come and take its toll. We are threatened with becoming lifeless, the life squeezed out of us; or, if we listen to the message within the fear and the dream, we activate potential for life to wrap itself around us, to contain and metabolize anxieties, and nestle us in wisdom.

When It's Too Scary To Feel Good....!

Sometimes folks feel bad because it's too scary to feel good! Especially when there's been chronic trauma in a person's life, feeling good can be scary. The good can be at any moment ripped away. That's what chronic trauma does to the head, makes a person afraid that what's good and feels good could at any second be pulled out from under foot.

The inner saboteur generates misery and drama. A dark figure surfaces in dreams as one who wreaks havoc on what is good. It's a terrible thing to not be able to feel well or to allow ourselves to feel well. It's like running a car without lubrication. We end up smoking and burning out!

Feeling good on a consistent basis means facing what's bad inside. The shadow aspects of self call for attention; or else, they will be acted out in our daily lives. There's something to be said for self reflection, insight, and working through emotional issues. If we do this, then we lessen the chances of acting out what's bad, something that always generates bad moods, bad relationships, a bad life.

So, to go in the direction of the good calls us to turn within. Too scary to feel good is a symptom of underlying low self esteem and pain. Dreams reflect this as in the case of one gentleman who related, "My devouring mother in the nightmare screamed, 'Who do you think you are to feel good when the rest of us are feeling bad.' In my family of origin I had to take care of everybody. That's how my mother raised me. I had to feel bad because they all felt bad."  

Dream images symbolized inner conflict. He took one more step toward freeing himself from internalized demanding maternal expectations. Consciousness raised, he understood that fear about feeling good can have more to do with old ghosts than present day realities.

When People Are Running Your Life.....!

Fast and furious come the demands. They want time, attention, energy. People feel empty and turn your way. "They'll steal your soul if you let them....don't you let them," goes the contemporary folk song.

Problem is that there is often a psychic hole in us that permits people to make their incessant demands without us setting limits. We need to be needed. It's a dark abyss of a most nontransfomational sort to require the neediness of others in order to manufacture an ostensible wholeness in ourselves.

We can't be whole by incessantly meeting the needs of others. People and their needs running our lives signals that we take stock, turn within, hear what we may be missing out on. A vital core of the self  can be impaired. We can be too needy. From this is birthed the need to be needed.

Dream symbols of energy directed inward help to reorient us. Orientation to soul calls us inside to realms away from excessive outer demands. Dream symbols of the desert hermit, a snake coiling in on itself, a yogi in his cave meditating, conjugal bliss surge forth during times of energy directed toward the self.

Reorientation toward self, life proceeding from the inside out, is the antidote to allowing people, with all of their demands to run our life.  An inner life, cultivated and tended, engages us with others optimally without excessive demands imposed from either side. Living from the inside out helps to prohibit our lives being run by others and instead nourishes soulfulness that keeps body, mind, and soul intact and growing.

Psychic Reality!

When depth psychologists speak of psychic reality it is about a felt happening that underlies all reality and influences our daily life, so, to my way of thinking, it's certainly something to cultivate a healthy and ongoing sensitivity and reverence for.

Carl Jung: "Psychic reality" is a controversial concept, like "psyche" or "mind."

By the latter terms some understand consciousness and its contents, others allow the existence of "dark" or "subconscious" representations. 

Some include instincts in the psychic realm, others exclude them. The vast majority consider the psyche to be a result of biochemical processes in the brain cells.

A few conjecture that it is the psyche that makes the cortical cells function. 

Some identify "life" with psyche. But only an insignificant minority regards the psychic phenomenon as a category of existence per se and draws the necessary conclusions.

It is indeed paradoxical that the category of existence, the indispensable sine qua non of all existence, namely the psyche, should be treated as if it were only semi-existent. 

Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. 

Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable.

To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually non-existent. 

This is a fact which, with few exceptions as for instance in Schopenhauer's philosophy-the West has not yet fully realized. But Schopenhauer was influenced by Buddhism and by the Upanishads. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 480-481.

http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2014/07/carl-jung-psychic-reality-is.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FGJCbE+%28Carl+Jung+Depth+Psychology%29

Keeping Your Head Clear!

When head space gets clogged, a psychological complex has kicked in. it could be that we're unconsciously trying to please a mother or father figure. There's a chance that power needs or an old habit of tying into depressive attitudes has us by the throat and won't let go. Whatever is causing it, a complex clogs up head space and can pull us down into the dumps.

The good thing is that the dumps carry the seeds of potential change. It's like a built-in compost heap for the psyche. When we go down, we have time to take a good look inside and see what we can see. There's often surprises of a most intriguing and often transformative nature.

"I push myself too hard. It gets hold of me and I don't let up." This young man heard the  voice of his  father in his head, a tyrannical father complex at work. It clogged up his enjoyment of life. Another one noted, "I dream of drowning myself in drink." To this he associated being engulfed by smother/mother love. He had a mother who wouldn't keep emotional boundaries, demanded his time and energy in inappropriate ways. The mother complex had him and wouldn't let loose. In both cases, the men found that their mind was bogged down and they had to go down deep to get a hold of themselves and figure their way through the complex.

Dreams, symbols, images work us through and out of mind boggling complexes. We can be eaten alive by psychic conflicts and unconscious emotions that get jammed into our minds and cripple day-to-day living. So, when we find ourselves in the dumps, the compost heap of the psyche, let's watch for symbols and emotionally charged images that come during sleep. Archetypal symbols and images help in sorting through emotions and keeping our heads clear !

The Mysterious Third!

Relationships make us ill or can cause us to heal, grow, become stronger. People interactions are loaded with a complex mix of ambivalence, toxicity, good energy and exchange, and many times a  confusing combination of emotions. There's a dynamic between people, something bigger than either person, a mysterious third force, energy, dynamic. 

When things take a bad turn it signals the presence of a psychological dynamic gone awry. But, things go wonky for a reason. That purpose reveals itself if we are open to what I call the mysterious third.

The mysterious third is a psychological force, energy, spirit. Thomas Ogden, depth psychologist, writes of the mysterious third as inhabiting all relationships. It attracts us, repels us, causes us to hate, to love, to lust, to settle in quiet intimacy. 

A couple states, 'I don't know what  gets a hold of us. We're out of it. Not ourselves and we end up fighting. Or, sometimes there's so much caring and love we can barely contain it." This is the mysterious third.  

The mysterious third speaks to us. It makes us feel things. It does not lie. There is always something for us in the mysterious third!

Trauma Clots and Secret Places!

Traumatized people need hope! Their life depends on it. Without hope, the psyche flounders, atrophies, may leave, die out. When psyche dies out, we're left literally feeling lifeless, loveless, soulless. It's a sad situation; but, a remedy is in the offing. The god of hope, Hermes, stands on the sidelines, awaiting our call.

Soul needs to be open to hope. Mind needs to be open to hope. Soul is the deep unconscious, a profound repository of hope. Mind is that which we know about self, feelings, memories, experiences. Hermes, god of hope, comes in times of desperation, hopelessness. Images form in the unconscious mind, surface in dreams that offer us a way through the darkness.

Darkness that is stuck is clotted energy. Energy clots when we're traumatized. We freeze emotionally. Emotions then turn into nasty moods. We take them out on others, direct anger toward self. There's nothing helpful about being stuck. Sure, maybe it gives us time for self reflection, but usually I find that it's often time spent in self pity. It's far better to get a hold of what's going on emotionally, learn from it, and move through the clot or let the clot move on its way through you and out!

Michael Eigen in his book Feeling Matters writes about trauma clots: "It takes a lot of patience to work with a ghoul. When you think you know it, it turns into something else. But certain characteristics were clear in a messy sort of way. A lot of darkness, amorphous blackness with variable clots and spreads. A lot of hate and self-hate sprinkled with self-pity. A sense of collapse or semi-collapse, offset by a malignant inner glare, a nasty turn of mind. Hopelessness. And somewhere in the hopelessness, obscure bottomless pain....In the outside world, the psychiatric diagnosis is depression, treated with medication. The inside world, though, is alive with crawling, slithering things, evil whispers, taunts and jeers,  slimy brews, oozing wrath percolating in mouldy cauldrons, teeming dead seas, nearly invisible, inaudible wormy squeals. A lot of death goes on in the deadness, many kinds of deaths within deaths....Insides call to insides and pills may help but do not touch secret places where life grows with little or no light." 

Trauma clots stored in secret places hold wisdom. We face what we need to face, talk through the pain, the shock, the trauma. There's something to be learned. Trauma clots in secret places give us access to wisdom for life and living as long as we don't give up in the getting there, as long as we find and hold onto hope!

Life Is Too Much!

No question about it...life is too much! After over thirty years of treating patients in psychotherapy, I'm convinced there's a reason it's too much. It's too much because we're in the midst of a life or attitude shift. We don't want it. We want to cling to the old, tried and true, but misery making attitudes, life styles, relationships. They're what we're familiar with. So, the energy for the shift builds up, and gets to be too much!

Dreams of floods start up, toilets backed up, out of control fires. Life is too much, we say in waking moments. Then dreams too become too much. We're overwhelmed with the too muchness of everything. Relationships start acting up. Work goes into deluge mode. Everything gets on our nerves. It's too much!

So, the thing is...what to do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Don't do a thing. The too muchnees of it all can guide us. It is built-up energy in life. Once we settle, cease our frantic attitude and behavior, the soul sees more clearly. This takes time, for sure; but, mental swirls and confusion part way to a clear mental sky when soul settles. Taking a breath, or two, right now and understanding that life is shifting. We're in the midst of a shift. Energy begins to be loosened, begins to find its way.

The psyche is an energetic system. It is energy. Pure energy finds an outlet. Once it ceases in one direction, it moves into another. Energy doesn't end, die, cease transforming. Energy shifts, is constantly shifting. Your life feels like it's too much because your life energy is shifting right now...no question about it!

Into the Mystic!

"We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun...let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic." There's nothing like the mystic when it comes to healing ourselves. It reaches deep within, and takes what is in need of enlightenment, shines a bright light, and the process begins. Without a doubt, inner depths that form the rich, loamy, soil of the mystic can be off putting. We're scared to go down so deep, into the mystic.

We're scared, until we're in need,sometimes badly in need. James Hillman writes in his book, Healing and Fiction, that "Jung considers Freud too selective, too logical, shaping all shoes on one last. Everything may be founded on human nature, but human nature itself is founded on things beyond human nature." Nature herself is the mystic. When we've suffered in our lives, in childhood, it needs to be dealt with. Freud stopped there. We need to move on. We need to go forward into deeper dimensions of life, the mystic.

"My childhood was terrible", stated a middle-aged man. "It's taken all I have in me sometimes just to survive. It wasn't til I had the dream of  The Great Man that things began to change. I initiated my life journey of healing." William James, father of American depth psychology, wrote of "the integrated soul of all things in the cosmos without exception..." From this cosmic integrated soul, the mystic, came a transformative dream. "It gave me hope. And, I pressed ahead from there." The mystic...it gives us hope so we can press ahead from where we are onto where we are going, meant to be.

Mystic Consciousness

A relationship with the mystic in life, nature, the way of all things ushers us into a healing connection with self and significant others. It proves itself a balm in the midst of pulls to find answers outside of self, as is the case in addiction. I remember as a teenager a yogi telling me that mystic consciousness is "the natural high." Now, fifty years later, his words continue to ring true and satisfy my soul!
 

Lisa Miller of Columbia University recently wrote in the New York Times (2.11.14)research shows that "a personal relationship with a higher power is the most powerful form of protection against the unsuccessful grasp at what william James (the father of American psychology) called the 'mystic consciousness' of substance abuse, and for those in recovery against relapse. While we usually can return to transcendence through reflection and practice, this is not so when we pop in as a tourist, through drugs."

The alchemical Doctrine of Correspondence, "as above so below" takes us into bliss, the natural high, that comes from soulful depth. We can only genuinely feel as well, healthy, as we are living from an authentic place of truth to self and meaningful others. Correspondence means staying in touch, maintaining contact, relationship with self and intimate others.

Mystic consciousness kindles bliss as fire provides warmth. Bliss glows from deep within. It lingers and is furthered through a reflective self, the practice of meaning and forsaking that which has ceased to be meaningful. "We are constituents of the absolute's eternal field of consciousness," wrote James. The mystic takes us within, to absolute consciousness. There we absorb the healing balm of soulful bliss, a natural high.

Seeds of Potential

Seeds of potential present themselves in everyday life events. The moment, each moment, gives us a seed, maybe more. There's something to see about ourselves or others or the unfolding dimensions of our life. These are seeds and they carry life potential. To be able to see them, spot them, can be as simple as raising our awareness.

Awareness works the soil, takes us into the digging under and the under going of what it is that needs to speak to us. Without awareness we traipse along going through one thing after another, nothing really effecting us, nothing taken in, nothing ingested, absorbed as psychic nutrient. We end up going through things with the shock or trauma, the unhappiness, the pain or joy not being metabolized. We go through things on the surface, they stay on our surface, we surface it along through life and end up skating over and so having to go through the same old thing over and over because we never allowed it, things, happening, and ourselves to dig down deep and under. It's the under going in life that works in the seeds of potential in the fertile ground of upsetting and stressful life situations.

"The art of the fire and the key to alchemy means learning how to warm, excite, enthuse, ignite, inspire the material at hand, which is also the state of one's nature so as to activate it further into a different state." James Hillman, depth psychologist and scholar of all things alchemical, wrote of this alchemy of seeds, the material at hand, what life dishes out to us to work into the soil of our being. Seeds present themselves everyday, every moment, so we can see them, spot them, raise our awareness and work them, our nature, so as to activate ourselves "into a different state."
 

Inner Truth

"The root of all influence lies in one's own inner being: given true and vigorous expression in word and deed, its effect is great.." The I Ching speaks to inner psychic energy influencing our outer life. Our energy is off, our life is off. There is no way to back away from this inner truth or pretend it's not there. We try to run from inner truth, it gets us smack dab in our everyday life.

Ever felt like something is so wrong and you just can't put your finger on it. That something is always on the inside. It had its beginnings with a fear, a lie, denial of some sort. Then, things start churning, guilt and shame about the fear or lie or denial start burning and get acted out in everyday life. Something out of the blue hits and we feel bad. We've made ourselves suffer for the inside thing we didn't want to face.

The mind blowing reality is that we can deal with outer drama as though it were a dream. Inner truth acts itself out as drama in our everyday life. We can listen to the unfolding as we would a symbol. Symbols carry psychic energy that has a message, conveys inspiration, and generates the potential for change. A person told me that they felt stuck. Nothing was particularly wrong. And nothing was particularly right either. Their life energy was stagnant. This was its own form of dramatic enactment.

One day as they were slugging along in their life a roadrunner sped past, right in front of them, inches from where they stepped. It shocked them. It struck them as lightening out of the heavens. It energized them out of their psychological rut. "I quickly turned my head to look for it. It was gone. It was like it came out of a dream. It was a spirit guide that came and did what it did then disappeared. That's how I took it because that's what made sense to me."

Inner truth as waking dream. Symbols as they come in daily life. Messages everywhere if we will but listen, see, take in and understand. Life gives us chances, hope, meaning, opportunities to feel inner truth and to let its effect be great!

In Your Own Skin!

"You know I consider myself lucky. I found myself a long time ago. And I'm grateful for that...It really just means being comfortable in your own skin. That's all enlightenment is, isn't it? The Buddhists can do their crazy calisthenics, their marathons of silence and ritual bullshit, but at the end of the day if someone's happy in their own skin, that's the Buddha. People think they need that perfect job or perfect inspiration or perfect spiritual practice but all anyone wants or needs is peace of mind." ---The Empty Chair by Bruce Wagner

This quote reminds me of how hard we make the process of enlightenment. Often, it's with us far more than we imagine. We look here and there, do austerities, and all the time it's in the moment. We pass up moments. Moments of awe, gratitude, wonder surrounding and drenching us. It's the drenching part, I believe, that frightens us. We want, even crave, peace of mind, being content in our skin; but, so often our healthy desire is from a distance.

People come in for depth psychotherapy and say they feel they're jumping out their skin. It's anxiety. It's the everyday crazies. It's as though we crave peace of mind, but find ourselves colluding with uptight, anxious, crazy ways of living. Dreams are taken over by bugs. We say we're buggy, jumpy, jittery.

We're jumping out of our skin because we need to be out of our skin. The old ways don't work anymore. They need to be shed. The rigid ashram Buddhas, old plastic Jesus, deities of dogma be gone! Human skin, deep psyche, flesh and blood and bone, passion, caring, dreams and visions are the stuff of enlightenment, the peace of mind that makes us comfortable in our own, new, skin!

Holiday Frenzies, Winter Mysteries, and the Feminine Soul!

The mystery of the feminine unifies life. Holiday stress takes away from sense of self and well being. Feminine mystery is a sacred order imbued into existence, a far cry from the outer, masculine, rush rush of holiday season buying and meeting up and dysfunctional family gatherings. Sacredness, respected and honored in daily life, turns us within, to soul. Contrary to holiday frenzies, winter, a time of retreat, takes us into soul mysteries. It's a call into an interior cave, illuminating as fire, as whispers in the night.

The cave, the realm of winter mysteries, is a spiritual reality. Winter bids us turn within, to a deepening spirituality. This speaks to solitude, quiet, sustained interiority. "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside of you as fate," C.G. Jung noted. The draw of winter is the draw toward inwardness, feminine archetypal energy. Without going into the cave during this season, to the place where inner situations are made conscious, we are vulnerable to the fate of destructive irritability and black moods.

The soul is feminine; so to be out of touch with soul leaves us out of sorts. By the end of the year, stresses have mounted. We need time to turn within, access primal feminine energies, to let go and replenish. The outer world beckons, even demands, more and more energy output. The deal with the devil is give more and you'll get more. Downside to that is what the more is that we get is not what we bargained for.

Too much masculine energy going out unbalances us. This is especially true during the holidays when much is expected. It's hard not to tie into social and familial demands that leave us running here and there, often frantically. We complain of feeling off. Nestling within, into the cave of deep soul, can offset the holiday frenzy that fates us with irritation and bad moods. We needn't live out or be possessed by fateful moods. Moods hurt self and others. They're to be learned from and then shed like an old skin. Mysteries of feminine energy await us as we enter the winter cave of hibernation, time for solitude, quiet and renewal of self!

Soul, Holiday Haunting, and the Blues!

The holidays are coming, and so are the blues. They hit when everybody around us is so happy. All of a sudden a pit opens up inside you and you're there. Depressed.

A depressed soul is a haunted soul. James Hollis in his book, Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, notes that the greatest haunting we suffer is a lost relationship to soul. When the relationship to soul is lost something has crept into us and taken its place. Traumatic holidays, dysfunctional families, toxic religious experiences are ghosts that can come haunting during the holidays.

"Christmas for me was like being forced into a religious straitjacket," remembered  a particularly insightful young man. Another person added, "I dream of huge Christmas trees and everybody is very, very happy. It's denial. Holidays bring stress and everybody goes into super happy mode with their huge trees and expensive presents to cope...to deny."

Chances are if you're holiday anxious you could be haunted. Anxiety and the holiday blues go together. It's called agitated depression holiday version. Bad memories pushed away, present day stress denied, trigger a host of destructive spirits, negative and anxious attitudes. It's the holiday blues.

Holiday commercialism is rolling down the highway like a sixteen wheeler mowing down anyone in its path. Department stores are staying open for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It won't stop. So, best thing to consider is to stop ourselves. Stop and move into self and stay there, sequestering the haunting and the blues!

Dreams as Prophet!

Dreams tell of the past, present, and future. This is frightening, to be able to peer into the nature of things with clarity. This is much more than looking through a glass darkly as the New Testament writer proclaimed. If we want to see, really and truly see, then we can see with startlingly acuity in our dreams!

Problem is, then change happens. Change inspired by dreams prompts intrapsychic and relational transformation. It might mean divorce or marriage or moving or staying put. It always means deepening. When we see from and within the world of spirit then the illusions of the everyday world of ego consciousness drop away. We're left with truth, enlightenment, shock!

If we understand the dream, then we're shaken. Dreams don't come to tell us what we know. Dreams don't waste time or energy. They are expedient. And, in accord with a pragmatic depth psychology, they are practical. They directly affect our living of life.

Prophets can end up dead. People not infrequently kill them. Ego consciousness gone awry struggles with and murders the prophetic message of the dream. It strangles what it does not want to hear or see. At the very  least, we may push it into the background so the dream is seen only dimly, as through a glass darkly.

One sincere soul related, "Dreams take my breath away and at the same time they make me awake and leave me gasping for breath." Dreams take away old and stale breath. They infuse us with inspiration, fresh spirit. Dreams are the prophets that clear away the old and make room for the new.

Soul Haunting and The Dream!

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Dreams, especially nightmares, can be loaded with haunting! Exactly...you did read the right words, just as I wrote them. Nightmares have lots and lots of juicy psychic stuff for insight, enlightenment, and soulful growth in the form of haunting. Thing is, we're so often afraid to listen to it, to the haunting. To listen to inner disturbance as it comes out in nightmares means facing the ghosts that always bear tidings of one sort or another.

Halloween and All Souls Day proclaim the existence of an unseen world. The veil between the world of waking and sleep, the realm of the deep unconscious mind, the spiritual world, thins. Spirits are real. People have reported dreams and waking visions of seeing spirits. I have a colleague, a psychotherapist, who is also a trained shaman. Unseen souls can inhabit homes, place, generate havoc! She's the one to call to exorcise the spirits so the home will sell. It's worked countless times for countless folks.

In the world of soul, the unseen world and the spirits that populate it bring messages into the world of consciousness. They haunt us till the message gets  through. They help us to grow, if we're willing. The spirit that appears by our bedside at night, the nightmares that haunt sleep, the dark events that come out of nowhere can shock us into consciousness...inspired change!

I had a rip-roaring nightmare last night of a literary demon. He was trying to force me into the mainstream literary establishment. I'd be abandoning my writing in dark fiction. It was frightening to say the least. A complete abandonment of self, of soul, was what the demon demanded. I awakened knowing that I had to remain true to my writing, true to myself.

Listening to the message of the nightmare, the spirits of the unseen world, means partaking of organic soul food and not Halloween trick-or-treat candy. Symbolically, candy can refer to a sweetening up of what's bad so that we don't taste it, feel it. Halloween tricks or treats...pass them up in favor of contemplating the haunting, the candle in the center of the carved out pumpkin head, its flickering, its eerie and unrelenting soul meaning.

Anxiety, Soul Sickness, and The Dream!

In this morning's newspaper I read an article about how anxiety increases perceived pain for those diagnosed with chronic pain conditions or those suffering from acute physical pain. In other words, the research stated that anxiety makes body pain worse. Anxiety also increases emotional and spiritual distress. When we're uptight everything goes out of whack. We're seeing through a magnifying lens of grotesque proportions. The soul has become sick.

"We all got a push for the crazies inside us," a very insightful person remarked. He went on to describe a dream in which he was splurging on ice cream. "As I ate, little tiny ants crawled up my arm."  The ants brought a terrible anxiety. Ants were messengers; raw angst crawling on him. "For me, bugs mean buggy. Sweets have  been an addiction. They're denial in my life. I'm in denial and I know it, can't run from it anymore. It's making my mind, body, and soul sick. It makes me anxious." Anxiety was a signal of denial at work, something needing to be faced and learned from.

Anxiety inflamed various physical disorders. He suffered from one aliment after another. His doctor told him that stress (anxiety) compromised his immune system. Running from what needed to be faced loaded him with anxiety. Ice cream in the dream signaled how he was wanting to sweeten things up.

The dream came, as dreams do, to enlighten. He was willing to see how he'd been "out of whack in my life." The crazies had bitten into him. Ants in the dream crawled over his skin, were in his mind, had infected soul. He'd become soul sick. The dream enlightened him about issues that needed to be faced, decisions that needed to be made. Anxiety was a symptom of soul sickness and the dream came as gift guiding the way to, what he described, as a "sense of getting it and getting myself whole again."

Dreams, Gentle Whispers, and Peace of Mind!

It's one thing to talk about dreams, it's quite another to actually take them to heart and follow their inspiration. With a new book out, I've been listening to them; but, really taking them to heart has been a challenge. Outside voices from the book industry have said do this or do that. Dreams come and offer guidance in gentle whispers.

Gentle whispers from dreams mean that there is genuine inspiration coming our way. We don't have to have nightmares to get the message if we listen to the whispers. A couple of times I've gone back on what my dreams have whispered regarding my book. My soul has patiently waited as I then learned from what could have been avoided had I listened. It took energy from me to go through this, but I learned what I needed to learn. I also learned to listen and follow the gentle whispers of my dreams despite outward urging from others to do this or that, all contrary to the gentle whispers of dreams.

Peace of mind returns when we listen to the gentle whispers of dreams. We become realigned with Self. When the alignment with Self is interrupted then the mind is fractious, anxious. Alignment with Self, as happens when we listen to the gentle whispers of dreams, brings in peace of mind.

Well, I feel back on track with my writing and a new book making its way through the world. It's a good thing to move with and live with the peace of mind that comes from listening to the gentle whispers of dreams. Last night, as I dreamt, it was clear that innocence was being restored and my soul righted. Back on track, with a new and replenished sense of self making its way through the world, is a good thing and it comes with peace of mind.