C.G. Jung wrote "You cannot have both, Church and freedom, and if you want both undiminished, no Solomon will be found to pronounce judgement." (C.G. Jung to Pastor H. Wegmann, November 20, 1945) Patients often struggle with the issue of feeling bound to church. They crave a freedom of spirituality. Dogmas bind them to one way of seeing and experiencing the spiritual world.

A patient recently told me of how they came to grips with this during the holiday season: "Christmas for me isn't about religion. It's about goodwill. I take stock of my life and the reality that I do wish well being for all individuals and that I do my part to help to make this happen in the small ways that I can." When I think of religion, I'm immediately bogged down. With Christmas, the holidays, about well being I can relax and replenish. I feel free."

Psychological consciousness offers us the potential for increased spiritual freedom throughout life. The end of the year signals a time to be grateful and, in the words of my patient, offer well being to others. I noticed, as I meditated on this insight, a freedom within that was brought to light and nurtured. We cannot have both church and freedom, but we can have both goodwill toward others and a free soul!

In a letter dated June 12, 1933 C.G. Jung wrote, "You have a mind just as well as any other human being and you can use it if you only know how to apply it. Any of my pupils could give you much insight and understanding that you could treat yourself if you don't succumb to the prejudice that you receive healing through others. In the last resort every individual alone has to win his battle, nobody else can do it for him."

No one else can win our battles. We alone have to face the monsters and beasts within our psychic dungeons. They lurk during waking hours in the forms of other people and troubling attitudes that challenge us and our conscious way of thinking, seeing, feeling. At night they emerge as dreams or nightmares that frighten, even terrorize.

A woman confided, "A hideous man, a monster really, appeared in my dream. I was in a nightmare. But, he turned into a shaman, touched me on the forehead and I entered into a sacred cave where I was to dwell." 

Her parents were demanding that she enter medical school. Her heartfelt desire had always been to become a depth psychotherapist. She commented, "By going into my own depth therapy and becoming this sort of healer, I feel like I'm entering a sacred cave. This is my life and my life's work." The nightmares subsided with this insight. She applied to and  entered depth psychotherapeutic training. 

Over time she learned to treat herself, to listen to dreams and spontaneous images that would arise in her mind throughout the day. Personal psychotherapy helped to set her on this path. To this day, she continues to do what only she can do for herself, in the words of Jung, to alone win her battle. 

"Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase-a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use." ( C.G. Jung Letter to Arnold Kunzli March 16, 1943)

Daily catastrophe ready for use is an alarming term. Yet, we are confronted by situations each day that threaten us with anxiety, the hallmark of neurosis. If we go rigid and don't respond creatively, productively, illness sets in. We become a chronic case of malaise, everyday misery.

Jim,  a colleague and seasoned practitioner in depth psychology, had been suffering from a stiff neck, a painful condition for over three months. He had a dream in which the world was ending. He had a choice of what to do. He could go with it and move into another dimension outside of space and time; instead, he shifted into a huge boulder and refused to change. The boulder immediately crumbled, turned to dust. He awakened in a cold sweat.

The next day he decided to retire from professional practice within the year. From the dream he knew his professional world  was at an end. It had been on his mind, the wrestling with it a constant source of depletion. He struggled against making the decision, a stiff neck, rigidity ensuing. "Best not to stay rigid and turn to dust," he commented.

The following night he dreamed of a luminescent orb that "pulsated with well being." He had made the right decision. Dreams guided him out of the neurosis, rigidity toward self and life. A crisis, a daily catastrophe, an ongoing stiff neck,, was what he was able to use to propel him into a new life that pulsated with well being.

In a letter of Jolande Jacobi (October 27, 1936) C.G. Jung commented, "...a dream has always to be understood under two aspects. On the one hand the historical root,  on the other the freshness of the tree. The tree is what grows in time....a look behind the scenes into the age-old processes of the human mind, which might explain your special feeling of happiness."

I recently became a grandfather. Memories of dreams for the past two years told of my transition into this stage of life. A new birth signaled change, possibilities, and potential for the future. Dream after dream portended this inevitability. 

As I held my granddaughter I was overwhelmed with intense love and joy, dreams of months past rushing to mind. There was a sense of time stopping. Space seemed to open up with her in my arms. Love and the world of dreams and dreaming quickened into a special feeling of happiness.

Each night that we dream, we're gifted. Actually, we dream multiple times nightly but only remember a few. I'm never troubled by, and encourage patients to not be worried about not recalling every specific dream. It's impossible and unnecessary.

After over thirty years of doing dreamwork I'm convinced that dreams that are meant for us to remember, we remember. The rest do their work within like psychic housekeepers that come in after hours and take care of things without being noticed. Often, it's those that aren't remembered that can impart a profound gift: we awake refreshed without retaining a long dream narrative or a particular image.

Cherishing sleep as a time to receive the gift of dreaming and dreams is a sign of respect. We respect what we value. A senior Chicago colleague over thirty-five years ago, trained by C.G. Jung, told me, "I rarely watch television anymore. Sometimes it interferes with my dreams. I go to sleep now ready to dream. Dreams really are a gift, you know. A nightly gift." 

I I pay attention to how I feel around people. Sometime's there's a sense of well being, peace. Other times, there's confusion, chaos. People bring energy with them. As we are conscious, we can feel the energy within and surrounding others.

I came across the following quote by the American poet Charles Bukowski: "The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them." 

When I enter my consultation office I clear my mind. I pay attention to thoughts, images, feelings regarding my patient. I listen to the energy coming from them and in the therapeutic relationship. 

I remember last week a vivid image struck me as I entered into psychotherapeutic consultation with a depressed person. I saw a black bird with golden flecks and streaks of golden feathers suddenly fly by on the white screen of my mind. I wondered what this was about and how it would inform the session. The patient said, "I dreamt of a large black bird with colorful wings last night. He took me under his wing, sheltered me. I feel much better this morning."

At first, I wasn't sure about what had happened. Black birds can be an omen of death. But, this bird had golden coloring along with the black. Perhaps, the patient was still considering ending their life. But, there was more than black to the image.

I wanted to go slow, make sure we were understanding the message in this image. As we talked, we agreed that there was cause for both concern and relief. The bird was both a messenger of Asclepius, god of healing, bringing relief, and a harbinger of potential problems, the desire to no longer live.

My patient and I felt our way into the meaning of the nighttime dream and waking vision. As long as we sheltered under the wing of the symbol of the black bird, absorbed its meaning and the reality of her suffering, then there was healing, potential for freedom from the albatross of suicidal ideation and intent. 

To listen to feelings around people helps us stay away from or work past oppressive darkness, so that the rarity that is freedom of soul may shelter us under its black and golden wings.

Solitude and quality of life form a complex matrix of meaning that includes having nourishing relationships and excludes relationships that detract from who we are as individuals, our essential solitude, and who we are as loving beings.

C.G. Jung wrote, "Solitude is for me a font of healing which makes my life worth living." Life being worth the living goes further than doing this or that with these or those people. In fact, too much contact with others, especially in order to while away time with idle socializing, detracts from self and quality of life.

Fear of growth, ongoing consciousness, often stems from a terror of isolation. To distinguish oneself in terms of interests, perspective, and mentality takes us apart from the group. We fear being different from everyone else. Embracing our capacity for solitude takes us into a depth of relationship with self and also, however surprising, into an increased capacity to nourish healthy relationships and personal lovingness.

"My head spins with too much to do and too many people in my life," exclaimed an anxiety-ridden soul. Dreams of fogginess and "people, people everywhere, so that I couldn't breathe. They were sucking up all the air" abounded for this individual. Quality of life had been compromised. Spirit, air, had been siphoned off. A return to the essential solitude of the self, to include nurturing relationships, was needed in order to rediscover a replenishing spirit and quality of life.

Richard Kearney in a recent New York Times post (8.30.2014) wrote, "In perhaps the first great works of human psychology, the “De Anima,” Aristotle pronounced touch the most universal of the senses. Even when we are asleep we are susceptible to changes in temperature and noise. Our bodies are always “on.” And touch is the most intelligent sense, Aristotle explained, because it is the most sensitive. When we touch someone or something we are exposed to what we touch. We are responsive to others because we are constantly in touch with them."

Patients healing from childhood trauma require resensitizing themselves to their bodies. Women and men who suffered at the hands of adults as children, need to listen to their bodies in a new way and not override their feelings. Bodies speak truth and do not lie.

"My mother would hit me so bad, I thought I'd die," a man shared about his childhood. "I grew up being attracted to women who seemed all right from a distance, but as time went on in the relationship, it was obvious that they were abusers. Sex was bad. My body wouldn't work. It was telling me that what I thought was good was bad."

After intensive work on his past, helping his soul to heal, he learned to listen to his body. His mind tried to override his body feelings. It didn't work. The psyche is a body psyche. As we listen to our bodies we grow to be in touch with self and others. We listen to soul in a sensitive and meaningful manner that optimizes health, well being, and the potential to live a life based on listening not overriding our body/psyche.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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!

To hit on lethal aspects of mind scares the beejeezus out of people! We've all got them lurking there inside us. They're the destructive emotions that hurt people, hurt ourselves, maim or destroy one potentially healthy relationship after another. They're primitive psychic energies that we need to come to terms with or else they'll inflict themselves onto and into our lives whether we like it or not.

Today I posted on social media, "And now to move into a day of doing depth psychotherapy at full throttle as folks move into realms of mind not heretofore explored and loaded with numinous potential for transformation, often shocking and always enlightening!" In order to do the  exploration of mind that takes us into wondrous realms, primitive, frightening aspects of self need to be encountered. Images from dreams trouble us with what we don't want to see about ourselves. They're primitive, hidden, things that some might call nightmarish. But, we can deal with them and open up hope for healing. 

"YOU CANNOT CHANGE WHAT IS GOING ON AROUND YOU UNTIL YOU CHANGE WHAT IS GOING ON WITHIN YOU," states an anonymous author. Primitive states of mind emerge in daily life because they are begging for attention and transformation. The same old problems and mistakes are preludes to change. Yelling and screaming and howling and raging and crushing self doubt and unending unhappiness and tears all signal that primitive aspects of mind are crying out for attention. 

A guy who many described as "the nicest guy in the world" complained of nightmares in which a face was screaming at him. We explored the image and discovered that "the nicest guy in the world" was bound up with anger that needed release and resolution. A primitive aspect of mind cried out for help. Primitive aspects of mind, once realized with insight, can begin to heal and change!

Your back is up against the wall, you're in crisis, there seems to be no way out, you need an answer ---open your mind, intuit it! When problems press hard against the psyche, it becomes white hot. Mind opens up. Answers can come in a flash, or via an unexpected encounter, or through a rip roaring dream that provides a lit up perspective on a dark dilemma that's been plaguing us.

Intuitive understanding is a natural faculty of soul. it can be honed via awareness. The more we are aware of intuitive potential the more intuition speaks to us. Guidance comes as we are conscious of the fact that it can come. In the words of C.G. Jung, “Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.” 

Intuition flashes through mind. It comes as image on the white screen of mind. It occurs with inspiration in the moment. Dreams come of meeting up with someone we haven't seen in years. We see them that very next day. I dreamt of an old professor I hadn't seen in twenty years. The next day I saw him driving by. He was a scholar on the depth psychology of inner calm. It spoke to me loud and clear, an intuitive message regarding my need to cultivate inner calm. 

The intuitive message came because I needed an answer. I was open to one. Answers can come within the minute or within the day. Some take longer. The more we look and listen, the more intuition knows we are open to and serious about hearing what needs to be heard and seeing what needs to be seen. In the words of Jung, the message needn't be in the form of a rational explanation, not long or drawn out. It's something that hits us, strikes us as true and meaningful for us  at the time, an answer that lights up dark places of mind and clears through that which  plagues the soul!

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!

"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.

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 depth 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.