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."

"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!

"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!

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!

The divine feminine entrances me. The term, the concept, the energy sends me into a trance state of altered perception, consciousness, insight. I know when it happens because there's a quality of leaving behind disconnected ways of thinking and being. Rather than, logic, control, dominance being in charge, I'm more open to intuition, flow, interconnections. This is the living energy of the divine feminine.

The divine feminine shows up in dreams and in cultural events. December is the month that celebrates the Assumption of Mary within institutional religion. Psychologically it is about a world changing frame of mind, an altered state of consciousness, that heals the dissociation between spirit and nature. Within the yogic world, Shakti is the divine feminine presence, energy that pulsates through the universe bringing things to life. That which is ailing or less than true to self or nature is healed, made whole, through the intercession of this feminine force.

She is awakened through dreaming. Life, in many respects, is a waking dream. We are living our stories, our myth, our way of being in the world, quite often in a dramatic manner. We have conflicts, we quarrel, we have ups and downs, we are happy and sad, are angry and love. This is life. This is what it means to be human. This is Shakti, the Black Madonna, Mary the Virgin Goddess of the Heavens.

Through the years more than one person has told me something like, "I sometimes wonder if I'm in a dream and dreaming my life and that one day I'll wake up." We're definitely in a dream, the Divine Feminine pulsating with the dream narrative, the drama of daily life that fashions us into the being we, by nature, were meant to be. This is the Divine Feminine, nature's vibrant energy, coursing through us and transforming us into whole human beings.

Awakening the Divine Feminine happens naturally as we dream that life that we are living and dreaming and awakening to each day and every moment as circumstances and relationships take us by surprise and we open our eyes to the always new discovery, a trance state directed into the self, of the Divine Feminine in the world, in life, and in the soul!

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 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.

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.

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."

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."

I'm quoting from an email from Michael Eigen Ph.D., author of The Psychoanalytic Mystic. As I was having morning coffee and doing first of the day reading, it so struck me that I wanted to post it word for word. It's a source of inspiration from old masters in depth psychology and spirituality! 

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.

Trauma shatters mind. You turn against yourself. The world feels hostile, frightening. "The Core of 'Mind and Cosmos' ", a recent New York Times article by Thomas Nagel (2013.08.18) makes the case for mind, what depth psychologists call soul, as intimate to nature. William James wrote of God as intimate soul.  Intimate soul, intimate God, intimate Nature symbolize the reality of that which is immense and yet nearest and dearest. Nagel states that mind transcends empirical science, cannot be bound by objective facts. Soul is a subjective reality intimately affected by all aspects of life including trauma.

Trauma victims have told me, "I've lost it", "My mind's blown", "My soul is gone".  They go on to say, "I'm in shock", "My life is over", "I can't go on". Trauma reaches into intimate realms of soul. It shatters reality. Demon Dis of ancient myth flies in through psychic cracks generated by trauma. Dis sets disturbance into mind. Not dealt with, emotional pain can become demonic, the personality taken over by something described as "bigger than life." The soul becomes possessed.

People become their depression. They become their pain. They become their trauma. People become traumatic to be around. They are souls possessed.

Possession by a psychological complex, felt as an intense mood state that grabs hold and won't let go, can be personified and projected. An acquaintance shared, "I had a ghost or a spirit follow me when I was with my ex-husband. He was harmless but a prankster. He liked to turn the television on and off. Turn the lights in the house on and off. Play with the animals. Actually, I think he was with my ex-husband, because when my husband left so did the ghost."

A traumatic relationship that leads to divorce may have been the place of a haunting. A soul possessed, one troubled by demon Dis, can project that foul energy, sensitive souls picking up on it and personifying it as a ghost...a seeing into relational and intrapsychic realities in a spiritual manner. Whatever the cause, trauma can shatter minds and relationships, leaving behind energies that need to be dealt with, eventually expelled or exorcised via human caring and understanding that leads to growthful change. Souls possessed can come from traumas buried...best to unearth what needs attention, face the ghosts or face the haunting!

Hot off the press, Trauma and the Soul, by my friend and colleague, Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., delves into trauma, the soul, and the demon Dis. I think I'm going to contemplate this area for a while on this blog. In particular, today, I am drawn to the body as container of repressed pain and trauma. Kalsched explores the myth of the god Dis, the penultimate demon of negation, the one who divides body from soul during trauma.

People who have been scathed by emotional, spiritual, physical, sexual trauma encounter Dis, sometimes in the form of bodily symptoms that mainstream medicine can't diagnosis or effectively treat. I've found that at times, there are reasons in a person's background, perhaps dating to childhood, for chronic body pain and various ailments. The dark archetypal energy of Dis separates us from psychic pain so that we  can survive. Dis distances us from what is unbearable, too much to admit to consciousness.

Dis can also refuse us access to the emotions of anger and fear so necessary in the working through of trauma. Dis is the inner persecutor who blames us for our sufferings. So often I've heard patients say, "But, it was my fault. If only I hadn't been that way then it wouldn't have happened." This attitude of self blame represses true emotion of outrage to an inner hell place that then threatens us with ongoing misery since it is never worked through.

Dante, in the Inferno, describes Dis as the vilest monster at the center of Hell. Psychologically, he is one who generates dissociation, disintegration.  He shoots us full of the chronic sense that everything, including our very sense of self , is coming apart at the seams. Dis disintegrates, dissociates, disempowers, disconnects, propagates disharmony and disease.

However, Dis can also inspire a displacing of Dis. Plainly put, it's miserable to keep trauma locked up and hidden. Doing so makes life a living hell. Consciousness, motivated by a healthy desire for mental and physical relief, and a willing moving into true feeling that has been denied or repressed, potentiates healing. The ongoing narrative that emerges in the living of misery and chronic body pain, the psychic story of Dis within the context of experienced trauma and the soul, echoes the adage that when the mind is in pain the body cries out.

A neuroscientist and I got caught in a conversation while in a NY elevator. He talked about his work with the brain and wanted to know what I did in treating survivors of religious abuse. We got into the story of The Unholy and how religious trauma effects not only the brain but the deepest recesses of soul. It didn't strike him as odd that I'd emphasize this; but, it did hit him hard, though, that he'd never considered soul as integral to trauma and its impact.

Well, thus goes it in the world of everyday, mainstream, mental health care. It still has a ways to go in terms of understanding that we are not only physical beings, but soulful beings whose most intimate aspect is that of psyche, soul. Psyche reels and is loaded with torment when traumatized by religious guilt, fear, and deceit. A young man once shared a dream with me in which God appeared to him in the form of a luminous woman who instructed him to enter into a hallowed place within the center of the earth and there escape the terror of living in a religiously rigid and angry family that incessantly berated him for not being "worthy in the eyes of god." He stated that he learned to go within himself, to "the place that for me was the center of the earth, the center of my being."  He fled within himself, to deep recesses of soul, to protect himself from the religious trauma of being raised by parents set on the dark side of religion. 

 A childhood diagnosis of attention deficit disorder led to a regimen of medication. He described it as "settling my brain but my soul was still quivering, shaking inside me." The brain can be dealt with, treated when injured by trauma; the soul requires patient tending and healing that requires what he felt was "a good long time."

In his adult years he entered depth therapy and furthered his understanding and experience of psyche, soul. He discovered that the ground of his being indeed lay within, in psyche. The woman who had come to him in the dream during his adolescence returned many more times to confirm her watchfulness over his life. He came to terms with the reality that for the rest of his life he would be in the process of healing from the damaging effects of having been immersed in the dark side of religion during his childhood. Fortunately, the psychological injury was not as bad as it could have been due to the dream he had had as a teenager. He responded quickly to it, went within himself and there found safety.

The dark side of religion disrupts brain chemistry and physiology and traumatizes the soul; but, auspiciously, the psyche comes during dire times, and she guides us to turn within and discover hallowed realms of soul, the center of our being so as to begin the process of healing from injuries sustained by the lash of the dark side of religion.  

Soul care yields a happy mind. After over thirty years of professional practice in depth psychology and over forty years of personal dream tending, I've come to the conclusion that caring for the soul takes us into a strange realm of contentment and well being. Happiness of this sort is not common. Soul care requires patient and tender devotion to the psyche. As we cultivate such devotion through sensitivity to self and others and by consistent dream tending, there comes a gentle but definite knowing that all is well.

I've heard colleagues and acquaintances argue about happiness, some saying it's superficial or irrelevant. Their fierce manner and twisted expression betrayed an underlying frustration. Often, in hushed tones, they'd complain about disturbed sleep, chronic conflicts, and a host of physical ailments.One psychoanalyst recently commented, "Well, after all, Freud did consign us to everyday misery being about the best we can hope for." I knew he had missed out on a vital facet of life experience, evidently unknown to Freud....happiness.  Happiness, when denied and thus never integrated, turns south and morphs into legions of suffering.

Patients who heal and learn to tend soul gradually, sometimes incrementally, experience consistent happiness. The archetype of happiness reveals herself in dreams as a flush of oneness with self and the world. My own Native American influenced cosmogony (my grandmother Pueblo Indian and medicine woman) looks at unnecessary pain and disease, to include unhappiness, as resulting from a disruption in harmonious cosmic patterns involving gods and spirits, people and animals, the archetype of nature herself.

Tending the soul by asking what caused imbalance, what disrupted natural life harmony, may yield corrective insight so that we return to a harmonious cooperation with nature and life that brings soulful well being and happiness.

Breath, heavenly wanderings, and The Unholy (Sunstone Press/Release Date August 2013) fit together just as natural spiritual openings that are blocked generate toxic backup. My depth psychological colleague, Michael Eigen, author of The Psychoanalytic Mystic, shared with me the following quote by Chuang Tzu: "All things that have consciousness depend upon breath. But if they do not get their fill of breath, it is not the fault of heaven. Heaven opens up the passages and supplies them day and night without stop. But man on the contrary blocks up the holes. The cavity of the body is a many-storied vault; the mind has its Heavenly wanderings. But if the chambers are not large and roomy, then the wives and sisters fall to quarreling. If the mind does not have its Heavenly wanderings, then the six apertures of sensation will defeat each other."

Psychic breath happens naturally. Toxic religion loads spiritual passageways with shame. Bad things happen when natural spiritual openings are blocked. Here in New Mexico, the realm of Aztlan in my novel, we have witnessed institutional religion inflicting horrors on innocent souls. Both Eastern and Western religions have been implicated on the front page of newspapers. Eastern gurus and Western priests have prohibited what Chuang Tzu described as Heavenly wanderings. They claimed souls for themselves. Shame bore down on souls meant to be nurtured into increasing degrees of freedom.

In The Unholy, Claire discovers that hidden within her own past is a religious skeleton that cannot be escaped. It rattles in the closet like a bag of old bones. The dark side of religion, its masked ways and shiny lures, eclipse the reality of human suffering perpetrated by ecclesiastical masters of illusion.

What is not faced takes us down. Going down, in the realm of depth psychology, is not necessarily a bad thing; it offers psychic prospects. In the case of Claire, she must enter the depths of her own life experience and make discoveries similar to those made by patients in depths therapy. As skeletons are faced, room is made, and transformational possibilities emerge.

All things that have consciousness depend upon breath states the old wise man. So, breath for us, as practitioners of soul, remains the sure conduit to the sacred. Healing soul blockage, induced by the dark side of religion, require opening the mind to darkness and light, the truth of shame and the luminosity inherent in choosing one's own path over institutional demands. Breathing large and roomy breaths ushers us into dream time wandering in spheres of soul where destiny calls and choices lie before us.

New York Times Sunday Dialogue article (May 26, 2013)  about medication and psychotherapy struck a few soul chords. Medication works for as long as its taken. There is no doubt that it can prove necessary and helpful when treating severe and chronic mental pain. However, drug cocktails don't fix soul misery and the need for meaning and wholeness. Seasoned therapists know when to use drugs, when to refrain, and about the need to guide the sufferer along deeper and darker paths of soul to find authentic and long lasting healing. 

To go for mere brain change confuses fixing the outside and then thinking this changes the inside. A deep soul  shared her experience: "I needed the medication so I could stabilize, but then my dream said the pills had done what they could do. I had a new hairdo that was sprayed hard with hairspray. Tiny flies and mosquitoes flew around and in and through the pretty looking hairdo. It looked good but was loaded with tiny bugs. I felt good because I wasn't feeling the craziness that was inside me.  Drugs helped me to stabilize. Then, I needed to wean off the drugs and get down to soul work."

Some folks, of course, need to stay on medication due to the severity of their problems. Soul work can be done while on medication as long as the drugs don't deaden human feeling. This happens when a person is over medicated. All in all, we can say that drug cocktails alter the brain, depth therapy alters the brain, but only soul work heals the human psyche.

Shame and bad religion ring about as hard in the human ear as a bell clanging way too up close that finally stops. Shame gets the bell of bad religion going. Without the human capacity for shame, the inner sense of being defective, then bad religion would have no hold on the human psyche.
   

For over thirty years I've been helping people take the deep plunge into the unconscious mind so as to find freedom from the dark side of religion. It doesn't always work. Sometimes people want quick fixes, a whole lot of help without much struggle. In my novel, The Unholy (Sunstone Press, August 2013), Claire comes face to face with feelings of being defective and not wanting to go on. The shame induced by bad religion cripples the soul, at least momentarily, and can cause us to want to give up, not go on with life.
     

When a child is raised in bad religion, the mind's innocence and receptivity to natural and freeing spiritual experience is compromised. Bad religion induces shame, the sense of being defective way down to the core. Bad religion goes on to state that giving your soul over to it will insure you of salvation. Giving yourself over to something, to anything, outside of yourself and your own right mindedness inevitably compromises the psyche.
   

"I was so into the cult of it all, that I thought it was right. I felt superior to everyone who wasn't following my religion. They were bad and I was good, they were shameful creatures, I was not." So said a man who underneath it all finally admitted his emptiness and unhappiness. "I was all right when I was with the religion. They did my thinking for me. But, when I was alone, I was with myself and what was left of my self eventually got through to me. I had to work hard to find and then to keep my own mind, my soul."
   

A dream came to him one night. "I was walking out of the church, looked up and saw a giant turd fall on the church. I got the message, from above so to speak." This man found his way out of bad religion, the unholy, the clanging bell finally coming to a stop. Like Claire in The Unholy, he discovered that something other than himself had hold of his mind and he was the only one who could do something about it.