Interlude: Why Archetypes for Your Better Endings?

Socrates had a wonderful admonition for us all: “Know Thyself.” He buttressed this with a fuller statement: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” While not everyone might equally agree with the second of these postulates, most would agree that there is much value in a life well lived and that we learn more about ourselves as we experience life’s treasures, including hard times as well as easier, happier times.

Carl Jung is largely credited for his recognition that getting to know our Selves involves much more than simply looking into a mirror.  We are each of us inherently multiple in the sense that we develop different sub-selves as we gradually take on roles and responsibilities in the process of forming a sense of our IDENTITY, both consciously as public personas and privately and unconsciously as well.

 

Becoming a social self in a community of others entails adopting ‘typical’ role identities, and as an anthropologist I would say that Jungian (and other) ARCHETYPES relate to these role personas both consciously and unconsciously. So as we become an individual we develop certain facets of our identity corresponding to specific sorts of situations. We draw upon universal or collective “archetype” images as we develop these outer and subjective personas. A parent may take on ELDER LEADER and/or NOURISHER points of views and attitudes, for instance, a spouse expresses LOVER traits, a soldier enacts a WARRIOR role, a doctor the HEALER, etcetera. All human societies include a stock in trade of several primary role modalities which are psychologically available for identity construction and expression. These also may become aberrated or may take on “Shadow” traits in our unconscious psychological makeup.

What Jung prescribed for all of us is to seek to better INTEGRATE our archetypal persona influences in the process of becoming fully mature, self-actuating, INDIVIDUATED persons. As Jung himself pioneered for us as a role model (see his RED BOOK and articles about active imagination), he has encouraged us to get to know our archetypal animating energies as vital aspects of our greater Self or Soul. I call this your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetypal Characters”. In my forthcoming book (hopefully 2016) YOUR LIFE PATH, I focus part of a self-discovery toolkit around understanding 12 Universal Archetypes that were used by the late Dr. Charles Bebeau and his wife Nin at the Avalon Archetype Institute, based on Sumerian mythology and Jungian principles.

With this blog this year I am presenting one archetype per month and aligning that with a “Life Metaphor” that connects with that archetypal energy. Getting to Know YOURSELF as an integrated Whole comprised of various persona dimensions in key situations in your life can definitely help you to achieve your own BETTER ENDINGS.

You can aim to fulfill all aspects of your Self, not just one or two at the expense of others (thereby leading to internal conflicts or frustrated “parts of Self”).  What Life Dream would help you to do that? This will be our topic for August as we celebrate and explore the NOURISHER Archetype and the Life Metaphor Life is a Mountain with Vistas.

I invite you to stay tuned and join the Adventure. 

I always welcome your Comments and Stories.

 

 

Life Is… Your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetype Characters

Friday night there was a triple feature treat for me on Turner Classic Movies, with Man of La Mancha, Camelot, and Lost Horizon all playing on the same night! These are three of my favorite tales. Now I know better why these stories all appeal to me: they each have ensemble casts with very distinctive personalities. Don Quixote has his Sancho Panza and Dulcinea, as well as his shadowy foils. Lost Horizon has a range of personalities within the group of plane crash survivors and Temple personages including the Abbot, Conway’s resistant, pragmatic brother, and several other colorful characters each with their own distinct motivations and roles. And of course, Camelot has Arthur’s Merlin and his Lady Guinevere along with his Knights of the Roundtable and his own set of shadowy foes.

Arthur’s Roundtable image is what I want to focus on as we begin a new month here at Life Paths for Better Endings. Carl Jung makes reference to a similar Roundtable that he saw in a significant dream he describes in The Red Book.  Jung’s table had an emerald green surface and twelve seating positions around it like spokes on a wheel. He comments in The Red Book about the significance of twelve, as in twelve disciples or the twelve zodiac signs, and in his dream a feminine archetypal figure visiting Jung as a white dove mentions “the twelve” as well. Elsewhere Jung has written about the factor of twelve primordial archetypes representing the four elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and the three natural energetic phases of any process (origination, maintenance, and dissolution). Dr. Charles Bebeau (with his wife, Nin Bebeau) developed these Jungian concepts—which Dr. Bebeau also relates to god/goddess figures in Sumerian astrology—into a pantheon of twelve universal persona Archetypes for his program in archetypal psychology at the Avalon Archetype Institute formerly in Boulder, Colorado.

Above is a wheel of Bebeau’s universal archetypes, named as adapted for contemporary psychotherapy by Debra J. Breazzano, MA, L.P.C.. These are The Twelve that I am exposing you to with this year’s blog schedule, pairing one of the twelve universal archetypes with one of twelve positive Life Metaphors each month. As these archetype energy modes are universal, that means that each of us has all twelve of these potentials within us, although each of us develops some more than others especially in relation to the sorts of “typical situations” and roles we establish in our particular Life Paths.

So, this month’s Life Metaphor is “Life is…An Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetype Characters,” which are The Twelve Universal Archetype figures identified in the Archetype Wheel shown above.  They are an ensemble cast much as Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable, or they can be, when they are integrated as a Council of Allies within your integrated, individuated Self. That is the topic we will explore this month!

Tuning In to Your Mystic Awareness

How can you tune in to your own inner Mystic Guide? Let’s count some of the many ways available to you:

Active imagination

Meditation

Contemplation

Yoga

Dream work

Archetype Dialogue Journaling

Prayer

Mindfulness

Each of these natural modes of accessing your unconscious and/or spiritual awareness offers great potential for engaging your Mystic archetype as an Ally who can help your conscious self by sharing deep insights. Let me describe a few of these methods, then, that you may wish to practice.

Active imagination:

This is the technique Carl Jung himself used which he wrote about extensively (e.g. see the marvelous new Reader’s Edition of Jung’s The Red Book). It is a mode of creative visualization. You can journal about your inner experience after returning to your normal waking perspective.

Contemplation:

Contemplation is an active, engaged form of meditation. You maintain awareness while asking an inward question for inner guidance, or you can travel, either astrally (in your emotional state of consciousness), mentally, or via soul travel, to explore dimensions of consciousness beyond the Physical realm. With active contemplation you may assume the perspective of being in the state which you wish to observe, and release your conscious mind to allow whatever experience is relevant from that perspective. You may begin with active imagination and then shift into a contemplative experience.

Dream work:

Dreams occur from many different levels of consciousness, so different kinds of dreams reflect these different levels of perception (and action). Lucid dreaming occurs when you become aware within a dream that you are dreaming; achieving lucid dreaming can help you to be more conscious of your ability to control your outer states of consciousness while waking as well as your dream state.  Archetypal dreams—which Jung was interested in—appear with symbolic content that can reflect either universal, collective archetypal imagery (e.g. a snake can refer to transformation, or a circle can refer to completion or wholeness) and also personal unconscious archetypal parts of Self can appear as personas in your nightly dream. Waking dreams may also happen (more so when you pay attention as such), wherein you realize an outer occurrence has a symbolic component or gives you an answer you are seeking in a serendipitous manner. Some mystical philosophers would remind us that the outer life is as much of a dream as a nightly, “inner” dream scenario.’ (A good primer: The Art of Spiritual Dreaming, by Harold Klemp.)

Archetype Dialogue Journaling:

Using active imagination and contemplation, you can enter into a conversation with your own personal unconscious archetypal ‘parts of Self’. This is the approach I use with the Life Maps Process, and it is the approach Jung used that is described in his The Red Book.  Once you become proficient at invoking and ‘shifting’ between these perspectives, you can journal a dialogue with your varying archetypal personae as it occurs. This can allow you to explore your conflicting attitudes and motivations. These different archetypal perspectives may be identified with “typical situations” in your life; that is, with the distinct ROLES you have established and that you enact daily.

You can approach your MYSTIC archetype for a direct, dynamic dialogue or within a soul travel type of inner encounter.  Remember, all you have to do inwardly is to ASK! And then, accept what happens with a loving heart, ready to learn, and record your experience so you can interpret and remember the insights gained.

How Will You Get There?

This week we are contemplating the ensemble of “Big” life questions: Where are you Now? Where are you going? And for today through Saturday:

HOW WILL YOU GET THERE?

On Thursday I asked ‘What is your Shangri-La?’; that spiritual destination you aim to return to or arrive at in order to best fulfill your sense of personal Mission in this life. Then I had a significant dream Monday night that really supports my motivation to communicate about the principle intrinsic to our question this week:

 

I was co-teaching to a large class of students. One woman I had been talking with individually addressed the class with her profound answer to a question we had been discussing. Then I went to address the full class with that same question. But as dreams go, a shift occurred, and as I approached to speak, I saw the students were being assembled by some beings in white coats or uniforms , down and off to the right a ways. They were being assembled in a circular formation around something red in the center. I addressed the class anyway, figuring somehow they would be able to hear and sensing this was a very important question for them. I asked them:

“What is your purpose here? Not ‘What is your purpose HERE’, but ‘What is your PURPOSE Here?”

Now then, that dream became prophetic the next day. I was preparing for a large class I am co-teaching which involves conducting mainly college seniors through a full life mapping rites of passage cycle. I was already going to share the dream, as it is of such obvious relevance!  While prepping for the class, I was reading “Confrontation with the Unconscious” by Carl Jung (in Joan Chodorow’s Jung on Active Imagination), and I was also reading in Jung’s The Red Book, both of which were assigned for the class. You who appreciate Jung will appreciate what happened next as “synchronicity”: The very image from my dream of the students being assembled by white clad agencies in a circular formation around a red center is almost identical to a dream that Carl Jung himself had that revealed to him the importance of the integrated Self as an archetypal CENTER of consciousness! Jung dreamed of a town set up in a circular fashion (with milky white colors) with an island in the middle, and on the island was a magnolia tree with “reddish leaves”!

So in my dream I dreamed Jung’s dream within my wider dream, and it was about helping the students to orient around the concept of the Integrated (both conscious and unconscious, unified) Self/ soul and to answer: “What is your PURPOSE Here?”

 

Wow! So now for this blog post, let’s take this one further step to consider how the question being posed in my dream (and Jung’s archetypal image of wholeness at the center of Selfhood) pertains to: “How will you get There?”

Knowing your PURPOSE orients you to your GOAL. The CENTER, which is Self or Soul, IS the Goal.  (as stated in Jung’s words re. his dream: “There is nowhere to go beyond this Center”!

How then will you approach the center of your divine Self? One way or another, it is through integrating outer and inner, conscious and unconscious domains of consciousness.

Through the class I am teaching this semester an image has come through:

Do you see? This shows our conscious awareness, or the “outer” reality itself, as being like a film AROUND all that which is in the dynamism of the Unconscious, or “inner”. We live outwardly as if this were the sum of reality, but we are only surface dwellers in that light. We must go within, make a Descent, find a way to maintain connection with the content of our unconscious awareness.

That is how we can get There…

I welcome your insights and stories!

Forging an Archetype Ally

As one of twelve primordial archetype character modes, the Teacher is associated with the element of Earth, with a Dissolving energy mode, and with Sagittarius (hence, December).  A Teacher perspective usually involves practicalities or facts rooted in solid foundations, revealing in that sense an earthy nature.   Teacher also brings a dissolving or resolving energy, allowing questions to be answered and transitions forged. And Teacher may cut to the heart of a matter with constructive critique like the Sagittarian archer.

Regarding our archetypal aspects of Self as potential Allies, Teacher is a very positive ally to cultivate in its Strength mode.  If in Shadow, Teacher can be overly didactic or attached to a rigid point of view. But in its positive nature, Teacher can be a transformative Ally, showing the way to new vistas or a more flexible, new way of being.

In order to harness the positive strengths of your inner Teacher potentials, it is necessary first to get to know yourself in this dimension.  In my personal development book and Handbook, LIFE PATHS, I will be presenting a complete Archetype Dialogue process to facilitate your “alliance building” in this respect. For now, I invite you to start an “active imagination” form of conversation with your Teacher energy.

I invite you to simply seat yourself in a comfortable armchair or lie prone on a couch or bed. You might chant a favorite mantra or a prayer, or breathe deeply several times and release your breath to relax into a mindful or aware state. Focus inwardly on that spot between your eyebrows, gently expecting to encounter a part of your Self that has a Teacher aspect to him or her. Imagine this inner Teacher energy; it could be someone who has been a teacher for you or a fictional character or your inner Teacher may take her or his own unique personal form.  Allow yourself to spend some time with this inner character. Allow your experience to unfold in its own way. Meanwhile you can have a conversation with your Teacher figure. Ask whom s/he is and what s/he would like for you to know about him or her. Continue the encounter as long as it naturally unfolds.

When you return from your active imagination session with your Teacher part of Self, you may either continue the dialogue before opening your eyes, then record in your journal all that you remember; or, you might open your eyes after your main interaction and then start journaling an immediate dialogue in your journal.

When Jung returned from an active imagination experience–as described in his THE RED BOOK–,he would first journal about what he had experienced, then he would often draw a painting  or create a mandala to represent the lesson he had learned.

 What does your Teacher archetype look like? Does s/he have a name? Now that you have shared an encounter with him or her, do you feel a little differently for having included your inner Teacher energy more consciously within your Awareness?

Inwardly you can invite this figure to remain part of your consciousness from now on! You can offer to be more attentive and caring about his/her interests and concerns. You can work together to help achieve your common goals.

I welcome your insights and stories!

Jung’s RED BOOK: Using Mandalas to Ground Your Awareness

 

Today I want to discuss Jung’s RED BOOK (or, Liber Novus; 2009) as an example of how to use Totemic Representation to ground and illuminate your personal growth and development.

For a series of evenings starting from November 23 – December 25, 1913, just before the outbreak of WWI,then continuing for 16 years off and on after that, Carl G. Jung, founder of Depth, or Analytical, Psychology and the primary pioneer in the field of archetypal research, undertook an adventurous odyssey; he dived into the netherworlds of his own unconscious depths, and he returned to integrate his dreamlike encounters with the denizens of his unconscious domains within his conscious awareness. Using a form of contemplative practice that he termed “active imagination,” Jung sank willingly into a dreamlike awareness in order to encounter aspects and personae of his own Psyche that he would refer to as Archetypes.

 To Jung, Archetypes exist in a “collective unconscious” dimension; that is, similar archetypal images or forms are found all over the world and often appear in myths and dreams in similar ways and with similar meanings, although the individual appearance of an archetype might have very individual, personal form and specific cultural relevance. Jung identified several collective archetypes in his active imagination scenarios: an Anima (feminine aspect of a man’s Psyche), Shadow forms, and a Mage sort of figure represented in Jung’s experiences as a philosophical guide or guru figure, Philemon. He also experienced many fairly idiosynchratic figures related to his personal relationships and to his academic, religious, and literary background studies.

Some of Jung’s archetypal encounters lasted for several nights at a time, weaving a meaningful story.  Every night after his active imagination session, Jung recorded what he had experienced—including dialogue that had occurred with his archetypal figures—in a special journal he called his Red Book. He would sometimes paint some of the content of his experience in the Red Book, too. Every time a storyline had revealed its full significance to Jung, when he came out of his reveries that night he painted a special artistic image to represent his understanding of that archetypal encounter in the form of a circular Mandala (see link).

A Mandala is a universal sort of artistic image, created in a Circular form within what might be a 4-corner outer frame and with a center image around which the rest of the picture aligns. Tibetan monks and Navajo Indian healers alike use Mandalas in healing and centering rituals. Mandalas represent Balance and the organized coherence and integration of what might otherwise be considered disjoint or even chaotic elements or forces. To Jung, his Red Book mandalas represented the “integration” of archetypal energies within his own Psyche or Soul as he came into greater understanding of their presence and significance.  This process of integrating archetypal energy forms is crucial within Jung’s broader psychological theory of Individuation which he developed more completely after completing his Red Book ‘Descent’ and reemergence.

Jung’s Red Book mandalas—which I can link to only indirectly here so as not to infringe on copyrights—are an excellent form of totemic representation. They served to literally ILLUMINATE the shadowy unconscious forms that might appear in Carl Jung’s dreams and reveries. The process of arranging these archetypal images in Mandala forms revealed the deeper significance of these forms to Jung; it represented the integrationof their MEANINGS within Jung’s holistic understanding of his own Psyche or Self.

I certainly recommend reading Jung’s Red Book (there is a new Readers’ Edition available that makes this precious gem more accessible and affordable). Even more,I encourage you to engage in an ‘active imagination’ exploration of your own archetypal depths. In Life Paths–also in the next year of this blog that will begin in a couple of weeks from now— I’ll be offering an Archetype Dialogue process to help you discover aspects of your own unconscious archetypal influences that can be thought of as your own ensemble cast of archetypal Ally characters.

For now, though, I invite you to create a MANDALA to represent your LIFE DREAM. Place an image that represents your GOAL ACHIEVED (how you will feel or what your life will be like when you have fully integrated your Life Dream into your daily reality) in the center of a blank page. Around this Life Dream image, place other images or words and phrases to represent significant aspects of this Dream or representing the steps you can take to manifest your Life Dream.  You can refer to last week’s “Yellow Brick Road” and “Your Next Step” blog posts to find or develop material to use in filling out your totemic Life Dream Mandala image.

 

I welcome your Mandala image or comments!

Childsplay and Active Imagination Techniques

 

I consider myself to have been very fortunate as a child to have shared a best friendship with Karin, who was as much interested in creative imagination and adventure as I was. We were so interconnected through “childsplay” of various forms that when I remember my past in this life, I often say that my Childhood WAS Karin (…later extending to Barb, Diane, Ro, Pattie, Franco, Sebrena, Kery, Jan P,  Jan J, my sisters, Corinne, Gianmichele, Zvia, and Kathleen; gratitude for all these human companions, plus always my beloved pets!). But Karin and I had a special latitude in our very actively imaginative play, from when we were around 7 to 12. She lived with her mother in a beautiful, woodsy area in Pennsylvania; there were willow tree vines on which to swing across a creek, and lots of little green clearings within circles of large trees that made excellent forts, or rooms, or spaceships, or hiding places, or worlds. We played outdoors a lot in her yard: we played WWII soldiers, Indians (never cowboys), spies, and horses (that was my fave; we were just horses, wild and free, or one of us–playing a human–would rope and befriend the other, leading to many high spirited adventures!) Then indoors, when not practicing our violins together (we aimed to play “Santa Lucia” together at Carnegie Hall one day), we built elaborate universes, mansions made of Golden Book walls filling the upper and lower areas of a ping pong table at my family’s home. We created lives there for her Barbie, my Ken (yes, always the tomboy…); and we would weave adventurous, intricate life stories for our alter selves extending for over months at a time.

I am glad I had Karin as my playmate, along with family and other friend adventurers throughout childhood and beyond. I don’t remember ever closing down this creative flow and in fact I can gratefully say it has continued always, through writing, dreaming, daily contemplations, daydreams, reading, and travels. Compiling the Life Paths Portfolio Handbook as a self-help toolkit, based on coaching people who have used this method for their own life mapping adventures, has helped me remain engaged with my own Active Imagination playground!

One vital tool for using active imagination as a personal growth and development sandbox is to establish an ongoing “Archetype Dialogue” contemplation and journaling practice, which I highly recommend for anyone. This is what Carl G. Jung engaged in, which he in fact called an active imagination process. For Jung it resulted in his The Red Book: Liber Novus, and it spawned his general approach to understanding and working with “Archetypes of the Unconscious.”

We all can have some access to our unconscious archetypal sub-selves—what I like to call our ensemble cast of mythic characters–through engaging our imaginative faculties and by remaining attentively engaged with our dreams. While some psychologists and others who have read of Jung’s forays into his Unconscious Archetypal domain through active imagination and journaling concluded this was evidence of Jung’s own psychological imbalance, he countered that since he was in control of when he would engage his archetypes and since he used these inner encounters to gain a more balanced and integrated Psyche, quite the opposite was true. Joseph Campbell similarly has cautioned that when people do NOT attend to their inner archetypal impulses, that could result in a form of ‘schizoid’ split in a person from “not listening to” their own inner selves, or Soul.

 

 Many scientists, artists, and writers have likewise relied upon active imagination to keep open to the Creative Wellspring within each of us that allows us to be adaptive, flexible, playful, creative and productive in making of our lives that which we would fashion out of choice rather than only of necessity.  It is said that Edison never slept more that 20 or so minute catnaps at a time in order to stay primed at that creative aperture of consciousness between waking and sleeping.  Many artists share how their ideas have come through visions either sought or unexpected, as have scientists such as Kekule, who in 1890 dreamed of a snake swallowing its own tail and thereby developed a model of a benzene ring. Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Watson, theorized it is important to use dreaming to ‘forget’ our non-productive or fixed ideas so that the subconscious mind can better explore and reveal its secrets.

The book and recently released film Heaven is for Real adds a spiritual dimension to the practice of active imagination which I believe is also very important.(Or, read Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander in this same vein.) OOBE’s, NDE’s, and some forms of dreaming (e.g. lucid dreams, prophetic dreams, past-life dreams, etc.) can reveal to us that there is so much more to Reality—and life and death—than can be understood by physical science alone.

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What are some favorite ways YOU exercise your Active Imagination?

Where does it take you to?

I welcome your Comments, Insights and Reveries!

How to Use Your Dreams for Better Endings–Just Ask!

As an example of how you can use dreaming to bring about Better Endings, allow me to share about a time in my life when dreaming was fundamental in helping me to make a major life move. I grew up “back East” (from a Colorado perspective!): in Ohio, Pennsylvania and then upper western New York. My family lived near Niagara Falls when I was in high school and then I went to college in Buffalo for my bachelors and Masters degrees; so I lived in the eastern part of the country for my first 25 years, from 1954 to 1979.

After my Masters, I wanted to go on for a doctorate in Anthropology, and I had become particularly fascinated with the Southwest and Southwest Native American cultures from my Masters studies in Linguistics while in Buffalo. I took a wonderful cross-country bus trip with a friend to visit Sedona and Phoenix, Arizona, and after that I decided to apply for my graduate studies at Arizona State University. I was accepted into their graduate program, and that’s when my whole life was about to take a major shift, not only of location—Eastern to Western states—but to a fundamentally new way of being, for me, apart from my family and friendships I had forged in New York. “Going West” was a huge shift for someone whose whole family hailed from the Eastern states. So, I had to go through a major shift in perspective in order to accept this major life move. To do so, I turned to my dreaming.

Every night for over a year while I finished my Masters thesis and began to prepare for ‘the Big Move’ to Arizona, I sat for a ½ hour to 2 hour contemplation in my bedroom in Buffalo, and then went to sleep, to dream. Each night I framed a question that I would aim to receive an answer for in the contemplation or in my dreams that night. My questions all had to do with the upcoming move. For example, was I crazy to make such a huge relocation, from East to West, or shouldn’t I just give up on this wild adventure scheme and stay ‘Home’? I was going to drive my red Buick Special convertible; wasn’t red going to be too hot for Arizona? I was taking along my beloved cat, Chela; could she make such a long car trip? And, would I meet any ‘real’ new friends in ‘cowboy country’ (or again, maybe I should stay home in my ‘comfort zone’, after all!)

It was amazing, really, in retrospect. The technique was much like Jung’s nightly experiences with “active imagination” that he wrote of in his journal, The Red Book (check out this link for Jung’s images!). Every night in contemplation I would pose a question like those above that mainly challenged whether I could or should make such a huge transition, and afterwards, every night I would ‘be given’ a lucid dream that very clearly answered that specific question in the form of very direct and unmistakable inner guidance.  I was addressing my questions in contemplation to a spiritual Inner Guide, and he was helping me every step of the way, probably because without such clear answers, I would have found it harder to make this major change in consciousness that, spiritually, I really did need to make in order to move forward in my life.

When I complained that my car was red (How could I take a red car to Arizona?), that night in my dreams I was taken to a hotel in Phoenix (I later learned it was a Ramada Inn that really exists there!). This hotel has a rotating restaurant at the top. I was taken to that overview where I looked down at the parking lot. Guess what? It was FULL of red cars!

When I complained how could my precious cat endure such a long road trip, that night I was shown myself and her taking the trip. I was driving a big van that had a PIANO in the back! Over the piano was a quilted comforter, and stretched out in pure comfort along the piano top—with soft music playing—was, yes, you guessed correctly; my cat friend, Chela!

But would I meet any real friends? I was shown that night a truly prophetic dream revealing four specific persons whom I later met and recognized when I met them from that night of dreaming! One became my good friend whom I later married for 3 years, Franco. Another became a best friend and graduate school cohort for several years. Another would be my PhD advisor, Betsy. And the fourth became somewhat of a personal spiritual advisor while I was in Phoenix.

But, did I really have to make this trip? Would I be happy? Two dreams followed from those two questions. In the first, I was shown that there would be hard times to endure but they would be necessary for my spiritual unfoldment. In the second, I was walking with my Grandmother along a Phoenix city street. There was happiness in the air as I sang a lilting tune which I awoke with: “I’m leaving; But there are a few doors left to close, before I get over there!” For the rest of the year before I made the Big Move, I sang this song daily, in the morning at the university where I was teaching English and at night. I was leaving. I did clear up whatever remaining business I had in Buffalo before I could go.

When I reached Phoenix, these dreams had prepared me perfectly for all that was to come. Things went smoothly, and I learned what I needed to learn along the way. After only one night of tears when I realized I really had separated from all I had ever known, I adjusted rapidly and undertook one of the most significant and edifying phases of my life.

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Have you had this sort of “tandem” relationship with your Dreams? As an explanation of the method I used that you can use, too; it can be summed up very simply: Just Ask!

I would love to hear about your insights and experiences too! Feel free to comment and share YOUR stories!