#7 - The Wanderer's Bag of Tools

[wren]

Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were both with…
- David Whyte

The Wanderer’s second task within the cocoon is to prepare for soul initiation: the inauguration of a new, soul-rooted identity. He must ready himself for a birth and a new home. There are two components to this second task: (1) learning and employing techniques for soul encounter, practices that will help him approach the soul and gather what he finds there, and (2) cultivating a soulful relationship to his life and to all life. We will explore here the first of these tasks.

The Wanderer’s Bag of Tools

Sometimes, without any effort on our part and when we least expect it, the soul shows up, pulls the rug of ordinary life from beneath us and showers us with its confounding radiance. We hear our true name spoken for the first time, or an angel appears and invites us to wrestle, or we awaken in the wilderness at midnight with a deer licking our forehead, or out of nowhere, God says, “Take off your shoes!” Revelation can occur without conscious preparation for the encounter. It ‘just happens’ sometimes, or at least so it seems to the everyday mind. More commonly, we must make deliberate and courageous steps in the soul’s direction, using pathways that lead to that mysterious and veiled world.

In nature-based cultures, these pathways encompass a great variety of practices, techniques, and ceremonies taught by elders to the youth of their communities. When a young person becomes socially and culturally self-reliant, when her natural curiosity emerges about the mysteries of life, the elders notice. When the time is right, the old ones uproot her from her home and take her to a place where she will prepare for initiation. The elders bring with them a bag of tools, a treasure chest of soulcraft practices. In nature-based societies, these are the most important things to learn at that time, even more important than hunting, horticultural, food preparation, or shelter building.

For contemporary teenagers, too, developing soulcraft competence is more vital to their personal development than math, science, and business know-how. Most teenagers sense this and most would prefer this knowledge. Most of their teachers, however, don’t have a clue about pathways to soul. Few of us learned these things as teens or in college. Now, in order to initiate ourselves onto our soul paths, we must have the opportunity to teach these things to our own children and grandchildren.

A Sampling of Pathways

The Wanderer is not likely to magically transform one shining day from someone who has never encountered her soul to someone who, suddenly, is an initiated adult. Rather, she will meander through a heightened time of self-discovery outfitted with a set of practices for recovering and assimilating soul qualities. Every culture has – or once had – a set of such practices. Some of the most common are:

- Dreamwork
- Deep imagery or active imagination
- The discovery, fashioning and use of symbols and sacred objects
- Self-designed ceremony (a means of conversing with the sacred Other)
- Skillful used of hallucinogenic substances within sacred ceremonies
- Symbolic artwork
- Journal work
- Fasting
- Breathwork
- Extreme physical exertion
- Yoga disciplines
- The way of council
- Trance drumming and rhythms
- Ecstatic trance dancing
- Ceremonial sweats and saunas
- The enactment of traditional ceremonies, rituals and nature festivals
- Vision questing
- Understanding and responding to signs and omens in nature
- Talking across the species boundaries (nature dialogues)
- Animal tracking and other methods of sensitive and skillful nature observation
- The telling, retelling and study of myths and other sacred stories
- Personal myth work
- Storytelling of one’s own personal journeys
- Sensitive listening and clear reflection upon others’ stories
- Sacred speech and ritual silence
- Soulful music, poetry and chanting

Several themes are common to these pathways to soul. Many practices, for example, entail the deliberate alteration of consciousness, perhaps explaining why religious historian Mircea Eliade refers to them as ‘techniques of ecstasy’ . The ordinary state of ego consciousness must be temporarily dissolved or radically shifted because the uninitiated ego is the primary obstacle to the conscious experience of soul. The encounter with soul will shake up the everyday personality’s beliefs about self and the world. That’s why a conversation with soul is not likely within the defended confines of ordinary consciousness. The conscious self must look at its own psyche from a different perspective, from a unique angle, from a position of altered awareness, like viewing earth from outer space, or returning home after a month in an exotic culture. Most soul-encounter practices induce liminal states of temporary ego dissolution that release us from the usual rules and norms of our personality and culture, opening the way to fresh observations and creative adventures.

Upon entering the second cocoon, the Wanderer has a natural and implacable thirst for these consciousness-altering knowledge and skills. If there are no elders to teach these methods, she will make her own attempts. Most un-eldered teens in Western society, for example, end up using mind-altering chemicals – including alcohol – which, outside a ceremonial context and without spiritual guidance, are unlikely to lead to successful encounters with soul, and may be physically, psychologically and spiritually harmful. Indeed, many of the soulcraft methods discussed here can be downright dangerous. Mature guidance and adequate preparation are crucial.

In addition to non-ordinary states, the pathways to soul have other common themes. Many are rooted in metaphor and symbol – dreamwork, deep imagery, ceremony, signs and omens, poetry, and art. No surprise here as symbol is the currency of imagination and imagination is the primary window to the soul.

Many pathways evoke powerful emotions. When we cross borders into mystery and move beyond our ordinary relationship to the world, we evoke experiences from which we had formerly been ‘protected’. Some terrify us. Others give rise to joys and ecstasies. Sometimes we are flooded with sadness, for losses suffered and unclaimed dreams no irretrievable. Other times we stumble into unhealed wounds and the hurt, anger, guilt, shame and grief waiting there. In every case, our emotions encountered on the descent provide the opportunity for a deeper alignment with the world and ourselves. We are never left unmoved by the encounter.

Another common theme is conversation with the Sacred Other, that exotic Other appearing as a frog or a raven, the wind or silence, a saguaro or a blade of grass, a mysterious dream image, our lover’s face in the midst of lovemaking, the voice of a goddess, a dying child, an entranced dancer, or a poem or painting. The conversation may or may not be verbal but its medium is always the intimate and authentic interaction between the conscious human self and another being from a world quite distant from our surface lives. Deeply encountering that Other changes us, as might a profound conversation with a person from a radically different culture. The Sacred Other can be found in many terrains… in dreams, deep imagery, ceremony, psychotropic plants, trance dancing, the wilds of nature, sexual ecstasies, and the great mythologies of the world. Entering the conversation with the Other ushers us to the edge of our world, where we might acquire an astonishing new perspective. The conversation invites us to think outside the box, to enter the unknown, to cross borders, to descend into the dark mysteries.

Another common thread is that pathways to soul stimulate a deep bonding, not just between people but also between humans and the other beings of nature. Bonding across the species boundaries helps us to overcome conflicts and disparities between nature and culture and within human culture itself. By deepening our identification with all life forms, with ecosystems, and with the planet herself, we begin to discover within us what has been called ‘the ecological self’ or ‘a psyche the size of the earth’ – the broader and deeper self that is a natural member of the more-than-human community.

Wandering in nature is also a common theme of soul-encounter pathways, nature being a mirror of soul (and vice versa). And, finally, story, rhythm, music, and the arts in general are regular features. Indeed, some say all arts originally arose as methods for approaching or celebrating the sacred. If you have ever felt the joy of creation of something beautiful, you can understand that belief. That something larger than yourself was at work, flowing through you.

Soul Encounter Versus Soul Initiation

Before exploring pathways to soul in detail, it is important to appreciate the distinction, only implicit so far in the discussion, that soul encounter is an experience of the mysterious image you were born with, while soul initiation is the developmental transition from psychological adolescence to true adulthood. An experience of soul encounter does not necessarily result in soul initiation and soul initiation does not necessarily occur at the exact moment of a soul encounter.

During a soul encounter, you glimpse one or more features of your soul image. This image can be multi-faceted and complex like an elaborate tapestry that has many sub-images. Woven into the fabric of the image is a mysterious symbol that holds within it the secrets of your life purpose. Through one or more soul encounters, you learn about that symbol and how it reflects your unique soul qualities or core powers, the gift you were born to carry to others. The fact you have your particular soul qualities, and not others, is the truth at the center of the image you were born with.

Imagine your soul as a beautiful, rare, priceless and completely unique jewel. Your soul encounters are glimpses of the facets of that jewel, not necessarily the jewel as a whole. You begin to see and, on some deeper level, understand, there is more to the soul than these first glimpses. Each encounter shows and teaches you more of just who you are.

Soul encounters are rare before our mid- to late-teens but there is no reason they cannot occur in earliest childhood. Soul encounters also happen after soul initiation; there is always more to learn about our soul and our soul powers. You may glimpse your own soul image only once in a lifetime, or you might observe it, and variations of it, many times. You might encounter somewhat different images on different occasions… different facts of that jewel. Each new encounter elaborates on the previous ones, offering further differentiation, clarification or extension. The soul image is most commonly experienced visually – as we are especially sight-oriented beings – but, for many people, the image is auditory, kinesthetic or emotional. The image might occur as a sensation in our body, a song you hear with every cell, or a powerful feeling coursing through you. You may or may not be able to put it into words. The image might be an inner one (like a dream image or one from your waking imagination) or something you perceive in the outer world. Sometimes it combines both imagination and sensing. Often we simply don’t know whether it is inner, outer, or both.

Each person’s soul image is as unique and mysterious as his or her destiny. One person may carry within her the image of a sacred chalice from which others may drink. Others have discovered their gift is to journey through darkness bearing light; to stand at the edge of the waters and help those who are ready to cross; to bring the power of healing hands to the world; to shine the light of the north; to sing the song that calls the Divine Beloved; to be for others a glistening web over waters; to mirror the hearts of others; to walk rainbows; to stalk the heart like a wolf; to sing the songs of the soul; to offer the compassion, courage, and wisdom of a strong and nurturing tree; to be the gift of a sparking heart; or to echo the cry of the earth.

In contrast to soul encounter, soul initiation refers to that extraordinary moment in life when we cross over from psychological adolescence to true adulthood, from our first adulthood to our second. At that moment, our everyday life becomes firmly rooted in the purposes of the soul. The embodiment of our soul powers becomes as high a priority in living as any other. But it’s not so much that we choose at that moment to make soul embodiment a top priority; it’s more as if the soul commands us to that task and we assent.

In the Western culture, we need to be careful of the word ‘initiation’. Many people associate it with elitism, secret societies, flaky or nefarious cults, and oppressive, hierarchical organizations. For some people, the word evokes, on one hand, a sense of their own inadequacy (if they have not undergone an initiatory experience and believe they ought to have done so) and, on the other hand, suspicions of arrogance or ego inflation on the part of those who participate in initiatory rites. Due to its considerable charge, it may be best to avoid public declarations of being initiated. Soul initiation is not something to be worn like a badge or a status symbol; it is to be quietly embodied through a life of soulful service.

Soul initiation transforms our lives by the power of the truth at the center of our soul image. Embracing that truth results in a radical simplification of our lives. Activities and relationships not supportive of our soul purpose begin to fall away. Our former agendas are discarded, half-completed projects abandoned. Many old problems are not solved but outgrown. Old ways of presenting and defending ourselves become less appealing and less necessary.

At soul initiation, our lives are changed forever, irreversibly. We have, in effect, understood a certain truth and have made the sort of promise of it will ‘kill you to break’…

By the lake in the wood
In the shadows
You can
Whisper that truth
To the quiet reflection
You see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
The water, remember,

It wants you to carry
The sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember
In this place
No one can hear you

And out of the silence
You can make a promise
It will kill you to break,

That way you’ll find
What is real and what is not…

It is possible your soul initiation will occur during soul encounter, one so profound that it fundamentally changes your sense of what your life is about, and so clear that you see right away how to translate it into action and a life of service. More typically, however, soul initiation occurs at some moment other than a soul encounter. You might wake up one morning and recognize that your old priorities have been superseded by new, soul-centered values, as if a profound but gradual shift within your psyche had been reverberating underground, hidden from your awareness. What ultimately confirms your initiation is neither your experience of an image nor the blessing of a community authority – even an elder – but rather the depth of fulfillment you derive from embodying your soul image and your community’s recognition and celebration of that embodiment.

The second cocoon provides your best opportunity in life to study pathways to soul encounter. The lessons typically come in unpredictable forms through the guidance of teachers who are often eccentric and enigmatic, sometimes non-human in form. The Wanderer must be open to whatever form these encounters take and whatever embodiment of teacher is offered.

Through this process we are afforded the potential of becoming embodiments of Dana, a pervasive spirit that tends life, cares for the soul, and seeks greater and greater manifestations of a new dream. As embodiments of this dream, as embodiments of this tending energy, we remember our true place in the cosmos again and begin to see these inner spirals of memory and belonging reflected in the outer world. We comprehend within our own being that just as we are being initiated so too is the planet.

The process of initiation and change now happening on the planet is what we might call the Great Remembering. This process has just begun. We are on the edge of a sword. The path of Dana and the soul-tracking methods of shamanic spirituality are ways of retracing our steps to the original instructions of Creation, instructions that can enable us to rebuild an edifice of harmony in our lives and on the planet.

This realignment is about our future and our future culture. This culture has an energy, a pulse, and a life of its own. Many already carry it as an enlivened vision within them. For some it is like a fragrant nocturnal flower blooming inside them. Others may be unaware of this pulse and yet they sense that another way is possible. Perhaps you feel such a pulse quickening within you?

This era in which we are living is a compelling experiment – in spiritual evolution, in our human potential, in reclaiming the art of becoming good ancestors for those who will inherit the earth from us. Everything has been leading us to this moment, both the actualized and enlightened expressions of our humanity, as well as those shadowy dimensions of our collective condition that beckon for transformation. The full range of all we have known is woven into the fabric of this process. As the Hopi have said, we are the once we have been waiting for.

This phenomenon is not easily seen or comprehended if we look only through the limited lens of personal ego. This perspective, fostered and colored by myopic cultural, religious, and even national patterns of perceiving and relating to the world, is profoundly crippled in its ability to foster the kind of consciousness necessary to promote the future earth culture, much less to see it. Therefore, some kind of severance from these limited ways of seeing and knowing is necessary. What is needed to discern the larger process of initiation is a transpersonal and holistic perception of the world, which shamanic spirituality fosters. One way of putting it is that to truly grasp what is happening we must learn to step outside ourselves to see ourselves.

Like the spiritual law of ‘as above, so below’, another axiom holds equal value…’as within, so without, as without, so within.’ If we turn to indigenous people and modern visionaries alike, we quickly see that many other people have their own unique way of articulating the churning tides of this individual and collective initiation. From the Inka to the Hopi, from the Maya to visionary thinkers such as Ervin Laszlo, each in their own way speaks of a process of reclaiming a primal (meaning original) way of spiritual and environmental sustainability or of cultivating new visions and new pathways toward this reality.

If we make the most of this time, we will have successfully birthed a legacy worthy of passing on to future generations. We will have become good ancestors. From a shamanic perspective, we are dreaming twenty-four hours a day. If we are present to this fact, and paying attention to the unfolding dream, then we are participating in a deep reverential attentiveness to the spirit within and beneath our lives. As we gain our footing in this ancient practice of soul tracking within we find that we can then apply our consciousness to other people and our planet. We will be on the path of ‘tending’.

Tending and soul tracking are what the abiding and re-emergent spiritual energies of Dana are all about. Whether as goddess, harmonizing principle, or tutelary spirits of the earth, Dana is a teacher of teachers, a healer of healers, a guiding force who instructs us in paying attention to the deeper flow of the unfurling dream in which we are all journeying. Dana invites us to remember the sacred role with which we have been charged as caretakers of the Spirit of Life wherever it may dwell. Dana as an Irish shamanic principle invites us to relearn the practice of tending the luminous filaments of spirit.

From this point on, you shall begin to gather your tools, filling your bag with all you shall need to continue this journey. Each one has a unique role to play in your quest for soul encounter and soul initiation. Each one builds upon the others. Examine each one closely before placing them in your Wanderer’s Bag of Tools…

[Senbecc]

Wren, these shaman boards have provided me with allot of good reading, and learning. Beautiful work as always. I hope to become more active in these boards myself now that I'm finding more time and more thoughts.

Love light and laughter!

[wren]

Glad you are enjoying this work, John! It means a great deal to me!

[wren]

Dreamwork

Dreamwork and deep imagery journeys are the traditional tools of twentieth-century psychology for lighting up the deep dungeons of the soul and helping us befriend the demons and angels who dwell there. These are inner work tools, practices for exploring the intricate and intimate corners of our individual psyches – our fellow humans and the other, more wild creatures of the planet.

The inner is no less real than the outer, and, although it is part of us, it is not literally inside our skin. We imagine the unconscious or the soul as something private and inside us but the unconscious can equally well be imagined outside our bodies, out in the world, like a dark, wild forest through which we roam. There are equal measures of mystery in dreams and wilderness.

Dreamwork reaps transformation, healing, direction and initiation from the rich landscapes of our nocturnal visions. Cultures from every corner of the planet since the dawn of humanity have consulted dreams for guidance. We should not be surprised, then, to find a hundred ways to approach a dream. Beliefs about dreams in our own society range from the dismissive – that they are meaningless results of random neurons firing while we sleep – to the more reverential view that they hold greater reality, meaning, and potency than our waking hours.

Soulcentric dreamwork diverges from other methods in its premise that every dream is an opportunity to develop our relationship to soul, to who we are beneath our surface personalities and routine agendas. Each dream provides a snapshot of the unfolding story and desires of the soul, and a chance for the ego to be further initiated into that underworld story and those underworld desires.

Approaches to dreamwork can be divided into three categories: objective, subjective and archetypal. These approaches differ as to how they see the relationship between the nightworld (i.e. – the events, locations, and characters of the dream) and the dayworld (i.e., the waking world). All three approaches can be used on a single dream.

In the objective approach, we imagine the dream as a sort of psychological x-ray of our waking life, revealing previously hidden truths about the dayworld people, places, and relationships portrayed in the dream. In soulcentric dreamwork, we rarely employ the objective perspective because it traffics in surfaces and we are headed for the depths. We want to know about the soul and its desires and about the relationship between the ego and the soul. We’re not so interested in better understanding of the ego’s place in the dayworld.

In the subjective approach, we regard every part of the dream as a part of the dreamer, part of the dreamer’s psyche. The elements of the dream are not seen as corresponding to things from the dayworld; rather, we understand the dream components as representing the dreamer’s sub-personalities, attitudes, feelings wounds, rejected qualities, and hidden potentials. The ‘I’ in the dream represents the ego, the way the dreamer thinks about himself. The dream reveals the relationships between the ego and other elements of the psyche. The dream – the dreamwork on it – affords the opportunity to facilitate integration and wholeness within our psyches.

The subjective approach helps us integrate our conscious personalities with parts and potentials that have been lost, hidden, rejected or repressed. This facilitates soul work because the soul seeks wholeness.

With the archetypal approach to dreams, we again say every par of the dream is a part of the dreamer, but now we expand our meaning of the dreamer to include the collective (universal) unconscious as well as the personal unconscious embraced in the subjective approach. The archetypal perspective, which subsumes the subjective and goes beyond it (or better, beneath it), was developed by James Hillman, the American depth psychologist and found of Archetypal Psychology. Some parts of the dream are seen as archetypes, the gods and goddesses that act through our psyches, as well as representing our more personal qualities. A conflict of any such magnitude within the psyche could result in the rearrangement of a lot of inner furniture.

A key principle in the archetypal approach is this: the archetypal presences in our dreams – and the dream more generally – may not be the least bit interested to help with the ego’s dayworld agenda of personal happiness or adjustment. The agenda itself may be the primary obstacle to soulful growth. Rather, that dream affords the ego an initiation opportunity in the underworld that would bring about not a healing or patching up of the ego but something quite contrary: a death to the ego’s current way of being in the world.

From the archetypal view, the dream wants to separate the ego from its surface life, at least temporarily, so it can be introduced to a deeper, richer, larger possibility, a life more in keeping with the desires of the soul. Ultimately, this will render the conscious personality more whole, but not without an intervening death.

The dream ego (the ‘I’ in the dream) finds itself in the position of Persephone, abducted from her middleworld home by Hades. Persephone becomes Hades’ wife, his queen, the goddess of the Underworld, thus, ultimately, fulfilling her destiny. Every dream, in this view, perpetrates an abduction of the ego for the sake of its education in relation to the soul.

In the subjective approach, the dream is seen as information for the ego as to how to grow more whole. In the archetypal approach, the dream is a divine power that can have a direct transformative impact on the ego. The specific strategies of archetypal dreamwork impel the dayworld ego to dwell as long as possible in the world of the dream, among those nightworld images, given them plenty of opportunity to alchemize the ego. This contrasts with strategies that keep the ego in the driver’s seat, extracting the dream’s images into the dayworld, where the ego, unscathed, can have its way with those images. Looked at with soulcentric eyes, every dream reveals hidden potentials of our deeper lives and stories and provides the opportunity for the ego to be rooted more firmly in the soils of soul.

Dreams are one of the foremost and universal ways the soul speaks to the ego. But the soul does not merely speak by way of dreams; it can also do something to us. In addition to capturing our conscious imagination, the dream can capture the ego itself. We are pulled down into a strange realm of confounding events we may or may not understand intellectually but that profoundly impact, through our emotions and imagination, our beliefs about ourselves and the world. The dream can and does transform the ego, especially when we cooperate (surrender) during our dreamwork.

Through soulcentric dreamwork, dreams can have the same transformative effect on the ego as a thorough immersion in nature. The inner wilds of dreams and outer wilds of nature are our most powerful allies, teachers, and guides in our maturation and initiation. To intensify the transformative effect, we can work with our dreams while immersed in the natural world, bringing dreamwork to an exceptionally deep level and opening new doors t the sacred garden of nature.

Dreams arise from the waters of our deepest human nature. And the magic and splendors of the natural world constellate the flowing dream of the earth. The earth, every day, invites us to dive into her dream stream.

Imagine dreams as currents in an underground stream – a soulstream – flowing beneath our surface lives. The rock group the Talking Heads has a song, “Once in a Lifetime”, about waking up to that other, more real, meaningful, and wild life waiting and flowing beneath our everyday, overly civilized routines. That deeper life can be recovered and lived. "Under the rocks and stones,” they sing, “there is water underground.” Beneath the ground of our habit-bound lives, with our beautiful houses, large automobiles, and nine-to-five (or five-to-nine) jobs – “same as it ever was” – there is the constant flow of a deeper, hidden life. We may not get many chances in a lifetime to enter that underground stream, maybe only one. If and when the ground beneath our feet suddenly swells and bursts open, we shall find ourselves aghast at the life we have been living – and the deeper life we have not.

Dream researchers have shown that the neurologically normal person has a dream, remembered or not, every ninety minutes during a regular night’s sleep. Every hour and a half, we dip into a stream, a Great Underdream that is always flowing even when we are not having what we normally call ‘a dream’. We might imagine this Underdream as the soul eternally musing about its life, and inviting the ego in (“the water’s fine,” it murmurs). The Underdream is what the soul wants the ego to embody in the dayworld. The Underdream surges and swells, floods and spouts, night and day. Each night dream represents our brief descent into the Great Underdream, a dipping of our toes into the soulstream, a briefing on one or two points about the deeper life waiting and longing to be lived.

The earliest remembered dreams of our lives, the ones from early childhood, say age three to five, represent especially clear and portentous glimpses into the Underdream. These dreams occur when the ego – a solid sense of ‘I’ – first appears in stable form. It’s as if the soul attends the launching of the ego into the vast ocean of life with a message tacked to the mast. The message outlines the soul’s greatest hope for the ego and provides vivid clues to the ego’s destiny. These early dreams are especially fertile when worked with soulcentrically. Carl Jung, for example, dreamed, at age three or four, of being out in a meadow and then descending a stone staircase into an underground temple that contained a great golden throne with a ‘subterranean God’ upon it in the form of a fifteen-foot erect phallus. In his memoir, written at age eighty-one, Jung wrote that this dream:

“laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life with stormiest passion…Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth. What happened in order to bring the greatest possible amount of light into the darkness. It was an initiation into the realm of darkness.”

And, as we know, Jung spent his life illuminating that underworld realm of darkness and its strange cast of portent gods and goddesses.

Imagine that the soul ceaselessly years to dream itself into the world, not just in early childhood. Sometimes the ego cooperates; mostly it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s not likely to inherit the greater life of the soul. The ego tends to think of itself as fully in control. The soul constantly calls the ego to die to its current illusions. To surrender to the underworld its death (to the ego). We long for transformation but don’t want it that way. As W.H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed.”

~

To respect the power of dreams, the first rule in a soulcentric approach asks you to refrain from interpreting your own dreams too soon and never interpret someone else’s dream. Rather, permit yourself the sometimes disquieting luxury of hanging out among the rich symbols and events of your dream, wandering slowly through its images and emotions, twisting slowly in the breeze of its seductions and abductions. Whenever you can during the day, let the dream do its tidal work on the ego rather than allowing the ego to do its analyzing work on the dream.

You might approach each dream as if you were entering a vast desert inhabited by sun-scorched canyons, craggy mountain ranges, hidden springs, furtive mammals, blossoming cacti, and inscrutable dangers, a shape-shifting world in which you might choose to dwell for an indefinite span, paying close attention to how things feel there. You might be changed in ways terrifying or liberating, or both. You might do best to avoid dream dictionaries and other books that attempt to tell you what a dream symbol means, as if each dream element could be extracted from its dreamworld and hae a fixed meaning independent of its relationship with the dreamer and all other elements of the dream.

There are many techniques for working with dreams without interpreting them right off the bat, or ever. First and foremost, you can gain an enormous amount by telling your dream, out loud, to one person or more, without comment. Like a poem (it is a poem, a soul poem), try recounting your dream in the present tense (as if the action is happening as you speak) and talk very slowly, very slowly, even slower, like reading a world-class poem, savoring every word. Allow the emotions of the dream to flow through you as you speak. Let the emotions and images do their work on you. Go slowly. Describe the sensory qualities of the dream in great detail – the sights, scents, sounds tastes, and textures. Describe the subtleties of the personalities and the emotional nuances of the encounters. Linger.

Tell the dream in this manner at least twice, the second time immediately after the first. Maybe several times. You goal at this point is to simply be in the dream, not to figure it out. You might choose to insert the world ‘inner’ or the phrases ‘of me’ or ‘in my life’ after the significant elements of the dream to more fully feel, as you speak, that the dream is making a statement about the larger you, and that it is speaking in metaphor, like poetry.

Several dreamwork methods help you merge with the dream elements. One method is to act out the role of one or more dream characters. Do this repeatedly, perhaps exaggerating it, in order to sink deeper into that dream character. You might have a friend or a dream guide interview you as if you are that character and ask how ‘she’ is feeling emotionally, how her body feels, what she wants, how it feels to be her. Then you can do the same with other characters, or with the journey itself, or the conflict.

Another psychodrama-allied method is to ask people in a dream group to play the characters and/or things or places in your dream. Be sure to carefully explain to them the qualities, attitudes, styles and intentions of the dream elements so that the actors remain faithful to your dream and not spin off their own variations or fantasies. You play the part of the dream ego. Act out the entire dream. Do it a few times. Let yourself feel the full dream image. Later, you might take a turn at embodying other dream elements.

You might journey back into the dream through your deep imagination (deep imagery will be explored in the next section). With or without assistance from an imagery guide, first enter a deep state of relaxation. Then, in your imagination, go back into your dream and relive it, lingering as long as you can in that world and experiencing it as fully as possible. Allow that particular dreamworld to take you where it will. While there, you can also interact with the dream characters, getting to know them, not trying to change who or what they are. Or you might ask their permission to merge with them and be them for awhile.

You might, as another method, enter into dialogues between two or more dream characters (including the character that is you, the dream ego), taking the place of one and then the other. Do this in your imagery, or with your eyes open and your body engaged (with or without the help of a dream guide or friend), or in written dialogues in your journal. Stay true to the way the characters are in the dream, their attitudes, desires, feelings, agendas and personalities. Keep in mind, with a soulcentric approach to dreams, that you never want to rewrite the script in any way, to change the action for ego comfort or to give the dream a ‘happy ending’.

These methods permit you to get inside the dream, to crawl into the skin of different dream characters and discover the conflicts, potentials and desires – yours – embodied in those beings. You can do this not only with the people in the dream but also with the dream’s animals, trees, rivers, mountains, clouds, houses, cars, situations, emotions, sounds, speech, and even qualities such as colors or size.

Another dreamwork method explores your direct associations with the elements of your dream, allowing your imagination to reveal the significance of a dream symbol. For each element of the dream, note any idea, feeling, person, or memory that spontaneously arises. Write them down and hang out with those associations until one or two click with the dream more strongly than the rest. Then retell the dream (out loud, to yourself or someone else), substituting that association for the original element. Notice how the dream comes more alive, evokes stronger emotions, or triggers additional memories.

Another way to explore your dreams is, through meditation, meet an animal who will serve as your dream guide. With a good relationship forged with your animal guide, you can request its help in learning from or being changed by your dreams. You might, for example, enter a recent dream, meet your dream guide there, and wander through the dreamworld together. Or, while you are working one of your dreams through a dream group, you might ask your animal dream guide to be present in the room (vividly so you can virtually see it there), watch its response as you work with the dream, and perhaps ask it for suggestions about interacting with dream characters and situations. You might also consult your dream guide as you help others with their dreamwork.

One last example of a soulcentric dreamwork method is to enact the dream either literally or symbolically in your waking life. Within the bounds of ethics and propriety; take the course of action, in your dayworld, that the dream ego or another character does in your dream. This is done not with the belief that the dream maker wants you to conduct your dayworld life in the manner of the dream. The purpose, rather, is to submit yourself to the dream’s nightworld, to go back into that world, to give the nightworld images another chance (beyond the dream itself) to do their shape-shifting work on you. You hope to discover what the dream does to you independent of what your dayworld logic might predict.

~

The soul speaks primarily in images. Dreams are one example. Although we might engage in thought in non-dream sleep, we don’t think when we dream. We imagine. The dream is a series of images. Hillman suggests we imagine a dream as a single image like a complex painting. When we look at a painting, we start in one place and then move our gaze across the painting until we have seen it all. But despite our sequence of glances, it is still one painting, a single complex image. We might try relating dreams this way: the images can be looked at in any order; together they make up a single symbol. This will help us avoid the ‘making sense’ of the dream too soon, imposing our everyday logic and perspectives. Give the dream a chance to do its work on you by dwelling in its images and feelings as long as you can before coming out (or up).

Dreamwork is an essential tool in the Wanderer’s bag of soulcraft tools.

[wren]

The remainder of this work will be posted at:

www.voidinvortex.proboards74.com/index.cgi?board=journey

If you have questions or concerns about any of the work here, feel free to post in these threads. I will still be supporting this work here at PM!

[KittyLane]

thanks for the posts wren!

[Lady Anastasia]

Thankies for adding the link to where the updates and future work can be found Wren, it is appreciated