Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams.
Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams.
The body has a wisdom of its own.
However slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence and total support to the ego.
To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative, dammed energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in.
After body work, the dreams bring to consciousness the complexes that have been threatened or released.
Ancient toilets that have been overflowing, broken or plugged begin to flush; animals that have been dead, disabled, frenzied or starving begin to be healed; automobiles with faulty starters, flat tires and smashed in rear trunks are repaired; houses with defective wiring, where short circuits amass too much energy in one socket with no current in another, are recircuited.
Often new windows replace little old garret slits, or big secret rooms are discovered in the old house.
If the individual is ready, and if the experience has been one of trust, a powerfully numinous dream of the Great Mother as nourishing, loving protector is often given.
Rarely does she show her face, but her love infiltrates the body with a soft, luminous Light, an experience so powerful that the woman returns to that moment again and again when the Gethsemane days of the analysis seem unendurable.
Repeatedly, analysands say, “I don’t know what happened. I am not a religious person, but I know Somebody loves me.”
Such an experience can turn an addiction around.
The emptiness at the center of the psyche that has heretofore been experienced as nothingness—an abyss to be avoided with as much anesthesia as necessary—can be transformed into Beingness, respected and cherished as the abode of the Goddess.
Concentration then becomes a movement around the center, and the frenzied, forsaken hours that were formerly spent binging, vomiting, starving, working, drinking, cleaning can be transformed into the most creative hours of the day.
Addictive personalities are often highly energized people who are lost in a maze because their search for essence has failed.
They run around like gerbils on a wheel finding whatever transcendent experience they can through the euphoria of starvation, the orgasm of vomiting, the spirit in alcohol, the “reality” ~Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 60
Carl Jung Dream Interpretation
The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects
On Dreams I have no theory about dreams, I do not know how dreams arise.
And I am not at all sure that – my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a “method.”
I share all your prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness.
On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it.
This something is not of course a scientific result to be boasted about or rationalized; but it is an important practical hint which shows the patient what the unconscious is aiming at. Indeed, it ought not to matter to me whether the result of my musings on the dream is scientifically verifiable or tenable, otherwise I am pursuing an ulterior-and therefore autoerotic aim.
I must content myself wholly with the fact that the result means something to the patient and sets his life in motion again.
I may allow myself only one criterion for the result of my labours: does it work? As for my scientific hobby – my desire to know why it works – this I must reserve for my spare time.
“The Aims of Psychotherapy” (1931). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.86
dream dream dream
