Shadow Work: Dream Groups

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Carl Jung, Dream, Dream Groups, Dreamwork, Shadow Work

I will have to admit that even with all these methods for interpreting your own dreams, sometimes it can still be difficult to find what seems like the correct meaning.

If you continually have problems interpreting your dreams, you might want to look into joining or forming a Dream Group. Dream Groups should never be larger than 10 people or they get unwieldy.

If you can’t find a local dream group, here are some guidelines for forming your own:

1) All participants should have some previous exposure to dreams whether it is extensive reading or a period of recording their own dreams or an introductory course or conference or individual meetings with someone on dreams.

2) No one should be coerced into joining the group. Everyone should feel comfortable and safe being there. If your psyche is telling you that now is not the time, listen to it. If you are seeing a therapist, you might want to consult them about joining or beginning a group.

3) It is best to have someone in leadership of the group who is well versed in dream work and the group process. If not, use a rotating convener who sees that the group sticks to its rules for its own safety.

4) Every gathering of the group should begin with silence, the ringing of a bell, the lighting of a candle, saying the Jesus Prayer, or some other ritual that will help the group to center itself and invoke God’s spirit.

5) Once centered, the group can spend about 20 minutes or so checking in with each other. It is important to share something of your life and any relevant information or feelings. This will help the trust and connections between your life and your dreams.

6) Then, whoever is convening or leading the group, should give a short (about 10-15 minutes) presentation on the wisdom of the dream or related material. This can come from ancient or modern sources. It can be something from Jungian psychology, mythology, Scripture, or a book, CD or DVD on the subject matter. This should be followed by a short period of reaction and discussion. This, along with the opening prayer, calls forth the Self, and brings wisdom and learning to the group as well as promoting the health, healing and safety within the group.

7) Everyone who wishes, may now share a dream. There is no discussion or interpretation, just the sharing of an actual dream.

8) The convener or leader then asks for a volunteer to share their dream for group work. Preference should be given to those who have yet to share a dream. The procedure for group dream work should be done strictly, as follows:

A) The person shares the dream with any pertinent information (not their Interpretation).

B) The group asks questions of clarification (not Interpretation).

C) The leader now asks the dream presenter to give the dream to the group.

D) The group now talks with each other without looking at the dreamer. The dreamer ONLY listens. The group now projects onto the dream using words such as, “if it were my dream, I . . .”. It is important to the process that the group adheres to both of these rules.

E) After sufficient discussion, give the dream back to the dreamer for any comments. Thank him/her for sharing and tell him/her that it is important to track their dreams in the next few days because future dreams will repeat the message if we did not interpret the correct meaning the first time.

9) Each gathering should end with a “feeling check” and the participants in a circle holding hands sharing an extemporaneous prayer time, saying the Lord’s Prayer, or something else that will gather everything you have done together in your meeting time to remind people of God’s grace and they are accepted regardless of where they are on their journey.

It is important to agree to maintain confidentiality outside the group should a dreamer ask for it. Otherwise, it is acceptable for members of the group to discuss dreams outside the group as long as anonymity is maintained.

 

Shadow Work: Active Imagination

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Active Imagination, Carl Jung, Dreamwork, Robert A. Johnson, Shadow Work

Cupid at Bonaventure

In his book, Inner Work, Robert Johnson goes into much greater detail on the technique of Active Imagination, but I will give a quick introduction to the process here. Basically, Active Imagination is a meditative dialogue between the Ego and a personified aspect from the unconscious (dream character, dream object, personified emotion or mood, etc.). The dialogue is most helpful when the dreamer writes it down or speaks it to another person or into a tape recorder. Write quickly, without censoring, while in a deep state of meditation.

NOTE: It is best NOT to do meditative dialogue with a dream figure that is an actual person you know and interact with in your waking life as the danger for projection and introjection is too great. Instead, do basic symbol association work.

Step 1) Choose a figure from a dream or personify an emotion or a mood that carries compelling energy. With your journal and pen, get comfortable in a place where you will not be interrupted for at least half an hour.

Step 2) Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and focus on your breath. Using whatever mantra works for you (for example, you can inhale cleansing energy, exhale tension, fatigue, fear, or whatever you need to let go of or focus on a single word), and sink as deeply as you can into a relaxed and tension-free place in which you are balanced and focused, open and receptive. Once you’ve reached this state, you will be open to the source of the dream.

Step 3) Into this space, invite the figure with whom you want to dialogue. Try to encounter this figure with all your senses–seeing, hearing, feeling, even smelling and tasting, if that is possible. Allow the sensations to impact your body. Now, note the places in your body that are responding. What memories or emotions are stirring? Like a camera, zoom in and experience your companion in close proximity. Feel the energy. Feel your emotions. This symbol before you holds the wisdom to help you grow and heal. Now your companion wants to speak. As you open yourself to receive your companion’s wisdom, ask questions respectfully, listen intently and continue to stay deeply relaxed. Pick up your pen and record the dialogue (or turn on the tape recorder or let the person your sharing the process with record it for you).

Questions you might want to ask:

*What is your name? Who are you and what is your purpose?

*What do you like about who you are and what you do?

*What do you dislike about who you are and what you do?

*What do you hate or fear the most? What do you desire or want the most?

*Why are you hear? What do you want of me? What do you want to teach me?

*What gifts can we give to one another?

Step 4) Allow the dialogue to continue for as long as it seems fruitful. Close by expressing gratitude to your companion. Then quickly record the experience in your dream journal. Slowly return to ordinary consciousness. Later, you can reflect on the dialogue and continue to work with the experience.

Next Week: Forming a Dream Group

Shadow Work: Four-step Dreamwork

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Carl Jung, Dreamwork, Robert A. Johnson, Sahdow Work

Robert Johnson

Jungian analyst Robert Johnson created a four-step way to work on dreams in an effort to bring our conscious and unconscious selves together.

Step One: Associations

After choosing the images from your dream (these can be persons, objects, situations, colors, sounds or speech), write down every association you have with each image. For example, starting with the first image, think to yourself, “what feeling do I have about this image? What words or ideas come to mind when I think about it?” These associations will be anything (words, ideas, mental pictures, feelings or memories) you spontaneously connect with the image. Don’t try to decide which association is the correct one, just write them ALL down.

Always make sure that your association related directly to the image. Another thing to be aware of are the colloquialisms that the image might inspire. For example, with my image of pennies last week, colloquialisms might be: “pennies from heaven,” “worth every cent,” “a penny saved is a penny earned,” and so on.

To choose the association that fits best, use Jung’s “It clicks” Method. In other words, which association arouses the most energy in you? Which one seems just clicks with you?

Another way of finding associations with dream images is to use archetypal amplification, which is a process of gathering information about any archetypes in your dream by using sources such as myths, fairy tales and religious traditions. Each archetype will express itself in your dream with its own characteristic symbolism. Dreams with archetypes have a mythical quality: things are larger or smaller than real life, there are otherworldly animals or the figures may have an aura of royalty or divinity.

If you recognize one of the figures in your dream is an archetype, the next step is to go to the source: what memory does the archetype spark? A passage in the Bible? Something from the legends of King Arthur? The Greeks gods and goddesses? And so on. Go to that source and see what it might tell you about the archetype you have seen in your dream.

Every image in your dream will also have personal associations. For example, pennies are meaningful for me because I collect those I find on the ground and save them in a special bank. They are also a sign from God for me. Write down whatever personal associations you have with the images, as well.

Step Two: Dynamics

Now, connect each dream image to a specific dynamic in your inner life. For each image ask, “What part of me is that? Where have I seen it functioning in my life lately? Where do I see the same trait in my personality? Who is it inside me that feels like that, behaves like that?” Then write down each example. Always begin by applying your dream inwardly.

Sometimes, the urge to take the dream image (when it is another person) literally is overwhelming, especially if it’s someone or something we greatly desire or something or someone we are in conflict with. Don’t! Dream images are almost without fail about our inner selves.

The most practical way to connect an image to your self is to ask yourself what traits you have in common with the image or person: What are the main characteristics? If a person, how would you describe their character or personality? Where do you find those same traits in you?

Dreams often speak in extremes in an effort to grab our attention. Because we often repress the best parts of ourselves because we think of them as negative qualities, these parts can only take part in our lives by “stealing” our time by stealing our energy through compulsions or neuroses.

Our egos divide the world into good and bad, positive and negative. Most aspects of our shadows can become valuable strengths if we can become conscious of them. You will NEVER find anything in the unconscious that will not become useful and good once made conscious. And, only you will be able to say what part of you is represented by this shadow.

By thinking of each dream figure as an actual person living inside you, you can ask questions like: Where have I seen this person at work in my life lately? Where in my life have I seen her/him doing what she/he did in the dream? What part of me is it that feels like that, thinks like that, behaves like that?

Pay attention to where you are in the dream as it may give you clues as to whose influence you’re under. If you are in your grandmother’s house, for example, you might be under the influence of the Great Mother archetype. In my dream of the pennies, I was on a bridge: a symbol with obvious connotations. Animals may represent animal instinct or consciousness, something primordial, but like all images they have both negative and positive connotations.

Step Three: Interpretations

The interpretation ties together the meanings of all the images in your dream. Now you can ask yourself questions like: “What is the central, most important message that this dream is trying to communicate to me? What is it advising me to do? What is the overall meaning of the dream for my life?”

Don’t expect your dream interpretation to come out perfect on the first try; keep working at it until it makes sense and fits with the overall pattern of events in the dream. For example, my first impulse with the pennies dream was to attribute to it a need to be more “competitive” before realizing it actually meant “assertive.”

An adequate dream interpretation should be able to sum up your dream in a nutshell. It should supply a specific application of the dream’s message to your personal life, to what you are doing, to how you are going to live. So, write out your interpretations and once again, follow the energy, the interpretation that arouses the strongest feelings in you. Your dream, itself, should provide you with some small clue as to which interpretation is correct.

There are four principles for validating interpretations: 1) Choose an interpretation that tells you something you didn’t know; 2) Avoid the interpretation that is self-congratulatory or ego-inflating; 3) Avoid interpretations that shift the responsibility away from yourself because dreams are never about changing or finding fault in others; 4) Learn to live with dreams over time–fit them into the long-term flow of your life.

Step Four: Rituals

Once you have interpreted your dream, act consciously to honor it. This step requires a physical act (symbolic or practical) to affirm the message of your dream. The ritual neither has to be big or expensive as the most powerful rituals are the small, subtle ones.

Consciously seek to transform the ritual act into an active, dynamic symbol. Johnson says that each ritual must be custom-made out of the raw material of your inner self. And if you can’t think of anything, just do something, anything: Take a walk around your blog as you think about the dream, light a candle. Use your common sense, but don’t act out.

Next Week: Active Imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shadow Work: Dream Work

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Carl Jung, Dreamwork, Shadow Work

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral.

“The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man” (1933). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 304

Yet another way to work on your shadow aspects is through dream work. By becoming aware of your dreams, it will be easier to see where shadow areas might lie. This is particularly true where your anima or animus are concerned.

According to Carl Jung, every man has a feminine side and every woman, a masculine side.

The man’s feminine side is called his anima. The anima emerges when a man relates to other people, when he experiences his emotions and feelings, when he attends to the limited but everyday reality of physical life, and when he is open to the wisdom of the natural as well as the unconscious.

For example, if a man relates poorly to people, and if resentment, rage, and sentimentality are his controlling emotions; if he neglects the real in favor of the ideal; if he squashes what is natural and ignores the unconscious; then he will have feminine figures in his dreams that have unpleasant characteristics. The female dream figures might be seriously seductive, flagrantly hostile, sickly, abused, and so on.

Alternately, if a man’s feminine aspects are more conscious and well developed, his dreams will contain positive feminine figures. If he does not know the woman in his dream, it may be a part of his feminine self that he is not yet aware of; if he does know the woman, then it is more than likely a part of himself of which he is already conscious.

Likewise, females have a masculine side that can be seen in their dreams. This masculine aspect is called the animus. The animus is present when a woman is speaking her mind, when she is inspired to action, when she organizes and focuses, when she appeals to higher principles, when she reads, writes, and masters objective information, and when she is creatively or religiously inspired.

Unpleasant masculine figures will appear in her dreams when she misses the point when speaking her mind, when she is generally disorganized or unfocused, when she is rigidly devoted to political, intellectual or spiritual principles, when she can be seduced away from the genuine and grounded life by the lure of an intellectual, spiritual or creative activity that arises from a collective spirit and is not truly her own, when she breaks relationship destructively, or when she alienates people unconsciously.

A woman’s animus displays the healthy and positive manifestations in her dreams when the masculine figures are portrayed as friendly, helpful, and loving males. Similar to men, a woman will see parts of herself that she is unaware of when she does not know the men in her dreams. If she is familiar with the men in her dreams, she is already, even if subconsciously, aware of these masculine aspects of herself.

Next week, I will offer a couple of practical methods for interpreting your own dreams. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to work on your dream recall. Everybody dreams, usually a half a dozen times a more a night. The difficult part of dream work is remembering at least one of those dreams. The most important thing to do is to decide by what method you will record your dreams.

For most people, it is important to place a pen or pencil and a notebook, paper, or whatever you intend to use to transcribe your dreams, next to your bed. This way, if you wake up in the middle of the night and remember your dream, you can jot down a few notes on key words or images that may help you more fully recall the dream in the morning.

Focus your attention on remembering and understanding your dreams before going to sleep. Say a prayer or create your own ritual to help you remember. If you still don’t remember, don’t despair. Dream Work is a process and sometimes it takes a little while to find the right system for remembering your dreams.

Shadow Work: Myers-Briggs

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Myers-Briggs, Shadow Work

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

“Psychology and Religion” (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire which was created to measure the way in which humans perceive the world and how they make their decisions in using psychological preferences. These preferences were theorized from the typological theories proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, and first published in 1921 in his book Psychological Types. Jung concluded that there are four principal psychological functions through which people experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking, and these are attached to either an extroverted on introverted personality. He claimed that one of these four functions is dominant most of the time.

According to Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who developed the MBTI,  the test sorts some of these psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or dichotomies, with a resulting 16 possible psychological types. None of these types are better or worse; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that individuals naturally prefer one overall combination of type differences.

The dichotomies are Extroversion versus Introversion, Sensing versus Intuition, Thinking versus Feeling, and Judging versus Perception.

Books have been written on this subject, and the best starting place, when working with shadows, is to find a Myers-Briggs-like test (if you cannot afford to take the actual test), and then research the results. You will find plenty of information both online and at the library. Sometimes, the best starting place is knowing what your tendencies are, and proceeding from there.

A few test links are: Humanmetrics test; Personality Pathways test;  and the Truity test. And, that’s just a few of dozens.

Next week: The Enneagram style of personality typing.

Me and My Shadow

Tags

Carl Jung, Shadow Work

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

“On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35 Your shadows are the truths about yourself that your own psychological processes keep hidden from you. That means the person most in the dark about your shadows is you. While some of these shadows are obvious to every one but you, others remain so well-disguised that no one can see them.

These hidden truths may be called shadows, but they actually include the superior aspects of your personality as well as the inferior that you have yet to discover.

For example, your instinctual drives are a part of your shadows when they operate unconsciously. You might think you are being generous and noble when, in reality, you might be operating from an unacknowledged need for power. Or, perhaps, you may believe you are behaving innocently with another person when you actually have a sexual agenda. A third example: you may think you are relating from a position of equality with a peer when you are really treating them like a child or a parent.

There are very few of us who, even as adults, have not heard or even said, ourselves, things like, “Stop treating me like a child,” or “You’re not my mother or father.”

A part of every individuation journey includes revelations of your unconscious instinctual behaviors. Unfortunately, these cannot be discovered by simply sitting down and thinking about it. Neither does it help for someone to point them out to you. These behaviors are usually discovered through life experience.

Claiming your shadow will bring you unexpected gifts–qualities such as strength, inner beauty, leadership ability, tenderness, and incisiveness, among others. These are qualities that you might have only pretended to have or never really believed that you could possess.

Unfortunately, until we can claim our shadows as a part of ourselves, we will tend to project them on to others. Whenever you have strong feelings, positive or negative, about another person, there is something within you that is being unconsciously projected on that person. A quality that exists within you is being seen not in yourself, where you cannot see it, but in that other person, who may or may not actually possess that quality.

Some people will cause you to feel irritated, angry or outraged, or alternately, they will receive your praise, admiration and devotion. These people will tend to possess this characteristic in an exaggerated form, which makes it easier for you to see it in them, and more difficult for you to see a subtler version in your self. If it were not a quality that belonged to you in some way, you would not be so strongly affected by it.

Once you can bring yourself to stop and reflect on why you are having the reaction you are having, you will begin to realize that the cause of your agitation is within yourself and not in the other person.

Next Week: Some ways to begin the shadow journey.