Now that you’ve spent time with the Waking Journal, Image Return, Somatic Resonance, and Eros Tracking, you hopefully have some feeling of how they work together, how each one feeds into the others.

If you can’t remember your dreams, there’s not much to work with, so we use the Waking Journal to get in the habit of remembering.

If you do Image Return without including deep awareness of the body, you’re missing an entire field of densely connected experience. The emotions, memories, and impressions coded into the body won’t be in play, and will continue their sticky patterns. The communications from the unconscious will be missing critical nuance and non-verbal content.

If you cultivate Somatic Resonance without Image Return, you get a deeper connection with your embodied intuition, but you aren’t attending to the fullness of what the unconscious is saying to you. It’s like being in a conversation where you’re only paying attention to their body language and tone, and not giving much thought to their words.

And finally, if you do all the above without putting special attention on Eros Tracking, you set yourself up for turbulence down the road, a lack of facility with recognizing and directing the desire and aliveness that wake up when we connect with the unconscious.

Using all four of these together, you develop an unbeatable set of instincts for navigating your inner world, and that’s what this whole course is really about: not just following the exercises and exploring dreams, but developing the strengths and intuitions you need to freestyle and improvise, becoming a virtuoso of the inner aspects of reality.

There’s a lot to be said for practicing the inner aspects of reality on your own, on the cushion, in your own space. You can unlock a huge amount of emotional maturity, embodied wisdom, creativity, flexibility, and any number of other things that make life fuller.

But the road doesn’t stop there.

You are always swimming in inner realities — when you’re at home, at work, at church, at a family reunion, at the movie theater; your own inner reality, those of the people around you, of the institutions you interact with, the society and culture you’re embedded in, the century you were born into. All of it is right there, waiting to be recognized, explored, even healed, evolved, and made whole. And with a strong set of intuitions for the unconscious, the body, and eros, you’re in a good position to do what needs to be done.