We spend the first couple decades being shaped, re-arranged, and limited by whatever forces we’re subject to — parents, teachers, ads, the dominant ideas of the century we’re born into. At some point, we snap out of it, realizing that these forces aren’t The Laws of Reality. We realize that we have taken a very specific shape, and that we could have been shaped differently. That we still could take more agency over the shape of our own existence.
Every human Psyche is a force of nature, a tireless origin of strength, grace, wisdom, and nobility. That’s your birthright: to have the wind at your back — to be the wind at your own back; to not only trust your gut, but to have gut instincts worth trusting; to desire what is best for you and your loved ones, and feel driven to pursue it; to have no idea what someone might mean by “meaning crisis,” as if meaning were some external resource, rather than a matter-of-fact part of your day-to-day life.
Unfortunately, very few Psyches work like that out of the box. By the time you grow into some level of self-awareness, you’ve already spent a lifetime being fragmented, cut apart, turned against yourself. Your instinct and intellect can’t agree on anything; your ego is chasing things the Unconscious doesn’t care about; your body is a confused mass of warring tensions and psycho-somatic truces. In short, rather than a unified Psyche pouring its force outward as a single flooding torrent, it’s broken up into dozens of smaller currents all pushing against each other. You have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, and it’s not clear where you could even begin to start straightening the whole thing out.
I’ve talked to hundreds of people who feel some version of this. In their head, they want one thing, but every time they try to go for it, they lose drive, they become tired or clumsy or irritable. They chase after things they know are bad for them, and can’t bring themselves to want what they know would be good for them.
The Psyche has been pressed into knots and turned against itself. That’s the bad news.
The good news is: the Psyche has everything it needs to heal itself, untangle itself, and return to full strength.
Then there’s the weird news: you, the ego reading this, are one of the Psyche’s healing resources. That can be difficult to accept, and to lean into — the humility of not being the center of this process; of being one part of something beyond you, learning your place in a larger process.
That’s what this course is about: learning to take your part in this healing/wholing process; communicating with deeper and stranger parts of yourself, listening to what they have to say; co-ordinating with the Psyche you’re a part of, and helping it to naturally untangle itself.
There are quite a few ways to go about this, but when it comes to learning the language of the Psyche, the grammar of the Unconscious mind — the best place to start is with dreams.