Bondage

Imprisonment or anchorage. The feelings or links that bind you to others, or to work, or a religion, or set of ideas. One can be in bondage sexually as well, perhaps out of need for love, or even out of deep distress.

There is in many lives a bondage to ones mother, even in adulthood. Read Individuation and Identity and Dreams

Example: The dream felt as if it were set in Germany, but I was my present age and temperament. I was relaxing in a city, it was daytime, and I was sitting on a bench on a wide pavement. There didn’t seem to be many people about. As I sat there a woman came up to me and asked me if I wanted sex with her. I told her that I was not interested in sex and she took hold of my arm in a way to make physical contact with me, and said to me something like, “Oh yeah!” I put my hand over hers in a very warm compassionate way, and I could feel that gentle love for another human being who is having a hard life. As I did this I said to her that I didn’t want sex but if she was hungry we could go to have a meal somewhere. She looked at me and said that she didn’t want to do that as she had to work. I understood that if she didn’t work she couldn’t survive in her world.

I explored the dream involving the prostitute. It was clearly a confrontation with the possibility of sex. But it was sex represented in a particular way, the power of being possessed by the desire. The prostitute gains her living because men are directed to her by their desire, a desire they cannot stand aside from. They therefore risk disease, social condemnation and personal accusations. However, I do not reject this with any judgement, simply with compassion. In fact the dream felt as if it incorporated the wonderful feeling of transcending much of what ties the human soul in bondage.

In the Bible coming out of bondage to Egypt means to come out of bondage to material values and unconscious fears. On the material plane, bondage are generally are a symbol of marriage, blood relatives and comrades-in-arms. On the spiritual plane, bandage symbolise the marriage of heaven and earth. They are a form of the spiral, a lunar symbol of the Mother Goddess and of the eternal cycle of renewal.

So bondage can indicate slavery, and imprisonment-to places, people, jobs, situations, beliefs, dreams, addictions, etc. Positive associations are anchoring, binding, and communication.

Example: Anyways the reason I am responding is when I was 7 years old my father died and I had only ever seen him paralyzed on his right side. He always dragged that side around when he tried to walk. He went to see Oral Roberts in one of his tent meetings to be healed. Maybe he didn’t have enough faith or it just wasn’t meant to be at that time. I was there to witness this great healing that was to happen and didn’t. At any rate the day he was dying my sister screamed for everyone and we all ran in and the strangest thing I have ever seen and will never forget…He had that arm and that leg that hadn’t moved for years up in the air shaking them and then his life force was reclaimed. To me it had always been a signal that although he had always been a mean man God or his higher self, power or whatever had released him from that bondage and had welcomed him home. I haven’t actually been afraid of dying since that happened. Just felt like sharing. Thanks for reading. I think it odd that I have your link on my site and I had been trying to figure out my inner being and I clicked to your site. Anyways thanks again for reading.

Example: Yesterday my wife told me I had been calling out in my sleep, obviously dreaming. She said I had been calling my mother. She described it not as a cry of pain or anger, but as if urgently trying to get my mother’s attention.

My mother had died shortly before this dream, so I tried to explore the feeling of calling to my mother and experienced a spontaneous waking dream of my mother being in something like an old people’s home. She was very withdrawn and non communicative, and as I explored the feeling of this I sensed she felt as if she had been abandoned and felt resentful and angry about this.

My mother had died from multiple strokes and so was not aware of her process of death. I could see that in fact she had not been abandoned, but was in a place where she was creating her own environment through her emotions and attitudes. I attempted to communicate with her but she refused to respond at all, and I was unsure if she really was withdrawn to a point where she couldn’t hear me, or if she was angry and so not responding. So I called to her aloud and said she must realise she was dead, not abandoned. She had failed to realise her new condition and so through resentment from feeling we had all left her, had created a growing isolation and barrier to being with others. I explained that if she remembered something of the love she had given and received in life, this would release her from the bondage of her loneliness, and bring her into contact with many people who wanted to be with her who were dead.

Useful Questions and Hints:

In what way to I feel in bondage, and to what am I bound?

Can I honestly admit what binds me?

Have I found any ways to release me?

See Victims and also Life’s Little Secrets