We existed as a beast for millions of years before the sort of consciousness which led to personal awareness emerged. Self-awareness is still very new and vulnerable. It needs the greater depth and innate wisdom of the beast to survive. See: under animals.... More

What do babies dream about? Nightmares are exceptions. Mostly babies dream about what it is learning, what it is feeling about the world around it, and the ways it is expressing or denying its own creative centre. So drawing, modelling and talking about these everyday dreams is tremendously creative... More

Dreams of the Insomnium type Artemidorus related to the feelings and concerns evoked by everyday life - ‘The lover occupies himself with his sweetheart, the fearful man sees what he fears, the hungry man eats, the thirsty one drinks.’ ... More

He does qualify this slightly by making one of the first historical references to the faculty of lucid dreaming, by saying, ‘often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.’... More

Functionally what happens is that as a defence against meeting our pain and childhood trauma as we enter this vast storehouse of our being; or as a way of escaping the self responsibility for our condition, we might fly off into feelings of loving all things; of knowing the mystery of it all; of bei... More

There is however, no final death or rebirth. The cycle is a fundamental process in nature, and therefore active too in the physical and psychological nature of humans. It is not only old age or approaching death causing the experience to arise. It can also happen during profound personal growth, whe... More

To step out of the paradigm of the western mind, or any other paradigm, the path of self enquiry and direct experience of the reality you are is the only way. In the past this has often been called ‘illumination’ or ‘enlightenment’ – but think of it simply as direct experience of yourself.... More

The other side of the archetype is whether you can abandon or transform the life you have lived, a life that doesn't satisfy you, and is one in which major parts of you are left buried or imprisoned. The paradox is that we may have cast out - denied parts of ourselves, and so feel outcasts.... More

But you also meet the wonder of an enormously enlarged awareness, the sparkling immediacy of questions answered, the splendour of bodiless life linking in love and mind with an infinity of others. Here you experience the vision of the spirit’s journeys into time and space, and its life in eternity... More

While many therapists, counselors, and child and youth professionals may never work directly with infants, the issues of birth trauma and bonding have clear implications for practitioners who deal with a broad range of behavioral, emotional, and relational issues presented by children and adults.... More

The other main pattern put in place by my infant years, was the foundations upon which would be built a terror of losing the one I loved and the compulsion to be loved as desperately and urgently as I myself loved. In this way the scene was set for the drama of my destiny to unfold. ... More

'Don't you see that you can create beauty in building beautiful children?' I asked her. Gradually I could see her wistfulness and dissatisfaction disappear; her attitude toward housework and child care changed. Years later when I met her at a lecture I was giving in Philadelphia she showed me th... More

Ngalia: Spirit-children have dark hair with light-colored streaks. They sit under shady trees, waiting for a compatible mother to pass by. Meanwhile they eat the gum of acacia trees, and drink morning dew. ... More

The Great Mother may not have these connections for us personally, but may represent unformed, or largely unconscious feelings we have about how we are linked with the process of life, and have within us the splendour of this mystery. For a woman this may be particularly potent at times. It connect... More

In today's world, whether we are female or male, we need the balancing power of the Goddess in our external life. Without this contact with the sustaining and nourishing forces of life within us, we can easily become dried up, sterile, intellectual but empty pods of life.... More

Taking Christ as a symbol of the cosmic web of sentient life, of our own innate potential,, people can love it, wash their hands of it, crucify it, ignore it, be healed by it, lie about it, offer themselves to it, worship it - and so on and on. The stance we take in our relationship with this larger... More