The Leaven All Around Us

May 13th, 2020 | Click to Comment

This morning I lifted the lid on my Dutch oven to see the most beautiful loaf of sourdough bread I’ve made yet. The reveal has some drama, and a successful result is something to celebrate. The dough has a life of its own, making each loaf turn out differently.

Sourdough loaf baked in a Dutch oven

My relationship with the starter and the process is ongoing, and includes an element of the unknown. But my understanding grows, and the quality of the bread reflects the cumulative learning with every bake.

This grand experiment began in the initial, shocking days when the pandemic overtook us and normal activities ended. In a spirit of grow-your-own self-sufficiency, I wanted to see if I could capture wild yeast from the air and make my own sourdough starter. The ingredients were flour, water, time, and attention.

It took weeks to coax a bubbling starter into being. I fed it, adjusted its diet, and found the place in my kitchen where it was happiest to live. I even gave it time on my porch when the breeze was warm, inviting more yeast to the party.

My first efforts at bread were heavy and dense—less fluffy pillow and more like memory-foam. But I kept at it. Eventually, both the starter and my ability gained strength. I’m still learning, but I’m making progress.

The loaf I made today came out high and round, golden brown, with rustic edges to the scores I slashed just before placing it in the oven. The aroma while it baked was a dark and yeasty bass note, a hint of the underworld of life not visible or commonly met in the daily round.

The leaven for this loaf was literally taken out of the air. Not thin air, but air dense with life, with wild yeast that move through the world all the time. There’s much more than the virus that moves through the spaces between us.

The cultivation of this starter is a flavorful testament to the fact that we live and move and have our being in a field, not a vacuum. The space surrounding us is rich and dense and full of life. It is not an emptiness but a connective medium. It conveys all manner of ways through which creation affects us, and we affect one another.

We are part of a larger world that exists outside our concrete perception. This greater reality reaches us, impinges on us, supports and challenges us, and works with us when we manage the skillful means and awareness to engage. This rich field—call it Energy, the Life Force, God, the Higher Mind—offers leaven for our lives.

There’s no need to procure yeast elsewhere. Everything we need to bring life to the simplest of ingredients—flour, water, salt—is right here.

Sourdough round cooling

Susan Christerson Brown

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A Word of Encouragement

March 19th, 2020 | Click to Comment

Excerpt from a letter to those whom I see in my practice. I offer it here to support and encourage others as well.

A windowsill in my office

This is a time to take especially good care of your inner life, just as you follow recommendations for staying physically healthy. Notice what’s happening inside and hold it with kindness and self-compassion. By supporting ourselves in this way we allow emotions to release, rather than have them set up camp and impede our lives. Listed at the bottom of this note are a few online resources you might find helpful in these times.

These days I’m making an effort to be aware of how I’m resisting the current circumstances of my life, and gently inviting that resistance to ease. I’m trying to cultivate the practices that help me engage with others in a calm and grounded way, and to make time and space for the things that help me feel more resourceful and present. Walking in my neighborhood, meditating, listening to music, talking with friends, digging in the dirt, reading, and writing all make a difference for me. I’m seeing how important it is to take a break from the news and allow times of quiet when I can rest, inviting a sense of the greater Presence.

I’m also holding the question of what I might be able to offer as we make the changes coming in the next few weeks and months. I trust that what we’re going through together can create space for reshaping of our culture in a positive way, and I’m curious about how I might help that happen. I’m open to experiencing this time of withdrawal as a chance to reconnect with what is most important. And at the same time, I’m appreciating my connection with others as a primary value in my life.

It’s important to remember that we are not alone. We are in this together, and I believe we are inseparable from the One for whom there are a thousand names. The sacred ground of being holds us in love and sustains us through everything that happens.

I hope you and your loved ones are well, and wish you peace as you navigate this unsettled time.

With love,

Susan

Here are the online resources I mentioned:

For those able to claim space and time at home, this is about creating a half-day retreat:

Blog: Creating a Home Retreat: Finding Freedom Wherever You Are [FREE Half Day Retreat Included]

This is a beautiful site operated by Irish Jesuits. It takes you through a prayer that changes daily:

https://www.sacredspace.ie/daily-prayer

This is a list of mindfulness and meditation apps:

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/top-meditation-iphone-android-apps#buddhify

This is a nine-day course called Novena for Times of Unraveling:

https://onlineretreats.abbeyofthearts.com/courses/54/overview

These are practices for cultivating self-compassion from Kristin Neff:

https://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/

These are instructions for meditation not connected with religion:

How to Meditate

These are instructions for doing Centering Prayer:

Centering Prayer

Here’s a list of virtual museum visits:

The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections

If you provide your email, you can access this list of virtual gallery tours:

https://www.travelandleisure.com/attractions/museums-galleries/museums-with-virtual-tours

These are online art lessons for kids:

http://wildfreeandcrafty.com/2020/03/15/free-online-art-lessons-for-kids/?fbclid=IwAR1ifWn6WxFdQgnvaXygweQMAciYgWv-SLgF-98qmJ31MCth2TgxBdC83WI

And with your email, a sketchbook revival virtual workshop:

https://www.karenabend.com/sketchbook-revival-2020/
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Coronavirus and Clarity

March 10th, 2020 | 2 Comments

Everyone has moments of feeling alone, as if we’re plodding through our days disconnected from the rest of the world. But as we watch the spread of the coronavirus, evidence of our interconnectedness challenges that perspective. Perhaps in more normal times we question our role, our belonging, our place in the family of things, as the poet says. The spread of the virus says that what happens to some of us affects all of us. We’re all in this together.

To believe we are separate is to be looking at the world through a distorted lens. We are part of a greater whole. Whether hourly workers have paid sick leave affects everyone. The struggles of small businesses to stay afloat ripple through the community. The decision of whether to stay home when we’re sick affects not only those in our immediate circles, but potentially impacts other places around the world. No one is an island.

We respond to this reality, to the world and our circumstances, with either fear or love. Our choice matters. We can’t choose the emotions that arise as we see the spread of COVID-19, but we can choose the ones we live by. We can’t control events, but we decide how to meet them. Our lives and those of others are shaped by whether we act from fear or love.

I see love in how people are taking care not to spread the virus. Careful handwashing protects not only the ones doing the washing, but those with whom they come in contact. As we learn that the virus is spreading undetected among apparently healthy people, those who aren’t particularly worried about their own health do a great service to those more vulnerable when they take precautions. Love also plays a role in discerning whether to gather and how best to look after a community.

I also see love on the part of health care workers, making themselves and their facilities as ready and as safe as possible. We all take reassurance in the fact that they show up to care for those made seriously ill by this virus, as well as the other illnesses they treat every day. They strengthen our society through the courage and generosity of their work.

Certainly fear is driving behavior as well. My local grocery store displays two new signs: “No face masks” and “No hand sanitizer.” Trading in the stock market seems as panicked as the run on cleaning supplies. Fear has shown up in the senseless suspicion of Asian people, and in the desire to place blame for the outbreak. Fear can also drive us to put our heads in the sand, refusing to live in the real world, ignoring or denying the seriousness of a situation that we do not want to face. Anxiety and fear spread more easily than the virus, another reminder of our interconnectedness.

Yet we can also share a sense of calm and love with one another. Peace in the face of challenge is something we can spread through our communities. A loving presence passes easily from one person to the next, and it alleviates all sorts of suffering—our own and that of others.

Choosing love includes taking care. It means seeing as clearly as we can what is happening, and making good responsible choices about what we will do. Depending on our circumstances, love might mean showing up, or it might mean staying home.

We tend to forget, perhaps for long stretches of time, that love exists at the heart of everything. It’s like the water table deep in the ground, supporting our lives and connecting us to one another. That ever-present source of life remains available, and the more of us who can tap into it and share it, the more readily everyone can drink from its life-giving waters.

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Radical Advent: The Old King and the Voice in the Wilderness

December 10th, 2019 | Click to Comment

Fairy tales often present an aging king and the search for who will take his place. These stories remain fresh because they describe a cyclically occurring crisis in the lives of individuals and of nations.

A king who no longer has the strength to serve, in a fairy tale, represents longstanding ideals that have lost their vitality. When these guiding principles cease to inspire, they need to be reinvigorated. When they no longer spur people to offer their best, or to strive for the highest good, these crowning values need to be replaced. We need ideals with real power to remind us of what matters, and to lead us forward into life. We need inspiration that connects with our lived experience.

In fairy tales it is not the powerful or clever candidates who pass the tests to become the new ruler. It is rather the one in touch with instinctive and even naïve insight, able to stumble upon the right answer or to find help in an unlikely place, simply by following his nose. When ideals have lost their power, we lose our way. we need this kind of humble, grounded energy to gain vitality and aliveness.

Listening to the gospel reading on Sunday, I realized that this search for revitalizing energy is what John the Baptist exemplifies. He is part of the move to release what no longer inspires us, and to search for what has the vitality to replace it.

John the Baptist goes into the wilderness and lives like a wild man. He leaves civilization behind—no garments of woven cloth, no bread, no roof over his head. He wears animal skins and eats locusts and wild honey. He knows that something new is needed to bring meaning into people’s lives. He is radically open to what comes next, but does not yet know who or what it is.

John the Baptist is important in this season of Advent. His was not a quiet waiting, but an active preparation. He stirs the pot, and things begin to happen. Jesus comes to him to be baptized and then makes his own journey into the wilderness. When Jesus returns, he brings a new teaching and a new reality that changes the world.

When the old is no longer working we must face the frightening task of letting it go. It’s a time of going into the wilderness, of being willing to inhabit that vulnerable place of not knowing. We must set aside our barren practices to allow the vital life force to inhabit us again and propel us forward.

To do this wisely means being open to guidance greater than our own calculations. Instinctive energy reinvigorates, but it can also be dangerous. It is incredibly powerful, able to overrule reason. On the path forward it can be the one step back before the two steps forward. We need connection with both our highest and best ideals as well as the material realities of our lives.

John the Baptist is a shocking character. He shows up when a shock is needed to get things moving. When change is crucial but we don’t yet know what will be, we hear his voice crying in the wilderness.

When a wild man wearing animal pelts arises, change is in the wind. It’s time to answer his call and to make our own journey into the unknown. We need to listen for true wisdom and guidance, whether individually or as a nation, to find the compelling new vision that will lead us forward.  

Susan Christerson Brown

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Learning to Thrive

September 30th, 2019 | 1 Comment

A couple of years ago when I was visiting a friend, I confessed my ineptitude with houseplants. I didn’t understand what they needed, and it seemed like too much trouble to learn. Yet I found myself longing for green and growing life to enjoy indoors.

“You can do this,” she told me, taking up a pair of scissors. She reached into the luscious greenery trailing across her kitchen counter and snipped the end of a branching vine bearing two leaves. “Just keep it in water,” she said as she filled a clear plastic cup. “It will root. That’s it.”  

On the long drive home I carried the little starter plant in the cup holder of my car, hoping that if those simple instructions sufficed we just might have a future together.

I kept that snippet of greenery with me as I moved several times over the following months, eventually transferring it to a substantial coffee mug that wouldn’t easily spill.

Along the way this hardy little plant produced a slender new cylinder of green, much like the pale stalk from which it grew, and within a couple of days a tender leaf unfurled. Rooted only in water, it was growing. Amazing.

Once, in an efficiency apartment with almost no counter space, the heat from a burner singed one of the leaves. I felt bad about that. For almost two years, seeing the dry, brown scar along its edge brought back those cramped quarters. This plant and I had a history.

But a few weeks ago the singed leaf turned yellow and dropped, as if the vine were letting go of an old wound. Why now, I wondered. The remaining leaves stretched toward the sunlight as always, their roots resting comfortably in the only nourishment they had ever known. And I finally understood that if this tenacious plant could live and grow on nothing but water, how much better it might fare with its roots in real soil.  

The vine is thriving now. Lovely as it was before, in recent weeks it has lengthened its reach and opened new leaves. It managed to get by for a long time, but the earthy nutrients it needed have brought an abundance of life. Perhaps it will grow as full and lush as the plant it came from. Certainly it can spare the snippet I cut for starting yet another new vine.

We’re made to survive, and we can live a long time—perhaps even a lifetime—on the watery nourishment that gets us through. But what about those times of knowing that life should feel more abundant?

Things change when we put down roots in the soil of our own true heart. When we meet whatever we find there, with gentleness and compassion, our presence transforms the part of ourselves that we encounter. We touch the ground of being that supports us all.

We don’t have to wait for circumstances to get better, for issues beyond our control to resolve. The nourishing love placed in the depths of our own true heart is available right now.

Where do you find the soil that allows you to flourish?

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In the Heart Space

August 1st, 2019 | Click to Comment

Sometimes the only writing I accomplish in a week happens with my writing group, when we spend a few minutes responding to a common prompt. Balance, Not About Me, and What’s Difficult were three of the possibilities to get us started last week. The writing is done quickly to get past the inner censor, and it’s infused with the energy of the conversation we’ve shared. This is what it sparked from me:

The Three of Swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck

Not only is it not about me, I don’t even know where I am. So that’s an indication of my Enneagram type structure showing up. It means I need to go into the body, find what’s present there. And what I find is a heart that feels assaulted by the realities of this world and its leaders, by the ways people run over others, by the trauma each of us has lived through, endured, survived, and risen above. We move forward even if parts of ourselves were left behind in those devastating places, wounded and powerless, split off from the self that had to keep going.

I feel all of that as a sensation of weight and constriction in my heart. This sense of a heavy heart seems to be both for myself and for others. I asked for an open heart earlier this morning, and confessed in conversation that this is my work, my growing edge, the center of knowing I need to explore. But it hurts, and everything about me doesn’t want to hurt. I want to shut that pain down.

But I’m not able to just move on from it, and I don’t want to deaden it (mostly) because to do that is to deaden myself. So I sit here with this felt sense that sounds like a country song, like my heart was run over by a Mack truck. It brings to mind a song title, “You Done Tore My Heart Out and Stomped That Sucker Flat.” And somehow this, this makes me smile.

This calls for the laughing barrel that Maya Angelou describes, leaning into the barrel to let loose with the laughter forbidden to slaves, the laughter that says this world is f*ing crazy, these circumstances are absurd, but here we are and we’re alive. Alive! And the life showing up in us is bigger than the rules, or the hurt.

There’s a power, a life force holding all of this. Something bigger is at work. And yet my life and yours, my pain and yours, are not less than any other part of it all. I matter. So do you. I’m not separate from the flow of all that is. I’m in it.

What was God thinking, making this world with so much energy unleashed in ways that allow people to hurt each other? It’s like giving a toddler a sharp knife. Who does that? And yet here we are with our knives and our wounds, the cuts we make and the cuts we bear, the scars where we have healed, marking what we’ve learned, the compassion it has taught us, and the tender places we protect.

Hendree—my priest, my friend—says Love is All. He dwells in the heart space and he is my teacher. Maybe all heart types are my teacher. It’s the knowing that feels farthest from me. Grief at the loss of connection drives that space on the map of the Enneagram. Earning back the connection in different ways is what happens there. In my space it’s impossible to believe I can earn that connection, but maybe I can invite it.

For me, opening the heart means being undefended, allowing what messes with my sense of peace and harmony. What makes that ok is remembering and trusting that I’m held, that we’re all held, by Love bigger than anything I can try to recreate on my own.

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I’mportant

June 29th, 2019 | Click to Comment

This morning I had coffee on my front porch—a rare pleasure that takes more time than I can usually afford. Or so I’ve long convinced myself. Apparently I believe there are more important things to do than taking in the abundance of an early summer morning. That belief has probably caused me to miss out on a lot of other good things as well.

There are so many things I can’t take time for, I tell myself all too often. I have important things to do. I’m portant. As if goodness and value is something I need to manufacture.  As if there were not something more vast and wise and powerful that wants to show up through me.

The sure sense of what’s important grows distorted when it becomes “I’m portant.” I’m portant says that that the quality of my life and of those around me is all about me—what I do, what I know, what I contribute. I’m portant is what happens when I lose connection with the source of life and instead believe everything hinges on the effort I make to be safe and worthy and loved.

“Portent” foreshadows what’s to come, and I think of “I’m portant” in that way, as if I’m the one determining what’s to come, as if I were in charge. When I’m trying to be the prime generator of my life, I lose touch with the greater reality. It’s like struggling to touch bottom when I could simply let the water hold me up. Or trading away my place in the magnificence of creation for a small world of my own making.

So I’m practicing creating some space between me and the day’s demands. I’m trying to discern the truly important priorities as opposed to the ego’s clamor of “I’m portant.” Pausing to enjoy the world helps me remember that a vast and powerful life force causes everything to unfold, including my life and work. I have a part to play, but I don’t have the job of making it happen by myself. In fact, when I act as if it’s all up to me—believing that I’m portant—I cut myself off from the flow of life that would carry me forward.

Of course, there’s the reality of everyday life to navigate. Showing up at work, getting kids to school, arriving for appointments on time is part of an orderly, responsible life. We can’t always sit on the porch. But making space within the calendars that drive us is part of a life well-lived.

We are more than our schedules and obligations. Every moment marked by the clock is also a moment that manifests what is timeless. There is a greater reality in which we live and move and have our being. In the moments when we can remember that, there is peace.

Those moments enjoying the lavender budding on new stalks, a wren hopping across the porch, and even the ubiquitous morning glory vines winding up in new places, feel a lot like vacation. I feel connected to a world that encompasses more than the current political climate, one that isn’t pitching me to buy anything.

But old patterns die hard. Part of me wants to focus on the weeds that need pulling. “I’m portant,” is the message when those weeds call to the self that is driven to be useful, to get things done, to make the place look good. Yes, there is a time for weeding. But that work can be held in a wider context, one that honors and appreciates the living, growing world.

I do better when I remember that I’m not so portant after all. My mind is clearer when I’m not trying so hard to think. My heart is more open when I bring awareness and compassion to my own limitations. I move through the world more graciously when I can relax and receive the sensory information all around.

Perhaps instead of portant, I can be present.

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Why I Work with the Enneagram

May 14th, 2019 | Click to Comment

When I began studying the Enneagram, it was to understand more about myself and others. The Enneagram is great for making sense of why we do what we do. But figuring out our type is only the beginning of what is possible. I continue working with the Enneagram because it offers a path toward transformation.

Diagram of the Enneagram

To briefly explain, the Enneagram (from the Greek ennea, meaning “nine”) names nine basic types of people, with nine different essential gifts and inherent challenges. We have access to all of these human traits, but our Enneagram type colors how we process our experience. Our type is the lens through which we view the world.

Understanding our Enneagram type makes possible a new level of self-awareness. Appreciating the basic human longings that motivate the nine Enneagram types naturally cultivates greater compassion for ourselves and others.

But it’s important to remember that our essential self has no Enneagram type. Our type is the coping mechanism we formulated long before we were conscious of what we were doing. Our type is the way we found to make our world ok when our essential well-being felt threatened. 

Our type structure helped us when we needed it. As life unfolds, the consciousness and self-awareness that makes us human also gives rise to a sense of self-doubt and disconnection. As we grow up, there comes a time when we lose our natural connection to the joy and vitality of being alive. Or to put it more poetically, we inevitably experience being expelled from the garden.

When that happens we work to overcome what we perceive as our shortcomings, and we do this in the nine basic ways named by the Enneagram. We reach for our strongest gift, believing it’s up to us to create or earn a sense of connection, safety, or worth.

Understanding our Enneagram type helps in those moments when those deeply ingrained automatic patterns show up. We begin to notice when habitual impulses try to take over, and we learn to pause. In the space created by that pause we can be more perceptive. We can consciously choose what to do. This is the path toward transcending our type structure and becoming free.  

In this way, noticing our type structure in action comes to serve as a bell of mindfulness. When we realize we’re being driven by old patterns, we can learn to respond differently. Instead of automatically following our habitual escape patterns, we cultivate the ability to stay present. In doing this we lay down new neural pathways and begin developing responses that we consciously and freely choose.

Working with our type patterns helps us to wake up. We learn to see more clearly and act more effectively. We experience how the divine life force sustains us. We learn to differentiate between our true self and our conditioned responses. We become less susceptible to toxic influences, whether in the form of external situations or internal patterns. Instead of relying on unconscious coping mechanisms we learn to be present to ourselves and to the situation as it is, and to act from a place of higher wisdom.

I haven’t mastered all of this, of course, but I’m grateful to be on the path. Working with the Enneagram has placed me into the flow of life in a way that brings a new level of beauty, meaning, and connection.

I’d love to serve as your companion as you make your own Enneagram journey. Write to me at susan@mildlymystical.com with your questions or to schedule an Enneagram typing interview. I’m happy to meet you at my office in Lexington, Kentucky or online via Zoom.

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Dream Wisdom in Waking Life

January 19th, 2019 | Click to Comment

I’ve seen two oddly parallel news stories recently. With the power of those things you can’t un-see, they have lingered with me for days.

These stories weren’t about the major upheavals in the headlines, but I believe they demonstrate how the tone set at the top filters down to individual encounters. One happened at a nail salon involving two women. The other occurred at a gas station, involving two men. Both were recorded by the distant eye of surveillance cameras, preserved amidst the drone of everyday transactions in the public arena.

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Gustav Dore
Image from Victorian Web Art

In both cases, someone tried to pay with a stolen credit card. Both transactions involved a charge of around thirty dollars. When the charge was declined, they attempted to drive away without paying.

In both cases, the proprietor followed them and stood in front of their car to prevent them from leaving. Both images show, as if it were any other encounter, how the driver accelerated toward the person in front of their vehicle.

The broadcasts I saw mercifully stopped the video just before showing a vulnerable human body being run over. But just as the mind fills in the micro-moment gaps in such sketchy recordings, I can’t help but imagine in dismay how both of these people were hit and killed.

I have wrestled with these images for days as I try to find some meaning or some opening in which the presence of God might be known.

As I tried writing about them, all I could do was lament the state of our nation. I wanted to find some wisdom, or to talk about the kind of presence that can calm powerful emotions and scary confrontations. But anything I wrote sounded trite.

Eventually I remembered that I could engage with these scenes as if I were working a dream. I could look at these people as if they were characters created by my unconscious, representing a part of me outside my conscious awareness. When an event from waking life hooks us like this, approaching it as we approach a dream can be fruitful.

I asked what part of myself might be like the driver of the car. Is there an aspect of me driven by fear, determined to avoid facing some other shadowy part of myself? Can I find some way to identify with the driver of the car?

And what about the proprietor who was killed? Is there a part of me trying to hold the line on fairness, on what I’m entitled to? A part insisting on acknowledgement yet being overrun in the process? Can I find some resonance with the person whose life was taken in my own life?

Holding both characters at once, with each perhaps symbolizing part of my own psyche, is there some aspect of myself running over another part of me?

In addition, as these are stories from the national news viewed by people throughout the country, how might they represent something about our collective experience? In what way might I be part of a group that operates like the driver? How might I belong to a group being run over?

Just like working a dream, these questions don’t yield an immediate or simple answer. They are, rather, an invitation to enter deeply into my experience and my true identity. These questions challenge me to consider myself with honesty and humility, knowing that I am part of the story unfolding in the world. They invite me to look at what I’d rather not see in myself, and wrestle with it much as Jacob wrestled with the angel.

So what did I learn from this experience?

Seeing the broadcasts of these angry and fearful encounters evoked those emotions in me as well. I remained caught in the anger and fear that created such terrible events until I looked within.

The release I found from being trapped in these emotions began as I paid attention to what was going on inside, and held my dismay with kindness toward myself. This made it possible to see from a different perspective. Looking within, as if looking at a dream, showed me the need for compassion—for myself and for all of humanity. It allowed me to consider the great suffering that exists in every life.

That perspective cultivates openness toward others, even those who seem very different from me. It doesn’t mean allowing someone else to run over me, but I can hold my boundaries with a clearer mind and heart.

Compassion is worth cultivating. It yields curiosity and kindness. It helps us treat ourselves and others more gently.

Compassion helps transcend the simplistic categories of me vs. not-me. I believe it changes our experience in the world. At the very least, it makes difficulties we already experience less painful.

Compassion allows our heart to break for the world without us falling apart. It breaks us open to love, and perhaps even to heal what is hurting in ourselves and others.

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Why Keep a Dream Journal

December 31st, 2018 | 2 Comments

You know what it’s like to wake from a dream with the feeling that it somehow matters, even though you have no idea what it means or how it’s connected to waking life.

The emotion that accompanies a dream is a clue to its importance, but our task-oriented mind loses patience with it. The analytical brain rejects what doesn’t make sense, and the dream fades to mist as our to-do list for the day takes over.

Our “crazy” dreams are actually trying to show us something. Every part of the dream represents some aspect of our lives. It brings some new perspective, something we’ve missed in waking life.

Dreams seem nonsensical because they communicate in a language of images. It’s a language we barely understand, but we can reconnect with this aspect of our human heritage. The more familiar we become with the language of image and symbol, the more readily we can engage with our dreams.

The first step is to keep a dream journal.

By writing down our dreams we strengthen the dialogue with the unconscious. We demonstrate that we are interested in what it wants to show us, and this helps in recalling our dreams. A dream journal and pen by the bed is like leaving the door to our dream world ajar.

Even the clearest dream can disappear if it isn’t captured in a dream journal. The more detail we can record, the better. But even a word or two scribbled in the middle of the night can often bring back the entire dream. Making sketches of the dream, or of a particular object or scene, is another way of bringing to mind more information about the dream.

Recording our dreams also helps with learning the unique language of our own psyche. For example, a particular setting may show up regularly, and the more we explore our associations with that setting the better we understand the context of the dreams that unfold there. For me, there’s a particular figure who shows up in times of transition. Our patterns are easier to notice when we keep a dream journal.

Writing down the dream provides the option of working on the dream in greater depth. Every element of the dream represents some aspect of our waking life experience. Exploring our associations with the dream’s places, people, objects, and actions helps connect the dream to what it’s about. Even if there’s not time to do this exploration right away, recording a dream allows you to return to it later. I generally record my dream on the right-hand page of my notebook and leave the left-hand page blank for making notes about my associations.

It’s not uncommon to look back through previous entries and come across dreams we hardly recognize as our own. Yet this sense of being outside the dream is often helpful at gaining perspective on it and exploring its message. The meaning of our dreams is sometimes easier to see in looking back at them.

Finally, a dream journal helps us share our dream with others. Talking about our dreams with another person or in a dream group is a further way of honoring the dream and gaining insight from the conversation. Notes in a dream journal allow us to relate a dream that might otherwise evaporate before we have the opportunity to share it.

Do you keep a dream journal? I’d love to hear what works for you!

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