“It is not a good idea to try to make a ritual out of talking about your dream or trying to explain yourself to people. Talking tends to put the whole experience back on an abstract level. It gets contaminated with your desire to present yourself in the best light. Instead of a vivid, private experience, you wind up with an amorphous, collective chat. The best rituals are physical, solitary, and silent: These are the ones that register most deeply with the unconscious.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 99)
Archives
“That in a short while you will be nobody and nowhere; and the same of all that you now see and all who are now alive. It is the nature of all things to change, to perish and be transformed, so that in succession different things can come to be.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 119)
“If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 118)
“If we never feel as though we’re enough, we can throw ourselves into our work to try and ascertain enough-ness from our output, usefulness and indispensability. But in doing so, we tend to head toward burnout — the more we do, the further away being enough feels.”
Jayne Hardy, TED Article
“A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality, is to live in victimhood, blame the weather, blame the traffic. What I notice is, if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here, and I choose to have agency, to be responsible for my experience, not the external world, but to be responsible for my experience, there’s a surge of energy that comes back in the body.”
Jim Dethmer
“Opt for the interpretation that teaches you something new, rather than one that seems to confirm your ingrained opinions and prejudices. remember, the main function of a dream is to communicate something to you that you don’t know, that you are unaware of, that lives in the unconscious. Your dream will not waste your time by telling you what you already know and understand; therefore, you should choose the interpretation that challenges your existing ideas rather than one that merely repeats what you already think you know.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 94)
“The process of inner growth demands that we examine consciously everything that motivates us.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 72)
“Look at causation stripped bare of its covers; look at the ulterior reference of any action. Consider, what is pain? What is pleasure? What is death? What is fame? Who is not himself the cause of his own unrest? Reflect how no one is hampered by any other; and that all is as thinking makes it so.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 117)
“You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 71)
“This is probably the single most important principle in dream work—the one that determines whether you will find the wisdom in your dreams. We have to recognize that dreams are intricate tapestries of symbolism, and each image represents something going on within our own selves.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 69)
“The unconscious has the habit of borrowing images from the external situation and using those images to symbolize something that is going on inside the dreamer. Your dream may borrow the image of your next-door neighbor, your spouse, or your parent and use that image to refer to something inside you.”
Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 68)
