How to Overcome Anxiety, Worry, and Fear in a Job Search… and in Life.

Originally Published on Portland’s Mac’s List - May 13, 2013

Looking for work takes much time and effort, but once you’ve spent a part of your day networking and applying for jobs, you may still have hours left to fill. With all that dead time, it’s common for anxiety and worry to take over.

And all that worry is no good!

Feelings of fear and anxiety can have a constricting effect on the brain, shutting down the ability to feel optimistic and creative. In fact, worrying is like the imagination’s bad brother. It involves the act of fantasizing, but it does so in a pessimistic manner, spinning notions about a negative future that can take hold and run rampant: “I’ll never find work… I’ll never have a life that I used to dream about.”

It’s important, for your health and well being, to keep these feelings in check and out of the driver’s seat.

How do you counter anxiety, worry and fear while on the job hunt?

Get creative. Literally. Engage your positive imagination to keep the negative fantasies from taking hold.

Make a Schedule

In addition to a structured period every day to find job openings and submit well-crafted applications, include time on your daily schedule for creative activities. Do things that reflect your imagination and creative self. Work on your writing, or improve your cooking skills. Play your fiddle. Practice juggling. Go dancing!

Allowing your imagination to roam has tremendous healing power.

Find the Spark

By continuing to engage in activities that trigger your creativity during the job hunt, you will not only keep your spirits up, but you will also ensure that you’re a more attractive candidate when you land interviews. People are drawn to other people who have the spark of life (that’s as true on a first date as it is in a first interview). If being unemployed destroys your spirit, it will show when you meet an employer.

Follow Your Inclinations

If you struggle to know what can give you that creative spark, reading a wonderful novel can help—the more fanciful, the better. Spend time laughing with friends. Turn on music and dance around your living room. Or, if you’re like me, you may find that writing down your dreams and reliving those images can provide a wellspring of support. The unconscious is constantly engaging in the imaginative space.

Be Intentional

Be intentional about engaging your creative self. Invest in helping your imagination to flourish. It can provide you with the strength and joy you need to pursue the search for employment, and help you land the position that’s right for you.

Originally Published on Portland’s Mac’s List - May 13, 2013

May Dream Groups in Portland

Interested in exploring your dreams to understand their meaning? I’ll be facilitating two dream groups in the month of May.

The second group still has space. We’ll be meeting on Thursday evenings, beginning in late May, and we’ll meet for six consecutive weeks (through the end of June). All groups are $150 per person.

In order to allow for personalized attention and engagement, each group is limited to four members. Call or email if you are interested, 503-349-4242.

For more information, call, email, or visit my clinical website here.

Dream Interpretation: “In the Glass House, a Mysterious Man Opens His Palm…”

Dear Satya:

Q: I’m at the coast in Oregon. I’m looking at the stunning ocean from a large hill a few hundred yards from the shore. There’s not a single person in sight, as if I’m the only human for hundreds of miles. I look behind me and see a huge, regal grizzly bear running in full sprint out of the woods towards me. I immediately begin sprinting down the hill towards the ocean. When I reach the sand, I begin running south. I know there’s nowhere to hide. Then all of a sudden I see a glass structure that is blended in with the environment. I run towards the large glass doors and walk in. The inside is clean and immaculately beautiful, you can everything outside from inside. There is a tall man with his back to me and his hands clasped behind him. It’s as if he’s been waiting for me. I can’t see his face. He’s wearing dark colors and may have a cloak over him, though he’s non-threatening. I walk towards him. When I get close, he turns towards me and takes a few steps in my direction. He opens his hands and reveals little rocks and pills on his palm. “This is your Bear Medicine,” he tells me. 

Whoa. What a dream! This is the kind of dream from which movies are made. In fact… despite the very different setting, the similarities in the final scene of your dream and Neo’s first encounter with Morpheus in The Matrix cannot go unmentioned. Neo is directed towards a room in which Morpheus is waiting for him; Morpheus opens his hands to reveal Neo’s choices. Which pill will you take? And what happens next?

But I’m getting ahead of the story. Let’s start at the beginning, with a little insight from Dr. Jung on dreams with a theme like your own: “When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien, but it just becomes all the more dangerous. . . .The best stance would be: ‘Please, come and devour me!’ . . . The Other within us becomes a bear, a lion, because we made it into that. Once we accept this, it becomes something else” (Children’s Dreams, p. 19).

The bear is a part of you that has been split off from your conscious identity. And the bear, I would argue, transformed into that incredible, mysterious man at the end of your dream. He was seeking contact with you and got it. In one form, he sent you towards the glass home and in another, he greeted you there. I’ll share with our readers that you are a man in your early thirties. If you were a woman, this Morpheus figure at the end of your dream might be more like the Oracle, a wise old woman with esoteric wisdom. It is the inner aspect which guides you, whether you are aware of it or not. It is an aspect to which you are advised to listen.

In the beginning of the dream, you are admiring the beautiful ocean, staring into the vast unconscious. No one else is around, suggesting that what happens next is for you and you alone. This is not about relationships or the collective, but your own primal wholeness. Some part of you that has been cut off is trying to regain contact.

You might look back at a recent dream interpretation I wrote involving a bear for some insight into the bear in your dream. I think there are helpful parallels there. Concisely, the bear might be seen as a representation of the feminine instinctual sphere. The realm of being versus doing, of embodiment versus spirit. The bear is the Great Mother; while a figure similar to Poseidon would represent the god of the oceans, a powerful bear can be seen as a god of the earth. In this case, the bear is also representing shadow material as it explicitly appears from behind you, where your shadow follows you around. Similarly  the bear comes out of the woods, a setting which can be thought of as the physical unconscious. It is a place of earthly darkness, of mystery and potential danger. As the bear is coming from the woods, it is suggested that the physical, embodied, earthly realm is where your shadow resides.

The bear runs towards you. It chases you down the hill and you are forced into lower levels of consciousness until you nearly reach the ocean itself. Then a glass structure appears, which you find beautiful. You enter it. Glass walls or containers in dreams can indicate our separation from emotion: you can see whatever is behind it clearly but you can’t feel it. Connecting with what is inside is important.

Your life and work pull you towards both the intellect and spirit, so I wonder if the physical and emotional realms are not seeking more attention from you. As we move through life and gain intellectual and spiritual consciousness, we can also begin to devalue our embodiment. It’s worth asking yourself: Are you remembering to play? To dance and be silly? To save space in your life for love and romance and embodied life? Think of what the gods would do on the first day they found physical form. What do they think about when they long for embodiment and mortality?

As a nod to the collective unconscious, your dream parallels many myths in which there is a glass house, often where an old man is waiting inside. This wise man in your dream offers you medicine, something to ingest. He hands you pills and rocks which he refers to as Bear Medicine. In the language of dreams, I would argue that this is about you incorporating the bear into yourself, an act which will then protect you from being devoured by the bear. A common theme in fairy tales is the ingestion of bear meat, the incorporation of the bear’s power; your dream imagery parallels this theme. The rocks, like the glass vessel in which you and this wise old man stand, might be viewed as an alchemical symbol: the Philosopher’s Stone. “This is your opus,” your wise old man seems to be telling you. This is very important work in your life, to integrate your bear, your primal shadow, your earthly self. You are asked to descend, not run higher, and you are asked to eat the earthly stones and the bear. This is your healing. Reconnect with your grounded, emotional, vulnerable, earth bound self, those aspects of you for which the gods are envious.

Satya is a Jungian psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon specializing in dream work, the quarter-life crisis, and work with individuals in their late teens, 20s, and 30s. www.QuarterLifeCounselor.com

How a 20th Century Poet Can Help You With Your Job Search

This piece originally published on Mac’s List

The pursuit of a college education may be a long-term blessing and a short-term affliction. A bachelor’s degree provides some economic freedom, but it does not always offer clarity on who you are or who you want to be. If you’re like most people who pursued higher education, you grew up with every stage of life laid out in front of you: kindergarten led to first grade and so on. It was not until the precipice of college graduation that you were expected to figure it all out on your own.

The desperate search for one’s own passion may be derided as a crisis of privilege, a “First World problem,” but the existential call to be the writer of one’s own destiny is deeply human. The urge towards the creative life is innate in all of us. When we are no longer chased by wolves or the threat of starvation, we are chased by ourselves.

The cries “be who you are!” and “know who you are!” are not easily silenced, and attempts to do so will only transform into addictions, foul moods, and physical complications.

So how do you figure out what you want and who you are? In the early 20th century, the poet Rainier Marie Rilke wrote to a despondent 19-year-old young man in “Letters to a Young Poet” with timeless counsel for job seekers everywhere: “There is only one thing you should do,” Rilke wrote. “Go into yourself.” 

Esoteric? Sure. You cannot easily place this advice among a list of things to do. But if the advice is understood and heeded, the ultimate rewards are unparalleled.

Through self-inquiry and good counsel, answers to the tangible questions of life begin to make themselves heard. Your anxiety and confusion, your headaches and stomachaches, all have information for what may be off track, they’re not simply symptoms to be silenced in the pursuit of the more conscious goals.

If you can learn when you’re off track by how your moods and body respond, you can learn too where your path lies. This takes some degree of faith, to be sure, but it only takes a few synchronistic successes for you to discover that you have a personal GPS sitting inside your chest.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell’s famous adage echoes Rilke’s: “When you follow your bliss, doors will open where you wouldn’t have thought there were doors.” Campbell uses the word “bliss” as a substitute for instinct, a path not lacking in terror and uncertainty but ultimately providing the greatest payoff. Our wants often only become clear after listening to all the other stuff of life.

In fairy tales, it is the awkward third brother who wanders off in the least anticipated direction, listening to the animals and following the path of a windswept feather, who ultimately finds the gold and marries the princess. Going into yourself and following your bliss means learning to listen to who you are innately. Learning what you’re passionate about begins with discovering and acknowledging who you are, not simply what you are expected to be.

This piece originally published on Mac’s List - April 19, 2013

Dream Interpretation: “Eve left the Garden and Awakened to her own Life.”

Dear Satya:

Q: I’m walking through a beautiful mid-century modern home. It’s filled with beautiful mid-century furniture and lovely light. A large window overlooks a beautiful garden. The home isn’t mine, or maybe it is but it feels foreign. At some point I notice the house is filled with water. I stay there for a while, submerged. The water is slightly cold and kind of refreshing. Then I decide I need to get out before I drown and I swim for the surface. I have to swim through another level of house before I’m out. Above the house is more water. It’s as if the house now sits on the bottom of the ocean. I finally break the surface and take a huge breath. I’m relieved that I can breathe.

A: The dream begins: You are in a beautiful place, a place that seems to delight your aesthetic senses. You notice the light, and when you look outside, there is a beautiful garden. The beginning of this dream evokes a setting like the Garden of Eden: idyllic and untarnished by the pain of greater knowledge. It is like Eden too because of the shattering that then unfolds. Something happens (we don’t know what) and you find the beautiful home to be filled with water. You do not see water suddenly rush into the house, but simply come to awareness that it is there. This is an important distinction. Feel into this shift in the dream and in your awareness within the dream. It is as if the water were there the whole time. You have been submerged in your home, but it took you some time to realize it. Like Eve, your growth of consciousness came with tremendous suffering. After the fall from grace, she and Adam were forced from their beautiful home and sent to wander, unguided, into the world.

The more I consider this age-old story, the more I think its lessons are valuable for exploring what’s happening for you now. I will share with our readers that you are a married woman who has recently begun to explore, painfully, difficulties within your marriage. It has not been easy. In this dream, as in your life, it was not so much events that changed, but your awareness of things. You went from a conscious standpoint of beauty and stability within your home, to one of feeling that you were overwhelmed and trapped. The transformation could not be ignored or you would have drowned.

Scenes of flooding or of being adrift in an ocean are dream images that can be intuitively understood. If you were to see this dream depicted in a film, for instance, you might immediately associate feelings of loneliness, sadness, and grief with the character out at sea. These dreams images tend to indicate that something significant and difficult is happening within the dreamer’s life. Since dreams really only express that of which we are unconscious, however, there is more to this dream than a simple announcement that things are tough. These kinds of images, when explored with your emotional self, can unlock deep feelings that are actually only being experienced intellectually. It’s like an individual who reports, for instance, “Yeah, it’s been hard lately” without really feeling anything; it’s not until much later when emotions unravel and they break down in tears that they actually understand the pain they’re in. Sometimes it takes tangible tears (another evocation of the salty ocean water) for us to recognize our grief.

Like Eve, however, these sorts of introductions to evil and suffering are also introductions to our greater existence. They are opportunities to trade in intellectual suffering for deep, embodied suffering–and also life. Opportunities to feel everything more deeply. I am reminded of a scene from the film The Hours. A woman, played by Julianne Moore, has been suffering within her marriage. She has felt weighed down by the loss of her own sense of self. The pain of her entrapment is too much for her to bear. She drops her son off with a nanny and goes to a hotel where she plans to end her life. When she arrives in her room, however, she falls asleep and has a dream. She dreams of a vicious flood that breaks through her room and takes over the bed where she’s sleeping. She is shocked awake in a panic and gasps for breath. (That is the power of psyche!) Shortly thereafter, she chooses life. It is a completely different life than the one she had once known, but it was life. Her own.

The unconscious will at times force us awake to our own existence. Like diving into a cold lake, the unconscious will sometimes deliver a visceral shock to bring us into recognition of actual life, versus the two dimensional one we so often walk around in. Nothing expresses our three dimensional existence like immersion in water where our location in space can be measured, felt, and seen. Underwater, we can see how much there is left until we reach the surface, and how far down we could go.

In this dream, when you first noticed your immersion in the water, you enjoyed the experience: ”The water is slightly cold and kind of refreshing.” Also like the Polar Bear plunges, cold water brings us into touch with our bodies and we can feel refreshed. Our body heat retreats into our core to warm our insides. The intellect is quieted and the senses are heightened. Perhaps as a parallel to your lived experience, when you came to another level of consciousness about what you had been enduring for some time, you were glad to simply feel. Your emotions and senses regained your attention, and this awareness of your emotional life and your embodied existence was comforting.

Then you realize you need to swim or you will drown. You realize you need to fight for your own breath and your own life. Another step in consciousness. And in the dream, you swim upwards, through another level of the home: another image indicating that you moved through another phase again, gaining greater awareness, going to higher and higher realms of psyche. The higher you rise above the submerged home, the greater perspective you have on what is happening there.

Finally, you break the surface and take a huge breath. You have broken the surface of this experience. Your perspective of where you are is heightened again. You have fought your way out of a tremendous submersion in the watery unconscious, and now you can breath.

You have come into some profound awareness of your own existence. The unconscious reared its head and you were forced to pay attention. That which had been ignored within your marriage can no longer be ignored. Like Eve, you did not make a conscious choice to wake up to this, you just did. And now, you are forced to face the paradox of greater awareness: it is a blessing and a curse. You have left the Garden. Yes, it may be hard to see the path forward from where you are treading water, but remember: in this fall from the grace, you have risen up. You have gained perspective and contact with your own existence. Without the expulsion from the Garden, there would be no true life.

Satya is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon specializing in dream work, the quarter-life crisis, and work with individuals in their late teens, 20s and 30s. www.QuarterLifeCounselor.com

Trauma, PTSD, and Dreaming: Understanding recurring dreams and nightmares.

I’ve written before about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and dreaming, that is, on the way that severe trauma can alter the dreaming function of the unconscious. Keep in mind the “severe trauma” can not always be easily assessed by the person who experiences it. For the most part, individuals who experience trauma are likely to minimize what they experienced. Even if the trauma itself can be catalogued as a part of war or an assault, the individual who underwent the difficulties (the shock and likely psychic or physical experience of near death) is not always able to see clearly how traumatic an experience they endured. Our psychic self-protections are strong. We can become tough as nails to defend us from terrible difficulties and it is not until those defenses begin to soften (often over time, with a lot of patience and love and gentleness, assurances of safety, and good body work and therapy), that we can acknowledge how terrible the trauma we experienced truly was.

The official diagnosis for an individual who becomes affected by a traumatic event is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, known simply as PTSD. This label can address a variety of symptoms, both physical and mental, but the exploration of how an individual becomes afflicted with dreams that repeat the traumatic event, having to relive what they experienced in recurring dreams, remains under-explored. A few years ago, I wrote a post about the work of Dr. Barry Krakow, refuting the notion that his work with the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic recurring dreams was new work, or non-Jungian. Indeed, as far back as the beginning of the 20th century, Jung understood what was happening within the unconscious of traumatized individuals, as well as how to cure the further trauma of recurring dreams.

Recurring Dreams and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

I came upon this passage today from a seminar that Carl Jung delivered in 1938 that explores the dreams of individuals suffering from “Shell Shock” the diagnosis of psychologically affected returning soldiers that preceded the modern diagnosis of PTSD. Jung explains how recurring dreams from trauma (“shell shock”) indicate an absolute shift in the psychic system, and are a singular exception to the way dreams typically process and digest material from life.

The dream is never a mere repetition of previous experiences, with only one specific exception: shock or shell shock dreams, which sometimes are completely identical repetitions of reality. That, in fact, is proof of the traumatic effect. The shock can no longer be psychified. This can be seen especially clearly in healing processes in which the psyche tries to translate the shock into a psychical anxiety situation. (Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, pp. 21-22)

Jung continues in his explanation, elucidating the way in which some traumatic experiences must be altered, slowly, into more symbolically rendered shocks in order to be metabolized and integrated into the individual’s psyche. (Ultimately, this is very similar to what Dr. Barry Krakow and others are currently working on; it must be pointed out for historical record that Jung was already treating patients in this manner over 75 years ago.)

The reaction of shell-shocked patients is that a knock, or anything reminiscent of a shot or an explosion, suffices to trigger nervous attacks. The attempt to transform a shock into a psychical situation that may gradually be mastered can also succeed toward the end of a treatment, however, as I have observed myself in a series of dreams of an English officer. In this man’s dreams, the explosion of the grenade changed into lions and other dangers that he was then able to tackle. The shock was, so to speak, absorbed. In this way, the dreamer was able to master the effect of the shock as a psychical experience. Any time we are confronted with a shock in its “raw,” not yet psychical, form, our psychical means are not sufficient to overcome it. We are not able, for example, to cope with physical injury or a physical infection [directly] by psychical means. … It also seems that a shell shock is so hard to cure because in most cases it is accompanied by  heavy, bodily shocks that probably cause very fine disturbances of a nonpsychical nature in the nervous system. (Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, pp. 21-22)

That’s a lot of material to digest! But the summary of Jung’s work here is pretty simple to summarize and is (thankfully) being integrated into work today with PTSD patients and the recurring dreams and nightmares that they suffer. The summary is that typical dreams are never just repetitions of daily events (they always include telling, important differences), but total repetition can occur if the dreams are the  result of a traumatic event. These dreams seem to overpower or overwhelm the symbol making function of psyche and likely also come with a physical residue of trauma that must also gradually be worked through (the field of Somatic Experiencing is doing very interesting work in this area).

If you are suffering from recurring dreams or traumatic nightmares, there are methods of treatment that are very effective and that can provide relief and renewed health. It is critical, however, that you seek treatment. The loss of sleep and anxiety that can result from traumatic recurring dreams, along with all of the other pain being experienced, can be detrimental — not only to you, but your loved ones. Seek out a mental health professional who has experience with tending to recurring dreams and traumatic dreams.

Click here for Support with Recurring Dreams or Nightmares in Portland, Oregon

Dream Interpretation: “She’s rich! Bring her into the conversation!”

Dear Satya:

Q: I am inside a very wealthy estate home where a family lives, a white family. I understand that an Asian-American woman and her daughter are also part of this family, although they are not integrated. It’s as if the family hasn’t known that they existed. I learn that the woman and her daughter have a fortune. The Asian woman has known about this money of hers, but the rest of the family has been oblivious until now. Then there is a big meeting, as if to decide the future of this money. It’s understood that this money belongs to the whole family and they need to decide how it’s distributed. The meeting room is filled with mostly white men. The woman and her daughter aren’t there. A man arrives with his son who is in his late teens. The man is very blonde and white and he’s to serve as the judge at the meeting, which will be like a trial hearing.

A: Last month, I wrote a dream interpretation that dealt directly with the meaning of race in the unconscious, as well as one that explored a motif similar to your dream in that it featured a well-to-do Japanese man. I’ll explore more of the meaning of these issues and symbols here, but I’d encourage you to read through both of those interpretations as they’ll help to stimulate your own associations and thoughts about the meaning of your dream. 

Your dream opens in the setting of a family estate. This setting suggests a couple of things to me. First, it indicates the plurality within psyche: our single personhood is made up of many different aspects of being, just like a single family is made up of different members. We are not just the “I” character in our dreams, and the image of a family estate renders this beautifully and simply. Second, this image also makes me wonder if the problems with which this dream wrestles may be ones that your whole family wrestles with. So much of our individual psychological viewpoint is rooted in the values, culture, and themes of the family in which we were raised; we are deeply influenced by our environments, and just as a plant will thrive or die, grow tall or grow crooked, depending on the conditions of the environment in which it was planted, so will we. While this may be stating the obvious, I offer it here because I think it’s an oft forgotten aspect of our own psychology when we’re exploring our individual dreams or individual growth. We are products of our environments. Important to keep in mind, however, is that our personal evolution will invariably effect the evolution of our family and culture as well. We each have the power to be change agents, just like those little mutant genes in Darwin’s theory of evolution that start to pull a species in another direction.

The most basic cast of the characters in your dream are: you, the white men, and an Asian woman. For our readers, I’ll report that you are a white American. Broken down simply, you represent the conscious ego attitude of your psyche, the white men represent the rational, masculine, intellectual viewpoint that dominates your psyche, and the Asian woman represents the under-appreciated, “irrational”, feeling, feminine, yin standpoint. For Western psyches, Asian characters in dreams often represent that which is opposite the dominant standpoint of one’s psyche (East versus West) which in America almost always means the artistic, feeling aspects as we are such a thinking, information, goal-oriented culture. If an Asian character arises in a dream, it’s worth exploring how it portrays one’s underdeveloped feeling type. (Of course, one would need to explore their personal associations to all the racial and cultural parties represented, as well as take into account one’s personal heritage.)

From the Jungian view, and certainly my view, the goal of psychological development is not “health”(whatever that is) or to function seamlessly within one’s social environment (most modern societies are pretty unhealthy!). The goal is more aptly described as wholeness. To pursue wholeness means that we are frequently trying to accept parts of ourselves that our dominant attitudes do not initially perceive as being valuable. This dream seems to be dealing directly with this issue, and it’s sending you a very lovely and validating message that there is great wealth to be found in parts of you that are just becoming visible. She has “a fortune” — she’s rich! Her value is undeniable. Also, money can represent energy. Think of the mythological relationship between Gold and the Sun. Or the modern parallel of Black Gold, Oil, where the tie between money and energy is evident. Money and energy are archetypally and literally linked. This wealthy part of you is a storehouse of energy, and her value for you is tremendous.

Now, what you’ll want to be attentive to is the fact that “the ruling principle” of your psyche continues to be the dominant white man, rational, thinking, legal perspective. Your feminine, feeling aspects are increasingly being recognized for their value, but they’re still not being included in decision making. They’re not even in the room. The result is that this part of you that the Asian woman and her daughter represent is being violated, de-valued, stolen from. Their perspective and authentic voice is not being honored. It suggests to me that while you may understand that the feminine, feeling, relational, instinctive, yin aspects of your character are important (they’re being recognized as part of the family), they are not yet deeply affecting your being. The value that the rest of your psyche is starting to recognize is not yet at the stage of altering the whole system.

The revolution that will need to take place within your psyche is akin to the social revolution of including the feminine perspective in land ownership and voting. The Asian woman who represents these different functions in your psyche will not only first need to be brought into the room where decisions are made, but she’ll need to be able to alter the process as well. She can’t just join the courtroom proceedings that is being run, and was established, by the dominant lawyerly masculine function. They’ll need to learn from her and allow her to help establish the proceedings under which decisions are made about her money for the sake of the whole family. Like the meeting of Native American tribes and the White Men that riddle our history, all “deals” that were struck between the two within the legal framework of the white men were a charade. The only fair deals that these two peoples could have struck would have required profound evolution of each population as the two grew to understand and value the very different cultures and systems of justice they each brought to the table. The fact that one simply dominated the other was not ultimately a win for either side. As we’re recognizing more and more, the dominance of the white culture over the Native American resulted in tremendous loss of wisdom and heart based thinking. We’re needing to reclaim much of that for ourselves now.

What does this mean psychologically? This aspect of your being that the Asian woman represents cannot simply be incorporated intellectually. You can know that you are needing to feel more and think less, for instance, but until you get in a non-intellectual way how to do that, the value and energy she carries won’t be released. She’ll need, over time, to affect your whole character.This will initially be scary for the more intellectual, rational aspects of you, but as you learn to incorporate what she has to offer and ask her what she wants and needs, you will be transformed, and you’ll be the richer for it.

Do you have a question about your dreams? Send me an email! satya@quarterlifecounselor.com

Satya is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon specializing in dream work, the quarter-life crisis, and work with individuals in their late teens, 20s and 30s. www.QuarterLifeCounselor.com