Enlivening Our Inner Space
Some days it seems as if the whole world is in a state of waiting, a limbo space between death and rebirth. In this period of intense change, both loss and transformation, our capacity to be receptive to our dreams is as important as it has ever been.
As Rilke wrote, You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.
But experiencing our images requires a body, not just a mind: Rilke’s metaphor of birthing implies as much. We respond to our dreams with all of our senses: Whether feeling a lover’s embrace, plunging into a beautiful seaway filled with whales, hearing the rumble of an approaching storm, or feeling the breath of a giant animal that has pinned us to the ground: we need our body to enliven our images.
Here we arrive at the crux of the difficulty attending to our dreams during periods of stress. When chronically stressed, we raise the drawbridge and take refuge in our heads: we disconnect from our bodily experience. When our nervous system goes into overdrive, we forget that our body can help us restore balance and reconnect with a wisdom deep within us. This wisdom includes our feelings, our dreams and the images that emerge spontaneously during periods of reverie, meditation and artistic expression. Our dreams want to bring us back to ourselves. Dreams integrate our bodily senses with our feelings and our deepest knowing. As we reawaken trust in our body’s capacity to hold our feelings without falling apart, we are enlivened, strengthened and can open to new and creative possibilities.
There are many many ways to cultivate a loving, gentle connection to our bodies, including dance, Tai Chi or Yoga and a thousand other body-based meditation practices accessible through the internet. As a place to start (or a supplement to what you already do), I offer you a short guided meditation, Enlivening Our Inner Space:
https://soundcloud.com/keren-vishny/enlivening-our-inner-space/s-7ciisU7pgfP
Dr. Keren Vishny is a psychotherapist and certified Natural Dreamwork Practitioner. She is also a teacher and workshop facilitator affiliated with the CG Jung Center, Evanston Illinois, and the Marion Woodman Foundation.