KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

March 13 through March 19, 2023

The workload kicks up this week, and we'll be running on all cylinders until the weekend, so keeping our noses to the grindstone is the best way forward. The Sagittarius Moon will keep us balanced as we sort out the piles of obligations awaiting us on Monday and Tuesday. A Capricorn Moon will add the productive energy we need to get through Wednesday and Thursday. Venus will enter Taurus, a sign it rules, on Wednesday, helping us reorder our priorities before moving forward. There'll be a lot of brainstorming and information to sort through under Friday's Aquarius Moon, so share your ideas and make surfing the internet highway a theme. Mercury will move into Aries on Saturday, sparking creative and innovative ideas for us to consider, but since it's the weekend, the main activity should be socializing, catching up with friends, and updating our social media and electronics to make them more current. Let's all take a breather on Sunday as the Moon drifts through Pisces and allows us to step back from all the demands that have littered our week.

Healing the 3 Faces of Our Shadow through Deep Dreaming, by Linda Yael Schiller

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Our Light and Dark Sides
Our Shadow side, in our dreams and in our lives, is the counterpart or counterbalance to the Light. We need both to be whole. Shadow, a Jungian term, refers to those parts of ourselves that we wish to bury or disallow or not acknowledge. We unconsciously make invisible or dissociate from the parts that we are embarrassed of, of our hidden or forbidden desires, or even the strengths we have that we have not yet owned or lived up to. Jung tells us that, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." We need to honor and recognize both sides to be fully whole and learn to make our darkness both conscious and healed or befriended.

When parts of ourselves or our history are not allowed expression or are unresolved, they can show up in our dreams as a monster: as a dark or evil force, as something that is chasing us or endangering us. Those lurking dark figures, those creepy slithering beasts, those masked men or women—all can be a sign of our shadow. Literature and myth are full of these figures, from Medusa the snaky-haired Gorgon to Darth Vader (later challenged by his son, Luke Skywalker, using the Lightsaber as his weapon in a historic battle between good and evil.) There was an old radio show called "The Shadow," whose creepy weekly tagline was, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

The Three Faces of Shadow in our Lives
What has not been widely talked about are the three faces of our shadow in our dreams and in our lives. It is mostly thought of at the personal layer with our personal challenges, traumas, and demons. What are less widely known are the ancestral and world shadows that can also show up in our dreams. From the science of epigenetics, we are learning that more than eye color and height can be inherited: the vicissitudes of life that our parents, our grandparents and even our more distant ancestors lived through can show up and effect our lives and our dreams. What is occurring in the world around us, what Jung called our collective unconscious, can also seep into our dreamscapes and we can dream of worldwide events that are not part of our personal history.

At the first layer, the personal layer, our shadow consists of the unhealed or unacknowledged parts of ourselves. The old hurts or traumas, or our own greedy or envious or foot-dragging parts can be here. For example, my client Samantha had a woman in her dreams blocking her path who moved ever so slowly and kept stopping and keeping her from getting out of the hole she was stuck in. Her Shadow side was the "Slow Woman" who kept her stuck in indecision and prevented her from action in her life.

To understand the second layer, the ancestral layer, we need only look at the nature/nurture paradigm. Some parts of our selves are governed by our genetic overlay, and some by the environment in which we have grown up. I think this is a false dichotomy, however, as we are parented by caretakers who have their own histories, for better and for worse, as did their parents, and so on and so on. One client of mine, Helene, was told by her mother that it was dangerous to be beautiful or visible since that could attract violence against her. Helene had lived her life suppressing her feminine strengths because of this fear. In investigating her family history, she discovered that her grandmother had been sexually assaulted as a child and passed this fear on to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to Helene. Neither Helene nor her mother had personally been assaulted, yet they behaved in life as if they had and feared most men as dangerous. Once Helene realized that she was carrying a family story that was not her own, she was able to do the work of divesting herself of it and come more fully into her own power. (Mark Wolyn's book, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, explains this concept in great detail.)

Finally, to understand how the world shadow may show up in our dreams, the most recent and common world dream shadow can be exemplified by the plethora of pandemic dreams we have been experiencing worldwide. As the Covid pandemic progresses and morphs, our dreams have shifted with it—themes of bugs, infections, being sequestered, and vaccine hopes. (Deidre Barret chronicaled this in her book Pandemic Dreams.) War, famine, refugee status, and climate change, to name a few, can also show up as world shadows in our personal dreams. We can dream for ourselves, we can dream for our family, and we can dream for our community and our land. Dreaming for the land can show up in our dreams in any form of a ravaged or endangered landscape, and many native and indigenous peoples have been urging us for centuries to dream these dreams forward with healing intentions, ceremonies, and actions to restore our lands. This can be part of our healing and redemption as well, for what we do at one level of action or consciousness affects all others.

Confronting the Vampire
For twenty years, my friend Jason had been followed around by a dark Shadow figure in his dreams that seemed to embody all three parts of this shadow. In the most recent of these dreams, a vampire figure showed up for him in a glass coffin, calling to him to join him on the dark side. Below we will look specifically at what this recurring dream had come to tell him and how it became resolved.

In working with his dream using the GAIA method of Guided Active Imagination Approach, along with hypnotherapy and journeying practices, he was able to identify and resolve all three faces of the shadow in his vampire-in-a-coffin dream mentioned above. Jason has been on a journey in his personal life to conquer addiction and his pull to the dark side of spirit, and to come into his own as a good and powerful man. At one level, the en-coffined vampire calling out to him was the face of his own personal history: needing to be watchful of and aware of his own dark side. Jason also related to me that his father had a history of alcoholism, so there was a family legacy piece as well. On the larger world spiritual and multiverse level, Jason was once told by a shamanic practitioner that there was a curse on his family, and that the men would be "Tragic Men" because of grave misdeeds in the past.

As we worked with his dream, his first inclination was to enter the room not only with the protection of the mentors and the bubble of light he had gathered up during Part 1 of the GAIA method (before entering the dreamscape to enhance safety and protection), but with guns blazing to do away with the vampire once and for all. I encouraged him to slow down and not demolish the vampire before finding out if there was a message or a gift for him hidden in the coffin or the dead-yet-alive man. This is important when we work with dark figures on our dreams: Don't just react to our gut instinct to kill them off; first find out, from a vantage point of safety, who they are and why they are there, and what their message is for you When Jason was able to do this, he could find within his safety net his own heart of compassion and get closer to the figure to really see who he was and what he wanted.

Then, when he peered into the glass coffin, low and behold he found an aspect of himself that needed further healing: both his current "me" and the long ancestral line of men who had come before him. He then climbed into the coffin with the vampire, held him close, and the terrifying vampire turned to ash in his arms. The final action step from this dream was to take some of the ash into his own heart, and then take the remainder and give it a proper burial. Later that day he created a ceremony whereby he wrote out the words Vampire and Dark Man on a piece of paper, burned it, and buried the ashes out in his yard in his pet cemetery. What a nice way to put an end to the old year and bring in the new, as we did this work the first day of the new year. The curse was broken.

To learn more about healing your Shadow and the GAIA method, you can read PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares from Trauma through Healing Dreamwork and Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom.

Bibliography:
Barrett, Deidre, ed. Trauma and Dreams, Harvard University Press, 2001, 1986
_______________Pandemic Dreams, Oneiroi Press, 2020
Bosnak, Robert, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, Delacourte Press, 1996
Dannu, Ayala, Ancestral Dreaming and Why it Needs to be a Part of the Dream Studies Conversation, Dreamtime, Fall 2019
Dunlea, Marion, BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma, Routledge, Press, 2019
Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York, Basic Books, 1992
Jesamine, "The Shadow: What You Do Behind Your Own Back," blogpost www.counselinginzurich.com
Perry, Christopher, "Shadow," www.webarchiveofthesocietyofanalyticalpsychology, 2020
Schiller, Linda, Modern Dreamwork: New Tools for Decoding Your Soul's Wisdom, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, 2019
__________, PTSDreams: Transforming your Nightmares form Trauma through Healing Dreamwork, Llewellyn Worldwide Publishing, Sept. 2022
Wolynn, Mark, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Viking Random House Press, 2016

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2022. All rights reserved.

I keep having a dream about my father's old house. I lived there for three years, starting when I was ten, and I hated it there. In my dreams, it's always winter or fall, and I'm either visiting or living there. I don't know why I keep having dreams about this house because I really hated it. My dad bought the house from his parents. I remember when they used to live there. I always went to visit them there, and when they lived there, I remember liking the house. After my dad bought it and I had to live there, that changed. I don't get along with my dad and stepmom and hated having to live with them after they bought the house. They sold it about 10 years ago, but in the past year (after getting stationed on the ship I'm on now), I've been dreaming about this house more frequently. It's starting to irritate me. Can you tell me why I keep dreaming about this house? Thank you.

Diana

Susyn:

When people frequently dream about a certain house, it's usually a sign that they are processing important information. Because this was a house that you actually lived in and had many different life experiences in, the feelings it evokes in your dreams are very telling.

You mentioned that when your grandparents lived in this house, you liked it. It was only later, when you had to live there, that you began to dislike the place. It's important that during this time, you were forced to live there with your father and a stepmother you hated. I am betting that your feelings about the house are more about the experiences you had there than the place itself.

You also mentioned that in your dreams of the house, it is always winter or fall. These seasons immediately bring to mind images of coldness and darkness. I would imagine that this reflects how you were feeling during this period of your life. You lived there from the age of ten to thirteen; these are very formative years. There was probably a lot of unhappiness during this time, and perhaps other events that you were forced to put up with or emotions you buried. It's not surprising that years later, these unprocessed feelings are starting to emerge.

Repeating dreams are a sign that we have work to do. In this particular situation, you are being alerted that it's time to look at the childhood events that went on in this house from the perspective of a mature adult. If you don't do this, the dreams will continue. Feelings of abandonment, betrayal, loss and powerlessness can all lie below the surface of such a dream. I feel that whatever was going on between you and your father during this time is still causing you trouble and pain.

It is interesting to note that you started having these dreams when you were stationed on the ship you are now on. I am wondering if you are feeling a bit adrift, as though you have no real home at present. If so, it would be natural for a home from your past to play a big role in your dreams. Since our dreams have a way of reflecting our current fears and desires, whenever we're longing for a sense of home, we may begin to have dreams about various houses we've inhabited in the past.

I am certain that once you acknowledge and work through whatever you need to heal and release from this difficult phase in your life, the dreams will change or be replaced by others. The important thing is that you do not focus on the actual house itself, but on making peace with the unhappy events that took place there.

*****

Oceania:

Being out at sea, far from family and the house of your pre-teen years, has lulled you into a state of greater calm and serenity. You are surrounded by Mother Nature, or in this case, Mother Sea. This is allowing the process of overdue healing to take place. It's not really the house you're dreaming about - the house is just a symbolic container for the emotional pain you experienced during the three years you resided there.

Like sunken treasures being hauled up from the depths, memories and old feelings are trying to surface, but your resistance to the process is impeding the flow. Please trust that this is a positive healing process. It may be temporarily uncomfortable, but it will prove freeing in the long run. Repressed feelings are a heavy burden that, much like an anchor, can keep you from moving forward.

It is painful for children to go through divorces and remarriage. There is so much grief involved: the loss of an intact family and often the loss of a familiar home, room, school, friends and neighborhood. Not only did you dislike your father and stepmother, you lost a lot by moving in with them. You used the word hate, which we experience when we feel trapped and have no one to hear our genuine feelings.

Imagine turning over the dirt in the back yard of the house to discover what's buried under the hate. It may be hurt, anger, fear or sadness. Imagine opening the doors and the windows of the house. Imagine walking from room to room. Observe Diana at the ages of 10-13. See if you can identify what she was feeling, first from your perspective as an observer, and then from HER perspective, through her young eyes.

Old feelings can be uncomfortable and you may not want to revisit them, but they're with you every day ANYWAY, and you're expending a lot of energy trying to push them away. As you've noticed, they keep coming back like a boomerang, and will continue to do so until acknowledged. The only way to release and dissipate feelings is to embrace, feel and express them! Take some time to grieve. Close your eyes and allow old emotions to drift into your consciousness and take form in your body, then express them through spoken or written words. You can be raw and ugly - this exercise is for you alone.

Autumn is about letting go. Your childhood feelings are like dead leaves clinging to a tree branch. Let them go so you can enter the dormancy and renewal winter, finish grieving your childhood losses, and start growing some new dreams in the spring.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.