Whose life is this anyway?

I am still in the transition from ego to Self. It has not been easy. I am so used to believing that I, my ego, is responsible for my success in life, and that ego has values like productivity is essential, and so on. Because of my experiences since I was diagnosed with cancer, I now believe that the Self is in charge of my life: not me. How to yield to Self as the director of my life is the question that challenges me moment to moment. The most telling evidence available to me regarding this shift is my energy which ebbs and flows under the power of a source which is not mine. A couple of nights ago I had a dream in which I was harnessing energy from retired horses who were delighted that I would want to involve them in such a fashion. I have had other dreams about energy conservation that point to relying on something other than pressure from my ego.

I have spent my life acting from pressure: it brought me success, no doubt about that. However it is time to let that go, and focus on "listening, dreaming, understanding the meaning, and preparing for death." Not an easy task. I find I have many resistances to letting go into a deeper place of living.

Dreams point in a direction

Marie Louise von Franz says (and I am paraphrasing) that turning toward the unconscious is like taking a new medicine and waiting to see the result.  Most likely a creative process will begin.  I have had patients in psychotherapy who did not want to turn toward the unconscious, and they were committed to finding a solution to a problem that concerned them rather than watching what their dreams were saying.  Often what I am focused on in my waking life has nothing to do with what the Self wants from me as expressed in my dreams.  It certainly brings a new perspective to me to realize that what I am so focused on is irrelevant to my dreaming life and therefore to my purpose in life.  What a concept!!  In my experience, I have found both with myself and others that we spend a great deal of energy focusing on some little or big problem and it turns out that it has not real importance in our lives.

Should I leave a relationship may not have any meaning to the real purpose of our lives, and only if we go to our dreams can we realize what we might better focus on.  Our rational concerns very often are not relevant to the real meaning and purpose of our lives.

Dreams

Pat and I are planning our flyer for our dream group:  actually, Pat is looking up quotes on dreams and I am sometimes helping her.  We are going to advertise in The Door Opener, so she is looking for appropriate quotes.  It makes me feel my excitement about dreams once more.  I stand amazed at how much is revealed in our dreams, and of course, I circle around that excitement off and on throughout the days, weeks, and etc.  

I have not dreamed in the last few nights, and I guess that is because Pat and I have been reading Jung's Seminar in Dream Analysis over the past month.  What a brilliant man that Jung is!  Anyway with my studying and working through the images in my dreams of late, my dream life has slowed down so I can catch up with all the images and symbols.

It feels so important to me to carefully work with our dreams for we have no other objective view of our lives, the purpose of our lives, and how to go about developing a relationship to God, if you will.  Indeed, what could be more important for the second half of our life after we have created all our ego would ever need:  then we can work on our relationship to God and of course the end of this life as we know it.