Amplifying Amaranth

Jungian analysis was today. Some of you may be curious how a typical session works, so I’ll try to give you a feel for it.

First off, Jungian work is not for everyone. I think I’m particularly well suited to it and it to me because of a few things. For one, I believe in magic. I’ve been known to consult oracles such as runes and the I Ching. I like their Rorschach quality, the ability of these oracles to help us get in touch with what we already know. We need a way to bring that subconscious knowledge into consciousness.

It also helps that I’m deeply spiritual and with Taoist leanings. I guess you’d say that Jungian analysis is to psychology as naturopathy is to physical medicine. It’s holistic, not dogmatic. It’s highly individualized to each patient and the treatment is allowed to evolve and get a life of its own, bringing analyst and analysand along for the ride.

The Jungian theory is founded on the belief that your psyche can heal itself. Somewhere inside you are all the answers to all your so-called problems. I liken your psyche to a flower in a pot on a windowsill. There is something between the plant and the window that blocks the light. And so the flower grows all twisty and turny trying to reach the sun. That’s what our psyche will do when there is a block or a complex standing between it and the Light. That’s what your posture will do when you have a muscle spasm. Once the massage therapist or chiropractor helps loosen the knot, your body knows how to straighten back up.

And so analysist and analysand are on a journey together, not as leader and follower, but as fellow travellers learning the language of the analysand’s psyche.

We do this primarily through dreams.

There isn’t one big dictionary of dream symbols whereby the analysist tells you, “Oh, you dreamed of a ladder? Well, that means ______.” No. The analysist prods and queries to help the analysand explore the significance of ladders in her own history, her own life, her own memory.

Once you’ve been in Jungian analysis for a while, you start to get the hang of it. You get to where you can analyze your own dreams much of the time without help. If I dream of someone I have not seen recently, like my childhood best friend, Mia, I know the dream is not really about Mia, but about the part of me symbolized by Mia in my dreams.

Just as Anna would ask me, “What is Mia’s essence?” to find out what part of me is trying to speak to me, I ask myself that question. Hmmmm. Based on the feeling I get from her each time she appears in my dreams, I’d say she is the part of me that has her head screwed on straight. She’s a very practical segment of me…cool, calm, collected.

Then we’ll talk about what was going on in my life the day before this dream. It doesn’t take long to figure out why I dreamed that and what my Inner Wise Voice is trying to tell me.

Dreams become just another oracle, if you will, but a very accurate and direct one.

Occasionally a dream symbol won’t be obvious right away to the analyst or analysand. In that situation, Anna pulls a book off a shelf of her amazingly comprehensive library, looks up the item or being or creature dreamed about and begins to read aloud all the things this thing has symbolized to different cultures since recorded history began. As she is reading these passages aloud, I listen carefully with my mind and heart open. When she gets to the meaning my subconscious was trying to convey in the dream, it will strike a chord and I’ll let Anna know what it means and how I know that. Then we’ll talk about it. Often the moment of revelation is an emotional one for me.

Anna practices out of an office downstairs in her townhouse. I love that room! On the walls are Egyptian rubbings and native weavings. Sitting on shelves are clay figures of ancient goddesses. Her book collection! Oh, my. I could stand for fifteen minutes, if she’d let me, just reading the spines of ONE shelf. And there are so many shelves. One section is just mythology: Celtic myths, South American legends, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, you name it. One area is books about the soul. One bay is full of books about Jungian work per se. Some of the spines are worn and faded along crack lines like an old pair of jeans from so much opening.

I sit on the sofa and Anna sits in her easy chair across the low coffee table from me. Behind her is the clock, which I appreciate. I can pace myself through the hour we have together.

Today I talked to Anna about the stuff most on my mind, which is the same subject I blogged about this morning on waking. I told her about visiting Dr. Margaret and about not eating gluten anymore. Dr. Margaret says it’s just for 3 weeks so we can see how I feel, but in my bones I know I don’t want wheat in my body anymore. I can just sense the rightness of that. I told Anna Dr. Margaret’s perspective on the fibroid and the rash on my eyelids. Anna took notes.

Part of me is so very happy, I told her, to be feeling a new growth spurt upon me. I’m finding new friends. I’m speaking up more. It’s all so exciting!

But as for the new eating habits, one little voice is telling me, “people are going to think you’re a crackpot, a crazy, an eccentric weirdo. You’re becoming one of those people about whom others whisper behind their backs.” That’s what ONE little voice wants to say to me. Irksome little twit in my head!

So my subject for Anna today was figuring out how to be true to myself, how to listen to the Inner Wise Woman and courageously honour her guidance. I know I must shore myself up with so much confidence in what I know is right, that others’ opinions and words don’t cause me to falter.

“I haven’t been remembering my dreams much lately,” I offered. “But I remember what I dreamed last night.”

Anna took the top off her pen.

“I dreamed I was in a grocery store and needed to find something I could eat. There in a display on the floor near the entrance/exit was a very large bag (dogfood sized bag) of Amaranth flour. That’s it. It was a short dream. Or I only remember that much.”

Anna asked me about the bag of Amaranth. How did I feel about it?

“Oh, I was really happy to find something I could eat. It wasn’t just OKAY for me, it was PERFECT for me. It was clean and good and healthful with nothing bad for me in it. I was just feeling grateful, relieved. Good. Very good.”

Anna got up out of her chair and took a few steps toward her bookcase as she asked, “where does amaranth come from?”

“It’s a plant in its own right, I think. It’s just called amaranth. I read about it last night while Googling non-gluten alternatives to wheat. I found a long, long list of foods I can eat, like teff, poi, quinoa, arrowroot, rice. Lots of rice.”

Anna pulled a book off the shelf, opened it and asked me how to spell amaranth. I spelled it.

I was surprised. I never knew she had nutritional books in her library.

She began to read, still standing by the bookcase:

amaranth
A. 1. name of an imaginary flower in poetry, which is supposed never to fade: ‘unwithering’: it can be revived by simple moistening in winter for chaplets; 2. the flower was envious of the rose, which is desirable in the eyes of gods and men, but the rose dies soon, and an amaranth blows forever: Aesop; 3. love of god, excluding all other affections: “Ah! is Thy love indeed A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?”: Fr. Thomson: “Hound of Heaven”; it likes being plucked; 4. immortality and incorruptibility;
B. 1. a genus of plants to which the dark-red Love-lies-ableeding (=A. candatus), the prince’s feather (A. hybridus hypochondriacus), Joseph’s coat (A. Tricolor) belong; they should not have too rich soil (get larger leaves and smaller flowers); the Globe A. belongs to another genus and is a tropical plant; 2. symbol.: a. faith; b. unfading love, stability; c. cheerfulness; d. indifference; e. decorum-emblem: it always preserves its beauty.

Anna closed the tome and turned to look at me. Tears of joy were streaming down my face. My Inner Wise Voice had spoken. Loud and clear.

Loud and clear.

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