Welcome to the path of mindfulness and psyche, and to a whole new relationship with your unconscious. Discover how psyche's presence manifests in your life. Find out how to forge relationship with psyche. By cultivating mindfulness of psyche's myriad messages, you can transform your problems into the path of awakening.
From moment to moment as you journey through life, a part of you is trying to tell you something. Your dreams, distracting thoughts, feelings, slips of the tongue, accidents, goofs, bodily symptoms, and relationship glitches--all are precious communications, signals from the wisdom nature of your unconscious as it tries to help you awaken. By learning to recognize and receive psyche’s messages, by translating psyche’s symbolic language, and by using mindfulness to live your messages into life, you fully participate in your karmic unfolding.
We rarely recognize how cut off we are from psyche, from our unconscious wisdom nature. Psyche, however, witnesses our departure from our inherent wisdom, and “wants,” if you will, to help us return. Time and again as we go about our business, psyche gets our attention--by making problems for us--or what can seem to be problems from our dualistic perspective. You see, your problems, patterns of behavior and experience, together with the secret language of your body-mind, are psyche's precious invitations to recall and relate to your essential wisdom nature.
Pain calls us to awaken. Pain is how the body and the unconscious mind try to get our attention. Whether it arises personally (as relationship troubles, emotional/physical health challenges, and practical/circumstantial difficulties) or collectively (as wars, terror, global warming, crime, poverty, food crises), pain is a call to responsible, sustainable, use of awareness. Only by finding our own inner analogs for outer situations and predicaments, and by working to transform those inner analogs, can our outer dilemmas and predicaments transform.
People who come to see me for therapy often express surprise--and relief--at the idea of a beneficent unconscious. Yet that’s what you find when you journey deeply. Psyche’s healing wisdom, though often discomforting, repeatedly points you toward the sacred mystery of life’s meaning and purpose. At every instant, and from every side, we are prompted to evolve in awareness. Each step of your journey becomes a precious teaching when you learn to translate psyche’s symbolic language. Everything that happens–both to you and within you–then becomes your ticket to awakening.
© Suzanne Szalay, M.D.