I currently live next door to a 95-year-old modern-day mystic. She has earned every one of the precious wrinkles in her always-tan face as well as her wisdom, and she’ll tell you so. She’s the one who told me that we are all emerge-lings, that none of us is any better than the other when it comes to where we are on the spiritual path or, as she likes to put it: “We’re all on the bus together.”

We’re all emerge-lings, because we’re all growing, all the time, we’re all on our way this ominous year of 2012, even if our fits and starts of emergence are not readily noticeable on the surface. Our karma is up, she says. We can coast now. Even the planet, she insists, is rounding in on its own karma.

I always enjoy Marge’s philosophies on spirituality, the collective unconscious, and life in general. She also always knows–before I utter a word–what  I am struggling with or what I dreamt the night before or what is making my heart sing that day. The insight she shares into my small-self struggles feels divinely guided, as if the answers I need are channeled through her from some all-knowing source. These answers usually don’t “solve” my challenges though. They hoist me out of my small, ego-based views, those stuck, stale places we all find ourselves in, usually when we’re viewing ourselves as separate from everyone and everything else.

Marge

In the warmth of her lighted window on the other side of the fence, while I’m churning out marketing materials and devouring psychology books on archetypes and the sacred feminine, Marge is pondering the micro (her own spiritual journey) and the macro (how all of us and the universe are evolving) and can prolifically articulate her latest thoughts like a living book with added dashes of humor and sheer joy at her discoveries. This is not a woman who does small talk. Oh no. Before our Hellos have barely been made, we are in the rich depths of why “melting” (embracing what is) is a much better approach than trying to fix each uncomfortable occurrence that comes our way–we don’t have any control anyway.  I’m glad I’m on the bus with Marge.

What Emerges in Our Dreams

Of course, I couldn’t let a new word like emerge-lings sprout without looking at how it could apply to my favorite realm–the world of dreams. Right away, I saw how the images in our dreams are all emerge-lings themselves, parts of us that want to be known, emerging in our dreamscapes so that we can learn from them, embody them, and grow into who we truly are in our waking hours.

As Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung noted, we have many parts within ourselves : our persona (the self we present to the public); our shadow sides (the rejected and repressed aspects of ourselves); and the anima and animus (the female and male aspects of ourselves) to name a few. Read more about our major archetypal characters here

Essential Nature

All these parts that make themselves known through our dreams hold valuable clues to what we are needing to look at within ourselves, the parts of our Self, for example, we are denying or, at the other end of the spectrum, leaning on too much.  Oftentimes these clues will come to us in our dreams through metaphor, a word Jung defines as a “crossing over.”  When we dream about flying, for example, often a metaphor for joy, the image of us flying in our dream when viewed metaphorically becomes a crossing over of information (that we are happy) from our unconscious, dreamtime mind, to our conscious, awake-time mind.

If we work with our dreams with an open mind, from a stance of not knowing, we allow this crossing over, this learning to occur without our ego, our waking-time mind, getting in the way. When we begin to rationalize the meanings of our dreams, attempting to validate these meanings through mere ego-based explanations, we lose the aliveness of our dream images, the potency of these just-born emerge-lings and their ability to present to us our own inner wisdom.

Let the Discoveries Begin

When working with individuals or  dreamwork circles, I encourage dreamers to inhabit this place of not knowing what a dream means, to imagine the images in their dreams as “alive” and capable of evolving, and to open to all possibilities. We  journey back into the dreamtime through visualization and conversation and uncover many surprises, spontaneous heart-felt discoveries, insights our rational, waking mind could not access on its own. A large granite rock with a red glow inside becomes the heart of a dreamer’s father; a sinkhole in a lawn between a dreamer and her mother becomes the “sinking” feeling the dreamer has when she lives her life contrary to her mother’s wishes; a dreamer who becomes a snake in her dream, embodies her creativity, the kundalini, her energetic force vital to life and her highest potential.

These dreamers nurtured their dreams’ emerge-lings to bring these parts of themselves forward, embracing and welcoming them, and becoming more whole and emerging more fully in their waking lives. Marge would be proud. Hurry, she’s saving you a seat on the bus.

–Susan Audrey, CHT