The Warrior's Journey - Interview with Archetypal Dreamwork Analyst Laura Smith

Please feel free to read this article about my creative journey within Archetypal Dreamwork published recently in Collective Dream Arts Magazine, 2014 Launch Edition.

Linked here with permission from Kayla Bowen, Editor, Collective, Dream Arts Magazine.

 The Warrior's Journey - Interview with Archetypal Dreamwork Analyst Laura Smith

Please note that the images on the PDF link above are not of good quality due to the file share limitations. Consider purchasing a copy of this incredible 108 page, full color publication filled with dream-inspired art. 

Thanks. Love, Laura

The Bird and the Spider

Copyright © Estate of Françoise Taylor, All Rights Reserved Used with Permission

Transformation is not linear. Imagine it like a mandala forming, but if you were looking at it from above, it might appear as a boiling caldron, each bubble blooming into existence to form a place in the mandala. The moment of the blooming is an awareness flooding, a new feeling opening, or perhaps alchemy happening. The mandala as transformation, becomes the love. Like nature, it is chaotic and unpredictable and yet still forms to an incredible, beautiful rendering of the soul. The human mythologies ripple through it, the cosmos tilt and spin, the natural world comes alive. One can feel the deep mystery at work. Now, imagine as you are looking at the mandala, that it shifts and reforms in a never ending bloom of transmutation of itself. And now you see that at the center is the still point, the girl/boy soul, which is infinity, unchanging, constant, whole, undifferentiated oneness...the boy/girl united.

I had the following dream while on an Archetypal Dreamwork retreat at Rowe Conference Center last month. The archetypal imagery of this dream is astounding as it presents a larger mythology of the journey of the spiritual warrior. The ultimate battle between good and evil which plays out in us all as individuals and as a collective. But it is my dream, so it is very specific and personal to me and my own struggle.

Dream: I am with a man and a woman. Suddenly a bird flies into the woman's mouth. And when she turns her mouth is sealed up like with skin that looks like scar tissue. Then I see her in profile and a huge tarantula crawls out of her mouth and lands on the floor. I feel terrified and run. Then we are in some underground sterile chambers that are small like berths on a ship but maybe some kind of surgical pod. I sense the structure is massive extending deep into the ground. I see the tarantula and it is being chased by the bird, but it is trying to get me. I start trying to get away from it and each time the tarantula tries to get to me, the bird dodges it away. But it is singularly focused and I realize that it will always be trying to get to back in its host and lay it's eggs. I think we will have to go deeper in the catacombs, but then I think there is no place deep enough that we can get to to ever truly be safe, that it would always find a way in because it is so singularly focused.

The Cosmic Vibration in Alchemy

Namaste - www.alexgrey.com

“The earthly sounds of all atomic motion, including the sounds of the body—the heart, lungs, circulation, cellular activity—come from the cosmic sound of the creative vibratory activity of Aum. The sounds of the nine octaves perceptible to the human ear, as well as all cosmic low or high vibrations that cannot be registered by the human ear, have their origin in Aum.” ~ from the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda

There is something I am learning about in the alchemy which has to do with vibrational sound. When one is still, suspended, it is easier to hear the sounds which lie beneath the world.

In the dream...

I follow the Anima into the water. I see broken people held by some kind of organic tentacles. The silty water is diffusely lit. There is no other distraction down here. This is the amniotic fluid of alchemy. The white tentacles wrap the flesh of torsos and arms and legs, piercing the skin in places. Everyone appears to be asleep. I am traveling through the water at a high rate of speed. I see adults and babies yanked up, out of sight, presumably to the surface.  Perhaps some of these souls are being born too soon, not fully healed. Do they awaken in the terror of alchemy, creating a shudder that catapults them world-side in a gush of fear and oblivion? I see a woman whose body is separated at the waist, there is blood, but not in the water. Her hair floats like vapor. She is held, white tentacles pierce her skin, wrap her, hold her, contain her.

The Body Remembers

Beneath the Water by Laura Smith

My current dreamwork prayer (I have decided to call it a prayer instead of “homework”) is to feel the vulnerability of the bunny/lamb as I bring my spiritual/inner work to all the places of my life and to stay in the alchemy of breathing the sulfur water in the deep well, even when the Anima leaves.

I think this is the prayer, my homework...with alchemy it always feels like a tumble...a blurry line between my inner life and my outer world. I can’t possibly know what is happening and so it is not the confusion of trauma, but the mystery of alchemy that is in direct opposition to the polemical vagaries of my mind.

It is true for me too how when I am in alchemy, my body experiences pain in the shifting. For several weeks, I have been suffering from asthma and the physical reactions associated with allergies, sneezing, headache, congestion, aching in my lungs and back. This is common for me in the fall and my partner, Vanessa, reminds me that the fall is a hard time for me. When the leaves find their color and the air turns crisp, my body remembers the pain of loss...my brother and my birth mother both passed in the fall. I got sober in the fall...the mountain in me erupted and the lava began to flow and I was burned.

The body does remember these things you know.

Walking in the Not Knowing

"He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world."  Carl Jung, p 129 The Red Book, A Reader's Edition

Who on the journey has not felt this? In the moment where we finally agree that our pursuit has been for naught, we encounter the place in us that does not know who we really are. And we are terrified.

I experienced this myself at a certain point in my life. It came in the form of hitting rock bottom. I was bereft, lost, and truly terrified. I feared dying the hopeless death of the lost soul I had become, enslaved to a cycle of alcoholism and in an increasingly desperate nihilism. My pain and hopelessness became the great motivator that I had sought in books and churches and people.

It doesn't matter how we come to desire our soul, only that we do. When we come to terms with our own powerlessness, our own inability to manifest through the force of our will the faith that we so desperately want, we may become willing to turn from our false desires and turn inward towards our soul.

This is terrifying, because we cannot know it until we find it inside ourselves, in this body, in this life. When we objectify it, we make it something outside ourselves to be sought after. But when we truly open our self to the mystery, then she can come.

Jung goes on to say, "Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.” p 137