The One You Feed - James Hollis on Living Between Worlds

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

James Hollis is an American Jungian psychologist. He is a public speaker and the author of 16 books. He runs a private practice as a Jungian Psychoanalyst and is the Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center.Eric and James have an interesting conversation about his newest book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times, his work with depth psychology, and what it means as we go through different passages in life.If you are interested in learning more about how to integrate and embody spiritual principles into the moments of your daily life, Eric teaches people how to do just that in his 1-on-1 Spiritual Habits Program.  Click here for a free 30-minute call with Eric to learn more.   But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, James Hollis and I Discuss Living Between Worlds and…His book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing TimesDepth Psychology is trying to engage and work with the unconscious Looking at the patterns in your life and working backward to see what produces behaviorHow dreams represent self-regulatory dimensions of the psycheAs we have conversations with the external world, we must have one with our internal worldSelf is the guiding energy that tries to heal your wounds Self is the natural motive towards wholeness and developmentA passage is when something has died and you’re in betweenThe first half of life is asking what the world is asking of me?The second half of life is asking what the soul is asking of me?Meaning is a by-product of being in the right relationship with one’s own soulAsking yourself what your fears make you do or keep you from doing?Investigating the archaic fear that is keeping us stuckThe psyche’s agenda of growth and developmentThe psyche’s agenda of self-healingThe purpose of dreamsJames Hollis Links:James’s WebsiteFacebookIf you enjoyed this conversation with James Hollis on Living Between Worlds, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Navigating the 5 Givens in Life with David RichoBecoming Wholehearted with Koshin Paley EllisonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The self is the natural, instinctual motive towards wholeness and towards development. And to the ego's dismay, part of that development includes, of course, aging and mortality as well. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is James Hollis, an American Jungian psychologist. He's the author of 16 books and a public speaker. James also has a private analytic practice and is the executive director of the Young Educational Center. Today, Jim and Eric discuss his book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. Hi, Jim. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you, Eric. I am really happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. But let's start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather

says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I think we confront that kind of paradox in our personal lives and in our national lives at every single moment, and that is the presence of our full humanity. We'd like to think we are always feeding the good wolf, but the bad wolf is always there, and it's often operating in the unconscious. And, of course, the problem with the unconscious is it's unconscious, so we're not aware of what our motives often are or what agenda we're really in service. I've often said to folks who are trying to make decisions or trying to figure out why a certain pattern emerged in their life,

when you stop and work it through and keep working it backwards and asking questions, what was this choice or this behavior really in service to inside of you? And at first, we may not know or we may have a quick rationalization, but the more we ask that question, the more it begins to unfold. And we begin to realize there are often other agendas and other motives that I just mentioned operating within us at all times. And this is sort of what Jung meant by the idea of the shadow. We identify with our conscious life, but it's what's going on in the unconscious. None of us is exempt from human nature. None of us is exempt from the whole human project. So

both wolves are present at all times. I love that idea that both wolves are present. You are a practitioner of something known as depth psychology. And I was wondering if you could share with us just a little bit about the difference between depth psychology and some other forms of psychology. Sure, sure. Most psychology focuses upon our behaviors, and it's understandable, or the thought process by which we got to those behaviors. And that's useful as well. But as I just mentioned, there's a vast sea we call the unconscious, which is present in all of our choices, our behaviors, and our reactions to people. And so in depth psychology, we try to engage the unconscious, which is by definition very difficult to do.

So we pay attention to our dreams, for example. We pay attention to our symptomatology. I was recently in a hospital, and a nurse was asking what I did, and she asked the same question you asked. And I said, we try to work with the unconscious. And she really, she sort of furrowed her brow, and she says, oh, I get it. You work with people in comas, huh? I said, no, not quite, or maybe once in a while. But we try to pay attention to what is not evidence. As I said, we're often in service to a shadow government, whether we know it at the time or not.

In deaf psychology, rather than say, how quickly do I get rid of my suffering, the internal discord, we ask, why has it come? What's it about? What is it asking of me? What sort of accountability do I need to exercise in order to address this? And that's a whole different kind of agenda. There are places where altering our behaviors and some of our thought processes are useful for sure. And all the therapists I know employ those techniques. But there comes a point where you have to say there's another sort of autonomous energy within us.

And among other things, it creates our psychopathology. In other words, no one comes into my office who was just in the neighborhood and wanted to have a chat. They're there because their previous mode of sort of dealing with their dilemmas have worked very well. mode of sort of dealing with their dilemmas have worked very well. And so they're looking for some alternative, maybe a quick solution perhaps, but it doesn't quite work that way. And so we say, all right, why is it that your psyche has autonomously withdrawn its approval and support from where you'd like to invest things? And that begins a kind of dialogue with one's own depths. And that's why we talk about it as depth psychology. And so what are some of the ways we can begin to wade into these depths? They're not obviously apparent. One of the things that you say in the

book is that it's often not about what it seems to be about. So what are some of the ways that we start to listen to our own psyche more effectively? Well, the first place to look, I would say, because we have to look at what is available to consciousness, is look at those patterns in your life, which you find keep showing up, even if you change your outer relationships or your geography? There are certain sorts of familiar places that you go to so frequently, particularly those places that you find injurious to your well-being or perhaps even harmful to others, and then say, all right, everything I do is a logical expression of something at work in my psyche. The question then is, can I work backwards to be able to see what's going on there? What produced that behavior? And even when I thought I was doing the right

thing, again, where is that coming from in me? I might be doing a good thing as I believe it to be. For example, we all develop patterns of conflict avoidance. That's understandable. On the other hand, there are times if we're going to be a person of value, we have to be willing to sort of stand for that and be present to whatever heat it brings back upon us. And you begin to look at, well, all those patterns of avoidance, and do I not find their roots in the long ago and far away in my childhood adaptations to the circumstances around me, we start trying to look at those patterns as rising out of the stories that we have working intrapsychically. And I put stories in quotes here, stories that in a sense are our

understandings at the time that we provide as a way of trying to understand what's going on. So every child, for example, is reading his family of origin or reading the world around her and coming up with stories. Who are you? Who am I? What am I supposed to do here? What am I not supposed to do here? We carry those stories with us. That's another way of talking about complexes. We have complexes because we have history, and some of our complexes are useful and helpful. In other words, if you hadn't had some positive bonding experiences in your childhood, you wouldn't be able to form intimate relationships today. But on the other hand, you'll find so many of those complexes

operate autonomously, pull us out of this present moment and take us back to another time and place. We also have dreams. I'm now 80 years old and sleep research has told us that if you get to 80 years old, six entire years of your life will have been spent dreaming. That's extraordinary. I'm astonished by it repeatedly. Nature does not waste energy. It's obviously serving some purpose. And I think that part of what our dreams represent for us is part of the self-regulatory dimensions of the psyche. In any given day, we receive so many stimuli that we're not able to absorb them all, metabolize them. That's why we have to go to bed to sort of process that,

whether we're paying attention or not. But also over time, as we begin to pay attention, we realize, okay, there's some kind of intelligence here that pays little attention to my conscious desires and is trying to form some sort of responses to my life. It's a commentary. And if I pay attention to that commentary and I start dialoguing with that, then I began to realize that the center of gravity shifts from simply being in response to the stimuli of the world outside of us, which will hit the same old buttons and produce the same old behaviors, I started finding some encounter with a more personal authority. The biggest project of the second half of life is really the recovery of personal authority to sort through that traffic and say, all right, of all the many voices that

I have within me, which ones are coming from my own depths, which are from my family of origin, which represent the traffic that we're exposed to all the time? And can I find the courage to live those? And if I do, you'll find your psyche is supporting you. And there are other techniques that we use to begin to undertake a dialogue. And this is not, may I just add, this is not narcissism. This is not self-absorption. It's actually the ultimate accountability because it's obliging us to really address what's going on inside of me. And to the degree I don't attempt that interrogation, to that degree, most of my behaviors out there in the world will either be conditioned responses or will be coming from that wolf you were describing, my shadow government, and we all have one. depths within us. You often use the word autonomous processes. So it sounds like there's a variety of

different things that are moving beneath the surface, for lack of a better word. There's these different things that are moving beneath the surface. And then there's this sort of conscious sense of I. Help me understand a little bit from your perspective, who I am. Am I involved in those depth processes? Is part of me down there in the depths? Is part of me here on the surface? How do you sort of come up. But of course, the ego is that part of us that thinks about the I, as you just said. It's who I think I am at any given moment. Years ago, I had a client who was trying to get her husband into therapy, and he kept resistant by saying, well, I know what I think. Well, it's what he doesn't know that he thinks or what is thinking him unconsciously is where the problem is coming from. So the conscious eye is what we call the ego. And it's

very important because it interfaces with the outer world. It's my ego that stops at stop sign. It's my ego that gets to work on time. It's a necessary function. It's an adaptation to the outer world. It's also that same ego that is in charge of making choices. Therefore, it's an agent of my moral system, what choices I make in this world. On the other hand, the ego can easily be possessed and often is. So I think of the ego as a kind of tiny disc floating on a large iridescent ocean that we call the soul, the unconscious. And it's an important disc. It's the boat that we're in consciously. So it will help us get to our directions in life. But it's foolish to think that it's in charge of the ocean. What it has to do is just as we have a conversation with the external world,

we have to have one with the internal world. And to the degree I don't have that conversation, as I mentioned, the behaviors and motivations and agendas will be coming out of the unconscious. So one of the things that Jung said, and you quoted in this book, is that within us, there's a sort of a deep, these are your words, a deep resilience guided by some locus of knowing, independent of ego consciousness, a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us. So it sounds like in addition to all these autonomous processes,

is there a process that is more truly us? Yes. What you were just describing is what you call the self with a capital S. And the self is often confused with the ego. See, again, the ego is simply a cluster of energy. This case, I'm talking to that cluster Eric identifies as Eric, but there's the totality of the human psyche at work. It involves your body. It involves your feeling function. It involves the life of the spirit. It involves all these autonomous processes that are keeping the whole system going. And it has the purposefulness of nature. We are animals in nature. And included in that nature is the fact, for example, that we're all mortal. And so the ego says, hey, wait a minute, I'm not impressed with that idea. I'd rather change that if I may. But you see, that's part

of nature and naturing. And that's how we get separated from the essential nature of our own nature. And so the self is essentially that guiding instinct, that guiding energy that tries to heal your wounds, that tries to make correctives. It presents us with the feeling function. You know, you don't choose your feelings. Feelings are qualitative analyses of how things have happened. But we learn along the way to repress our feelings, ignore them. Doesn't you know, it creates our dreams. It creates our symptoms. You know, many times it's the revolt of the self that has brought people into this kind of conversation where a person has to pull out and say, what's going on here? kind of conversation where a person has to pull out and say, what's going on here? How did I wind up in this place in my life? That sort of thing. So the self is the natural instinctual motive towards wholeness and towards development. And to the ego's dismay, part of that development

includes, of course, aging and mortality as well. But again, we are the ones with a standpoint of the ego only that is in contradiction to nature by trying to run from it, to deny that. But nature is at all times working its way through us. Here at The One You Feed, we explore ways that we feed our good wolf. That is to say, how can we build up our strength, resilience, and sense of well-being so that when life's challenges, both big and small, come our way, we aren't completely demolished. In fact, we're able to grow because of them. And even when life's not turbulent, we can experience deeper levels of joy and awe and appreciation moment to moment. The Spiritual Habits Program takes that quest one step further. By applying principles of behavior

change to core spiritual principles, we create a set of spiritual habits to weave into our daily lives so that we can experience the gifts of spirituality in even more profound and personal ways. I just finished the one-on-one spiritual habits program with my client Robin, and here's what she had to say about it. So now that I've finished the spiritual habits course, I'm reflecting on the skills and benefits that it brought to me, and I'm really happy with the things that I gained from having taken it and participated in this with Eric. I feel a lot better equipped to handle the bumps I encounter on a daily basis that are part of life. I think for a long time, I had this view that life is

supposed to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis and take a lot less effort from that point forward. And I've realized that the bumps and sort of jostles and jiggles that are part of everyday life are normal and I'm a lot less exhausted by them. So I have a more balanced approach and perspective on things that come my way and I see myself as being a lot more capable to handle what life throws at me with all the changes that are normal. If you'd like to learn more about the program and see if it might be right for you, go to OneYouFeed.net slash talk and book a free 30-minute absolutely no pressure call with me. That's OneYouFeed.net slash talk. And that's exactly what we'll do. We will just talk and see if the program is a good fit for you, whether it might be helpful to you, and we'll get to know each other. So I really look forward to meeting you. OneYouFeed.net slash talk. bathroom door go all the way to the floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned

during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that you talk about is that there's often, you refer to them as passages, or in-between states, right? That's part of the title of the book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. We can talk about changing times externally, but also it sounds like there's changing times inside of us, sort of a passage, which is sort of maybe something old is dying and something new has not yet been born again. Yes. When I first returned about 45

years ago from my training in Zurich at the Young Institute to the United States, and I started seeing many different people with differing backgrounds, differing presenting issues, different histories. One thing was in common to each of them, and that was their roadmap, which may or may not have worked well theretofore, was presently no longer applicable to the territory in which they found themselves. Their understanding of themselves, what their agenda was, or in some cases, they had done what they thought they were supposed to do, what life and what society asks of them. life and what society asks of them, but inside it was never feeling right, or it produces a depression or something of that sort. And then I realized, all right, that's what a passage is. Something has died, something has played out, and we're in that difficult in-between. And that's where some energy and some, you know, developmental stage or some sort of strategy of life has grown exhausted.

And we have to hold the tension of that in between. A lot of folks have been placed into that during our plague times that we're all going through around this world, where they began to realize a lot of their usual distractions, their friends, their families, their outer activities, even their office space, you know, so much of that was carrying a provisional sense of self. And if that was not available to them in some way, then, you know, all of that unfinished business and all that life projected out there came sort of rushing back as confusion, dismay, and of course, sometimes depression. None of us know until we're obliged to go through something. Is there something in our nature that will always rise to

the surface if we hold that tension and stick with it? Jung put it so succinctly once. He said, we need to know what supports us when nothing supports us. And sooner or later, everybody in their life reaches a point where their understanding of things just doesn't work anymore. And of course, we begin by going back and trying to revivify the old understanding, but it just gets worse. So that's where the new will emerge. That's where the person will have to undergo a difficult passing because there's always something wanting to renew itself, something that is wishing fuller expression. Now, just very briefly, the agenda of the first half of life is to gather enough ego strength to leave our parents, step out into the world, form

relationships, find a career, become a citizen, et cetera, all useful and necessary. But then at the second half of life, you have to say, and why am I still here? What is important for me now? And, you know, just as the question of the first half is, what does the world want of me? Then one has to ask a different kind of question for which most of us are not prepared. And that is, what does the soul ask of me? When I use the word soul here, I'm just translating literally the Greek word psyche. That is to say, what is that depth within me asking of me now? And another way of putting that is, what wants to enter the world through me?

See, that's a different question. It's not about how do I free myself from conflict? How do I free myself from distress? How do I reach that sunny meadow where everything's resolved? Well, dream on. That time never really comes. What we really have to say is, is the life I'm living meaningful to me? And if it's not, why not?

And if it's not, change it and undertake whatever, you know, peril one has to undertake to change it. And when we're living then in accord with the developing agenda of nature, then we will feel that support that's there. agenda of nature, then we will feel that support that's there. And the most elusive but most important of all of the indications that rise from the depth of the soul is that inexplicable thing called meaning. If we think we find the right partner in life or we earn enough money, we gain power over something, we're going to have a meaningful life. Well, there are a lot of people who've done that, but they haven't experienced what they thought they would experience. Meaning is something that is a byproduct of being in right relationship with one's own soul. And you don't manufacture that, you submit to that. And that's quite different.

When you say you don't manufacture that, you submit to it. Do you mean we don't manufacture the meaning? We submit to the meaning Do you mean we don't manufacture the meaning, we submit to the meaning that is coming from deep within us? Right. Or submit to the rigor, the difficulty, even the suffering that one must address in order to live more meaningfully. Now, for example, through the years, I've often had to sacrifice what I would consider normal life and diversion. At the end of a workday, I see people all day in therapy. And in the evenings, rather than watch a movie or something, I've often written because things were wanting expression through me. I was never writing for money. I was never writing for anything else except to give

voice to something that I felt was important. And I was seeing in my clients and myself in the course of the day. And for me, teaching and writing and being in therapy has always been a calling. It wasn't what I would have intended in childhood, but it was sort of what was intended by the soul. And so I find myself privileged to have been able to, in a sense, submit to what was wishing expression through me. Because I think all of this are some kind of experiment by nature, some sort of investment by nature. And the question is, what is the nature or soul asking of us? And when we conserve that, you will find that resilience that we've referenced, and you'll find a deep sense of purposefulness in your life. And when you run from it, or you simply submit yourself to your

old stories, one has a fugitive life. It's not a crime to have fear. Everybody has fears. The pragmatic question is always, and what do your fears make you do? What do your fears keep you from doing with your life? And then you realize where you're summoned to accountability is you can't have your life governed by fear. You can't avoid them, but you can't be governed by them. And therefore, you have to throw yourself into that breach and say, you know, I'm going to have to go through what I fear in order to express what is wanting expression through me in this world. And that's not something that is grandiose. It's actually humbling. It's not something that is going to make me popular. It will often separate me from patterns from the past. But inwardly, there's that deep,

deep sense of the rightness of our journey. And when we're doing that, we can feel it. We know the difference. And when we're not, there's something inside that sickens and sours and produces nothing good in the world. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, Really No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So a question for you about symptoms because

according to your writings and depth psychology, the presence of symptoms, let's just pick a symptom in this case, depression, is a natural expression of the psyche, a commentary on how our life is going from the soul's perspective. And I want to explore that a little bit more with you through my own life and my own times of depression. Because I have had experiences where, yeah, depression was a manifestation of something was wrong in my life, me not living in a certain way. And I seem to have had the opposite of that, or maybe not the opposite, but I seem to have had a different circumstance. And that different circumstance is that I appear to get visited by depression, even though my life appears to be, again, I'm using the word appears to be the life I want want and I'm living the way I want to live based on what matters. And what seems to happen is the depression comes in and it suddenly turns things that are normally meaningful to me meaningless.

And then it will pass. And when it passes, I will go back to what appears to me again, to be my normal life where I go, here's the things I love. I love, I love making music. I love doing this work that I do. I love this person and I love that person. But while that depression, and that's a word I'm using for it, and I sometimes not even sure that's the right word to use for it. While it's there, for it, and I sometimes not even sure that's the right word to use for it. While it's there, it sort of drains the meaning out of everything, even things if I try and think, well, what else might matter? My brain just goes nothing. I mean, the term I've heard is anhedonia, right? Things that normally provide me joy, just get sucked out of joy. So is depression always a expression of

the psyche that something's wrong? Or are there other instances? Are there chemical changes that our brain goes through? Or say a little bit more about kind of what I just said there. Well, of course. And you're absolutely right in your description. First of all, we have to say there are depressions. There are depressions that are driven by biological sources. And there are various forms of addressing that, including some medication. various forms of addressing that, including some medication. There are depressions that are reactive depression to outer losses. You know, if you have a critical loss in your life, you're not supposed to just sort of skip gaily along. You're supposed to say, if there's a value there, I have to grieve that loss. And it would be pathological not to do that. But you're right. From time to

time, we're visited by those difficult and dark times, and they are opaque. We don't always know what they mean. But one of the things we always have to ask is, is this depression asking some question of me? And you're right. Sometimes they come, and sometimes they abide for a long time, and sometimes they're fairly transient. So I think we often have what I would call pockets of depression that say, just for example, when I stop and think about the suffering in the world, I think about injustice in the world. That will occasion a pocket of depression, and I consider that part of my humanity. That means I'm not indifferent to the terrible things that go on in this world.

And at the same time, I also have to find what is my role here? What is my position here? How do I go about addressing that if I possibly can? And it's, again, the autonomy of the psyche. And we don't always know the answer to those questions. Sometimes we just have to say, let me sit with it. I was speaking in Montreal about a year ago, and a friend of mine up there who was with me in Zurich said, when we would experience depression in Zurich, as I think probably all of us did, being away from family and another culture, another language, et cetera,

rather than have our analyst supervisors talk to us about five easy steps to do this or that, they'd say, you know, go back to your shabby apartment and sit with it until it reveals what it wants from you. Now, nobody wanted to hear that, but I think for all of us who stuck that out, that's how we began to also find new resources in our own psyche. It's how we began to also find new resources in our own psyche. And it's that kind of thing that often is calling for some substantial change in some key areas. I wouldn't have even started on this whole profession and this whole discipline of depth psychology without myself in my early 30s getting a depression. I'd achieved everything that I wanted in my life,

and I was happy with it. I was an academia, and I had a lovely family, but I found myself, as Dante did, in the dark midlife, and that's what sent me to my first hour, and little did I know it was going to be moving me in a new direction. I'm not talking here professionally as much as I'm talking about how so much of my life had been living in the head and not really in the feeling function. And this was the psyche's way of reaching up and pulling me down into that place. And I would never want to romanticize that and say that was easy or blissful. It was far from it. But I think it was a move towards healing something, and it was a move toward some greater wholeness. So sometimes, to tell you the truth, we have to sit with it, abide it, pay attention, be open to it, dialogue with it. And I came to realize, you know, in the

course of my training, that's when I began to appreciate the role of dreams. And after a while, I'd be realized, hey, you know, there's some intelligence in me that knows more than I know. And it's trying to communicate with me. And it's always been speaking to me. And at times I had intimations of that, but other times I just shut it off. And so my attitude toward that source of wisdom, natural wisdom that's inside of each of us,

slowly changed and modified. And the ego became less resistant and I think less imperial in its position and far more humble. Because this work doesn't make us feel terrific in terms of the ego. It's, as Jung put it in his memoir, Memory, Dreams, Reflections, oh, here's another thing I found out about myself, and it felt like a defeat. Well, why would it be a defeat except that the ego had the fantasy that it was the bomb. It had the fantasy it was in charge of everything. Well, it's not. It's one participant in a very large congress of voices, intra-psychically. Congress and voices intrapsychically. Exactly. I was introduced to your work via a question, and I don't know if somebody paraphrased this question of yours or if it's an exact question of yours, but that's what got me introduced to your work. And since, as I've explored different parts of your work, I think questions are a big

part of your work. And so I want to start with this question because I think it's a brilliant question that has helped me many times. And then I'd like to ask maybe what are some other questions that we can be asking ourselves if we want to say, hey, let me go a little deeper into what's happening with me. And the question that got me introduced to your work was, does this path or this choice make me larger or smaller? Yes. Well, we come to junctures in our lives where we don't know what to do, whether to change jobs or change relationships or whatever. And asking that

question is the first way to begin to explore what's really at stake for you intrapsychically. You know, maybe the new job that offers more money, better position, whatever, is really fool's gold, that it would really take you away from something that really matters to you. How much are you going to have to trade away of yourself? Or many times you'd say, well, your desire to hang on to the old is really your insecurity at work and your distrust in yourself. And then you ask the question, because intuitively, we always know the answer to the question. Will this enlarge me psychologically, spiritually? Is this going to diminish me? If you don't know the answer to that, you keep asking that. Another important question of the places where we're stuck, and everybody has some stuck places

in their life. Stuck places are always blocked by some archaic fear. Sometimes we can identify the superficial fear pretty easily, but you have to start probing and saying, but where's the wiring here that leads metaphorically into my basement? And there's an archaic fear. There's the fear of being out there by myself, being abandoned, being alone, or there's the fear that this is too large for me, it's going to overwhelm me. Where is that fear? Because that's what's keeping me stuck. And many times that fear is really phantasmal. You can work right through it because an adult has grown up in the meantime who can take that on for whatever was overwhelming or intimidating to the child.

But the stuck place will continue unless we address that other kind of question. We also always have to ask ourselves this basic question as well, as you've already suggested. What I'm doing may be productive, it may be applauded by people around me, but does it bring me meaning? Do I find myself growing? And it's clear to me, the psyche has two agendas at all times. One is our growth and development, and one is self-healing. And both of those are going on at all times. And the growth and developing part, when it's stymied, actually injures the second. It adds to the wounding of life rather than the healing of life. For very few people, if any,

do we hear in childhood, you have to sort of, in time, figure out what's right for you and really live that. It's more commonly the message, how do you fit in? How do you meet the expectations of people around you? What are your parents expecting from you? Those are the kinds of questions that have that sort of archaic institutionalization inside of each of us that are often the chief deterrence for our feeling a sense of permission and a sense of freedom to move forward and make changes in life. Because the nature of nature has changed, that's for sure. Our body is changing every second. Our psyche is changing every second. And here we are stuck in the same old, same old. Yep. I want to ask you one or two final questions. We're nearly out of time here, and I appreciate your time. My first question is related to dream work, or maybe that's not even the term that you would use, or is it? Yeah, it's a good word. Dreams, dream work. Do we need to know what we are really doing in order to explore our dreams?

And by that, do we need to understand what all the symbols mean? Do we need help in someone else interpreting them for us? Or is it simply enough to turn our attention sort of inwards and say, you know what, psyche, I'm going to start listening to you. And I'm going to start just taking what comes up to me in my dreams. And I'm just going to start taking it with a little bit of seriousness. And I'm going to pay a little bit closer attention and see what emerges for me. First of all, sleep research has told us that, you know, you don't even have to pay attention to dreams for them to serve a purpose. Laboratory circumstances where people have been allowed to sleep, but not dream after a while,

they begin to hallucinate. Right. So if that material has to be worked through in some way, whether you want to or not. And secondly, not everybody is or should be in therapy. I'm not recommending that to everybody. On the other hand, when you have dreams, the ego is sort of on the one hand saying, oh, I know why I dreamt that. That was on a telly last night. No, the psyche has no obligation to talk about what you already know about. It's a scavenger. It begs, borrows, and steals from conscious life and utilize these things. And maybe calls your teacher from 30, 40 years ago from grade school or whatever. What associations do I have here? What emotional memories do I have with that person or this situation? It's patient work. You don't expect it to come out like a telex it just tells you do this

or do that you begin to realize over time everybody has a symbolic system the best interpreter of the dream is really the dreamer because you and i could dream about our grandmother today but we have different grandmothers there's grandmotherliness and that that's a common experience that we have, or some other image of that sort. But then you have a particular set of emotional experiences that rose out of your relationship, if you had one with your grandmother. And then you begin to say something there is being triggered. There's some kind of analog that is to say every moment in life is new. But the psyche is often bringing up the analogy. There's some kind of analog that is to say every moment in life is new. But the psyche is often bringing up the analogy. Something is happening today in my life that touches on this experience with that third grade teacher or the grandmother or whatever the image is.

And if I begin to say, where is the emotional link? Where is the symbolic link? Then you begin to realize these things do have meaning. And there is this ongoing commentary. And I've seen people, for example, who've said, well, why do I hate having the same kind of dream, you know, repeating the same memory? It's like, well, because these are your issues, your problems. Would you want someone else's problems? In which case, you'd have their dream. So our dreams often do have recurrent motifs and do have themes because, after all,

they're tracking the life and times of a single person when they do appear. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for taking the time to come on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation, and I have about 100 more questions I could ask, but we are at the end of our time. So I'll have links in the show notes to your books and to your website. And I really appreciate your time. Well, thank you,

Eric. It's been a privilege to talk with you as well. And I appreciate your questions greatly and I wish you well. Thank you. Be well. Bye-bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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