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Lately, and these things seem to come in spurts, I’ve been asked to do a fair amount of dream inter­pre­ta­tion. I only look at dreams one way — the way sug­gested by Fritz Perls, founder of the Gestalt Ther­apy Movement.

Here’s a def­i­n­i­tion of Gestalt Dream Work:

Fred­er­ick Perls (1893–1970) is the founder of Gestalt ther­apy. Gestalt ther­apy seeks to fill your emo­tional voids so that you can then become a uni­fied whole. Perls believes that dreams con­tain the rejected, dis­owned parts of the Self. Every char­ac­ter and every object in a dream rep­re­sents an aspect of the Self. You are the tor­nado, you are the attacker, you are the bro­ken down car and you are the dusty book. Perls rejects the notion that dreams are part of a uni­ver­sal sym­bolic lan­guage. He believes that each dream is unique to the indi­vid­ual who dreams it.

So, think about it. You are everyone and everything in your dream. Not what you expect, right?

You dream of a con­ver­sa­tion with your mom, or a roll in the hay with your first sex­ual part­ner, and you think you’re actu­ally talk or rolling with the real peo­ple. One recent dream I was told about fea­tured mommy show­ing up as the daugh­ter was get­ting up from a roll in the hay, which is also “inter­est­ing,” but I digress. Mom is not in your head, nor is any­one else. As we keep repeat­ing, every­thing in your head is imag­i­nary, and each imag­i­nary char­ac­ter is writ­ten, pro­duced, and directed, by you.

In the kind of dream work we do, then, every­one in the dream (plus every thing) is you, inter­act­ing with… wait for it… you!

The Divided Self

I’ve been mean­ing to write about this for a long time, and even have been watch­ing for pho­tos, to illus­trate. (like the one above.)

OK, so more than 5000 years ago the Taoists invented (no sur­prise) Tao­ism. One of the key prin­ci­ples is that of yin and yang.

Now, you may be slightly famil­iar with this con­cept — it divides the world into “sides.” The word “yin” orig­i­nally referred to the shady side of a moun­tain, and yang to the sunny side.

But key to all of this is the phrase, “…in rela­tion­ship to…”

A tem­per­a­ture of 70 degrees F is yang …in rela­tion­ship to… 32 degrees, and yin …in rela­tion­ship to… 100 degrees. This applies to every­thing — every­thing is how it is in rela­tion­ship to the other side of the pole.

Here are a few com­mon yin / yang pairs:

I grouped the last four for a reason.

• The front of the body is yin, the back is yang.
• The left side of the body is yin, the right, yang.
• The lower body is yin, the upper, yang.
• The left side of the brain (which con­trols the right (yang) side of the body, is yang.
• The right side of the brain, (which con­trols the left (yin) side of the bodyis yin.

The amaz­ing part, for me, is that the Chi­nese had the divi­sions fig­ured out eons ago. Right down to the brain split, which we in the West only began to get a han­dle on last century.

Take a look at the lead photo. You’ll actu­ally see the divid­ing line on the chest and belly. Every­one has this divid­ing line — it’s just eas­ier to see on the skinny.

So what, you ask?

Well, the key to whole liv­ing is that our yin and yang natures be bal­anced. I like to pro­pose 100% / 100%. This is not the “nor­mal” state of affairs, as we are brought up to lean toward our gen­der. So, women in gen­eral tend toward yin, men toward yang. To our detriment.

These ener­gies (or brain states, if you must be “West­ern”) work best in har­mony, and har­mony is best if bal­anced. I could then say that my work on myself, and my work with my clients, is to iden­tify the imbal­ance, and strengthen the depleted side, while cool­ing any excess.

Using myself for an exam­ple, I spent my first 32 years “doing yang.” I was mouthy, angry, cruel, obsessed, demand­ing. All signs of out of con­trol yang. In 1982, I began an exper­i­ment. I tem­pered my yang nature by shut­ting my mouth, and at the same time, I began to “trust my guts” (which are inside, intu­itive, and there­fore yin.) I did this for 13 years (wow… insight… this par­al­leled my years in the Min­istry — I got kicked out exactly 4 weeks after I re-claimed my yang side… hmm…)

In 1996, I did Phase 1 at The Haven. One exer­cise involved Jun­gian Shadow Work. I’ve writ­ten about this before, but what I saw, in a guided visu­al­iza­tion, was a big guy in Japan­ese armour com­ing toward me with a katana (sword) raised. he swung it for my head (to split me in half?) and stopped just above my head. He reversed the blade, hand­ing the sword to me, with these words:

“You can kill, or you can heal.”

I took this to mean that I could let go of my “exces­sively yin exer­cise,” and take back the power con­tained in yang.

Or to put it another way, I could begin to truly enact my true, undi­vided nature.

OK. So what do I see with clients? Most of my clients are in exactly the same boat I was in.

The men are work­ing on leav­ing the aggres­sive nature of Yang on the side for a bit, while, like me, learn­ing to trust their guts (instincts) — the yin side.

The women are learn­ing to enact (the yang side) their pas­sion , as opposed to “just sit­ting there in a pile of emotion.”

90% of my clients are women, so let’s look there

Most of my female clients are stuck on the yang, “actu­ally liv­ing out of their lives” side. In other words, they have good ideas, great instincts, and a lot of cre­ative charge. They have been con­di­tioned to stuff their pas­sion, repress their desire to be whole, and to some­how metaphor­i­cally become depen­dent on a man to pro­vide the “yang side.”

Stand­ing forth, own­ing their own respon­si­bil­ity for their lives, becom­ing self-sufficient — becom­ing strong — this is their task. (It’s also why I’m with Dar­bella — she’s had her act together since we met…)

In body­work, I tend to start with the client face down. I stand at their head, and look down their body. Almost invari­ably, I will see imbal­ance in the body. One shoul­der higher, one hip or butt cheek either higher or twisted. A left — right “disagreement.”

Or, I might work on the legs, and one leg will be all “Ouch!” and the other, not so much, or even “dead.”

Same with par­al­lel points on the back, chest, pelvis.

Next week, I’ll give you a chart that relates chakra points to yin — yang. For exam­ple, the root chakra is about secu­rity, so yin is, “I feel safe and secure.” Yang is, “I know my place, I own my space, and I know I belong.”

See the pat­tern, and why unity trumps the split?

Finally, here’s a dream I was told 15 years ago. The per­son with the dream was a “the­o­ret­i­cal artist.” By that, I mean that her par­ents brought her up to be a suc­cess, and in their world, artists were dead­beats. They took her paints away, phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. She wanted to express her­self, but it wasn’t hap­pen­ing. Theoretical.

The scene of the dream: her bed­room. She’s alone, and engaged in solo-me-time. (I’m inten­tion­ally being coy.) Her ex hus­band (who in real life she despised) came in and said, “You’re not doing that right. Let me show you how, and you’ll finally really enjoy your­self.” She got pissed off (in the dream…) and told him to take off, colorfully.

Instead, he sat on the bed and watched, and sighed a lot. She con­tin­ued doing what she was doing, furi­ously, and with­out result, other than to dis­cover she was “rubbed raw and irri­tated.” Then she woke up.

Now, if you pre­tend this dream was about her ex, you’re knackered.

Nope. Remem­ber, this is her dream, in her head.

I said, “This is about you and mak­ing art. What you are doing right now is ten­ta­tive, and not work­ing, yet you keep doing it (or, in her case, not doing it, as she wasn’t paint­ing…) the same way, and irri­tat­ing your­self — but being raw and angry isn’t chang­ing any­thing. Your ex is actu­ally your dis­owned yang side, and that side is offer­ing to help you do things dif­fer­ently. He wants to take you by the hand, guide your hands in another way, and help you to pro­duce some­thing excit­ing and chargy. Your way isn’t work­ing — ”his“ way involves get­ting off your ass and actu­ally doing some­thing different.”

My clients often bring in dreams fea­tur­ing a strug­gle with a mem­ber of the oppo­site sex, some­times gen­tle, some­times vio­lent. In each case, the “other” is the dis­owned side of them­selves that is des­per­ately attempt­ing to get through to the blocked side. The blocked side is scared, and often pic­tures the blocked energy in a scary way (ex-husband, “uncle Louie, etc. )

Remem­ber, we are “com­fort­able in our dis­com­fort” — our nat­ural side feels nor­mal, and the “other side” always feels threat­en­ing. (Hell, mine was an 8 foot tall ninja guy…) Nonethe­less, get­ting any­where with this requires a firm resolve to step into the dark­ness of vul­ner­a­bil­ity and open­ness, and actu­ally doing some­thing different.

More on how this looks, next week.

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Make Con­tact!

So, how does this week’s arti­cle sit with you? What ques­tions do you have? Go to the top of this arti­cle, click on the title, and leave a com­ment or question!

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Read about it here:

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Related posts:

1. Love: doing all in your power to encour­age another to accept their wholeness.
2. Bal­anced Living
3. Noth­ing

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Tagged with: challenge • dreams • dreams interpretation • frederick perls • Fritz Perls • gestalt therapy • perls • psychology • relationship books • yang • yang split • yin • yin and yang • yin yang

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