When I came into the work, I was beginning to find the the voice in me that felt true. I had been writing poetry for years, had begun to publish a few poems here and there in small journals. The reason I had landed in Vermont at all, just down the road from Marc’s house in Morrisville, Vermont, was to do a two month writer’s retreat at The Vermont Studio Center. I was living in San Francisco at the time with no intention of ever living anywhere else.
At the Studio Center, I had several famous writers look at my work and offer insights, criticism and praise. It was a dizzy time for me, for I was beginning to believe that maybe I was a writer, maybe this thing I thought I had made up in my head was actually true. Maybe I did have this passion that I had spoken of for years but had been too afraid to do.
In fact, I felt that I had started to write some poems that were good poems. That had something in them. That had weight and heft.
Just a few months after starting the work with Marc, I had this dream.
Dream:
I am walking in the woods. Hearing a noise, I turn to see a bear in the distance chasing my mother. I yell to her not to worry, that the bear probably will not hurt her. I turn back to my path and discover that there is a cave in front of me, with crude steps leading down into the cave. I feel intrigued and a little scared. I walk down the stairs and come across an easel with a blank canvas and paint. I knock one of the cans of paint over, spilling a brilliant sky blue down the steps. I keep going and at the bottom of the steps is a man sitting in an open cave area. Around the open areas are little cave rooms. Feels like a monastary to me, the rooms for solitude and work. To my surprise, there are easels in each room. The man points me to one of the rooms. I feel startled.
The dream was challenging me around the issue of my writing. Going into the cave, my monk’s cell was not a cell with a desk for writing but a studio for painting. I had never painted in my entire life, did not know the first thing about it. The dream seemed funny to me, a bit startling.
But the dream was challenging what I was doing with my writing. As I began to feel into the passion I felt for writing, I began to make the writing something that it was not. I began to look at poetry as Poetry, with that big capital P. Unconsciously, I was deep in the throes of making the writing bigger than me. That if I could just be a good poet, if I could just write the perfect poem, then I would be okay. It became about what I could produce.
The dream challenged this. In session, we spent a great deal of time talking about why the dream was about painting and not about writing.
Marc said, “Being a writer will not make you a good person. There are many writers and artists out there who are not good people but who create things of great beauty, of great depth.”
“Yes, I have met some of them. It is like they take what is best in them and put it in the writing, put it in the painting, in the movie, in the sculpture.”
“Right, but what they don’t get and what you don’t get is that the art is not the point. The canvas is not the canvas to put paint on or the blank page to put the writing on. When you are connected to your true passion, your true soul, then you become the canvas. The poem or the painting will flow out of you and you will be transformed by it. You do not have to leave yourself behind when you do your writing.”
“Okay, but why the dream with painting?”
“Because, clearly, the Animus wants you to paint. He wants you to stop writing and to paint.”
Finally, just as something was blossoming in me that felt real, that felt more than just a surface thing to do, and the dreams were asking me to stop it. Why? I knew the poems were good, that they were finally moving toward being poetry. Why would I stop?
Marc repeated it, “Clearly, He wants you to stop. Can you trust the man in the dream enough to stop. He’s the Animus. It doesn’t mean you have to stop forever, just for now. Are you willing to do this? Are you willing to try painting?”
Marc and I have discussed this moment in my work many times since then. For Marc, he did not have a clue what the Animus was doing only that He wanted me to start painting. It did go against logic – for the first time in my life, I was allowing passion to come in, passion to guide me. I was doing something I loved, in my fear around it even. Most therapists would have encouraged me to keep going, to keep doing what I was doing.
It is a moment that Marc and every dreamwork therapist meets in many sessions. What is He doing here with this person? Why is He doing this? Marc could have hedged his bets in this moment and had me try painting as well as doing my writing. But he did not do that. He stayed obedient to the dream, obedient with integrity to the dream. The dream did not have a writing desk, did not have any writing utensils, had nothing to do with writing.
In the moment that Marc said the hard thing – “He wants you to stop writing and start painting,” Marc stood with the Animus against all logic not knowing what would happen. Not only did he not know what would happen with my work, he did not know what would happen with me. Would I react and get angry, storm out of the office? Would I react without telling him and then never come back for another session? It is a difficult moment to stand in.
****
It took years of working with clients for Marc to trust that moment. When he first began to work with clients and began to really feel the Animus’ guidance when in session, he often felt confused about what he was hearing. He would think to himself, “You want me to say that? Really? That doesn’t make any sense.”
The dreams have a wisdom and a plan that is beyond what we could ever devise on our own. Every person’s soul is an intricately woven vessel of history, lies, truths, emotions, feelings, stories, memories, experiencies, realities; every person requires a plan specifically catered to meet the true soul at every step, at every moment.
Marc learned early that he did not have that kind of wisdom, that he could not figure out on his own what someone needed at any particular moment for their personal work. With the dreams, he learned that he did not need to have that kind of wisdom. In fact, it is ridiculus to believe that any one could have that kind of wisdom.
But the dream. The Archetypes know each of us with more intimacy than we will ever really know our selves. The dreams are custom-created for us in each specific moment. They are created for us to experience, to feel or not feel if it is more appropriate, what it is that will help in that moment.
To stand in the uncertainty and the unknowing every session with every client.
It was a difficult thing for Marc to learn. He recounts a moment in a session with a client early in his practice. The client was struggling in the work and had a dream that seemed to suggest that she not do the work anymore. At the time, Marc only had a handful of clients and he did not want to lose one. He felt invested with the client. When the dream came about leaving the work, Marc did not want to see the truth of it.
The client began to talk about not doing the work anymore and Marc began to fight with her trying to talk her into not leaving the work. He was not being obedient to the dream. In that moment, something happened:
From Marc:
I could feel how I did not want her to leave the work, that I did not want to lose her as a client. I was at my desk in my office at home when I noticed someone in the living room. I looked up and saw that it was Him. He was standing there waving his arms at me, shaking his head. He clearly was telling me to stop arguing with my client. I understood at once and stopped arguing. She left the work and it was the right thing for her to do. I will never fully understand why it was the right thing to do, but it was what He wanted.
In the moment when Marc asked if I could be obedient to the dream, he had to stand in uncertainty with me. Would I leave, too? Would I get pissed at him? Would I project that he had some kind of agenda for me?
Marc said, “I’m not sure why He wants you to paint or why He wants you to stop writing. I won’t kid you about that. It’s just clear that He does.”
Marc had many clients over the years get angry at him. He has had many clients react to the message of a dream, blaming him for the message, blaming him and using the blame as the reason to stop doing thier work, to stop following the dream.
It would have been easier to get angry or huffy in that moment. It would have been easier to say that I was not going to do that. It would have been easier to not be obedient to the dream. I had been carefully crafting an image of myself, one that was not repugnant, one that felt good and that seemed to have truth in it. Maybe I was not just playacting, as I had done in the past. It was an image of myself that I liked. I was attached to it. It would have been easy to get angry in that moment because the dream was challenging that image of myself. It was challenging the story that I was making up about myself.
Sometimes the story we create for ourselves is really quite lovely. This one felt lovely to me. I was discovering that I was an artist and I knew there were many artist story lines I could plug into. My favorite one was my “Emily Dickinson” story line. In this one, I would write poetry but never try to get the poems out there. Instead, I would do what Dickinson did, which was to have her books in a drawer in her room. Waiting to be discovered.
In this one, I would be like Dickinson in that I would never have to be in a relationship. I could avoid intimacy altogether because to be in a relationship would take time away from my passion. I could use writing as an excuse to not be in relationship. It was very romantic. I could sacrifice myself for my work.
The plan was to have one of my nieces be the recipient of the poems I was going to write. I would have the books in a trunk in my house and when I died, I would will the trunk to one of my nieces. or, I would be discovered by someone who would help me get books published. Then I would be a famous poet.
And underlying this story, no matter which version, was the story that I was bad. That I had to do something to be good in order to make up for the badness. Like all good stories, my story had a hidden story, a story underneath.
Either way, it was a story. It was my story. I wanted to be the author of my story, wanted to be in control in some way, all the while looking as if I was being noble or good. I wanted some story in which I could be good and in which I could be justified in my isolation. This one seemed like a really good one.
But the dream challenged the story. The dream challenged me to see something outside the story I was creating.
I did not get angry at the dream or at Marc. I walked out of his office with many feelings in me. When I considered what it felt like to write the few poems I felt had life to them, I could feel the place of being the canvas. Writing them felt as if I was being written, as if some part of my body was being altered when I wrote them and revised them. It was an excruciating feeling that I did not really like.
What I preferred were the poems that were cool and distant. I liked writing those because they had a gleaming surface to them, a gleam that I could shine and work. It was a gleam that I could hide behind, a cool voice like that of an observer. In those poems, I did not allow myself to be written, I was the one doing the writing. It felt safe. I understood that these were the poems where I did not feel like I was the canvas. When I walked out of Marc’s office that day, I understood that the poems that scared me the most, the most uncomfortable ones, where the ones where I was the one being worked on.
I also realized that what was growing in me was the need to accomplish something as a writer. That my very life depended on doing this thing, doing a good poem. This is what the Animus was challenging in me – that who I was was not dependent on being a good poet, on producing a good poem. He did not want me to have my identity, my sense of well-being to be attached to the production of poetry.
He wanted me to know that I was loved and lovable even if I never wrote another word.
I stopped writing.
It was a risky moment for part of me was happy to stop writing. I did not understand it, but I did know my fear around it. When I walked out of Marc’s office determined to stop writing, there was a high level of relief. Like I had dodged a bullet. I could let go of the need to be a writer, I could let go of the need to write.
What the man in the cave was asking me was to let go of the need to be defined by my writing.