Dreams, Symbols & Spirituality
Not everything we know about ourselves exists in words. Sometimes our conscious mind is busy analyzing and trying to make sense of our lives, while something deeper within us may already be communicating through intuition, dreams, images, and symbols.
Some of the work I find most meaningful involves helping clients explore this deeper, sometimes spiritual level of awareness.
Influenced by Jungian ideas about dreams, symbolism, and the unconscious, I work with dreams and imagery that clients bring into therapy. Rather than simply telling someone what a dream or symbol means, we explore it together.
- What catches your attention?
- Why might that image have appeared?
- What does it mean to you?
- What emotions does it bring up?
- Is there something here that feels important?
For clients who are highly sensitive, intuitive, creative, or spiritually oriented, this kind of exploration can open another door into healing and self-understanding. Spirituality can also become part of our work when it is meaningful to the client.
Painting From the Subconscious
One exercise I use involves creating a series of three spontaneous paintings. Rather than planning what to paint, clients quiet their analytical mind and begin with whatever image first comes to them.
After the first painting, I simply ask: “What happens next?”
They paint a second image. Then I ask again: “And what happens next?”
Clients sometimes create a visual story that reflects something happening in their lives that they haven’t yet been able to recognize or express consciously.
When an Image Tells a Story
I once worked with a young girl whose family was going through a difficult divorce. In her first painting, she created a field of flowers.
In the second, the flowers had been cut and placed in a container.
In the third, she painted a dandelion gone to seed, with its seeds blowing across the field.
She wasn’t consciously trying to tell the story of what was happening in her family. Yet the progression of images offered a powerful way to explore change, separation, loss, and the possibility of something new emerging.
That’s what fascinates me about this deeper work: sometimes an image can express something we don’t yet know how to put into words.
Dreams, images, symbols, and creative expression can help bring what is beneath the surface into greater awareness—where we can begin to understand it and work with it.
Sometimes the deeper parts of ourselves begin speaking long before our conscious mind has found the words.