Body, Soul & Spirit

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, CSP | Wholistic Counseling

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Excelling at the Game of Life: Living to the fullest

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Life is a Contact Sportfeet in grass

By Marie O. Davis LPC and Tayria Ward Ph.D.

 

One of the joys of sports, whether individual or team sports, is the consistent challenge to perform at our best.   We measure that best by looking at other’s performances or by exceeding our own previous attainments and striving to improve skills with every try.

When it comes to playing the game of life, there are numerous ways people endeavor to enhance performance and develop new proficiencies. How do evaluate ourselves and make the changes that we long for?  Spirituality, therapy, self-help, journaling, reading, yoga, and multitudes of programs offer assistance. When we want to change our soul life performance – in our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors – there is a need for an objective way of testing and challenging experience.

In sports athletes learn their skills, train and get feedback from coaches and trusted sources. How do we get such feedback while learning life skills?  We are suggesting a couple of means to do this. Your dreams of the night are ever offering consistent, reliable, insightful feedback to you from a higher source of wisdom and knowing. Additionally, an alchemical mandala-making process can show you visually and with felt sense how well you are doing, and what needs tweaking next. We have become fascinated with the efficacy of bringing these two methods together in classes and workshops we are now offering.

Try this. Try writing down your dreams of the night, no matter how ordinary, mundane, bizarre or random they may seem. You’ll most likely find that as soon as pen comes to paper and the intent to listen to the language of the dream is activated, another dimension of your psyche starts speaking, offering insight and assistance in its own mysterious language. Your dreams will function like a good coach, the best coach, the one who knows you way better than your conscious mind knows you.

dream catchersWhen life keeps coming at us with challenges and we keep missing the same hurdles, falling into the same emotional and psychological patterns, attracting the same opponents, miss opportunities for advancement – dreams of the night, and the dreaming dimension of the waking psyche are consistently offering to us the most pertinent, relevant, timely, healing advice about how to understand our obstacles to improvement and how to master them. Because they speak in a language that modernity has tragically forgotten, dreams are most often, sadly, ignored. Every person and situation in your dream is a symbol, every person and situation in your life is a symbol. Learning the symbolic language of dreaming will help any person to improve performance and satisfaction in the game of life.

I (Tayria) work with clients to help them recover the language of dreams – both in person in my lovely office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville and also by telephone for people who live a distance away. And I am enjoying teaching workshops and classes now with Marie Davis combining her work with the “dreaming awake” work of making alchemical mandalas.

I (Marie) learned a method for making these mandalas from Dennis Klocek, an avid student of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy. The technique uses collage images to express the issues, challenges and movement in our inner life. By ensouling these images with meaning, placing them on paper where we can see them and move them around, something alchemically occurs to us that moves and improves our spiritual, emotional and psychological situation. We work through fixities, see our patterns and figure out ways to develop new skills in relationship to the issues.

When we use alchemical mandala’s, different than Eastern mandala’s, the structure of placing images that represent different activities we do creates an objective way at looking at the self and areas of life where we feel stuck.  The soul activities that we look at are how we form beliefs, engage in a process, get our beliefs challenged, and gain insight.  By choosing images to represent soul gestures, we take our ‘problems’ and place them outside of ourselves to gain a different perspective on the life events that are challenging us, giving us an opportunity to develop ourselves, change beliefs and find new responses and behaviors.

In sports, top athletes visualize themselves doing certain actions over and over again as a way of preparing their body to perform the action in the best possible way.  Similarly, when we make an alchemical mandala, we are imaging/imagining how we are performing certain life actions –thinking, feeling, or doing – and evaluating how we think it is going and what we think we might do differently.  Achieving excellence in life is just like what athletes do in sports. We practice in our imagination how we would like to perform.

hands reachingI (Marie) also work with clients in body-centered therapy. In this work, one is supported and guided to explore automatic or habitual movements that are made when talking about specific issues or challenges in life.  By paying attention to the story that our bodies are telling, the client is able to begin to access the internal “map maker” who formed certain beliefs that may no longer serve us.  This level of working with movements and ‘communications’ that our bodies are making that are beyond our awareness is also a deeper form of seeing that parallels dream work and mandala making.  By making conscious the limiting beliefs that we are still holding onto, we gain access to more of our human facilities and skills at our disposal.

For example, if we believe “my needs don’t matter”, we may go through life avoiding acknowledging our basic human needs and feel deprived of love, connection or support.  By revealing this level of belief to the conscious mind, we are finally able to gain awareness our specific needs and then can take productive action to get them met.

Similar to learning to improve our game in sports, we look to utilize improved skills that will make us more effective.  Having helpful and empowering belief systems allow us to excel in life.  But if there are unproductive or unhelpful belief systems that hinder us from getting the most out of life, how do we become aware of these and change them?  Dreamwork, mandala making and body-centered therapy radically help a person in processes of self-discovery.

Like any sport, the game of life is both exhilarating and exhausting, dangerously challenging and ecstatically rewarding. Any way to learn new techniques, increase skills and challenge ourselves to develop strength and awareness is a blessing. We think these techniques are effective, exciting, fascinating. They will offer your psyche and your heart all new ways to engage in life.

For information about upcoming fall series, please contact Tayria or Marie by phone or through their website. 

Tayria Ward, Ph.D. is a depth psychologist and dream analyst in private practice who does telephone sessions as well as face-to-face work with clients in her office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville. Her telephone number is 828-329-0853, website is www.tayriaward.com

 

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, is an expressive arts and body-centered therapist in private practice in downtown Asheville and is a part of the Asheville Healing House collective.  More information about her and her work can be found at: www.bodysoulspiritasheville.com or by calling 828-273-5647

The Power of Symbols, Dreams and Mandalas

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Coming Home To Your Self Through Mandalas and Dreams

 

By Marie Davis, MA, LPC and Tayria Ward, Ph.D

 

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.” ~ Warsan Shire

 

The concept of life as a journey is not a new one. Spiritual seekers of all ages speak of it as a journey of returning, a quest to find their true home. Home is a metaphor and a symbol at the heart of numerous writings describing the inner quest.

 

 

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dominiqs/

Marie: In my work, I find that metaphor and symbols allow people to talk about experiences and feelings that elude concrete description. Home is one such symbol. At one point in my life, when traveling to different places every month, I began to realize that home was where I was, a state of being that resided within me.

 

When I met Tayria, we clicked right away on our love for the language of images; we immediately felt at home together. Collaborating with her in our work has been affirming, stretching me and deepening the work that I do with my own clients. Through exploring how my life has been speaking to me in dreams, I am able to discover myself on a deeper level, bringing me closer and closer to “my true home.”

 

I grew up in a family that outwardly appeared well put-together, but was actually chaotic. While I knew that my parents loved me, I didn’t feel like I had a home, a safe place for me to unfold. Even at a very young age, I had a vivid dream life where my feelings of not being safe and protected showed themselves. I dreamed of being chased, of dark looming figures following me, of searching in a dark maze for something; I didn’t know what.

 

I would find myself in apartments, houses, condos, skyscrapers—various images for home—always exploring, searching, or looking for safety. Sometimes there would be people around, other times I would be alone, yet images of “looking for a place to live” were ever present.

 

As an adult, I began searching for ways to heal the wounds and insecurities of younger years, realizing a need to create a home within myself. To accomplish this, I had to re-parent myself so the “I” inside could unfold. Using psychotherapy, mind/body medicine, and spirituality that incorporated symbology, I began healing and my dreams changed. As I did this deep inner work, the weather in my dreams cleared; furnishings inside dwellings improved; people became more welcoming and friendly. Consequently, I began to focus on using dreams and symbols/images for healing.

 

Tayria: The function of dreams in general is to bring one home to oneself, to what is really going on inside, which isn’t always apparent in the outward gaze of daily living. Dreams speak a symbolic language. Every image, even the seemingly mundane, carries an important message from the unconscious to help the dreamer become aware of what the conscious mind does not yet know, but needs to: something relevant and important, something to bring balance, well-being and healing. By working with our dreams and their images, we begin a process of coming home deep within ourselves, the home we have been longing for.

 

When I met Marie, she lit up when she learned that I am a Jungian-oriented psychologist who works with people’s dreams. She described the powerful work she does creating mandalas, which seems a potent way of dreaming while awake. The mandala images, and the relationships among them, emerge from the same realm of the psyche as dreams do—the in-between land of dream-time.

 

The first dream of Marie’s that I worked with had a lot of imagery about home. The action took place in different rooms and areas around the house, each of which gave us insight into the “problem” expressed in the dream, along with helpful messages for her.

 

In dream symbology, “house” is a classic representation of the Self. Its structure represents the structure of the psyche. The front of the house indicates the part of Self that can be seen from the street, from the outside. The back yard is more private, generally known only to friends and family. Activity in the living area points to the more social or public parts of the personality, while the bedroom represents confidential or secret places. In a bathroom, cleansing and elimination are the focus. The basement can represent the subconscious—the attic the higher unconscious. What goes on and who shows up in these areas gives us clues to the inner life of the psyche.

 

This one symbol—home—is a rich example of how the Self uses imagery to show us what is going on subconsciously. The unconscious runs like a software program behind the scenes, directing everything: our perceptions, interpretations of what is said and what happens, thoughts and feelings, common reactions—everything! When we know how these programs operate, we can update or upgrade them, giving ourselves new choices for living.

 

Tayria and Marie were simultaneously inspired by each other and now collaborate to combine their complimentary perspectives. They have created an imagery series to explore dream work and mandala-making in small groups, to stimulate creative exposition of the images and tap into the personal and collective unconscious. The investigation of sleeping and waking dreams has been exciting for both.

 

Marie: By using the structure of the alchemical mandala, we have a form to address the images our soul offers. The mandalic structure is a visual representation of the process of alchemy—the transformation of material from one state to another, higher state. Using our dream imagery, we can help our soul transform the raw material of our unconscious into a higher form, thereby growing and evolving. Each step of this transformational journey brings us closer to our true home.

 

In our collaborative work together, Tayria and I offer group participants an opportunity to dialogue with their unconscious, using the language of its images. Each week, one or two members explore a dream with Tayria. By asking a series of questions to discover associations, she helps the dreamer understand the message within the symbols and activity.

 

Tayria: Every dream is personal, and also has a collective significance; archetypes and patterns in the collective unconscious, as well as for the individual, are revealed. Because of this, one person’s dream can become a rich source of insight for each person in the group.

 

Working with dreams and mandalas together brings the images into consciousness. It is fascinating to realize they are not just products of our minds, nor are they matter—the paper or substance that expresses them. They are actual living things that reside in the intermediate realm between mind and matter. Our work takes us into this “other” in-between realm, where transformation and healing begin. When we address these images in a sacred manner, significant revelations often occur. They offer strong medicine, capable of shifting mental and physical conditions.

 

A process of inviting the images back into sleep completes the cycle, which begins a further exploration and dialogue with the unconscious. Each symbol becomes a personal guide to further individuation.

 

“Home is where the heart is.” I once had a dream where I heard the words, “The heart speaks in images.” Much later, I learned that indigenous people say the same thing about the language of the heart. arie and I are excited about this journey to learn the heart’s language and venture closer and closer to its core.

 

 

Tayria Ward, Ph.D., a depth psychologist and dream analyst in private practice who does phone and face-to-face sessions. Her office is in Asheville’s Flatiron Building. Contact her at 828-329-0853 or visit www.tayriaward.com.

 

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC, is an expressive arts and body-centered therapist in private practice in Asheville, part of Asheville Healing House collective. More information about her work can be found at www.bodysoulspiritasheville.com.

Becoming Balanced and Whole Again

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b-m-s circlesRead this amazing personal story of a Licensed Clinical Social Worker becoming balanced and whole again through Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.

As a licensed marriage and family therapist working for many years with traumatized clients, I feel that I know the vast benefits of therapy.  Working with Marie Davis in my own therapy, however, has been and continues to be a life changing process more than I could have ever imagined. Marie utilizes Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a therapeutic model to really dig deep and address both attachment issues, or issues from our childhood, as well as trauma we have experienced such as an abusive relationship, difficult marriage, accident or even something as horrific as rape. She has helped me to peel back the layers so to speak of my own trauma to address my struggles on a cognitive, emotional and sensory level so I can once again become balanced and whole. Therapy with Marie has brought “new meaning” to “old hurts” so I can move past irritability, depression, anger and even physical pain in my body towards a once again happy and healthy Kelly. If you yearn for things to be different in your life, relationships to be whole again, thoughts to be clear with intention and to move past a history of trauma, Marie Davis can help you reach that place.

-Kelly R., Licensed Clinical Social Worker