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

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Psyche and Eros: A Myth Revealing Psychological Dynamics of Love and Relationship

February 3, 2015 by mariedavis

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

Myths and fairy tales may rightly be understood as the dreams of our collective psyche. They reveal deep archetypal dilemmas and patterns common to human development, experienced in some form by every individual within a culture. As our dreams of the night speak in stories and images that reveal the innermost depths of the psyche, so do myths use similar language. They are the culture dreaming out loud in well-told tales. While sometimes myths feel obscure or irrelevant to the modern person, if we endeavor to understand their world of symbols and allegory, modern humans will find an invaluable guide for living a rich and soulful life.

erosWitches, monsters and dragons that appear in our myths can represent deep-seated fears, as well as unconscious shadow characteristics. Stories of abduction, separation, love, loss, envy, jealousy, or heroism reveal the psychological situations and challenges we experience. Reading the myths and locating our own story within them can help us to not take ourselves so personally, recognizing the common nature of our most intimate challenges. They show a path to action, acceptance, perspective and wisdom offering tremendous healing value. Myths help in understanding different stages of initiation, the inner experiences and spiritual helpers on the path of personal development and within our relationships.

Eros and Psyche has become a classic story regarding love and romance. It addresses patterns of development in human and divine relationships—both one’s internal relationship to Soul and Self, and outer relationships to loved ones. This myth has been widely used as a subject in literature and art as a basis for psychological and cultural analysis, capturing the imagination broadly since it first appeared in the second century in the writings of Apuleius.

The story is told in varying ways. One version goes like this: Psyche is a princess who is the most fair and beautiful in her whole land, but she cannot find a husband. When her royal parents plea for help, the Gods tell them to put her in a death chamber. They weep with sorrow but do as they are told. As Psyche lay there alone, cold, and fearful, the West Wind comes and swoops her into a castle that is beautiful and has everything, both beautiful and necessary. But she longs for companionship. After the first night, her companion, the God Eros (also known by the name Amour, and also as Cupid) comes in the dark and shares intimate conversation, love, and lovemaking with her. Psyche is finally happy.

In time, she misses her family and asks Eros if she can bring them to the castle. He finally agrees but says they can only come during the day. Once her sisters arrive they are very envious of Psyche’s new life. They incessantly ask about her lover, but come to discover that she has never seen him, since he always comes to her in the dark of the night and never reveals himself. They purport that she may be in love with an ugly beast. At their urging Psyche finally carries a lamp and a knife into the room of her sleeping lover, an act that he has strictly forbidden. The light reveals him to be the most handsome, desirable God, the God of Love himself.

Psyche is startled and spills oil from her lamp on Eros, awakening him. She has broken the rule of darkness, and is banished from the castle. Amour says he can never see her again. Psyche finds herself lost in a wilderness. In despair she pleads to the gods for help.

Aphrodite, Eros’ mother, responds but will only help Psyche if she completes the four impossible tasks that she gives her. Psyche manages to accomplish these one by one, with the aid of natural and supernatural help. At the end of these she is exhausted and collapses. Amour flies down from heaven, revives her and gives her the gift of immortality. They can now be married and have the divine love that began on Earth, in the light of heaven for all time.

We could say that Psyche in the earlier stage of the story is an idealized, not-yet-initiated aspect of the Soul. It is hard to find a functional love relationship at this stage. First we must undergo a death ritual, a dying to innocence. When Love then comes to us, though we may think that we are happy, Love’s true face is unknown. We are in a gripping unconscious situation. When the time comes to shed the light of consciousness on our relationship, all sorts of disasters occur. The God of Love disappears from us. The Goddess of Love sets out impossible tasks for us to achieve in order to reclaim love. Each of the tasks requires the aid of natural and supernatural, miraculous, helpers. Persistence is necessary. Just when we have given up in exhaustion, Love returns. We become immortal and mortal at the same time, an initiated human in relationship to divine powers.

Each of psyche’s tasks is highly symbolic. In one she is confronted with a huge mound of a wide variety of seeds, which she is told to sort into separate piles before dawn. It is an impossible task, until an army of ants comes to assist her with the sorting. Magically, the task is accomplished. When we are in a “seed sorting” phase of love’s initiation, we may find that we have to sort out the seeds in our psyche in short order: these are thoughts about love or responses learned from family, these from the culture, these from a couple of failed relationships, these are what I actually think, these my friends want me to think, these my partner insists upon and so forth. It can be necessary to sort it all out very quickly in order to salvage the relationship but if one persists, seemingly magical assistance occurs.

In another task Psyche must steal golden wool from violent sheep. She is sure to be killed by them, but a reed gives her good advice. She is able to gather the wool stuck in briars at the end of the day rather than be exposed to the danger directly. This advice from nature can be life saving at a psychological level.

While learning to navigate the relationships in our lives—whether romantic, familial, friendships, colleagues—all of these stories from the myth may come into play. There will be a loss of innocence required as a relationship matures. Psychological separations, tasks, challenges, and helpers arrive. Receiving guidance from the symbolic and mythic dimensions of the psyche can be salvational.

Marie and I have developed Dreams and Mandala workshops that greatly assist participants in developing communication with these soulful dimensions lying just behind the veil of more rational or conscious thought. Dreams of the night are always speaking to us from this realm, offering timely, healing, personal, and wise guidance. In these workshops we learn the language of the dream together. I have been studying dreams for 40 years now. Years of extensive investigation of the world’s religions, followed by earning a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology where I learned approaches to dreamwork developed by Freud, Jung and archetypal psychologists, have uniquely prepared me to work with people’s dreams.

Dreams are your ‘visions of the night’ that speak the language of myth and symbol. They may seem like an undecipherable mixture of random characters, events and images, but a trained ear can locate their system of logic, which is invariably a strong medicine for the heart and spirit. Once a person begins to write down his or her dreams and muse with their messages, life becomes a meaning-filled adventure of psyche’s development, a journey for the soul with access to new maps.

Marie uses alchemical mandala-making as a structure which helps uncover archetypal beliefs, feelings, and actions that we habitually ‘fall into.’ Working the dream messages while making these mandalas offers an opportunity to be more deeply present to life during situations that may ‘wake us up.’ In this technique, we collect collage images that express the issues, challenges and movement in our inner life. By ‘ensouling’ these images with meaning, placing them on paper where we can see and move them around, something alchemical occurs, internally, which 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.

The alchemical mandala is a different approach from making Eastern mandalas. The structure places pictures that represent different internal thought patterns, creating an objective way of looking at the Self and areas of life where we may feel stuck. By choosing images to represent soul gestures, we take our ‘problems’ and place them outside of ourselves to gain a different perspective on the challenging life events, giving us an opportunity to develop ourselves, change beliefs and find new responses and behaviors, especially in our relationships.

When we do the dream and mandala work in a group, each person’s narrative adds insight, texture and richness to our own. A rare kind of community is formed. The dramas presented in ancient Greece were for similar purposes—telling mythic stories that help wake up audiences to realms of meaning, mystery and magic that inform our lives.

We love this opportunity to share with others the fascinating combination of dreams and mandala work. Participants in our workshops have reported life altering experiences of insight and healing.

Psyche and Eros – Soul and Divine Love – these are the muses that give purpose and richness to our everyday lives. It is a love story we all participate in, each in our own way. Relationships form the fabric of existence; no one can do this life alone. Working with the Psyche and Eros myth, finding techniques to engage its meanings and messages, is a gift that helps bring the immortal dimensions of love and soul into the mortal arena of human existence.


Tayria Ward, Ph.D. is a dream analyst in private practice. She sees clients in her office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville, and also provides phone sessions for dreamers all over the country. Visit www.tayriaward.com for more information.

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor with a graduate degree in Expressive Arts Therapy and has a private practice on Orange St, in Asheville. She has studied and practiced Rosicrucian soul alchemy for the past 15 years through various trainings and self-study.

For more information call Marie @ 828/273-5647 or Tayria @ 828/329-0853

Filed Under: Events, Mind - Body Health Tagged With: ritual, ancient wisdom, holistic counseling, experiential therapy, expressive arts asheville, expressive arts in asheville, group therapy, dream work, personal transformation, symbols, dream analysis

Dreams and Mandala Making

August 8, 2014 by mariedavis

sky, moon, clouds

Tap Into the Power of Your Dreams

“Listening to Dreams Through Mandala Making”

With Tayria Ward, PhD. & Marie O. Davis, LPC

Six week Series: March 3- April 7, Tuesdays 6-8pm

Location: The Healing House, 33 Orange St, Asheville, NC

Register Early, Space is Limited

 Price $295 for six week series

To Register http://bodysoulspiritasheville.com/contact/ and click Paypal Button


Six week series

Listening to dreams and creating mandalas together brings to the surface spiritual and psychological material that is working us unconsciously – we often get that “Ah-ha! now I see it” experience! It allows us to recognize what is going on through symbols and images as they present themselves. These images are neither mind nor matter – they are living things that emerge from an intermediate realm between mind and matter – what Carl Jung called the “psychoid” realm. All healing and transformation begin in this in-between dimension. When our images are worked with together, significant revelations often occur, capable of powerfully shifting our mental and physical conditions.

Tayria works the dreams of participants, using skills she has gained from 40 years of learning the dream language. Marie teaches the technique for making an alchemical mandala. It allows you to see more deeply into the nature of issues you are dealing with, and thus to alchemically transform them.  Using our dream imagery, we help the soul to work on the raw material of unconsciousness; we literally grow and evolve as we do this work together. Each step of the journey is a remodeling for our soul and brings us closer to our most intimate truths.

smiling mandala (2)

In their collaborative work together, Tayria and Marie offer participants an opportunity to enter into the process of dialoguing with the unconscious, using its own language, that of symbols and images.  During each session, Tayria will work dreams. By asking a series of questions and discovering associations, she helps the dreamer to understand the important messages offered to them in their dreams of the night. The information discovered is most often equally helpful to every other member in the group. Using the images and stories gathered, we then move into creating mandalas. These further the integration of insights as well as continue the revelations that come from the dreaming. The process is exhilarating, fascinating, healing and transforming.

Tayria Ward, Ph.D. is a dream analyst in private practice. She sees clients in her office in the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville, and also provides phone sessions for dreamers all over the country.  Visit: www.tayriaward.com for more information.

Marie O. Davis, MA, LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor with a graduate degree in Expressive Arts Therapy and has a private practice on Orange St, in Asheville.  She has studied and practiced Rosicrucian soul alchemy for the past15 years through various trainings and self-study.  

For more information call Marie @ 828/273-5647 or Tayria @ 828/329-0853

 

Start your own dream group with friends. Contact Tayria to discuss.

Playwright Henry Miller had this to say about working with his dreams:

The realization that there was a pattern to my life, one which made sense, came about in a curious way. Shortly after moving into the Villa Seurat I had begun to record my dreams. And not only the dreams but the associations which the act of transcribing them induced. Doing this over a period of months, I suddenly began to see, “To suddenly see,” as Saroyan says somewhere. A pregnant phrase—to anyone who has had the experience. An expression which has only one meaning: to see with new eyes.

Learn to see with new eyes, hear with the heart and open the mind by working with your dreams, hearing the dreams of others and learning about the realm of the dreamtime. It can be for you as it was for Henry Miller, the patterns of your life and of life itself become magnificently unveiled through dreamwork.

Call Tayria: 828-329-0853

From Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss:

“Long before the first Europeans set foot on American soil, the Iroquois taught their children that dreams are the single most important source of both practical and spiritual guidance. The first business of the day in an Iroquois village was dream sharing, because it was assumed that dreams were messages from the spirits and the deeper self, and that they might contain guidance for the community as well as the individual.”

“The early Iroquois regarded someone who was not in touch with their dreams as the victim of serious soul-loss.”

“Today, it is popular on the Iroquois reservation for people to supplement their dreams with readings of tarot cards, tea leaves, or shreds of native tobacco bobbing in a simmering saucepan.”

From Listening to the Oracleby Dianne Skafte, Ph.D.:

“Oracles speak from a mysterious source beyond the personal self. We always experience these communications as coming in from elsewhere. One may imagine that oracles issue from a domain of the human psyche, or perhaps they exist independently from us, but their nature will always remain a mystery.”

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: asheville psychotherapy, Mandala, dream work, personal transformation, art therapy, personal growth, Jungian analysis

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