Inner Work audiobook

Just excellent. Why did it take me so long to find this book? I've always admired Robert Johnson's memoir, BALANCING HEAVEN AND EARTH. This text should be required reading for anyone working with dreams or the imagination as part of their spiritual journey."In fact, no one "makes up" anything in the imagination. The material that appears in the imagination has to originate in the unconscious. .... Imagination is a TRANSFORMER that converts the invisible material into images the conscious mind can perceive.""Our isolation from the unconscious is synonymous with our isolation from our souls, from the life of the spirit. It results in the loss of our religious life, for it is in the unconscious that we find our individual conception of God and experience our deities. The religious function—this inborn demand for meaning and inner experience—is cut off with the rest of the inner life. … If we don’t go to the spirit, the spirit comes to us as neurosis."

Esu šališka C.G. Jungo ir ko pasekėjų vertintoja - (dažniausiai) man ten viskas aišku, įdomu ir atrodo, kad visiems reikalinga. Bet čia tikrai aišku :D ir suprantamai parašyta, kaip analizuoti savo sapnus ir dirbti su savo vaizduote, tik perskaityti ir pritaikyti belieka.2022-ųjų papildymas - skaičiau, nes prisireikė vienas užsiėmimui. Vėl nustebau, kaip viskas paprastai ir neprimityviai parašyta. Iš kitos pusės, aiškiau matau, kad čia tik pirmieji žingsniai ir norintiems eiti toliau skaityti irgi reikės daugiau.

This book is founded on the very psychoanalytic presuppositions that (a) an important (deep) part of who we are can only understand the world symbolically, (b) our adult, rational processes are unable to directly access these deeply symbolic aspects of our selves, and (c) we need to adopt special ‘playful’ ways of engaging and encountering our ‘deep symbolic self in order to understand and interact with it. I put the word ‘playful’ in those weird ‘half quote’ thingies (that I still don’t entirely understand how to use) because I want to draw attention to the special usage of this word. When someone from the psychodynamic tradition says ‘playful’ what they mean is the very advanced, very adult capacity to knock an idea around, get curious with it, explore it, flexibly adopt different cognitive stances and look at it from different perspectives.Any creative knows that this type of ‘play’ can be really fucking demanding and deadly serious. I’m clarifying all of this (in part) because I myself am literally allergic to the goofy, hippy, infantilizing, human potential movement style, experiential therapy techniques popular in the 60s and 70s. These interventions were posited as playful, but they were gross and un-boundaried and always awkward.It’s like play therapy for lame extroverts. Yuck!That is precisely the awful and creepy type of thing I avoid and resent. But this ain’t (necessarily) one of those. If you dread those like I do.Fear not. Active imagination is a therapeutic self inquiry technique that uses the imagination to engage, encounter and better understanding these aspects of our psychological selves that are otherwise obscure or unclear.But it does not require singing and dancing or any other kind of public display of catharsis. Unless you’re into that type of thing. Anyway.Inner work is an accessible, plain spoken accounting of the dream interpretation and the active imagination process and their theoretical underpinnings, with easy to self-implement ‘how to’ sections. I liked this book a lot. I found it to be sober, clear, useful and quite inspirational at times. I have been tinkering with the dream analysis techniques and imaginal processes described in the book to great effect in my personal life and professionally in my capacity as a therapist. The book feels a little dated and dry at times, but that’s a feature not a flaw in so far as it deals with a topic that can easily become so dooshy and woo woo as to inspire any normal, sane, critical thinker to stop drop and roll. In other words. This is a reasonable, practical guide to doing dream work and inner exploration, sans the new age pewp. I prescribe a lot of books in my therapeutic work with people. That being said. I’m very very conservative with the books I recommend to clients.I only recommend books that I have read carefully, and that are sober, smart, useful, and well written.Inner Work will definitely make that cut. The only reason I’m not giving it 5 stars is because I started reading Mind Fixers by Annie Harrington right afterward and it’s so good that it’s currently wrecking me for other books (past, present and future).So like 4.75 stars I guess 🤔⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

Dreamwork archetypal analysis.

I have only read 1/3 of the book but I feel like I have opened a Pandora's Box. It has been one "aha" moment after another ever since I started reading this book a couple days ago. Just blew my mind away!! It opened my eyes to, what to me is, the Greatest SECRET of the Universe: the essence of the total self, relationship between the conscious and subconscious, the subconscious as the source of all creativity and language, the symbolic language that the subconscious uses to communicate with the conscious mind through dream images and imagination, the notion of the collective subconscious of all of humankind, and how fairytales and myths are an expression of it.Being a scientist who has always prided herself in her superior rational thinking abilities, another major epiphany for me has been about the major disconnect in modern culture between science and the spiritual/religious. I guess with all the great scientific and technological feats of the past century, a lot of us have gotten a little too cocky, over confident about the capabilities of the rational mind, and have degraded or dismissed the spiritual and religious to the realm of pure personal belief.

This is an excellent work on the process of dream interpretation and is the first book to give me real confidence that I can interpret my own dreams. The process Johnson outlines is deceptively simple but it leads to some intense, evocative results. Beyond the mechanics of dream interpretation, the book is incredibly well written. Johnson is a thoughtful, engaging writer who puts words together in a way that we not only understand but enjoy reading.

I'm a big fan of Carl Jung. I've read other books on Jungian psychology. But loved this book because it's so easy to understand. The nice thing about this book is that it provides practical methods for working with dreams and imagination. I've been maintaining a dream journal for 2 years now. Reading this book gave me better clarity. But the methods outlined in the book are rather difficult and tedious to follow and don't work for me every time. The unconscious doesn't seem to co-operate so easily. especially active imagination. What seems to help me is the urge to understand or sometimes a flash of insight. Not so much a step by step method. Or, maybe I'm doing something wrong! Nevertheless, it's a great read

Thanks to this book I discovered the idea of active imagination, which I found very inspiring and enriched my inner life and spiritual practice.

Soooo interesting. I started reading this while engaged in a course on meditation and the body's subtle energy systems. Dreams were referenced as a way to engage with our inner selves and I remembered I had this book on my shelf. I hadn't realized it was a Jungian approach to creating a meaningful relationship with one's unconscious selves. Absolutely fabulous, and I think I'll be absorbing and going back to this one for a while.

I used this book to write a paper for my grad school application. It was extremely well written and described for any person at any level to dive into dream work and active imagination.