Give the Gift of Self Reflection
A Great Time for Gratitude and Self-Reflection!
As the year draws to a close, setting aside time to reflect about the past can bring the rewards of experiencing closure, finding meaning in painful events, and discovering patterns that need to be discarded to achieve something new in 2022.
The support of many people made it possible for my book to get the #1 New Release status on Amazon (for books on psychology Education and training). Click here to check it out on Amazon.
If you haven’t read it yet, I hope you will soon. I promise the framework I offer will be helpful as you wind down one year and set intentions for 2022. My eBook is just $.99 through the end of the year, and if you don’t already have one, get yourself a journal to accompany you as you read. Click here to see options I sell on my store.
So many of the people who provided encouragement, feedback, and reviews I met through The Write Practice, a virtual community of instructors, editors, mentors, and writers.
“How do you become a successful writer?” was the question founder Joe Bunting posed to eager students like me during one of his webinars a year and a half ago. “Generosity!” he passionately proclaimed before we had time to think about it. “We help each other.”
If I didn’t have Clarity about who I was becoming a year ago, my growing tribe of fellow creative colleagues is an indication of where my life is heading now. I am so thankful for their ongoing support.
I Wrote this Book for You—Or Someone You Know
Never in my wildest dreams did I believe I would become an unwitting victim of the archetypal midlife crisis. Now I laugh inside at people who think they can escape this significant and important transition in life. It might be your last day on Earth, but it will come for you. Only intense self-reflection and questioning of one’s deepest beliefs and assumptions leads to enlightenment about purpose and the meaning of life.
It may be that one purpose of the odd coincidence of being called to study depth psychology and the beginning of the end of my twenty-four-year marriage was to live through these concepts in real time so I could pass along a helpful framework to others.
As a control freak with a strong ego and many defensive coping strategies, I might otherwise have been swallowed up by my experience, or my continued denial of the truth of the situation would have limited my potential in the next phase of life.
This review of my book captures beautifully the tone and intent of my book. Click here or on the image to see more reviews.
Excerpts from Chapter One—The Discovery of You.
I hope you will take me up on my offer to dig into your life. If you are one of the rare people who has already experienced a symbolic death and rebirth, you know someone else who needs a framework to live through the process that leads to taking flight as their own version of the Phoenix rising from the ashes.
Do you really know yourself? I want to get you excited about exploring the most important final frontier—your inner world. Making sense of your current life will influence your future in ways you never imagined. Can you get through life without this depth of self-reflection? Sure, and many do. Others reach a time in life when what used to make sense doesn’t anymore. The way you approach life now is a stepping-stone to growing into the next version of you.
Have you reflected about why you believe what you believe? Did you adopt your parents’ religious beliefs, or did you run the other way? What does your annoyance with certain people say about you? Are you the black sheep in the family? Why did you become a lawyer or a community activist? Do you know the real reason you got married? If you’re struggling with alcohol, have you wondered what you’re really craving? Do you wonder why that thing your mother always says makes you so angry, or why you can’t help saying hurtful things to your sister? Do you know why you’re obsessed with certain Netflix shows or why you cannot watch enough superhero movies? Have you figured out what that recurring dream wants from you, the one where a plane crashes? Why do you feel fear when someone expresses misogynistic ideas even if you are not in physical danger? What is your earliest childhood memory?
Answers to questions like these are clues to discovering what a deeper part of you wants from you now. The deeper part of you can be referred to as Soul, and the Soul speaks to you through your unconscious. Soul is part of you and at the same time transcends your physical form. Soul connects you to everything and everyone. Soul allows the Source of creative energy to mix with your unique human experiences for the purpose of creating only what you can create. Soul is a perspective, a way of living life, a drive to find meaning, and Soul is how we make meaning. Soul cannot be pinned down. Soul is a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb.
Not coming into relationship with your unconscious means forgoing acquiring knowledge about most of who you are. Exploring all this is not about reliving or getting stuck in the past, nor is it about punishing yourself, or making excuses for bad behavior. It’s more like being a witness or companion to yourself as you reach into unknown parts of you and grab the things that will help you make sense of your current life. You’ll begin to see things you never saw before, as if you had been given a magnifying glass to reveal choices that never occurred to you before or that seemed possible.
Another version of you awaits! Strange events in my life had been staged by another version of me, a version that had opinions and needs of her own. Answering the mysterious call to pursue depth psychology no matter the cost set something in motion, including the beginning of the end of my twenty-four-year marriage. In that moment, I trusted the voice that had escaped the deepest part of me. She must know something I don’t, I thought. It was terrifying, but I gave up the need to know how it would go.
If I hadn’t surrendered to my inner being—my Soul—I would not have experienced the eventual reconciliation of the opposing forces inside me. The treasure that awaited was deeper relationship with my feminine nature, my body, my sexuality, and the deepest part of me—the bridge to what some describe as God. If I hadn’t embraced the uncertainty that answering the call had involved, then I might not have found and unleashed a buried creative urge that now freely roams the Earth. If I had not explored the root of the patterns of thinking and behaving that led me to show up in my marriage the way I did, I would have missed out on all the sexual and spiritual Growth I have been able to experience.
This is what I want for you. Your Soul is speaking to you all the time—through inner beings and forces that live, play, and argue in the playground of your unconscious. But are you listening, or do you dismiss those fleeting nudges? I know you have days where you feel a powerful urge to do something different, and then another part of you uses logic and reason to push it down. You can’t ignore it anymore, but you feel fear at the prospect of making the decisions that need to be made to answer the call. There will be people around you who will be vocal about their disapproval of your journey to find your own truth because that will shine a light on the denial of their own.
My book teaches you how to hear and communicate with your unconscious, the realm of the unknown, the vessel through which and from which your Soul communicates with you. Your biggest challenge will be conventional systems that have influenced your approach to life. These systems have helped you make sense of the world and your place in it, but these systems also drown out, distract you from, or invalidate your inner knowing, and they end up thinking for you.
C.G. Jung (Carl Jung), one of the founders of depth psychology—the study of the unconscious—suggested more than a hundred years ago that the fate of humanity depended upon the self-reflecting individual. He suggested the collective psyche of a large group is more like that of an animal as reflected in its mob mentality (Jung, 1954/1968). Avoiding self-reflection leads to the dangerous path of accepting as truth what would not withstand scrutiny by any measure of critical thinking. Allow this book to be your guide as you come into deeper relationship with your Self and Others and see what begins to unfold.
Dreams Are One Way Soul Speaks
Your dreams for example are a great source of guidance for what you cannot see clearly yet. Pay attention to your dreams as we move towards the end of the calendar year. Your dreams look ahead and provide clues about how to move forward in your life. My book teaches readers how to find meaning in their dreams.
Just last night, I had this dream:
I was in a small house on a coast. I looked out the window and
waves were beginning to form and move towards the beach.
The waves were gaining momentum in size and speed as they rushed towards the shore.
Then I saw what seemed like a tidal wave, but it was perpendicular to the shore rather than parallel.
This confused me. I had felt safe, but now the house moved as the waves began to overtake it.
I called to the others and we left the house.
Dreams that include images of water and houses are always significant, and the sideways tidal wave seems to indicate that I will need to go against what feels natural. Where and when and how are the questions I will be investigating next. Stay tuned.
Who Do You Know Could Benefit from this Book?
Give yourself or someone you care about a framework for deep self-reflection. Your Soul is Talking. Are You Listening? is available for sale as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and other online distributors for $.99 only through the end of the year. Paperback ($12.99) and hardcover ($21.99) version are available on Amazon.
- Have you been rethinking things in your life? My book will help you get in touch with the deeper part of yourself, the part that has been too shy to show itself, or ignored by you for too long. Read my book if you haven’t and leave a review on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Reviews help get it in front of more people who need a framework for self-reflection.
- Buy my book as a gift for someone you care about. The paperback and hardcover versions allow for readers to take notes and highlight parts of the book that really speak to them.
- Share my blog post and other social media messages with others.
- Copy, paste, and share this note/link to people in your networks (FB, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In): If something has fallen apart in your life, or if you’re just curious about the meaning of your dreams, check out Deborah Lukovich’s book Your Soul is Talking. Are You Listening?
Please give a shoutout for the beautiful photo of the stormy sea by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
Also give a shoutout for the photo of self-reflection by Daniil KuĹľelev on Unsplash
Have a wonderful Holiday Season and cheers to a
New Year full of peace and abundance!
Originally Published on https://www.deborahlukovich.com/blog/
