Due to the nature of the mental imagery I experience in direct connection to my inner psychological and spiritual states, I will periodically visit this inner imagery to get an idea of how I’m doing.  The state of the imagery directly reflects my psychological progress.  So let’s visit the different parts of my inner landscape and see what everything looks like.

Home By the Sea, with the Ship

My Inner Ship has been docked here at my Home By the Sea for some time now. It was my conveyance on my ‘inner journey’ as I ‘traveled’ around my psyche, learning about myself, healing, and growing.  It still gets taken out on occasion, mostly to clean up trash out of the Sea, which represents mental and spiritual ‘flotsam and jetsam’ in my psyche (the Sea).  It is still in the form of a crab fishing boat, one of the sea-worthiest vessels around, though it has taken many forms over the last six years.

As for my Home, it looks like a home now, and functions like one.  The living room is still full of boxes and trunks that need to be gone through, which represent unprocessed baggage, though there are fewer than there used to be.  But the house is tidy, clean, and organized with functioning power and plumbing.  The many bedrooms are occupied by different parts of my psyche at different ages, for whom my Higher Self essentially plays a Mother role.  Most, but not all, are children, ranging in age from 3 to 17.  Others are adults parts of my psyche, ranging from 23 to 46.

It is the imagery of the Home by the Sea that most closely reflects my real life.  While my real house does not look like my Inner House, sadly, their statuses are similar, with most things put away and tidy and a few other things needing going through, representing my ongoing therapeutic process.

The House itself is a fairy tale dwelling, a multi-story Victorian stone-and-wood mansion one might expect a witch to live in, and indeed, there are cats everywhere and a wild garden in the yard.  Inside, there are hidden rooms and passageways and stairwells which are mostly used for fun, but which can serve as hiding places if necessary, making it appear to outsiders as if no one is home.

Not that anyone who lives there really has to worry about intruders.  There are only two ways to access the House, and one is by Sea, which means I’ll see them coming.  The other path comes via The Garden in the Dark Forest, and there’s only one person who knows where that is or who can access it.

The Garden in the Dark Forest

Like the Sea, the Garden represents my psyche, just in a different way.  If the Sea is all of the superficial, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious layers of my psyche and how they interrelate with one another, then the Garden is all of the life that grows in those different layers and how they interrelate with one another.

In the center of the Garden stands the Tree, which I have been actively trying to heal for years now.  It represents my lifeforce, the central pillar of energy from which all aspects of my life draw from, and it was poisoned by a variety of life experiences.  Recently I made a figurative and literal breakthrough as I envisioned ‘breaking through’ a layer of rock within the roots of the Tree that were strangling it, allowing a surge of energy to flow through the Tree.

Since then, I have ‘bandaged’ the Tree’s roots by filling the dirt back into its hole and have been ‘fertilizing’ it, and therefore counteracting the poisons, with positive things like love, forgiveness, and compassion.  This has allowed the Tree to heal, and it has stopped losing leaves and is growing the most beautiful flowers to match its rainbow leaves.  I’m looking forward to seeing what real life fruits the Tree bears in the future.

The Tree is not the only thing in the Garden.  There are many groupings of shrubs, most notably the ones that represent men and women.  There is a cabin within the walled Garden, and next to it is a cluster of flowering shrubs that represent maternal energy: frangipani, jasmine, and henna.  They fill the Garden with a lovely, soothing aroma.  They were once tangled together in an ugly bramble that wouldn’t bloom, but I magically disentangled them one day, making them separate from one another so they were not strangling each other anymore.

In another area of the Garden stand a cluster of shrubs that were also once entangled with one another.  They represented masculine energies that were inappropriately intermixed: fathers with lovers with brothers with friends with grandfathers, etc.  It was the result of being sexually predated on when I was a young child, which horribly mixed up my impressions of men.  In order to separate these masculine roles within my mind, I had to do my best to disentangle these shrubs and trees that had grown together.

I am disappointed to say that I have only been partially successful in this endeavor.  While I was able to disentangle the trees and shrubs aboveground, they still share a root system, unfortunately, because I was so young when these masculine roles became intertwined.  As such, the masculine energies of the different roles are still intertwined on certain levels.  This means that I still view all men through the eyes of an abused child, which makes adult interactions problematic sometimes.

The nice thing about manipulating imagery in an internal landscape is that virtually anything is possible.  Things that qualify as imaginary superpowers in the real world are completely accessible in the inner landscape, and so I know it is within my power to separate those masculine energies and roles.  I just have to come up with the right visualization that will enable that psychological work.

This is what I work on in my Dark Forest, which represents the shadowy, hidden side of my psyche.  The Garden was once walled off from the Forest, but now it is essentially a part of the Dark Forest, its ‘walls’ now comprised of very tall trees with very wide trunks growing so closely together, a person could not fit between them.  Two paths lead from the Garden out of the Dark Forest: one runs to my Home by the Sea, and the other leads to the Valley.

The Valley

The Valley was where I spent the vast majority of my ‘inner time’ as I was engaged in the process of retrieving lost and missing parts of my psyche for a few years.  This Valley lies in the Otherworld, which has many names.  I have a House here overlooking the Valley from the North, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to a Hobbit hole.  Every time I retrieved a missing part of myself, I would bring it ‘home’ to rest and heal.  For a time, there were many parts of myself on the hillside by my House, all awaiting reunion and reintegration.

This is an ongoing process, one that is taking several steps.  Once my lost parts were retrieved, I led them over a bridge crossing the River that runs through the Valley to where a neverending Party takes place on an Island in the middle of the River.  Here my missing parts remembered what it was like to be alive, a necessary step before reintegration.  Many of my parts had been divided and needed to be reunited with their other halves, and that was something else that occurred in the Valley, especially on the Island in the River.

After my divided parts were made whole, we all took the Ship to the Home by the Sea, which is where Myself and all of my parts have been for about the last year or so.  My house in the Valley is not abandoned, but that is not where I ‘live’ anymore.  However, I know I will return there someday as a completely integrated soul, and when that happens, the darkness that lays over the Valley will turn to light.  Whether that will happen while I’m alive or after I’m dead is an unanswerable question.

The River

Along with the Ship, the River has been the most constant source of imagery since the beginning of my journey almost six years ago.  It seems to represent my lifestream, while the Ship is the physical conveyance (a Chariot, if you will) that conducts me down that lifestream.  At first, it was a River running at the bottom of a deep, narrow canyon in a desert, and the Ship was a canoe.   Sometimes it was calm, but sometimes it was running with rapids that nearly drowned me.

At least once, the River led me to the Sea, which I had to navigate (along with the Sky) back to land where I once again picked up the course of the River.  This time, the River is running across the floor of a much wider desert valley with steep mountains on both sides.  The silt and sand of the desert floor has broken up the flow of the River into multiple channels, and they are joining and shifting to change the main channel of the River.

Whereas before, I was journeying upon the River in a Ship, representing exploring my life and psyche, now it is my life itself that is changing as I simultaneously continue the process of exploration.  This is keeping me on my toes as I find formerly available ‘channels’ in my psyche are closing up while new ones are opening.  I’m trying to stay adaptable, knowing that this is my subconscious guiding me onto a new and better path and away from damaging thought patterns.  I mustn’t resist the process.

The Icebound Heart

It took about a year and a half, but my Icebound Heart is icebound no more.  When I first encountered it, it really was frozen and bound in ice, not even beating.  Only after smashing the ice with a hammer and freeing my heart did it begin beating, but oh so slowly and coldly.  Only with repeated, gentle attention did it begin to thaw and beat with more strength and regularity, only achieving what might be called a healthy rhythm a few months ago, and it was still cold.

Now it beats with a warm, normal rhythm, though it is still guarded in some ways, represented by an invisible shield around it that only I can See, but that others can feel when they bounce off of it.  Until the world becomes a kinder, more compassionate and understanding place, I’m not sure if this will ever change.  I have no illusions about ever being a completely normal, ‘undamaged’ person.

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And that is the status of my inner imagery at the moment.  I long ago lost track of all of the visualizations and visions that I have had since awakening six years ago, although I tried to write as many of them down as possible.  They lie somewhere in the bowels of the last six years worth of journal entries I’ve made, which I’m somewhat reticent to look at for fear of the level of ‘crazy’ that might lie within them.  I just need to learn to read my writing without Judgment, something I constantly battle with.  I wasn’t ‘crazy’, I was just processing an immense amount of information, and that made me hard to understand sometimes.

I know there is a great deal of wisdom and insight within those journal entries, and one day I will begin reading the entries to mine them for that wisdom and insight.  For now, it is enough to have the personal knowledge that the visions and visualizations have served a purpose, a very important one that has allowed me to heal and grow.  I am grateful that synchronicity led me to the works of Carl Jung almost instantly after my awakening, giving me a guide to what was happening inside my head after unintentionally falling through a hole in the walls of reality.

For that is all that really happened to me.  Like Alice in Wonderland, I tumbled down a hole, found myself in a completely different place, and had to find my way out.  Along the way, I saw and experienced many strange things that changed me forever.  I cannot look at the so-called ‘real world’ the same way anymore knowing that this Other place exists and that I can go there anytime I wish.  This is not ‘crazy’, it is merely a way of existing that has largely been lost to religious oppression, war, and medical pathologizing.

Defusing Judgment continues to be my ongoing inner task at the moment, and I hope the day soon comes when I can begin mining my journal entries for their wisdom, here in the 7th year of my ‘new life’ since awakening.  I can tell from the imagery of the River that I am in the midst of the final shift away from my ‘old life’ towards finishing establishing my ‘new life’.  I am by now used to existing in limbo, suspended between one thing and another as I await transition.  It’s practice for my new existence as a Walker Between the Worlds, always with one foot in this world and one foot in the next, in the grand tradition of Earth-centered spiritualists throughout history and stretching far back into time, before humans even had words.

These are the boots, hat, and cloak I now wear, spiritually speaking.  I even have a virtual magic staff, given to me by my therapist years ago to battle my inner demons.  I have altered the powers of this staff over time to enable it to serve as a source of light as well as different manners of weapon.  It can send out a shockwave of light that will knock over anyone it hits, or even generate an earthquake if thumped on the ground.

Rather than being frightened by my visions and visualizations as I’m sure some would be, I find them empowering and healing and guiding.  Rather than seeing them as being abnormal, I see them as being completely normal artifacts of my subconscious, ones that are trying to teach me important lessons about myself.  Indeed, as I learn these lessons in what seems to be an extended curriculum of Life itself, I find the bad lessons of the past falling away and being replaced by much better timeless lessons.

I’m looking forward to seeing how my visions change over the coming months according to changes in my life.  What will I See next?  What fruits might the Tree in the Garden be bearing?  Will I have gained the ability to separate the roots of the Shrub of Men?  What trunks and boxes from Home by the Sea might have been unpacked?  What will the River’s bed look like, and the landscape surrounding it?  Will the formerly Icebound Heart be less guarded?  Might the darkened sky over the Valley and the Dark Forest lighten just a little bit?

All I can do is continue my daily journey upon my inner River and take what comes in the moment.  My mantra for the last six years has been “trust the process”, and so far that’s worked out pretty well, so that’s what I’ll keep doing.