A guest post by Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D.
I just offered a seminar in Dream Tending to our students in the Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices Specialization of the Depth Psychology Ph.D. Program. What a delight it was to do so. This community of diverse professionals came to “the work” with a passion and background in the Healing Arts. On this day they brought their empathy, creativity, and experience into the classroom. The imaginal field in South Hall at the Lambert Road Campus activated in generative ways. The “inner-subjective imaginal field” opened widely, including dream images, dreamer, and dream tender, an essential dimension of hosting the embodied, living images of psyche. When the relational field, in this case a specific learning environment, resonated with care, curiosity, and high regard, the figures in dream became particularly vital and presented themselves in potent ways.
During class, we were visited by an animal presence in a landscape. Both the creature and habitat were alive and actual. All of us felt their presence and the “teachings” offered through their visitations. In addition, what really touched me were the remarkable talents of the students who brought their intuition, intelligence, and curiosity into the “conversations” with both the dream images and the dreamer.
Dream Tending is a craft that combines sound clinical skill along with tools for animating living images. When a community of students such as these assembles, we truly experience the “others” who are in the room along with us. Their intelligence, guidance, and visitation become part of our life experience . . . and we are better for it. For me, this experience once again underscores the idea that “dreams are alive.” The living images continue to dream us through their experience as we are dreaming them into theirs.
Dr. Aizenstat will present Introduction to Dream Tending: A Practical Approach to Dreamwork on July 14-16. More information can be found by clicking here.
Explore the coursework in the Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices Specialization, specifically the course The Inner Landscape of Dreams and Active Imagination.
Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., is the Chancellor and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a professor of depth psychology with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, licensed marriage and family therapist, and a credentialed public schools teacher and counselor. Dr. Aizenstat has provided organizational consulting to companies and agencies and teaches extensively worldwide. Dr. Aizenstat has explored the potential of dreams through depth psychology and his own research for more than 35 years. His Dream Tending methodologies extend traditional dream work to the vision of an animated world where the living images in dream are experienced as embodied and originating in the psyche of Nature as well as that of persons. His work opens creativity and the generative process. His book, Dream Tending, describes multiple new applications of dreamwork in relation to health and healing, nightmares, the World’s Dream, relationships, and the creative process. His other recent publications include: Imagination & Medicine: The Future of Healing in an Age of Neuroscience (co-editor with Robert Bosnak); “Dream Tending and Tending the World,” in Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind; “Soul-Centered Education: An Interview with Stephen Aizenstat” (with Nancy Treadway Galindo) in Reimagining Education; Essays on Reviving the Soul of Learning; The Soul Does Not Specialize: Revaluing the Humanities and the Polyvalent Imagination, with Dennis Patrick Slattery and Jennifer Leigh Selig: “Depth Entrepreneurship: Creating an Organization out of Dream Space”, in The Transforming Leader: New Approaches to Leadership for the Twenty-First Century; and “Fragility of the World’s Dream”, in Eranos Yearbook 2009-2010-2011 Love on a Fragile Thread.
