Sure, I’m excited about releasing my book today—I’m jumping up and down and doing a little dance right now! Of course, I want you to buy it and tell others to buy it too! In fact, buying it TODAY will help my ranking on Amazon, ensuring that more people see it. The eBook version is only 99 cents (FYI, you don’t need a Kindle to read a Kindle book and the paperback is $12.99).
What People Are Saying
“After my divorce, I was lost, and nothing made sense anymore. I didn’t know anything about Depth Psychology and drawing my dream during one of Deborah’s workshops made me feel silly, but something shifted in me. I hardly recognize myself after three years of allowing my dreams to guide our sessions and my journey. Working through this book is like having Deborah right there with you—as storyteller, teacher, guide, and cheerleader.”
—Angela Sterling, Coaching Client
“Dr. Lukovich’s book is an insightful examination of the human psyche through personal revelation during her quest to relate to the feminine, sexuality, and ultimately God. The book is not only a well-written introduction to Jungian theory but a useful workbook that provides readers with practical exercises to use in working with images offered by the unconscious.”
—Vlado Šolc, Jungian Analyst, and author of
Dark Religion: Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Jungian Psychology
There's Something Deeper Going On
There’s a more important reason to buy this book. The way it came about is a perfect example of how our Souls are desperately trying to get our attention to help us uncover our deepest desires and hidden purpose.
Here’s what happened. I had been going along, working on draft after draft of my memoir (it’s coming and related to my PhD research on women's experience of reconciling sexuality and spirituality). I got the idea of throwing together a short guide on working with the unconscious— to grow my email list and attract more coaching clients. Suddenly, the book took on a life of its own. I became a vessel in which the swirling forces of my personal experience and something transcendent mixed. It’s the only explanation for being able to write and publish this book in 90 days—and the experience kicked my ass emotionally.
This book is my first endeavor to share my experience of exploring life through the lens of depth psychology and to offer others the framework that emerged for me as I unraveled and then put myself back together. Being plunged into the depths of my unconscious led to insights that otherwise might never have occurred, which then unleashed a buried creative urge that is now intersecting with a new sense of purpose.
Self-Reflection in a World of Growing Mob Mentality
In my book—Your Soul is Talking. Are You Listening? I teach people how to hear and decode the mysterious language of the unconscious, the land of all that is unknown about ourselves and what is brewing beneath the surface of collective society.
At the intersection of desire and purpose is personal joy and contribution to humanity, and the contribution to humanity part is a little urgent right now!
About a hundred years ago, C.G. Jung (Carl Jung), one of the founders of depth psychology—study of the unconscious—suggested that the fate of humanity depended upon the self-reflecting individual. He hated groups and compared the psyche of groups to that of animals, as reflected in their mob mentality.
Avoiding self-reflection leads to the dangerous path of accepting as truth what would not normally withstand scrutiny by any measure of critical thinking.
This book represents an opportunity to self-reflect, which is not easy. Digging in to why you believe what you believe is serious business and requires humility. Understanding that beneath the surface of fear, anger, and demands of liberty for some and not others, are basic human needs. But empathy is not to be extended at the expense of enlightened action and work towards justice for all. I heard this quote the other day:
“He is not a good man who, without a protest,
allows wrong to be committed in his name,
and with the means which he helps to supply,
because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
—John Stuart Mill
My book doesn’t tell you how or what to think, rather it teaches you how to look beneath the surface and beyond the literal for the deeper forces at work in your journey as a human being. My self-reflection uncovered hidden desires which brought a new sense of meaning and purpose to my life. I wish the same for you.
Excerpts from Chapter Two—How This Book Works.
Experiential Learning
This book is designed to engage your unconscious from the start and be a tool to process your experiences along the way. Numerous Reflection Questions are meant to get your juices flowing. In all the hundreds of depth psychology books I read, I often struggled with the need to have examples or a template. Under each heading titled Try This are opportunities to put concepts and approaches to work right away.
The sections titled Sharing My Insights illustrate my process of finding meaning in my images and how that meaning turned into new ways of thinking and behaving. You might be tempted to avoid that last step, but it is the doorway to a new place. Practicing the new attitude, way of thinking, or approach contributes to your capacity to respond to life in new ways and creates new neural connections. This book is designed to last a lifetime, guiding you to go deeper and deeper over time.
Capturing and Processing Your Experiences
Exploring myself as a laboratory experiment or mystery novel continues to help me avoid drowning in my experiences. Looking at myself as if I am over there, creates distance and brings some objectivity to the process. The intense awkwardness I felt in the beginning of my post-divorce life changed my sense of humor, a defense mechanism of sorts for me to survive the process, and awkwardly sharing my experiences with others helped me process them. After decades of being in control of the persona I showed the world, I had now found myself blurting out my stories to certain people, who oddly found them entertaining. My personal Netflix series sometimes resembled a family drama and other times a romantic comedy.
This book will engage your unconscious as you learn about and apply concepts to your life experiences. Embrace your wandering mind when memories or fantasies come to the surface, and pay attention to emotions and the feelings you use to make sense of them, as well as what gets activated in your body. Do not discard or judge these glimpses into your inner world.
Plunging into the depths of the unconscious, the realm of which we know nothing, requires letting go of control and allowing new insights to emerge. The meaning will come later but know that the mysterious messages are meant to be helpful and contribute to your growth.
Finding meaning in the clues that emerge from your unconscious is not like solving a math problem where there is one correct answer. Often messages and new insights conflict with what we consciously believe, prompting us to evolve our attitude about ourselves and others. The more rigid our beliefs, the more threatening it feels to have a more nuanced and tolerant viewpoint. For example, holding yourself to impossible standards not only can lead to shame about past mistakes, but often leads to unfair projections onto others of what you cannot face in yourself. A new balanced attitude can emerge when there is capacity to manage the tension between the two things that were perceived to be in opposition. Carl Jung called this process the transcendent function (Jung, 1954/1972, p. 223).
Just as students use workbooks to practice and apply mathematical concepts, you will need a tool—a gathering place—to explore the material your unconscious presents to you. You will need two types of journals—one where you write, and one in which you draw.
You can purchase journals from my store at www.deborahlukovich.com. The written journal (I use a Word document) is where you will document messages from your unconscious, dreams for example. This is where you will reflect about associations and insights and develop strategies to integrate new ways of thinking and behaving into your life.
If you are new to journaling, or you haven’t journaled in a while, you may feel resistance. Journaling is difficult for many people for reasons that are more complex than they realize. Pulling things out of your unconscious and putting them on paper makes them real. Research shows that people who write down their goals are eighty-five percent more likely to achieve them, so putting your dreams and deepest thoughts down on paper creates momentum for exploring and makes it possible to find new meaning and change your life.
Be gentle with yourself as you gather the courage to pull out your insides and display them even if only to yourself. Write or type the words, half-sentences, run-on sentences, bullets, stream of consciousness writing, poetry, prose. There is no right way to journal. It’s the first step in allowing your inner being to have a voice. You don’t get to control what she/he/they have to say, but you can honor your inner being by putting the words on paper, and then you can walk away for a while.
Sometimes you will not be able to find the words to express an experience. The image journal will allow you to capture experiences for which there are no words, and it will be the gathering place for the most vulnerable expressions from your unconscious. Mine is small, leather bound, and full of those cream-colored pages with imperfect edges, and I mostly use color pencils for my drawings. This may be the toughest part of the process if your inner artist has been sitting in the shadows since childhood.
Sharing My Insights
The first time I allowed my unconscious to express itself in a drawing was a year after my first journal entry—I can't live like this anymore. I felt like I was in kindergarten, and I didn’t know what to draw, and this caused intense anxiety. In a trance, sipping on a glass of wine at my favorite bar, I started drawing lines from the center of the page to the edge. I must have drawn over a hundred lines.
After I filled the page, I stepped back, took another sip of wine and my eyes widened and my chest felt heavy. My cheeks turned red when I noticed that the blank space left in the center of the paper was in the shape of a heart. I colored it in, pressing down hard on the crayons and pastels, tears in my eyes.
In that vulnerable moment I had met my inner child. She was six, the year before I began to be bullied at school. I never told the teacher, and I don’t think I told my parents about the emotional torture and the threats of violence to my little body. The raw experience of allowing this drawing to emerge unleashed that forgotten and scared child part of me. She was able to break through all my protective layers as she guided me through the drawing of the image. I might not have found her if I hadn’t allowed myself to draw like a child. Acknowledging her and beginning to provide her with what I hadn’t received as a child led to new levels of joy, passion, and creative expression in my life.
Give the Gift of Self-Reflection
Embrace yourself as a living paradox, one drop in that ocean of humanity, caught up in waves that are more than you but made up partly of you. Your journey involves managing the tension between your uniqueness and as part of the collective.
Don’t let any collective swallow you up by giving away your mind, heart, or Soul, and do not become arrogant and believe your way is the right way, because as soon as you believe you are right, you’ve lost perspective.
Don’t take yourself too seriously either. Find the humor in your journey.
I hope this excerpt from my book inspired you to purchase one TODAY! Who else in your life needs a little prompt to self-reflect or needs some tools to do so?
I’m at the beginning of my new journey, and I hope you will share yours with me.
Thank You for Reading and Sharing!
Give a shoutout to Visual Stories || Micheile on Unsplash for her equality photo.
Give a shoutout to Alex Motoc on social or copy the text below to attribute for the image of self-reflection.