Mythic Imagery and Embodied Storytelling for Psycho-Spiritual Development

Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life 1905

I performed my version of a Jewish folktale from India I call "The Tree of Gold" on the main stage Sunday Morning Closing Concert at the Florida Storytelling Festival April 3.

It's part of my personal Mythic Yoga repertoire of stories that have a significant spiritual value for me personally as well as collectively that have themes of reconciliation and renewal.

The imagery in this story pertains to many psycho-spiritual elements contained in yoga and yoga philosophy. When we listen to this story, we connect via the metaphors and archetypical images that re-link us to ourselves via the mythic dimension of our beings, largely forgotten in favor of the intellect.

Listening and creating these images internally within with our imagination activates the neglected feeling and intuitive functions of our psyche that is found and felt in the body.  Healing and answers are thus provided to our questions and ailments. "...myths are also profound dramatic descriptions of our interior emotional and spiritual experience as human beings, says Jeremy Taylor, and these myths also show up in our sleeping and waking dream life.

We become the characters, images and elements of the story, as we progress in the narrative structure and through the ritual of listening have a conscious participation in the story. We live the myth. We are the foolish king, who sends his young queen away. We are the queen abandoned and sent to the forest to live with an old man. We are the old man, those feminine qualities in masculine psychology that are expelled from our patriarchal culture. We are the tree of gold, which is constantly flowing liquid gold but always holding its shape of a tree.

The Cottonwood trees of my youth
growing up in Boulder, County
 Colorado have strong meaning for me.
Native Americans saw the tree as
sacred and was at the heart of the Sun Dance Ritual

These images activate the yoga within and reminds us something about the ineffable. That's the purpose of a mythic image, Mythologist Joseph Campbell says. It has one foot in reality and one foot in the transcendent. That is the Mythic Yoga, as stories and myths have that ability to wake us up and help us reach the goal of yoga, union with the divine.

When we act the story out with out body or take a position of a tree, I can feel immediately the Shakti, the kundalini, the chakras, the tree of life. I am at the center point, the axis mundi. I am the whole world. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou Art That. I am at one with the cosmos, the divine. My body is the container, just as the tree is, for cosmic intelligence and consciousness. The body's intelligence knows the way, we just have to realize it by hearing the stories and participating in the myth via the ritual of yoga.

For that is the purpose of myth, to help us live in accord with nature. We become Solis, the Latin word for sun. I am the sun. That is my personal mythology. And I am always amazed at the images and opportunities that present themselves in my life all because I dared to take a risk and follow my bliss. Dared to extract myself of the commodified trap American yoga has become.

 I feel the image resonate within me and it grounds me when I think of it or move with it. The Cosmic Tree is a powerful archetype of cosmic renovation. The Asvattha is the chief of trees and typifies that tree of life which is rooted in God. Great reminders during our secular life to handle all that arises and be rooted in myth and yoga in a world flattened out with just economic and political concerns rather than ecstasy and spirit.

Yama while instructing Naciketa describes the eternal Asvattha tree with its root upwards and branches downwards, which is the pure immortal Brahman, in which all these world are situated, and beyond which there is nothing else (Katha Upanishad Verse II.vi.1). But Krishna tells us that the Asvattha tree having neither end nor beginning nor stationariness whatsoever has its roots upwards and branches downwards whose branches are nourished by the Gunas and whose infinite roots spread in the form of action in the human world which, though strong, are to be cut off by the forceful weapon of detachment to seek the celestial abode from which there is no return (Bhagavad Gita Chapter XV Verses 1-4).

This tree my father bought at an end of season
 sale at K-Mart in Boulder in 1981 for .25.
 It now grows and has an uncanny look of a woman!
Folklore says that when you cut down
 a tree, you cut down a woman. 

Powerful medicine. That's the power of the oral tradition. That's the power of storytelling and listening and the oral tradition, especially when you act out the myth as ritual with yoga and it becomes the yoga. Something reading won't get you (now will following a guru. Look within for your own sat guru. It's right here all the time, like a jewel in the middle of your forehead.

Forget expensive trainings and workshops by flying all over the world. America, always trying to make a buck. Simply sit down and mediate every day and get to know thy self!  For yogic wisdom for thousand of years has been passed down in such a manner, for the transmission is a psycho-spiritual knowing via the energy of the image that guides us to knowledge and liberation. It's perfect for modern times. Just to re-acquaint yourself with this silent aspect of your being.

For this is our yoga. Mythic Yoga, using images and symbols to find union. "To transcend profane time and re-enter into mythical Great Time is equivalent to a Revelation of Ultimate Reality. Reality that is strictly metaphysical and can be approached in no other way than through myths and symbols," Mircea Eliade says in his book Images and Symbols studies in religious symbolism.

Join me May 14 at Yoga Circle and Dance in Ormond Beach for a Mythic Yoga Workshop to discover your personal mythology. Or join me online starting September 12 for the Mythic Yoga Online Training and discover your myth through dreams and journaling, yoga and the global community. Amazingly we start dreaming together, experiencing the synchronicity that arises when we connect to our depths and share our hearts. We are all one!

OM SHANTI

Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body

Mythic Yoga: Dream Work 

Dream work is one of the most powerful yogas. Self-knowledge is revealed when we listen to our dreams, connect with the symbols that bubble up out of the depths and listen to the stories they are revealing.

I have been involved with dream work my whole life, and taught it as part of the Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga® Kids Yoga Teacher Training, as teachers must know their own story first and experience transformation before teaching kids. And when we merge the body with the image, profound insight, awareness and healing arise. Just as Vishnu dreams the world into creation, we too awaken every morning and open our eyes and bloom the world into creation. We enter the field of time and space, dreamed by a single dreamer in which we all dream too! Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body online classes start Wednesdays August 21 at 8 pm EST on Powhow.com.

We use the body as a vehicle to work with the dreams, exploring the meaning and messages through movement, yoga, meditation, myths and storytelling. JOIN US! Register at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow.com! 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body - Body Memoirs online class also starts August 24!

Here are some of my favorite books on Dream Work

• Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
• The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life by Jeremy Taylor

• An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper - I don't believe in Dream books, as dream symbols are personal. Yet this book offers a glimpse into universal symbols and is fascinating reading.

Join the League of Yogic Storytellers and Gain Access to these Articles on Mythic Yoga Dream Work by Sydney Solis

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams – The Beginnings of Personal Myth

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams Video

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online Classes April 27-May 18

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The Mythic Yoga Studio: The Story in the Body

Know Thy Self! 

Join Storyteller and Yoga Teacher Sydney Solis for 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online classes April 27-May 18.

Use dreams, myth, the body and personal storytelling for self-discovery and transformation! 

Four Saturdays April 27- May 18. 1 pm EDT. 

Join from anywhere in the world as it's online at the Mythic Yoga Studio on Powhow!

This is the first time Sydney presents the popular e-course Mythic Yoga on Powhow!  Each class features movement, yoga, contemplation and a different Hindu myth that guide you through life's stages to bring your life's story into awareness and to create a Body Myth. Bring a dream you’ve had and would like to work with, a notebook, your body and your listening ears to journey within, bring awareness to issues and discover your personal myth!

Required course for Storytime Yoga Teacher Certification.  Withdraw your projections to empower yourself and also so you don’t put them on the kids or others you work or live with!

Register for all four classes and save 20%!

League of Yogic Storytellers Members receive 50% off all classes!

• Purchase the Mythic Yoga at home course and go deeper to discover your own myth using the body, the word and active imagination.

Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body

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When Marduk  slays Tiamat and pins half her snake body up as the four-corners of the sky and makes the other half the earth, he is creating order from chaos. In this Babylonian myth, Marduk is conquering his symbiosis with the feminine chaos, mother serpentine, watery realm of the unconscious, and creating a container in which to hold the conscious world. He is asserting himself away from the all-devouring mother, creating his ego and assertion that he exists and has an “I”. To do that he has to slay the Mother, the feminine., as many mythologies, such as the Aztec Huitzilopochtli, seek to do.

Read more about Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers! (LOYS)

Mythic Yoga: Dream work and the Beginnings of Personal Myth

"The ability to see one’s life as a story is at the heart of identity. In fact, our ability to “narrate” our life’s events may even be the defining mark of consciousness." - Frank Bures

I have been in a dream work group here in St. Croix for the past two months. Led by my friend Nancy Ayer at her home in Estate Mt. Washington on the west side of the island, the group meets every week for two hours deep in the rainforest on beautiful plantation ruins that houses her incredible Chartes-style labryinth.

We sit in a circle, either beneath elderly trees dripping with hard, round avocados, or over by a disintegrating copper cooking vat where sugar cane was once boiled and cooked by slaves to make rum. We tell each other our dreams, and a remarkable alchemy takes place when we make the unconscious images and story lines conscious and bring it out into the world to share with others. They in turn experience the same image in their bodies and psyches, as I experience theirs. Common story lines appear and it's the making of modern myth.

We work with night time dreams, but also real life events, which when retold as story, seem as a dream. Such is life a dream and all the world a stage! Merrily, merrily we go! Paying attention to it all. No wonder the Vishnu Purana has Vishnu dreaming the world into creation, massaged by Lakshmi, who ignites the libido, the spark of divine desire to create!

How we are all creating our world! And through dreams, stories and yoga, we become self aware of this world creation. Get to know the story. Making what is unknown, known. From darkness to light, from untruth to truth. Our soul fishes in the darkness, on the edge of an iceberg, looking to hook something from the great depth below, pull it up to the surface and give it a good look in the daylight of consciousness.

Asato Ma Sad Gamaya
Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya
Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya
Om Shanthi Shanthi Shanthi

Lead me: From untruth to truth;
From darkness to light;
From death to immortality
Om peace peace peace

If there is a divine being, I believe it to be true because I have experienced such miracles and uncanny things in my dreams. Truly that is where I experience the divine, if I am ever to believe in god at all! This relationship with the Self. The spoken words, the weaving of consciousness from daytime to night time, all interact and are smeltered in the cauldron of alchemical becoming Self-hood.

I have been doing dream work for years and years, and teach dream work in my Mythic Yoga trainings, which prepares students who want to teach yoga for kids by getting clear of their story, lest they project it on the kids they work with. It's deep work, and I noticed we all started to dream others' dreams, and this is the creation of new myths. In this present dream group on St. Croix I learned to listen to other people's day time events, as if they were dreams. The same images and story lines put us into a listening trance as the dream unfolds, much like at night time. We follow along, and have a memory of that story which took place in a realm suspended of time and space. I begin to become aware of the witness consciousness, as I question as the Chinese sage did with, "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. or was I a butterfly dreaming that I was a man?"

 I also learned to look at a series of dreams, not only as a stand alone. I can see patterns and a story arising. Mega growth, the future, and being introduced to a dark man, my animus,  or masculine side of my psyche, who is now taking me on a journey. A mythic journey into my Self as revealed to me by dream images that bubble out of the dream depths.

Life is but a dream, and I can change this dream world I create with conciousness and awareness, working with my dreams to understand myself and guide me thorugh life. To make my unknown known, and bring me into complete liberation. Dream work and storytelling combined with accessing deeper meaning to the symbols through yoga asana as a form of active imagination, help us reveal that story, so that we can ultimately unmask our persona and step into the  point where the projections originate and achieve ultimate liberation of union as object and observer disappear.

So I follow my dreams, work with them as a most sacred aspect of my yoga practice. It can be remarkable, mystical. I have been dreaming about small, furry rodents for a while. This picture popped up instantly as I searched for a picture to use here. He was hanging around every day at the Omega Institute where I was conducting a Storytime Yoga for Kids training one summer.  I adopted him as my symbol, my animal helper and he made it into a Woodchuck Warm-Up. I had one furry rodent, beaver like creature presented as a gift from my my once terrifying animus who now is a business man who looks like my late husband.  And I dreamed of my high school drama teacher, Darlene Beaver, in a recent dream. I read a fairy tale in the Pink Fairy Tale book an interesting tale called The Princess in the Chest about a girl who, because of magic and a difficult father, was part beaver-ish for a while. After this writing dream work session, I will follow where my beaver takes me in the dreams and guides me in my next work of creation. And play with it in yoga asana practice for some Mythic Yoga Magic! We shall see!