Something in the body knows before we do. A tightening in the belly. A sudden warmth behind the eyes. A shiver down the arms. These are the ways an image speaks. Before interpretation. Before understanding. The body feels what the soul remembers.
We are not meant to rush past the image. It arrives from the depths and asks us to stop. Even if the mind does not yet grasp the meaning, the image is already doing its work. It lingers. It opens something. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it soothes. Always, it changes the inner weather.
In dreams, the images are clear and strange at once. A raspberry in the palm. A circle of stones. A spiral turning slowly. They come with color and texture. They smell like the forest floor or your grandmother’s kitchen. You wake, and the image stays. It has its own rhythm. Its own breath.
This is the beginning of soul work. The image holds the feeling that words cannot find. It waits for us to notice. It waits for the soft place where it can land.
Jungian Analyst Ken James speaks of the image as a bridge. It forms between what we know and what we do not yet know. The image appears when something deep wants to move toward the surface. It comes through the back door, dressed in dream-clothes, carrying memory, myth, and meaning in its hands.
When we allow the image to rest in us, it begins to shape our life from within. It calls up old feelings, some familiar, some forgotten. A gesture from a parent. The smell of rain in childhood. The sound of someone leaving. The image brings it all forward without force.
There is no need to grasp. No need to define. The work is to receive. The work is to feel.
Each image carries a pulse. Like blood through the veins. It calls us into the body. Into breath. Into a deeper way of listening. To understand the image, we must first let it touch the flesh.
A woman dreams of a deer watching her from the trees. She feels her chest open as the eyes of the animal meet her own. She wakes with tears and cannot say why. The deer stays with her for days. In the quiet moments, she sees it again. Its presence stirs something old and tender. She does not analyze. She waits. And in that waiting, a door opens.
The image teaches patience. It teaches reverence. It teaches us how to carry something sacred without needing to name it.
We live in a culture that devours images and forgets them in the same breath. But the soul does not forget. The soul drinks the image and stores it in the tissue. In the dreams. In the small choices that shape a day.
Some images come back after years, changed and yet the same. They grow with us. They remember what we tried to leave behind. They bring us back to ourselves in quiet ways.
Working with images is working with life. With shadow, with longing, with the mystery that lives in the bones. The image waits for us to be ready. It does not push. It does not perform. It stays close, like a faithful animal at the edge of the field.
When we stop long enough to let the image move through us, something begins to heal. Not because we figured it out, but because we made space. Because we let the image breathe in our body. Because we said yes to its presence.
That yes is the beginning of another way. A slower way. A truer way. A way that holds.
Rose – Soulful Nuggets Team
This blog is a reflection on the course ‘Complexes and Archetypes‘ taught by Ken James .
