A symbol does not sit still. It does not offer a single meaning. It moves in the body like weather. It curls into memory and unfolds slowly, over years. At first, it appears as an image. Something small. A circle. A bird. A child walking alone. You see it in a dream, or it appears in a day of strange coincidence. And something shifts. You feel it more than understand it.
There is a softness in this kind of seeing. You are not meant to grasp the symbol all at once. The psyche does not work that way. It offers the image. It waits to be met.
Jungian Analyst Ken James spoke of how a symbol asks for your engagement. You cannot be a bystander to it. If the image is to become a symbol, it must be turned in the light of your awareness. You must live with it. Feel it in the body. Follow its scent through memory. Let it reshape your understanding, even if the mind never catches up.
Symbols do not come for decoration. They come to gather the pieces. They come to bring together what has been separated. To see the symbolic dimension is to live in the world with deeper eyes. It is to know that a door in a dream is more than a door. That a pain in the back might also be a weight you are carrying. That the way a shadow appears in a story might echo the shape of your own unlived life.
But you cannot rush this. And you cannot know it in advance. The movement from image to symbol is a slow dance. The psyche does not respond to demand. It responds to attention.
When a dream arrives, you do not chase it down. You listen. You feel your way into it. You ask what is being shown. You sit beside it like you would sit with a friend who has no words. You wait for the symbol to breathe.
There is no formula for this kind of work. Each image carries a different fragrance. Some are ripe with sorrow. Some are thick with joy. Some refuse to speak until the right season. And some open right away, like a flower that has waited years for your glance.
Symbols do not solve. They gather. They hold contradiction without needing to resolve it. A symbol can wound and heal in the same breath. It may lift you and unsettle you. It asks you to live in the tension of what it reveals. And in that tension, something inside begins to ripen.
Symbols are multivalent. They do not belong to a single place or person. They move across cultures, across generations, across layers of consciousness. But they also change as we change. The same image you encountered twenty years ago may mean something new now. Not because the image changed, but because you did.
The symbol reflects the movement of the soul. It holds the history of your becoming. That is why symbols are never exhausted. You can return again and again, and each time something new is revealed.
Some symbols arrive at moments of rupture. A crisis. A threshold. A turning of the inner weather. They bring with them the possibility of healing. But the healing is not always comfort. Sometimes it comes with the slow disassembly of the old life. The symbol may unsettle before it soothes. That too is part of its medicine.
The image that stays with you is the one worth working. It might feel silly or strange. A fish in a hallway. A crumbling church. A child with one shoe. But if it returns, if it stays in your thoughts or dreams or movements, then it carries something of your own unfolding. It is the psyche’s way of saying, “Come closer.”
To come closer means to let the image enter you. To follow where it leads. To feel what it stirs. To let the symbol reshape the contours of your understanding. Not by force, but by presence.
When we meet the symbol this way, we are participating in something older than ourselves. We are stepping into the lineage of those who lived close to meaning. The artists. The dreamers. The lovers of mystery. We are touching the sacred ground where soul and image speak.
And that is what this work invites. Not clarity, but richness. Not certainty, but presence. The soul does not ask you to figure it out. It asks you to stay. To stay with the image. To stay with the mystery. To stay with yourself, until the symbol begins to live inside you. Until it becomes not something you understand, but something you are becoming.
Tim – Soulful Nuggets Team
This blog is a reflection on the course ‘Complexes and Archetypes‘ taught by Ken James .
