Follow Your Myth

CIGARETTE STUBS

Walking to get some lunch in Boulder this week, I passed by a discarded cigarette stub. This is the kind of thing most people pass continually and never notice. On another day, I may have done the same, but this day I noticed it, or rather, a part of me took notice and made itself known.  

I spontaneously remembered the name of a specific type of cigarette, Salem 100s.  By the time I reached the Broadway crosswalk, I was aware that this series of images from my past was more present than the audiobook I had been listening to. What came into my mind was a series of partial memories rapidly cycling.  There were ashtrays full of ashes and cigarette stubs. There were rough hands and a blue cardigan sleeve.  Goldfish ponds at liquor stores and a cigarette machine that fascinated me as a five-year-old. There was a red and white checkered tablecloth with minute cigarette burn craters. 

My first instinct was to crush these memories out of my mind.

So much of what I talk about with clients, and write about, is going toward the thoughts and memories that wish to come up from the unconscious, and I felt this was an opportunity to practice what I speak about, and use this as an opportunity to explore this more in an article. 

VIBRATING FIELD OF AWARENESS

If thoughts and memories are serving something up from our unconscious, that means that they are expressions of these fields of awareness that I have written about previously.  Another way to think of this is fields of emotions. I try to explain that these fields happen when a latticework from our unconscious vibrates, and when it does, these images and feelings begin to come forth.

A specific memory like this offers some specific ripples of emotions, and it wasn’t clear right away what was present.  What felt clear is that something was being expressed inside me spontaneously, like images from a dream that just emerge by themselves. There was a vibration, caused by association, and the fields formed spontaneously.

I decided to switch out of the audiobook, crushing instead the voice of Gabor Mate, who was talking about ADHD and attunement to children. Maybe there had been some overlap between his discussion and these memories.

While waiting at the traffic light, I turned to my collection of music that I use for meditation, seeking what I call a meditation amplifier. Following my intuition, I chose the song Delirium, a short piece by Jeremiah Fraites from the recent film, The Long Walk (2025).   This music I find effective in that it begins with violins that appear to coax memories forward from the unconscious.  It continues to build meandering into piano, and then there is a percussive sound that almost creates a synesthesia response in me, reminding me of dust motes moving through a shaft of light; it vibrates memories loose from the latticework.  

The frequency becomes more coherent and starts to unfold, even as I fold inward toward them in my mind. 

The memories I felt myself slip into were around my dad’s illness, but in particular, his smoking cigarettes, a habit that was encouraged during WW2 for the young men going to war. For many years, I would go to the store and buy him cigarettes, not understanding the damage they were doing to his already fragile health.  Eventually, I learned the truth in a health class and tried to persuade my Dad to stop smoking.  He did stop smoking, but it was more likely a health scare than my asking that led him to this decision.  It was already too late; this and so many other things had taken a toll on him, and he died just two years later.

SENSING INTO THE EMOTIONS PRESENT

I am sharing a little personal detail from my past that is intermingled with a feeling tone.  I’m using this as an example (without getting too detailed) to help explore a specific feeling that may be intertwined with a memory.

This narrative, or what I speak of as that latticework of the unconscious, holds information.  

It is when it vibrates that it offers something up from our unconscious.  It may do this with a memory or a quick emotional reaction at times. The information begins to come to the surface, but understanding this can be difficult, especially if it feels too big, and we feel flooded.  In my case, these were subtle feeling tones that were present that I had to turn my attention to and amplify to understand what was there. 

Note: When we feel flooded, we aren’t looking to amplify the feeling present; what I speak of instead is grounding through meditations on trust, safety, and compassion.

We can turn our attention to these emotions, and this is turning our attention to the unconscious. This is much like in dreams, where we can turn our attention to the imagery of a dream and analyze it.  However, what I often tell people is that it is the emergent feelings in the dream that hold the information and express something through imagery.  I like to turn my attention to dreams and ask when I wake up; what is the feeling that is present?  This is because I believe when dreams unfold, they can reach a cohesive frequency that then imparts information from deep within.   What that means is we can simply understand that we wake feeling something is present, such as loss, anxiety, depression, or maybe a complex mix of different things that we have to sort through. 

THE DREAM COLLAPSES WHEN THE MESSAGE IS IMPARTED

It takes some effort to tune into what a feeling is when we wake from a dream, but I often feel aware that when the dream image reaches coherence, and it has delivered its information, it then collapses, and we may wake at this point.

I believe this is our unconscious giving us space to take in what was expressed at a conscious level.  This is when we typically roll over and get comfy again, but over the years, I have tried to tune into the dream I was just released from instead. Sometimes, when it seems a dream has delivered something important, I have trouble returning to sleep until I write.  It is as if this unconscious part of me is trying to keep me awake until I process. 

This does not mean that I don’t think there is an art to interpreting the symbols and experiences in our dreams. I track my dreams often, and sometimes when a dream is important, I look at the symbols or repeating patterns to see what is present. I enjoy analyzing dreams and exploring them with clients, but I also try to help them see that this information comes from within and can be transformed into insight by paying attention.

All of this, I believe, happens in waking life as well.  

We have moods and feelings that move around within us at unconscious levels all day long. These feelings may be layered and so subtle that we aren’t aware we are receiving information from our psyche.  For me, the memory attached to this cigarette stub contained layers of memories and feelings.  I’ll tune into these feelings now to understand more of what is being offered to me from my unconscious

SURFING THE MESSAGE

This is where the surfing happens.

We wake from a dream or we feel the past is present in something like my cigarette stub story.  To ignore it means we miss the wave, and we don’t even try.   We can think of this like surfing a wave on the ocean, though.   

In amplifying the cascade of memories with the music and processing them through journaling, I am paddling like mad to catch the wave.  This is when I write about some of the memories that are associated with this cigarette stub.  Then I make some associations based on the feelings that I feel were imparted.  I ride the wave of information because that wave of emotional response, that vibrational field, carries us forward on this wave of insight that only builds if we move with it.

As we move with it we realize we are receiving this information, it becomes as though it is effortless, like riding an ocean wave (when you know how to surf!). It might come to us a little at a time, and as we journal, the insight builds, the wave builds.

The amplifying with music, the writing about the parts that are there has me moving with the wave, and as I write more deeply, more insight comes.  When this locks in, I can reinforce this by returning to it and journaling again.

In this way there is a real-world correlate to the metaphorical and philosophical way I explain these things. What I’m saying is that although I speak of this latticework of our unconscious, it has a correlate in our brain. We create new neural pathways by riding this wave and building new insights.

WHAT IS THE MESSAGE?

What happens is when we are riding this wave, which is now a coherent frequency generated by an emotional inner response, is that things start to move through us. It could be that I had a different association this week, and it was a memory about my soulmate, Sheryl, and our two sons going on a springtime hike in the Boulder hillsides instead.  In this scenario, there may have been some sadness and gratitude that made up a frequency like that. It may have been an insight that built around these other latticeworks that vibrate in different ways. It would have resulted in a different insight that was delivered to my conscious mind.

In the case of the cigarette stub, it was not this.  It was instead a wave of sadness and loss around my father that came through again; this is in part because grief comes in waves throughout our entire lives.  This was a wave of understanding as well about this journey that I am on in this lifetime, and this felt like part of new ways of perceiving my life and this world we are in. 

The dominant emotion that was present in this wave I surfed was shame about my past, growing up poor with my Dad’s illness as well as my own. The feeling sense that came from this cigarette stub was one of regret, and the shame I feel in life for the simple sin of being poor in this world. Also, though, more deeply was a familiar shame that I couldn’t do anything to help save my Dad.

Although shame was dominant, in writing about this, I can look at the shame that has been an integral thread of my latticework. Owning the shame by seeing it and feeling it from this vantage point allows me to also feel a growing thread of understanding and compassion for my young self. It simultaneously allows me to feel how a thread of shame has been vibrating through different experiences in my life. If I stay with it more, I can continue to write about this and understand more of its influence in my life. Understanding its presence in other words, doesn’t instantly banish something from my life, it is a step in becoming more aware that something from the past – is still present. That is a pretty resilient feeling which is why I describe these things as latticeworks of our unconscious. They feel structural, and need new scaffolding to help redirect these energetic lattices of energy and information. This takes time and effort.

WHERE DOES THIS GET US?

Yes, I’ve been processing so many of these experiences much of my adult life. One way to think of it is that there is no end destination because life does not have an end destination. We don’t win the game of life despite the board game from the 70s, and despite what the oligarchs think is happening.

This is a soul journey, and there are places we can reflect on our past. We can bear witness to this life we are living and take ownership of our experience by being present for it. This means even being present for all the hard things, like shame.

More importantly, though, when we identify something that we carry, it moves through us, as it should. As I’ve said in previous articles, we can stay in homeostasis in life and never grow, or we can contract when things come up, and this is a state of collapse.

If we go toward where these harder things are, in ways that allow us to process then we can go toward the third choice, which is to grow from our experiences even if it is unfolding gradually over a lifetime.