Dr. James Hollis

And at the bottom of that well, there's always a task.

There's always an issue.

The identification of which can lead one into a new place in one's life, a different journey.

In my case, it led me to...

leave a very fine tenure position in academia, travel to Switzerland, and spend several years there in retraining as a psychoanalyst.

And I now look upon that depression as beneficent, but at the time, I certainly didn't, as you can imagine.

Sure.

Well, this is a central problem of our time is everybody is going to say, I don't have time for that.

I had a colleague, now deceased, Marian Woodman in Toronto, who used to say to her clients, you have to guarantee me one hour per day that you reflect on your dreams or you journal in terms of what's going on in your life.

And she said, always people say, I don't have time for that.

Then she said, then you don't have time for therapy.

You're not making any priority here for this.

And you're right.

Wordsworth wrote in 1802, the world is too much with us, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

This is 1802, before the internet, right, with all of its claims upon us.

There's such a noisy din around us, we're all distracted by that, you see.

That's why it usually takes a crisis in a marriage or depression or whatever the case may be to get people to pull out of that and reflect upon that.

So I spend 15 minutes every morning before starting just meditating, particularly working on a dream if I've had a dream.

And secondly, I reflect on things in the evening too, because one of the things we want to try to do is to say,

What are the stories I'm living here?