A Recipe for Self-Knowing 
Ingredients
1 You
Healthy measure of Intuition (ongoing)
Nightly and daily infusions of Dreamwork
Daily mixture of Journaling and/or Art (often done at beginning or end of day)
Healthy study of Astrology (self-study and consultation)
Daily or weekly (or intuitively prescribed) consultation with Oracles
Daily healthy dose of Spiritual Practice
Combine ingredients.  Stir.  You will cook and distill for a long time.         

Serve, when ready.         

**************         

“What class am I taking right now?”                                                                                                 

This is a question I began to ask myself after a long series of dreams in which I was constantly taking classes – and not making the grade.  Depending upon what school of interpretation you subscribe to, this dream could have all kinds of meanings.  I decided to take one of Jung’s simpler approaches:  the dream means what it says.  So I had to ask myself, well, if I’m always taking classes in my dreams, what classes am I actually taking?  What are the dreams pointing to?  And why am I not succeeding or completing in the classes?   And then I began to think that maybe I had what I called a ‘soul curriculum.’         

This idea started to take on new meaning when I came across the phrase in Michael Newton’s book Destiny of Souls.  In his work with clients who through hypnosis connect with their soul identities, there is this very well-known understanding that when we incarnate on Earth we really do come in with a soul curriculum.  It seems to work something like this:  Before our incarnation we decide the classes we are going to take.  Then we arrive on Earth and from day one we are learning, we are taking classes.  Life washes over and through us, flooding us with its beauty and pain.  As we grow up and change, we lose touch with the soul’s desires and intents, our reasons for incarnating in the first place.  We lose clarity.  Our desires change and warp.  We experience joys and traumas.  As many a folk tale and story tell us, after we incarnate, life and all its challenges cause us to forget about not only our life before incarnation but also who we are and why we are here.          

Born into life having consciously forgotten why we came, we awaken into a labyrinth where we are called to search for the meaning and purpose of our existence, often with meaningful but scant and incomplete clues, following the paths as best we can.         

About this Article
Over the years of being on my own quest, life circumstances have compelled me to discern practical methods and ways to discover meaning in my experiences so that I can keep answering the age-old questions to find what I have come to call healing understanding, and to learn to carry difficult memories with grace.  Through my own seeking, and through much trial and error, I have discerned some simple ways to discern my soul curriculum and this has helped me come to know myself and the purpose of my life beyond surface level.          

It would seem that we are each given a very individual curriculum so what may be right for me may not be right for you.  Each of us may be given similar lessons but that does not mean we are learning the same things.  Keep that in mind as you read this.  It may happen that as you do so you may say to yourself, “Well that’s not how it is for me.”  If that comes up, take it deeper and ask yourself, “Well, how is it for me?”  As one who has done a good bit of searching throughout my life, it is a question I have had to ask myself.  By asking this question you will begin the process of discerning your own curriculum.  Keep in mind too, as Taitetsu Unno has written in his book River of Fire, River of Water:  “Despite the wealth of possibilities we may seem to have in the eighty-four thousand paths to enlightenment, it is through encountering great difficulties and reaching an incredible impasse that we discover our individual paths” (p. xxvii, italics mine).  Many ways of doing this soulwork exist.  As ever, take what you need and leave the rest.          

There are several ways to discern your current and past classrooms, what subjects you have decided to study in this incarnation.  The six ways and means I have chosen to highlight here are Intuition, Dreams, Journaling and Art, Astrology, Oracles, and Spiritual Practice.  And remember that each one of these ways is an infinitely vast subject unto itself and therefore overlaps and interweaves with all the others as well as many other teachings that you receive in your life.   If one or more of these areas pings your curiousity, go and research it more.  Your own discoveries will be the right medicine.         

Intuition
In the Russian folk tale of Vasalisa, as told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her now classic text, Women Who Run With the Wolves, when Vasalisa’s mother dies, she gives Vasalisa a doll and advises Vasalisa to always keep it close to her.  Whenever she has to make a decision or a choice in often dire circumstances with Baba Yaga, the doll jumps up and down in Vasalisa’s pocket, informing her of exactly what to do. Vasalisa always listens to the doll’s promptings and despite all her trials, she is rewarded with a good life.         

Vasalisa is the doll in your pocket that is your intuition.  Listen to it.  It is the still, small voice within.  It most often begins to be heard when you have built a solid foundation of regular meditation, contemplation and stillness into your life.  It is also gut instinct, the place of your inner knowing where Spirit meets you and guides you.  If you are in tune with it, synchronicities and omens can more clearly communicate to you and with these clues you follow the thread of your life.  Intuition is when you say and know at the gut level, ‘I know I have to buy this book.  I know I have to turn right.  I know I need to stay away from that place.  I know I need to go to that workshop.’  Parker Palmer’s understanding of vocation fits quite well with what I understand about intuition.  In his book Let Your Life Speak he defines vocation as: “This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.”         

Intuition is the hunch, the compelling inner tug.  It acts as inner compass and guide to steer you along as magnet to other magnets.  It’s what will guide you as you read this essay to know what will work for you and what will not.  In the ancient Greek thought-world, intuition was more like your daemon.  In our contemporary global thought-world of psycho-spirituality, it is often called your Higher Self.  Simply put, it is the voice that speaks and the knowing that knows.  Hear it, build relationship with it, trust it and use it.  In the spirit of Pascal’s wager, what have you got to lose?         

Journaling and Art
Keeping a journal and making art are yet other means to help you discern your soul curriculum.  Practicing them allows you to create a space in your life where all the streams and threads of living are interweaving together in a synthesis of purpose and meaning.  The journal in particular (which can also be art and not just words) is the place where we work through the stuff of our life.  It is the place where we sift through our life, record thoughts, ideas, dreams, events, dialogues.  It is a repository and a wrestling ground.  By keeping a journal we are by the very act of writing in it participating consciously in our life.         

Some people prefer to work with images instead of words.  If that is your medium, go to your art in a sacred way.  Work with your inner stuff on the canvas or watercolour board.  Collage with passion and wrestle with your inner world through paint, pastels, crayons, magazine clippings, postcards, gouache, coloured pencils.          

Whether you journal or make art, the point is to get into the stuff of your life to help you develop a practical yet illuminating and awakened awareness.         

Dreams
Pay attention to dreams.  Remember them.  Record them.  Work with them.  Explore them.  Wake up inside them.  Act them out or follow their cues in waking reality.  Complete them.  The literature out there on this subject is vast but a simple way to start remembering your dreams is to set your intent to remember them before going to sleep at night with the following simple statement:  I intend to remember my dreams, wake up and right them down. Breathe this intent into every fibre of your being.  In this way you begin to entrain your psyche, like setting an alarm clock to rise at the same time everyday.  If you do not immediately remember your dreams, set this same intent every night until you do.  No matter what comes, even if it is only one word, write it down.  I cannot say how many times I have told myself the fiction in the middle of the night that I will remember my dreams, gone back to sleep and then forgotten them completely upon waking up in the morning.           

Keep a dream journal           

The purpose of keeping a dream journal is to have a chronicle of your dream narratives so that you become more conscious and aware of what goes on in your dream life.         

The following is a simple method I have used over the years to keep a dream journal.  I did not invent it.  It was given to me by a therapist years ago and I credit her with the idea.   On the left side of the page right down the dreams under the dates they occurred.  Leave space on the right side to write down reflections, hits, themes, connections.          

In my own dreamwork I have discerned that sometimes dreams have an immediate benefit.  Often they are part of the longer narrative of my life and link to earlier dreams in what I have recognized as a constant, ever-flowing, multi-layered, multi-dimensional stream.  Dreams can give you clues in any moment about what classes you are taking in your soul curriculum.  In that sense they are in-time.  Yet I feel dreams come from a timeless place too and they often have meaning from earlier in life or are part of the future.  They help you create your life and know yourself at more than surface level.  They can be direct, confusing, mystifying and numinous.          

The key practices that will allow you to make use of your dreams to discern your soul curriculum are, first and foremost, to remember them and write them down.  On occasion it’s important to sit in contemplation with them.  In this way you will start to see themes and patterns arising.  Often we don’t know what classes we have been taking until we look back over three months of dreams and realize, “Ah ha!  I have been taking a class on X.”   From that ‘ah-ha’ moment, you are given the choice to allow your life to take on a whole new level of meaning and purpose because you have awakened to it by your own devotion, creativity and effort.          

The best thing about the dreams you catch and bring back is that they are your own.  Of course over time people have dreamed the same dreams leading to many centuries of dream books but these interpretations change from aeon to aeon and culture to culture because they are written in the sphere of very different thought-worlds.  Just because many of us have dreams where we are bitten by a snake doesn’t mean the dreams mean the same thing for us, although there may certainly be commonalities.  And while dream interpretation books are no doubt very curious and fascinating, only you can discern what meaning the dreams have for you and your life.  You are your best and most trusted interpreter.  Having said that though, I find that reading about dreams and talking through them with others has often given me hunches, clues to follow and prompted me into areas of interpreting them that I would not have come to on my own.         

Over time the dreams themselves will teach you how to work with them, how to interpret them.  By remembering and tracking your dreams you will come to know how they move in your life.  You may also find that the quality of your dreaming and the dreams you catch will change with your conscious participation.  You may find that you have more and more lucid dreams in which you wake up inside the dreams and begin to create the dreams yourself.  In this way you may find more unification and merging between what we call inner and outer reality.  When you reach this stage of dreaming, there is less an experience of dualities and more of a state of flow in your way of living.         

Astrology
Astrology is a great ally to help you map out your soul curriculum.  You do not have to become an astrologer to understand or benefit from astrology.  However, the deeper you go, the more you learn.  One of the best ways to start is to consult a professional astrologer and have a reading done. Or if you are ambitious, you can teach yourself.           

The internet is a good place to search for an astrologer but word of mouth is often best.  Many professional astrologers have written books and often do astrological consulting so if a book has caught your interest and you like what you are reading, contact the astrologer and see if they do readings.  If your inclination is DIY, many books out there can help you get started.  Here are two excellent websites to begin to learn about astrology and a couple of online courses:         

• Astro.com is one of the very best websites on astrology.  Using their online tools you can enter your birth details to see your natal chart, transits, progressions, as well as receive a Short Report Forecast and Daily Readings.  Articles by Liz Greene and Dana Gephardt, as well as transit information provided by Robert Hand, are great.  Clare Martin presents an online course on psychological astrology called Mapping the Psyche.
• Mountain Astrologer offer an Astrology Beginner’s Series on their website.

Oracles
Oracles are wise counselors who can provide guidance to you throughout your life.  As they work primarily in the language of symbol, your psyche is able to ‘read’ them from a deeper place beyond spoken or written language.  You can engage with your inner oracle in many ways:         

• make your own personal oracle out of paper using collage techniques or drawing (see my article Way of the Oracle on this site for a tried and true method for creating your own oracle);
• find objects in nature such as stones, bones or twigs or man-made objects that speak to you; or,
• consult one of the many oracles available in the marketplace today such as various Tarot decks, the Runes, the I-ching, Goddess Cards and many more. 

My personal favorite is The Crowley-Harris Thoth Deck because it was created in the spirit of the Western Esoteric Tradition (whatever our opinion of Crowley).  The artist, Lady Frieda Harris, was an esoteric practitioner and she included her own learnings of geometry and infinity into the renderings of the cards.  However, it is best to use your intuition to find the oracle that really works for you.  You may find that you use different oracles for different questions at different times.         

Like all personal, psycho-spiritual work, regularly consulting oracles deepens your relationship to your inner seer, the wise one within and over time it will deepen your instinct and intuition. Consistent consultation will allow you to develop your own rhythms with how the force of divination works in your life, intuitively knowing when you need to do a reading and quite intuitively ‘getting’ it.         

Spiritual Practice and Discipline
Do your practices.  Whether meditation, Pilates, yoga, working out, shamanic journeying, kundalini yoga, dance, whatever they are, they help you maintain a conscious and awakened self-knowing.  They require will, breath, imagination, devotion, responsibility and discipline.  They allow you to continue growing in the Art of Living and in consciously knowing your soul curriculum.  They keep you healthy, aligned and attuned and act as a glue that holds your psyche and body together.  Spiritual practices are done by doing.  They can be the toughest area of our lives in which to enforce discipline so be kind to yourself as you work them into your life.  Use the journal or make art to record your experiences or insights learned when you do your practices because they too are part of this particular recipe for knowing your soul curriculum.         

Synthesis
So, from this receipe, how do you figure out what class you’re taking and what your soul curriculum is?         

Through paying attention to your intuition, actively engaging in and working with your dreams, working with astrology and oracles and doing your spiritual practices, you become conscious, you awaken, you turn on the light bulb within.  You learn your cycles, your rhythms, your issues, your gifts, your (bull)shit, your ego characters, your shadows (all that you keep hidden, secret, locked away from others and yourself and this can be positive or negative because we hide away our gifts too), your unrealised potential.  By this process you may come to realise some of the classes you are taking in this incarnation or even just for today (there are a lot of one day classes in life but my experience has shown me they are part of the greater narrative story of your life and your overall soul curriculum).          

For example, you may find that your life is completely and totally dominated by family.  Family 101 may be your classroom.  Or it maybe Advanced Family Studies in which you are the elder teaching everyone Family 101.  Or it may be How to be an Individual While Being Part of a Family.  The classes you are taking are your own.  They are your own individual soul prescription.  They are for you to discern.         

You may find that you do not have any family, you spend a lot of time in solitude and you tend to be something of a hermit in your lifeways.  You may be taking a class on Self-Resourcefulness, Individuality, or Why Am I So Lonely?  You may also be taking a class in Lack of Self-Worth or Learning How To Love Yourself.  If you choose to be alone but want to be in relationship with people, your classroom might be Learning How to Trust or Opening Your Heart.  If you simply choose to be alone because you prefer it that way you may be quite straightforwardly taking a class on Learning the Gifts of Solitude.         

Say you are a complete and total extrovert but in your dreams you are frequently alone.  Maybe you are taking a class on How To Have An Inner Life or How to Balance Relationship to Self and Others.         

Even traumas we experience in our lives are part of our soul curriculum, part of our learning in this lifetime.  If you are one for whom trauma has been the lifelong teacher, and you cannot heal, there are many ways that can help.  Professional therapy is probably the best place to start.  Bodywork, massage and meditation are also good places to start.  However, you may find that through your soulwork other ways of healing make themselves known to you.  Some excellent work with those affected by trauma has been done by Peter Levine in his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences and through his Somatic Experiencing work which can be found at www.traumahealing.com.  Another great book that looks at the world of trauma from the the Jungian perspective is by Donald Kalsched:  The Inner World of Trauma:  Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit.          

Again, remember, discerning your soul curriculum is only one tool among many to help you take yourself seriously and deepen the experience of living.         

Meditation:  Your Incarnational Desire
One of my teachers once shared a beautiful teaching with me. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition it is believed that we all come into life with an ‘incarnational desire’.  When the monasteries in Tibet were still whole and active, young monks and nuns would be introduced to this incarnational desire in a steady way over many years.  As I was taught, this desire resides in our heart centre and is usually very simple, I desire to love, I desire to heal, I desire to grow.  It is not complicated by the ego’s grandiose notions of what it means to be alive and have purpose.         

Over many years of pondering and sifting this teaching, I have come to understand our incarnational desire as the root reason for our being alive and our soul curriculum as how we choose to live it out, learn the lessons we desire to learn, meet the appointments we are scheduled to meet, and fulfill as much and as best as we can the potential of that seed desire.          

Consider bringing this teaching into your own meditation to begin to discern what your own incarnational desire might be.         

Additional Resources
There are many recipes for self-knowing and self-awakening.  In addition to those I have highlighted in this essay, I’ll add a few more ingredients to the pot.         

Flower Essences
Flower essences work on our emotional body, our feelings, which are in constant flux.  Flowers have a long history of healing benefit on body and soul, from the beauty of their blossoms to the potent nutrients in their pollen and nectar gathered by bees and other pollinators.  Flower essences are often dispensed in a solution of spring water or brandy.  They have been discerned by practitioners to help with a wide variety of imbalances we face in the business of living.         

Essential Oils
Aromatherapy is a great aide to living everyday life in a more balanced way.  Derived from plants and various resins, the scents of essential oils enrich and deepen our sensory and sensual awareness as well as provide protection from all kinds of toxins.         

Herbs
Herbal remedies act much like flower essences and essential oils but from the inside out.  Normally imbibed, the remedies help all manner of body imbalances.  The remedies can be taken as tinctures, which is the most direct way to take them, capsules, or in teas and herbal infusions.         

Homeopathy
Homeopathy works upon the principle of ‘like cures like.’  Remedies are derived from plants, minerals and other sources to help any and all problems and are dispensed in minute doses that have been distilled to different levels of essence (6c commonly being the lowest).  Taken in the form of small sugar pellets, usually under the tongue, homeopathy works at a very deep level of psyche, soul and body to shift old patterns and help the healing process.         

Body Work
Here is where we find acupuncture, reiki, osteopathy, reflexology, massage, shiatsu, breathwork, any and all forms of body healing that you often find at more progressive spas.  All of these techniques act as supports to body and soul as we do the work of living and knowing self.         

Know Thyself
Discerning your soul curriculum allows you to track yourself in order to Know Yourself.  You plumb the depths of your psyche and the events and experiences of your life to understand the age old questions:  Who am I?  Why am I here?  Where have I been?  Where am I going?  What am I doing?  You search every moment for the synchronicity, the omen, the sign, the message that gives you clues to your path.  You track yourself because you are seeking to know yourself.  It is relentless self-scrutiny, introspection, reflection and it is never done.  You use all your tools to passionately and heartfully engage this sacred task.  You take care of yourself body and soul as you do this sacred work because the body is the temple in which all the work gets done.         

Yours in the Work.         

          

Inspirational Sources
Angeles Arrien, The Tarot Handbook
Kelly Bulkeley, Dreams:  A Reader on Religious, Cultural and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming
Mark Hedsel with David Ovason, The Zelator:  A Modern Initiate Explores the Ancient Mysteries
Lee Irwin, Alchemy of Soul:  The Path of Spiritual Transformation
Tom Kenyon, www.tomkenyon.com
Caitlín and John Matthews, Walkers Between the Worlds
Michael Newton, Destiny of Souls
Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy and Sweat Your Prayers
The Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot Deck