“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To John:) You do not feel free to move. Symbolically you do not feel that you have freedom of motion, and you are expressing this through the body mechanism. You did indeed shake yourself up when you decided to put your smoking aside, but this was simply because you felt subconsciously a loss. The smoking to some extent had been used by you as a method of giving yourself comfort, a way of giving yourself pleasure.

When you turned from the habit, and would have turned to food for comfort, you denied yourself this out of fear of gaining weight. Subconsciously you felt cheated. Now the comfort was needed to begin with so that you could make up for other things that you felt you did not have, and to help you cope with problems, as you are aware.

This was reflected in other portions of the body as well. As you noted, you felt off balance subjectively, and unsure. Now. You had grown used to smoking as a way of comforting yourself. You removed the comfort. You refused to add another, and at the same time you did not face the inner problem that was bothering you, that made the comfort so necessary to begin with. We will go into this more deeply, for you can indeed rid yourself of the symptoms, but I would like to make one point here first. When you bought the dog, subconsciously you felt that the dog was almost a symbol of your failure.

In the first place none of you would have found it comfortable in the long run, to live with an animal that you considered the symbol for failure. Now I will give you time for questions. Let us follow this through.

(Our cat Willy jumped up in Jane’s lap, but she continued to speak as Seth while Willy sought to make himself comfortable.)

Now there is something else. You want comfort of a certain kind, and you will not ask it of your wife.You feel, again,that you should not need comfort, that she will interpret such a need either as weakness or that she will become frightened. You have been denying yourself comfort of this kind, and it would help prevent the periods of depression, and the mood of depression that has gradually come over you and robbed you of your resistance.

Give us a moment. (Pause.) She is quite able to give it to you. It is to some extent her idea of her place and part, to offer comfort to her man when necessary. You usually prevent her from this role. You have been overdepriving yourself on several points, and the stiffness deprives you even further, you see.