“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.

For some time you had consciously considered various roads that you could take, but subconsciously you became more and more alarmed, and felt severely hampered in your progress.

Now what happens is this. You began by wanting to express withheld bitterness, often explosively. At the same time you did not do so. One group of muscles therefore were tensed for action, and the other group of muscles tried to stop the action. You wanted to go ahead but felt you could not, so that this was reflected in your posture long before you felt a symptom.

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.

You harbored thoughts of immobility. You feared you could not get ahead. You did not know what steps to take. You set up limitations in your mind. You used your imagination, a very valuable tool, against yourself. You saw yourself in the future worse off. You felt your freedom threatened until little by little these ideas began to predominate.

The failure was being rejected, you see. Now the dog was a hunting dog. Symbolically you have always equated hunting with a man’s work in modern society. That was one connection. You would not feel free to hunt successfully with the animal, for he was, you felt, the symbol of an unsuccessful hunt in the work world.

You were particularly frightened during vacation because of the inactivity. Old fears were aroused that you have never faced consciously. You never faced them honestly. You are terrified of inactivity, for many reasons: bodily inactivity, mental inactivity, some of this based upon fear of your mother’s disease. You must go, go, go, to prove that you can do so, and any threat to your mobility is not only strongly felt but negatively exaggerated.

Supposing you left your job and simply could not find another, what would you do? You could not bear to sit at home. This fear subconsciously nagged at you, and it has for this reason, among other, that the symptoms were with you before vacation. This year you felt the vacation almost as a threat because of the fears that had built up during the year.

To protect yourself from her disease you had to move quickly physically. You also had to move quickly in the area of work. You were sensitized because of your mother’s problem to fear inactivity. Any threat to your motion or advance, even in the business area, becomes highly charged for this reason. Earlier you felt that you could strike out. There was plenty of time. Then you became frightened after the age of 35, and you began to soften up your blows. (Jane gestured widely, with a fist.) You began to hold back, become more cautious, and then slowly began to entertain thoughts of the possibility of failure.