“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.

There are reasons why you chose the particular symptoms that you have, and reasons why they emerged at this particular time. Now. There was the feeling, the inner fear that you do not have freedom of motion in the economic or professional sphere—the fear, quite simply, that you were not going to make it. Some of this has to do with the symbolism you have attached subconsciously to the age of 40, and you see yourself coming closer to it. Some has to do with your assessment of your position within the firm, with your assessment of what you would get outside the firm should you leave it.

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.

You have taken it, subconsciously now, as a personal failure that you are not farther ahead, not only financially but in terms of the amount of power you would like to hold. You would like to kick out, but you feel you have lost your footing, hence the symptoms in the feet.

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 had not wanted such a dog until you had room and a larger place, and in the past you had not gotten the dog because subconsciously you hoped you would have more land within a brief, foreseeable future. When you bought the dog, and particularly since your wife was so for the idea, you feared that she also took this as a sign that you had made your mind up to the fact, or faced the fact, that you would be where you are for some time.

She knew subconsciously that you would consider that a failure. We will have much more to say. In the meantime take your break, but (smiling) keep yourself together.

The family all knew, subconsciously again, that the dog had to go. Everyone was overly nice to the dog, so no one would know consciously, what they knew subconsciously—that you considered the dog the symbol of failure. It was a closely guarded secret by all, hidden, but not entirely, from the conscious minds of those involved. No one wanted the dog killed, but it was not coincidence that you yourself loosened the dog’s collar, or that your wife was the one who left the dog; for symbolically the two of you were connected here. Now give us a moment. The act itself was symbolic, and the dog picked up all of your attitudes through its own sense of communication.

Each member of the family picked this up. The dog had to be loved. It was a face-saving gesture. No one wanted you to know, and all of this now on a subconscious basis. Under the conditions that were then in operation, and underline that, for you all to have accepted the dog for any length of time would have been an admission and acceptance of failure.

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.

You do not want to accept the basic fear of immobility and lack of motion. You are too afraid of the fear itself. You recognize it but you do not know what to do about it, and this frightens you further. You act this out subconsciously then, hampering the free motion of the joints, which then become stiffened through the inactivity. The stiffness then convinces you that the joints are indeed at fault; this adds to the problem, which then gives more fuel to the basic fear.