Einstein said that “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created the problem.” I work with people regularly to help them move from one level of thinking to another – dreamwork, vision quests, oracular consultations, shamanic work are powerful movers for shifting thinking. And I observe that when thought shifts, everything shifts. What seemed intractable is suddenly malleable. Where someone felt powerless suddenly there is agency and direction. I am good at helping others with this, but I need to be helped with it myself. This seems to work the way dreams work; as Marie Louise von Franz said, you can’t interpret your own dream any more than you can see your own back. Dreams come from our unconscious, as do our patterns of thought. We need help from the outside to see.

I see this more and more in the work I do and in living my life. We need to help each other. We need to give ourselves permission to need help from others, and ask for it, and hope for it and accept it. And we need to offer help when we can, as ethically and gently and non-judgmentally and lovingly as we would want it ourselves.

In order to solve our personal and collective problems we need to move to new levels of thinking. And we need each other for that. We need each other.