Take a sheet of paper and draw your ideal home. Draw a dwelling place, a garden, a path and two animals nearby. You can make it as basic as you olike, or you can take time to put in loving detail. It is your ideal. It does not matter how limited your artistic. Just have fun. You did it as a child and you have not forgotten how.

Then sit quietly and look at what you have drawn. W"hat does it tell you about yourself. Examine any thought that comes to mind. Don't censor anything. Enjoy the luxury of being as imaginative as you like.

In front of the round hut is a garden of vegetables and prickly, low-growing bushes. Behind is a lake- shore with palm trees. The hut is primitive, built of woven wattle with a palm-thatched roof. The door, however, is stout wood, firmly closed. The windows are barred. In the foreground are two animals, one on each side, looking strangely heraldic. A cobra rears its hooded head on the left. A scaly ant- eater
guards the right. The artist has elaborated beautifully on her tropical paradise home, showing the sunlight on the lake with golden path of shimmering dashes. She has coloured the snake and armadillo with bright mosaic scales.

It is not until we have thought long and hard that we are able to see beyond the enchantment conjured up by a brilliant painter. But then we start to ask questions. Why is the house so isolated and so small? There is only room for one person here. Why are the windows barred and the door so stout? Why is the garden planted with prickly shrubs. Why do the two heraldic beasts seem to be on guard on either side of the entrance? Surely this is the home of a person who does not welcome company? What is there to fear?

In contrast, a second drawing, childishly simple, shows a huge, solid square stone house between two bare, gloomy hills. Behind them a black beetle of a tramp steamer pursues a wavering course across an otherwise empty sea.

It is no surprise to meet the dour, joyless, lonely man who drew it.

Waleed has drawn a tent in an oasis. Around it the sun burns down relentlessly on barren sand. He explains, guilelessly, that he has lived in vast marble palaces with beautiful gardens, fountains and paved walks. "But for myself, I would want a simple life, with my woman and my God." The sincere words throw a new light on the sleekly handsome entrepreneur.

What does your picture tell you about where you are starting from on your quest to find yourself?

Suspend your natural scepticism and think about the right brain, stuffed with knowledge it can only communicate to you through symbols such as these.

Carry on the excercise with a new piece of paper and draw a tree. This tree represents you. Again, it can be as simple or as elaborate as you wish. Then look at it and see if you can read the message from your unconscious self.

Keep both drawings where you will be able to see them over the next few weeks. You will learn more and more from them as time goes by.

Marguerite had drawn a tree, a solid, leafy haven for birds, but low down on the trunk was a huge round scar where a second thick branch had been sawn off. Asked to describe the tree as herself, she began, " I am a tree. I am strong and enduring. I give shelter. My roots go deep."
After a while, she began to weep as she told us, "The scar is for my sister. We were very close. She died of leukemia last year."

Arnold had drawn a delicate weeping willow, all bound about with pink-flowered dog-roses and brambles. Arnold is a homosexual man, gentle, sensitive and enormously talented. He sees himself tied down and restricted by conflict between his regard for his family, the church principles with which he was raised and his personal needs and beliefs.

Our unconscious self, our right brain, has an awful lot of information to impart, if we will only take the time to learn to hear what it is telling us.

It is an interesting excercise to treat our dreams as Marguerite treated her picture. Identify with any particularly memorable details. "I am the....ship? sea? intruder? mountain? or whatever... I feel....big?evil? scary?.. and so on. " Stick with it, even if it feels faintly ridiculous. Suddenly you will gain some insight into whatever was on your mind last night.

IDENTIFYING WHERE WE WANT TO BE

There are several different ways of tackling this problem. We can be purely logical, drawing three circles on our paper and writing in one all the things we want. In the other we write all the things that will be better if we get what we want. In the other we write all the things that could make us regret our success.

A step further into our hidden side might help us to realise why we have not yet achieved what we think we want. Relax and imagine yourself fulfilled and succcessful. Then home in on the niggling doubts and discomforts. Talk to yourself about the way you feel. It is best to do this out loud. You may be surprised by some of the reservations that surface. You may even come to appreciate that there was a sound reason why you never really tried to achieve these dreams. You may even gain much more respect for your selves - both the self that has so far "failed" to live up to expectations and the self that constantly "sabotaged" you to prevent you from doing anything so foolish.

Then you can, if you wish, use one of the relaxation techniques you have learned to enter the meditative state. Then imagine yourself sitting in a beautiful garden. Enjoy the view, the flowers, the scents and sounds of birds and insects and wait quietly until someone or something comes to you. This will be your wiser self. Ask it what you can do to improve your life. Talk about your hopes and dreams. Discuss the various possibilities that are open to you. Ask frnakly about the things that worry you and do not dismiss the first answers that come to mind. Do not distract yourself with worries about it all being rather silly and nothing more than imagination. Your right brain IS imagination. It has also spent many years observing, recording, amassing and collating information whilst your conscious mind has been too busy to notice. You are simply learning to use a new skill, to access lost files.

It is rather like a computer with a special files protected to prevent you erasing material that is of
crucial importance. You will only be able to access and rearrange it when you have achieved a certain level of competence and can be trusted to know its worth.

PLANNING FOR SUCCESS

You must all have heard the words coincidence and synchronicity. The theory is that nothing happens by accident. That every idea has its time. That everything is interdependent. That a butterfly in the Amazon can affect the price of Wall Street shares, and that our expectations shape our experiences in a physical way as well as in an emotional attitude.

It really helps to visualise ourselves doing the things we want to do. It encourages us on all levels to repeat mantras and affirmations to ourselves.

There was a popular board game called the "Game of Life", in which one chose what proportion of fame, money, success or love one desired and then attempted to reach your stated objective. It was soon apparent that the easiest objectives to realise were those with a high proportion of love and a low proportion of fame or money. It did not take long to learn to be a consistent winner, although it might be at the expense of subduing your real ambitions in favour of what was relatively easy to achieve. That made it quite a socially manipulative activity. But the point was that one had to know what was possible and how to achieve it, and one had to make a clear statement of intent and then go for it.

One could choose the relatively safe but unambitious route, or one could gamble more excitingly on something harder to obtain. You made your own choice and then got on with it. Depending on your personality, motivation and strategy, it could be a thrilling game or positively a bore.

Just as if you were playing that game, try on a few variations of ambition, just for fun. Which feels best for you? Safety? Or thrills and spills? Care and caution or devil-may-care recklessness? How near is this to your usual strategy for living?

To begin in a small way, try a meditation about an ideal room. Picture yourself at ease in a room of your own, where every single item is there because it gives you pleasure. You can gradually build up this place in your imagination as a haven to which you can return to unwind in safety, to talk to your various expert selves and to grow and learn. Gradually, over a period of years, you will find that you are changing your surroundings to match those of your ideal retreat and, one day, you will realise with astonishment that you do not need it any longer, because reality is actually better now than that imaginary place.

In just the same way you can imagine changing other parts of your life - your health, your appearance, your job, your relationships. All will evolve together until you no longer need what you thought you wanted at the beginning - because what you have now is even more satisfying.

The process is a combination of a clear picture of where you want to be and a constant awareness of your feelings, satisfactions and doubts. This feedback enables you to update and refine your plan as you go along. So you are not stuck with something you have outgrown, but are constantly learning, progressing, reviewing and fine-tuning your guidance system.

The scientists who send rockets into space may think they have designed a pretty good technical gimmick, but remember, you had it first! It has been sitting in your skull all your life, just waiting for you to realise you had the facility - but of course, you have only just gotten around to reading the manual!

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