Knowing ourselves

Moved to the Truth chapter of the Joy Diet and today's Daily Dharma really resonated with that. Putting it here to keep thinking about (italics are mine):

October 26, 2009
Tricycle's Daily Dharma
The Language of Dreams

We know that our dreams are just ways we have of telling ourselves about ourselves when we are asleep, and yet we have learned to keep from ourselves so much of who we fully, truly are that our dreams seem strange. Amazing, isn’t it? What we tell ourselves about ourselves must be told with so much secrecy and arcane symbolism that we can’t remember it, and if we can, we can’t understand it. At such moments our inner world seems shrouded, muted, alienated, as the natural world seems when it is covered with snow.

Isn’t it sad to realize that we have learned not to accept who we fully are? And isn’t it wonderful to remember that gradually, with courage, we can come to accept and include even what at first had appeared so strange, so horrible, so not-me in our dreams?

- Sylvia Forges-Ryan, from “Bare Branches, Bare Attention,” Tricycle, Winter 2002