A spontaneous painting of the Medicine Wheel. An ancient life symbol used by all aboriginal peoples since the beginning of time. Indicating the four directions, the seasons and many other aspects of life. The inner circle is the symbol for Manitou, Wakan Tanka, The Great Spirit. My research has shown the order of colors is correct to the best of my knowledge. White for north, yellow east, red south and west black. Some indigenous cultures like the Lakota have a different order for the colors.

Comment by painter J W Kelly, Fine Art America

In January 2023, I opened my inbox and found an email from an acquaintance of mine, a middle-aged woman who shall remain anonymous. In this email, she wanted to open a space of sharing for a group I am participating in. More specifically, we were invited to relate any noteworthy experiences that took place after a New Year gathering.

In her part of the sharing—and for the first time since I’ve known her—she wrote about a dream of hers. Despite its shortness, the dream immediately caught my interest because it articulates one of these truths that sounds banal, and yet the unconscious, as a proxy for Nature, takes time and effort to point out.

She wrote:

I want to share with you all a special dream I was given some time ago. […] I was shown that placing oneself within the center of what is essentially a medicine wheel, and from that space engaging with any healing modalities of our choosing, the benefits are amplified.

And she further commented:

This is truly revered space of natural alchemy. When done with acknowledgement and gratitude, true and deep, multi-dimensional healing is opened. […]
The dream presented true medicine, in the native tradition of honoring all that space represents and energetically holds with utmost integrity.

Intrigued, I asked her to represent what she saw in her dream. She responded by sending this image, saying that this is the closest thing she could find.

Before we continue, some more context about this woman will be helpful. She is a person dedicated to introspective work and being in tune with the natural rhythms of life. Her spiritual inclination would be best described as natural spirituality, as she is neither religious nor adhering to any New Age practices. I would describe her as a woman of great integrity, interested in healing herself and supporting others in their task.

It’s also worth pointing out that she has never shown interest in Jung in our interactions. Thus, it is fair to say that this dream comes without preconceptions about wholeness or individuation.

The dream is essentially made of one single symbol, namely the medicine wheel.

The medicine wheel is a sacred symbol of Native American culture and tradition. In its most basic elements, the medicine wheel is a circle divided into four segments, with another circle at the center that is sometimes omitted.

Poster from https://tribaltradeco.com/blogs/medicine-wheel/

Each quadrant is then ascribed one of the traditional colors (white, yellow, red, or black) and an element of the whole (one of the four elements, one of the four cardinal directions, one of the four stages of life, one of the four seasons, etc.). The elements that fill the medicine wheel depend on the nature of the teachings or context in which it is being used.

Taken as a totality, the medicine wheel is a healing symbol of balance, harmony, unity and multiplicity, and of the circular nature of time.

From a psychological perspective, the medicine wheel can be first approached as a quaternity or as a mandala, two well-established symbols of wholeness in the field of analytical psychology. Jung writes,

Although “wholeness” seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him, like anima or animus; and just as the latter have a higher position in the hierarchy than the shadow, so wholeness lays claim to a position and a value superior to those of the syzygy.
Carl Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self, CW 9ii, par 59

This interpretation is readily confirmed by the dream: wholeness, or “the benefits of any healing modality” as the dream puts it, is ‘amplified’ through the relationship between the ego and the medicine wheel.

If the medicine wheel is a system of balance and harmony that one can work with externally, the dream points out that one can also move towards its center and stand inside it.

This brings up the notion that, as a symbol of wholeness, the medicine wheel is also a vessel or a container: if one were to stand at the center, one would be contained by the wheel, surrounded from all sides by it.

This containment of the individual by its own wholeness is best understood as a symbolic representation of a harmonious state of being, one in which the ego is more or less aligned with the mystery of the center.

Understanding the center of the medicine wheel requires particular attention and elaboration.

In his study of mandalas, Jung observed the recurring motif of a center distinct from the whole. He discussed the function of this center as a temenos or precinct, as a protected space in which the sacred resides.

At this point, a lengthy quote is necessary.

The experience formulated by the modern mandala is typical of people who cannot project the divine image any longer. Owing to the withdrawal and introjection of the image they are in danger of inflation and dissociation of the personality. The round or square enclosures built round the centre therefore have the purpose of protective walls or of a vas hermeticum, to prevent an outburst or a disintegration. Thus the mandala denotes and assists exclusive concentration on the centre, the self. This is anything but egocentricity. On the contrary, it is a much needed self-control for the purpose of avoiding inflation and dissociation.

The enclosure, as we have seen, has also the meaning of what is called in Greek a temenos, the precincts of a temple or any isolated sacred place. The circle in this case protects or isolates an inner content or process that should not get mixed up with things outside. Thus the mandala repeats in symbolic form archaic procedures which were once concrete realities. As I have already mentioned, the inhabitant of the temenos was a god. But the prisoner, or the well-protected dweller in the mandala, does not seem to be a god, since the symbols used—stars, crosses, globes, etc.—do not signify a god but an obviously important part of the human personality. One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala. Since modern mandalas are amazingly close parallels to the ancient magical circles, which usually have a deity in the centre, it is clear that in the modern mandala man—the deep ground, as it were, of the self—is not a substitute but a symbol for the deity.

It is a remarkable fact that this symbol is a natural and spontaneous occurrence and that it is always an essentially unconscious product, as our dream shows. If we want to know what happens when the idea of God is no longer projected as an autonomous entity, this is the answer of the unconscious psyche. The unconscious produces the idea of a deified or divine man who is imprisoned, concealed, protected, usually depersonalized, and represented by an abstract symbol. The symbols often contain allusions to the medieval conception of the microcosm, as was the case with my patient’s world clock, for instance. Many of the processes that lead to the mandala, and the mandala itself, seem to be direct confirmations of medieval speculation. It looks as if the patients had read those old treatises on the philosophers’ stone, the divine water, the rotundum, the squaring of the circle, the four colours, etc. And yet they have never been anywhere near alchemical philosophy and its abstruse symbolism. (Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par 156-158)

Traditionally, the center of the mandala is reserved to the deity. But the representations of a deity at the center of the wheel can also be understood as the innermost aspect of man who, like a distant star, rules from the deepest grounds of the personality.

This second center, termed the self by Jung, oversees both consciousness and the unconscious and thus participates in the life of the ego, even if its remote nature is usually taken as proof of its absence.

Moreover, given the limited access of the ego to what happens in the psyche, the self is so to speak a transcendental reality for the ego. Proximity to the self can be experienced in some limited manner through dreams for instance but it can never be fully comprehended by the ego.

Nevertheless, symbols like mandalas and quaternities are here to remind us that the wholeness that is the telos of man does indeed have a center and that this center is different from the ego.

We have now all the elements necessary to understand the dream: the medicine wheel is the emerging wholeness of the dreamer whose center is the self.

The dream further points out that the ego can stand in the center of the wheel, which is an invitation to align with, to be contained by this other psychic center. If the ego was to choose to do so, the dream tells us that “healing benefits would be amplified”.

So what does it mean to stand inside the center of wholeness, symbolically speaking? Before we attempt to answer that question, we have to turn to another aspect of the medicine wheel.

So far in this analysis, we have focused only on the circular aspect of the medicine wheel. But the intersection at the center of the wheel is also a cross.

As such, any cross inscribed in a circle is reminiscent of the age-old and universal sun cross.

The sun cross all around the world, found on Archaeo – Histories

As one of the oldest religious symbols known to us, the meaning of the sun cross cannot be exhausted in writing. Having said that, the dream gives us a specific context for us to look at this symbol as it emphasizes the importance of the center.

With that in mind, we can bring up another symbol in this interpretation: the current guiding symbol for being at the center of a cross is no less than the crucifixion. It is the most recent and most elaborated upon symbol we have and therefore can be used as a basis for comparison and understanding.

Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. (Carl Jung, CW 16, The Psychology of the Transference, CW 16, par 470)

In Aion (CW 9ii, par 68 ff.), Jung dedicates a section to the study of Christ as a symbol of the self. His initial conclusion is that “Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self ” (ibid., par 70) but this remains incomplete without the next part: “[A]lthough the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, coeternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb sacrificed between opposites, One divided into Many, etc.) undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist.” (ibid., par 79)

Understood in this manner, the Antichrist is “the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality, which ought not to be judged too optimistically.” (ibid., par 76)

These remarks were necessary to establish two points.

First, it is now clear that the symbol of Christ on the cross (as the self on the cross) is symbolically equivalent to the self as the center of the medicine wheel.

Second, if Jung is right in his assessment of the archetype being split in half, then any attempt to enter wholeness will be a torturous agony indeed. One cannot simultaneously claim to be whole and yet deny the dark half of the psyche, as both need to find a balanced expression within the individual.

From this it is evident that individuation, or becoming whole, is neither a summum bonum nor a summum desideratum, but the painful experience of the union of opposites. That is the real meaning of the cross in the circle, and that is why the cross has an apotropaic effect, because, pointed at evil, it shows evil that it is already included and has therefore lost its destructive power. (Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par 705)

The crucifixion then is the moral problem of being confronted at once with two incompatible halves (light and dark, good and evil, etc.) and an appropriate symbol of the overpowering experience of being under such paradoxical pressure.

[T]he image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves . . . tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. (ibid., par 79)

In this respect, the figure of Christ is a symbol of a psychological stage where the ego is unconsciously identified with only one-side of the totality of the self. And, to enter a wholeness that includes both, one must go through an intolerably painful ordeal, one foretold by our collective myth.

A figure painted by a woman who “has a shadow problem”. Note the quaternity resembling a medicine wheel in the background.

From Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par 705.

As long as the dark side of the psyche is rejected by the individual ego, stepping progressively into wholeness is going to be an unbearable torment, a Passion leading to the crucifixion.

However, if the individual has dedicated him or herself to inner work, the picture in the unconscious changes completely: the crucifixion is now a medicine wheel that the ego can step into without thorns or nails.

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