Sunny Speaks to Me

My cat spoke to me in a dream a few nights ago; I love it when that happens, when animals have a dialogue with me in the dreaming.  It's always worthwhile to listen.

It was kind of funny because, as in waking life, my old gentleman is hard of hearing, so I was speaking right to his face, so he could lip read and enunciating to be as clear as possible.

He was telling me about his mother and father; I asked him to tell me more about his dad.  I don't know if he heard me correctly, but he answered "fathers are important", or something like that.

Of course it put me in mind of my own departed dad, how important he is in my life.  From there, a host of other beneficial ponderings ensued.

But how cool is it to hear an animal speak in a dream!  I laugh because in the dream I thought he sounds a lot like me but in a lower register.  Part of me is aware in the dream that it is all coming from me, for my sake.

Talking animals are the stuff of fairy tales, and dreams.  The fact that it's my beloved waking life cat conversing with me makes it even more thrilling.  Sunny is the most psychic cat I've ever lived with, from the beginning he acted like he just read your mind.  It's fun to have him show up with me in a dream, let alone talking.

There's a trickster, but deeply divine energy to the wisdom animals impart in dreams.  I collect my animal dreams in one file; I reread them often and value the energy and significance each one has gifted me from the dream lands.  Different animals gift different energies to the dreamer they visit.  I figure it's up to me to recognize the gift and honor it by paying attention and learning the lesson offered.

What animals have visited you lately in the dreaming?

Dream Spirituality: the Divine in the 21st Century

"Full Moon In Taurus" by Katrin Haiba   2017

I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is in a shit load of trouble.  My best friend and partner, Jim, has taught me to distinguish between the world's situation and the people in it.  The trouble is incontrovertibly, the people.  The world, as Jim insists, is a beautiful place.

Why are people causing so much trouble, so much suffering for themselves and every living thing around them? Could it be that the people are acting out of misguided beliefs?

For all of  recorded history, not to be confused with actual history,  history is the story as told by the conqueror.  The conqueror's rule, the conqueror's dictums, the story as the conqueror sees it.  In a patriarchal paradigm, might makes right, strength is power and daddy knows best.  Patriarchy conquered about 6 millennia ago; Homo Sapiens, our clan, have been around for about 200,000 years.  Do the math; do you really think we came into our own only 6,000 years ago and sat around twiddling our thumbs before that? Archeological records suggest periods of human history resplendent with remarkable human works, and whats more, with respect for the Feminine Divine, God as Mother.

Today, can we recognize a failed paradigm when we're living it?

On this beautiful planet, patriarchal religions constructed the paradigm of violence and domination.  For the six millennia of father rule, patriarchies have been one blood bath after another.  The more rigid the tenets of the patriarchal belief structures, the worse women in that culture fare.  Restrictions on everything female are a hall mark of these paradigms.  "And he shall lord it over her" because she is at existential fault for all things evil.  You can call her Eve, make sure she stays in her place or she will deceive and subdue you.

But there was a time when we emerged, wide-eyed from our caves and proclaimed the Divine Mother.  It was a simple deduction.  Who gives birth?  Who bleeds and does not die?  The Great Mother is not Barbie dressed as the Virgin Mary; the Great Mother is the primal creative force of the Universe.

The problem with problem paradigms is, as you think, so shall you do.  If society can get us to accept absurdity as the norm, even the goal, through the crap they teach you is true, when it isn't, then that particular consensus reality can rule.  Patriarchy is a physical earth consensus reality that I think is way past its use by date.

Men don't have to feel threatened; they just have to open their hearts to the Feminine Divine, think with their hearts more and join the revolution.  The opposite of patriarchy isn't matriarchy; the patriarchal paradigm rules by hierarchies and force.  The opposite of patriarchy is balance - harmony, dance, and chill living.  Anyone want to sign up for a new paradigm?

Thinking is dangerously arbitrary; a paradigm that dictates inane, insane beliefs, especially about women for the benefit of men, also justifies the subjugation of one race to another.  It all begins with the hubris to make rules that handicap to any degree the natural potential of a person, whatever gender, whatever race.

Isn't it time we took stock of the wineskins into which we pour the truest elixirs of our soul?  God is not male or father.  God/Goddess is All.  Light. Energy.  Way too big for those tiny, stiff foreskins, I mean wineskins.

Haven't you met the divine in your dreams?  It doesn't always take the same form. Sometimes it's surprising or humbling to recognize our initial blindness to the shape the divine does take in our dreams, but when we become aware, we know it by the awe it inspires in us.  Your divine and my divine will not manifest the same.

Yet, from the time we're born, we're told god is Father, mighty, to be feared and to be catered to, regardless of how callous, cold and petty vengeful his actions often prove to be.  Take the principal sacrifice at the heart of patriarchal Christianity, that of the only, the good, loving son who must die to settle a debt.

How can a religion that claims god is love also insist that something so unnatural, horrible and cruel as demanding your own son's gory death to satisfy a sour tempered grudge is ultimately an act of selfless love for humanity?  But then again, how many sons have been sacrificed in any of those bloodbaths that are just the way patriarchy rolls.

Why has the Divine Mother been forgotten or relegated to the handmaid who'll do whatever the Father says?  It is no accident, as I've written, but the question for today, for the 21st century is, how much longer is an untenable spirituality going to rule us?  How much longer will people listen to religious babble and consider it the word of the one, almighty, all male, god?  Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

If, as I've mentioned, our spirituality is as natural and individual to us as our bellybuttons, why not tune in to the channel you frequent every night and find out more about who you really are from your own direct connection?  Does that mean that we share nothing?  No, as it turns out, we soon learn that we share everything.  We are One.

Try seeing the divine in Mother as well as Father, equally; the yin and the yang is the great balance that makes life flow.  Try keeping an ear to your own best counsel of your dreams so that you come to realize you live in more than one place at once; the dream world and the physical world are equally, if differently, real.

Our differences are based not on physiology but on beliefs.  It's our belief that separates one from another, sometimes breeding real hatred.  Look at the racial hatred in vogue now; how stupid are these beliefs?  Many people can concur that they are; then how stupid is the belief in one supreme, male deity who wants anyone who doesn't agree to die a horrible, long painful death and forever burn in putrid fires for eternity.  Nice.

Dreaming is just one avenue to the spirituality that can liberate us of old, mean and dangerous beliefs. I heard Neal Degrasse Tyson call his version, cosmic spirituality.  We all don't have to arrive at the same conclusions nor follow the same paths; but we all have to find true balance so that we don't continue to rock the boat so violently ( the planet) on which our survival depends

There is no mistaking Love.  It doesn't restrict, punish nor demand.  It flows with what is needed most for the wellbeing of the soul. Love is ineffable and best experienced directly, so why not tune in to your own connections and open your heart to greater possibilities?

I didn't need to give up Jesus to give up patriarchal christianity; Jesus is the best feminist role model for men in patriarchal history.  The divine feminine is equally important to our psychic health as the divine masculine.  A divine masculine out of control is bad for you, a fact that history bears out repeatedly.  For spiritual balance the divine feminine must exert equal influence in the human psyche and the cultures we create.  Divine Love is a Dance.  We're here to dance, or at least let our hearts do it for us.

All That Dies Shall Be Reborn

This is an important time of year for me; I chose to marry my dear man on October 31st.  It's a sacred day to the earth religions, the pagans of the planet.  It's the day of transition between life and death, autumn and winter, into the dark, the still, the cold, the lifeless. It's also a time to give thanks for the bounty of the summer's harvest.

In pagan thought, all that dies will be reborn: Spring follows Winter; Life follows Death.  Spirit doesn't die; it transforms and transitions from matter to energy, and back again - from here to there, and back again.

Today, a friend spoke to me of her reservations about Halloween and all its hype.  Someone very dear to her died on this date and the practice of dressing as scary ghosts and ghouls repulses her. Me, too. The dead are not ghosts and ghouls; among them, are our beloved.

I shared with her the pagan understanding of Samhain, the Celtic holy day we now call Halloween, as the time in the circle of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, when we're even closer to those we love who've died to the physical, where we still reside.  I celebrate my beloved dead at this time of year.  I forgive them their trespasses and ask them to forgive mine.  I know I'll see them, in dreams and most probably, after my crossing, so I strive to keep in touch.  My relationship to both my departed parents has grown immensely through our continued interactions in the dreaming.

All Hollow's Eve is a wonderful time to tune into the energy vibe of wishing those we love who've transitioned from the physical continued blessings on their spiritual paths and the assurance of our heartfelt love.  It's also a time to let go of attachments to the dead that may cause us unnecessary grief.  The veil is the thinnest for the benefit of both sides.  I wish you healing dreams to help you connect to those you love across the divide we call death.

Dream Inspirations

Last week I recorded a dream in my journal I titled, "Two Lions and Two Bears" in honor of the animals in it. I posted a challenge on my Lita Dreaming Facebook page  for anyone to write a story with that title.  While waiting for any responses, I wrote a poem from my dream.

Dreams inspire us to create, to live life with our full heart.

Two Lions and Two Bears

Dream Poem

I saw the man

Open his back door

And release the Black Lion.

Beautiful, beautiful

Beast.

I saw the man

Cross the Street

And release the second Lion.

This Lion,

The Tan Lion

Lived across the street from him.

And he was old.

Two Lions loose.

Should we tell the people?

Beware!

Two Lions

Turn into

Two Bears

Two Bears at the door.

Enter the bears,

We exit,

Through the same door,

With  curtseys.

Into the next room

Until the bears

Enter, again.

The two bears

That were once, two lions.

Waking Life/Dream Life

A participant in one of my workshops wrote down a question about whether we repeat our daily experience in the dreaming.

Yes, I think so from my dream experiences, but there always seems to be a twist. Even though the characters of my waking life, in person and from TV, may show up in a dream because they figured in my day; there's always more to it, and it's personal.

My dreams will throw me a bone sometimes in the way of wisdom for my waking life; but they aren't that interested in the physical life I'm living; they are partial to the life of the soul.

What's sad to me is that most people automatically think, oh religion.  Christian, Muslim, Judaism or Buddhism, that's where one goes to plug into the life of the soul.  No, wrong.    That's where you go to get told what to believe and how to save something that doesn't need saving.  The Soul saves, it doesn't need saving.  Dreams are the Soul's messengers.

Some people think "spirituality" is all OM and Amen.  Spirituality is whatever you do with an open heart and selflessness.  Like dreams, that come big and small, so does spirituality.  And I don't think you can enter into true spirituality without a sense of humor, which leaves most religions out.

So, our dreams are focused on spiritual growth over winning the lottery, which often means we get even more lost than we already are into the physical.  Dreams bring us the messages that help us let go of rigid, silly or unloving ways, not just towards others, but towards ourselves.

Let's face it; if you get told from day one by your culture that some Nobadaddy was pisssed with you from the minute you hit the physical because your ancestors disobeyed, therefore, you must spend a lifetime making it up to Him.  What?  This dude even insists His one and only son die for the cause.  Jesus.  Who needs a god like that?

Dreams remind us that the Divine has many faces, and sometimes it has no face at all; just Light, just Being.  Many of you dreamers know just what I mean.  After one experience I wrote about here, I came back saying, "I'll never be able to explain this to anyone, not even myself."

Isn't it better to experience spirituality than to be told what to believe?  There is no language for the Truth that Is, you've got to experience it yourself.  Luckily, not only are we born with belly buttons, we're born with the power to dream.

So, back to how dreams mirror an experience in waking life to us, day life; yes, it can seem mundane repetition, but play with it a bit anyway.  Write it down, ponder it from time to time.  Let yourself say, huh; yes, that thing happened yesterday and that person I saw or spoke to, that was the movie I watched, the fight I had, etc. but there are some very interesting other things in the dream; it's not an instant replay.  Sometimes I have to wade through the repetition of a dream before it clicks, but life's lessons are best learned both in sleep and wake.  If both sides agree; I'm in good shape, at least spiritually.

My spirituality is like my bellybutton, mine.  It doesn't need a credo, or ask allegiance of me.  It never harms my wholeness.

Look at women's situations because of patriarchal religious dogma and tell me those misogynous edicts don't harm women, sometimes body and soul.  Eve; really?  Check out my Howling Mary dream and my posts about the Great Mother.  There was a time when these crazy religions didn't rule and we, as a human race, were just not that crazy.

Dreams are still our lifeline, though many hold that line with lots of slack.  When people ask me why they don't remember their dreams, my first question is; do you want to?  Do you set an intention to dream before you go to sleep.  Do you take the time in the morning to gather whatever you can from the dreaming?

Yes, we see lots of parallels to waking life in dreaming; it's up to us to notice the differences, the new elements our dream has added, the challenge our dream is presenting.  We don't learn from being told; we learn from experience.  There's great wisdom in how dreams handle us; it's up to us to recognize it.

Each of us is going to die.  There are few things we'll carry across that transition with us, but they are the best things we can have on either side of the divide.  Who and what we truly, selflessly love, what we do for others, and how much we learn to truly, madly, deeply love ourselves.

There are huge obstacles to self love; it's ironic that we have such supreme ultimate narcissists right now on the global stage, keeping us cowering every second possible with war threats and closed hearts. I lay that obstacle square at the feet of the patriarchal paradigm of the last 6,000 years; and I propose that once we discover who we truly are as spiritual beings having a physical existence, those mind-forged manacles will fall.

Dreams matter whether they're mundane or mind-blowing, whether we know we left our body and are in the dreaming or we don't.  Wether we have one dream a year, or a dozen a day.  They matter to each dreamer.  That's the bridge, the cord, the secret door to our souls, as Jung insisted.

So dream strong and pay attention.

Ashé!

Dream Whispering

So many times, someone at a party or in a chance encounter will tell me a dream; they know I love to hear them.

So many times, doors of perception open to the dreamer when I respond from my practice of Active Dreaming. Those awesome Oprah aha moments happen all the time in response to the simplest of observations on my part.  I'm not, the listener, playing Madam Medium who knows the meaning of your dream; as an Active Dream practitioner, I am trying the dream on for size without presuming to know what it means for the dreamer, only what, if this were my dream, it would mean for me.

Not only does this help the listener escape the ego laden path of answer person, it frees the imagination of the listener and the dreamer to dance with a dream and allow serendipity to offer its gifts as she sees fit.

A dream, even another's dream, with her or his permission, is a very viable, as in full of life, place to explore the extra-sensory resources available to each of us for daily living.  Dreams have existential energy and good luck.  I love being in that zone.

So, today was a two dream story Labor Day party with friends day. It only proves to me that everyone gets turned on, to some degree by their dreams.  I revel in the pleasure of opening even the tiniest of portals into someone's inner dream resources, and I am always grateful for the opportunity.

I truly get turned on by using the tools of Active Dreaming to take dream "work" out of the intellectual, cognitive realms and into the experiential realities we each inhabit.  It's a light hearted, respectful way to offer something in return for the confidence the person's had sharing the dream with me.  More, it's a primer for how to just go with your dream flow and think creatively in your waking life, using dreams for inspiration.

Bright dreams to you.

Stretch to Contain: A Dream Motto

A big dream is a life plan; it's a map for the journey.  Over the years I've written about my Howling Mary dream. I know why Mary was howling; she was calling to me to see and to do.  In my dream, I ran to her and offered to help.  She inspired me to grab the chalice from the priest and offer something better than the worms they were serving communicants. The worms had turned to rubber bands.

Rubber bands stretch to contain.  This dream is decades old, but right now, I think that's an excellent motto. A game in Active Dreaming is to come up with a bumper sticker derived from a dream.  "Stretch to contain."

I was recently invited as a past board member to a wonderful organization , run for and mostly by women, addressing critical issues women face in patriarchal culture, domestic violence and sexual assault.  In patriarchy, males are sanctioned to commit both, especially if women step outside the behavior code prescribed for them.  There are, of course, always patriarchal not libel clauses for  moments when "men will be men."

CBS 60 Minutes correspondent, Lara Logan, is the keynote speaker at CFJ's event.  She was covering the Egyptian "Arab Spring" In Feb. of 2011 when minor technical difficulties for her and her all male crew created a moment off camera when the reveling warriors became obsessed with attacking her.

She impresses me in her account with her unbelievable courage and clarity.  I cannot imagine in any cell of my body having to endure what she endured.  I'm very grateful to her for sharing her story and hope you will take the little bit of time to hear it if you haven't already; I'm attaching it at the end.

I've already mentioned how we're living in a ramped up pussy grabbing world, until we decide to call a spade a shovel and confront the explicit and malignant male view of women, how it's perpetuated in various religious cultures and what we can do to reverse this poisonous tide, we miss the point of what needs to happen.  A point that Howling Mary in my dream made very clear.

What happened to Lara Logan happened because she went into a supremely patriarchal bacchanalia thinking her international journalist status would protect her, as would her team of men.  But you look at that crowd and you see it's all men, maybe one grandma in full dark burrito wrap, but all men.  Then you look at Lara and she is the epitome of beautiful Euro/Anglo woman.  I have to ask myself; what's going on here  that isn't being reported? This is a hate crime, not a sexual assault.

Sexual assault is a loaded term in patriarchy; the "she asked for it" defense has served attackers well over the years.  But the violence that erupted from the celebratory victory parade Lara was covering, in my opinion, erupted as a cultural, uber-male patriarchal hate crime that has mixed into it, the hatred of the controlling male faction of patriarchy, the white race, the West.  But Lara was in the bullseye. She was the epitome of the Western woman, smart, beautiful, independent and unrestrained; definitely not burrito wrapped.

What responsibility does CBS have for their naive approach to covering the news of that testorone charged day?  A lot, I think.  But that aside, in the 60 minutes report, there is no mention of the obvious.  This is a fanatically anti-woman religious group attacking a beautiful, independently successful white woman, perhaps because she personifies what they fear the most, the freedom and equality of women.

I'm sorry, any culture that insists women be burrito wrapped in desert heat because of what her beauty and seductive powers might do to undermine the excellent job the guys are doing currently, is a culture to be called out and watched closely.  Uber-macho patriarchy is at the heart of God the Father, men in charge religions.

As a feminist since the 70's, I'm so tired of the bra-burning, man hating media Medusa projected onto our movement on the yap-tube, which is at least 90% male owned and run.  Yes, there was a great feminist awakening of consciousness for women and men in the 70s and 80s, but any feminist who doesn't know how the movement was co-opted; think super hero women in stilettos and bustiers, faking ingenue for Mr. Right.

At the heart of all human renewal is the challenge of balancing the female and the male in the human psyche, (psyche in Greek means soul, as well as butterfly).  It's clear to me that women don drag every day to take on the world.  They pluck and tuck and tweeze and squeeze into Barbie archetypes to follow the drill of feminine existence in patriarchal cultures.  I marvel at the smart news women on all stations in their Barbie dresses and stiletto heels.  Really?  I'd love to see drag day, where all the anchor men go into hair and make-up for the same effect.  We'd hardly know the difference.

We are souls first, manifested bodies second; yet, we're living in a culture that just focuses on the physical, and even worse, stereotypes the physical so excruciatingly narrowly it has all of us jumping for no good reason.  What if we thought more about the lessons we're here in the physical to learn, in order to continue an infinite journey?

What if, as renowned OBE pioneer, William Buhlman teaches, we need to claim spiritual independence?  How?  By trusting that we're born into the physical equipped with several safety lines to home. I consider all of dream studies a portal to organic spirituality, that includes spontaneous night dreams, lucid dreams and OBEs.

This spontaneous big dream that came to me in college preceded so many unforeseen turns in my spiritual road.  I went from culturally indoctrinated religion to paradigm bending women's spirituality to  exploration of inner space without the blinders of preconceived beliefs.

Why is Mary Howling?  The huge imbalance, injustice and under championed status of women in patriarchies all over this current world, the one that is imploding of its own greed and wrong-heartedness, is causing more and more suffering.  She's mad as hell and won't take it any more.

I'm so grateful that Lara Logan, warrior woman that she is, was able to reclaim her spirit after that horrendous waking horror.   However, this is a hate crime that shrieks of how brutal patriarchal religions are towards women.  Why weren't there women celebrating with the men? Allah wants women behind the scenes; Yahweh's often right there with him.  When will we call a spade a shovel and ban all religions that have only a male divinity?  It's not good for anybody, female or male.  The TAO teaches the yin/yang of existence and the need to achieve balance; it works.  As we exist now, the planet is threatened by the uber-patriarchal stances of warring male egomaniacs.  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over, expecting different results.

In the end, it was a group of Egyptian women on the sidelines, themselves burritoed, who saved Lara when CBS official protection failed. Her story is breathtaking.  They intervened and folded her into their circle, throwing water at the attackers, mobs of men.  The mob stopped at attacking their own women in a public setting, also, some men sided with the women.  From there, Lara was delivered from her attackers with the aid of soldier intervention, though it was touch and go the whole way.  Her story is remarkable; I hope to hear it personally at the fundraiser.

In my dream, Mary is howling for what happened to her and for what happens to women subjected to patriarchal religious and legal cultural restrictions.  Egypt in 2011 might have been one extreme of the great octopatriarchalpus, but pussy grabbing is our own western manifestation; that and legislation that subjects women to unfair biological demands because it's written into male favoring, women bullying patriarchal pseudo-god dictated codes of social behavior.  As Gloria Steinem once said, "If men could have babies, abortion would be a sacrament."

My Howling Mary tells me that we must stretch our imaginations and our hearts to contain all the damage that force based, rapist ideologies have inflicted over the last 6 millennia on our world cultures.  We need to think outside of what has been considered conventional, not with our heads, as the patriarchy endorses, but with our hearts.  Beware of anyone who doesn't use the heart as a touchstone.

Let's stretch our imaginations to redirect how our waking dream on this planet plays out.  Let's think in spirit form first and recognize how arbitrary rules about female existence subject to male dominance are destroying our planet.  We're in this together.  God is not Father, is not male.  God/dess is Love.

Here is Lara's story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF4VG5Dh-sg&feature=share


.

Peace and Blessings to Heather Heyer

Every time someone stands up to injustice, force, ignorance and violence, an Angel gets her wings.  What risky business standing up for loving, inclusive values can be!  I am so sorry, Heather, that your life was sacrificed to some roboton's absurd and bloodthirsty ideology.  I'm betting you're being attended now by all the loving spirit guides you need, but I am so very sorry for our loss.  I'm so proud that there are so many young people like you who are strong and smart and bold! Thank you for your courage and the message you died to uphold.

Some jerk from Ohio got into a car in Virginia, and full of blind allegiance to his hate fueled ideology, plowed into a crowd of innocent Americans exercising their full amendment rights of free speech. He murdered Heather Heyer, a proud young social justice warrior demonstrating for justice against white supremacists. What price did she pay in free America for her courage?  Is this something she or her family could have anticipated as the price of her civic altruism?  Her mom says:

I don’t want her death to be a focus for more hatred, I want her death to be a rallying cry for justice and equality and fairness and compassion.”

A dear young friend of mine posted on FB today a memory of blind racism from her childhood that chilled me to the bone.  As a Cuban-American, I know a little about ignorant projections, but I'm not dark skinned.   I've been with dark skinned friends and witnessed abysmally racist and ignorant behavior towards them.

These unenlightened, uninformed knuckleheads who behave this way have formed alliances like the one Heather counter-demonstrated against; they rule by violence, ignorance, deceit. The question is, how can they thrive in our country today? Does this represent America now?  One nation, under God...?

When did ignorance and brute force become the Gospel of Jesus Christ? I'm glad I knew Jesus before he got co-opted, back when what made you a Christian was giving a shit and loving your neighbor as yourself.

Good for you Heather; I'm sorry it cost you and your family so much, but I appreciate what you died to uphold.  I'll think of you, try to be braver and do more.

Reflection on Tanya's Dream in NPR Podcast

Have you ever been in love?  Researchers have isolated the chemical and neural pathways that light up our brains when we're in love; does that explain love to you?

I don't mean to diss science and research; for those who wish to take that left brain path, fine. It's always fascinating to keep up with theories and studies and scientific findings.  But when it comes to falling and being in love, I'll take the experience over the explanation.  The same is true for dreams and dreaming; nothing you can know about dreaming beats what you can do through dreaming portals.  Dreaming is a part of our existence. If each of us is individual consciousness in a physical body, my guess is that dreaming is meant to be our bridge, our life-line, our connection to Home.  Through dreaming we remember important aspects of who we are that help us live our waking life well.

I'd like to share a wonderful NPR podcast  relating to dreaming, a segment produced by Abby Wendel.   A young woman, Tanya Marquadt, shares her dream encounters with a little girl she knows to be herself, but full of joy and free of the pain of so much childhood trauma.  They consulted Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School who suggests using dream incubation to invite a re-union with Tanya's little dream girl she calls X.  As Robert Moss often says, help is always available (in dreams) if we ask.  We only need to focus on what we want to know, on what we feel we need, then articulate our dream request simply.  Tanya decided on "I'm ready for your message." and repeated it over to herself as she drifted to sleep.

She dreamed a wonderful encounter with X that went further in connecting her to this bright shadow dream character.  I loved hearing her story and how her dreaming is helping her heal in her waking life.  Still,  I was wishing I could share Active Dreaming's dream re-entry practice with Tanya. Abby commented on how quickly the feeling of being unconditionally loved that had been part of the dream experience, faded for Tanya in the waking.

An Active Dreaming practice is to consider the dream narrative as if it were my own, without projecting any of my thoughts as interpretations for the dreamer.  So, in my dream of Tanya's dream experience, I would know that this is an important dream that has much to teach me.  To re-enter the dream, I can lay back anytime I wish and, while wide awake, allow my imagination to explore any part in the dream I choose to enter again.  Do I want to continue dancing?  Shall I go back to that beautiful lake and sit with X some more?  Shall I put on the shoes and jacket and open the door to adventures, perhaps X comes, too?  Shall I go to the place where I felt that powerful love and let it wash over me again?  My dream is a portal to a location I can envision and to which I can return.  And this is a journey I can repeat, again and again, exploring further, understanding more to help my waking self.

Is this self delusional?  When what we call "waking reality" in our contemporary world seems so deluded, perhaps there's something to be had from understanding our individual and collective humanity a little better, using a different approach.  If I am a spiritual being, a spiritual approach matters.

Lately I've been listening to several podcasts on dreams and dreaming that propose to answer scientifically what dreams mean, what purpose they have in the survival of our illustrious human race.  This theory, that theory, all fascinating, but how do I use it?  I don't want to know about love in my head, I want it in my heart.  I don't care what the latest science-babble is on dreaming; I want to just do it, learning all about it from my very own source.

Active Dreaming isn't a theory; it's a set of practices.You can believe anything you want about dreams, even that they're meaningless, and still use the tools of AD to your own benefit, perhaps even to the benefit of those around you.

The NPR podcast reported on one or two dreaming theories; one, whose source isn't named, posits that dreams replay trauma and the brain desensitizes the dreamer so it hurts less in waking. Dreams are certainly powerful engines of healing, but I'm not sure this is what is happening in  recurring PTDS dreams.  I don't see the need to have a "theory of everything." I see this as left-brain thinking that's been elevated in patriarchal cultures to the status of "rational" and "right".  Reducing the machine to its parts might be fine for motorcycles, but human beings have shown themselves to be more than brains and bits of organs.

A popular dream question is "What does it mean?"  That might be the wrong question to ask.  I prefer; Where was I? What was I doing?  Who was I with?  Dreaming is a natural resource; Active Dreaming is a dream practice that helps anyone willing to use a more Right brain approach to satisfy their curiosity about dreams.  I've played AD games with kindergarten, primary and high school students, with adults of all ages; this approach never fails to produce results, so many aha moments connecting people to their own dream source. Learning to dream strong is a path in the spiritual revolution happening today.

Dreams help us keep, literally, an open mind.  We can be as rational as we want in waking life, dreaming existence isn't like that.  The rabbit (w)hole of the dream worlds is safe to explore when we take stock of both sides of our conscious existence, in the physical and in the spiritual.  Through dreaming, we have access to a spiritual lifeline, but we have to adjust our mental paradigms and relate to the language and culture of the dream world before we can truly benefit from observing our dreams.  Just like there's no theoretical way to know love, dreaming can only be known by dreaming.

What we experience in the dream worlds can be every bit as beneficial to our existence on this physical plane as what we experience in the waking life.  I love Active Dreaming because it focuses on direct experience of the dream world.  It honors the dreamer as the ultimate authority on her or his dream and it offers ancient practices mixed up respectfully with modern techniques to provide a toy chest of tools for dream exploration.   It's more like being in love with dreaming than studying it.

The Shadow We're Up Against

Recently, I read a wonderful post by Jungian scholar and author, Paul Levi, who, as I've mentioned, has written some fascinating and wise work on the Shadow archetype.  In this article, I hear the author adulate CG for his genius and way ahead of his time ways. He thinks of Jung as a teacher, and so do I.

I'm good with crediting Jung to a point.  As ahead of his time in scientific imagination as he was, he was also a man of his very patriarchal world view.  Ask Emma if living with C.G. was a picnic, or Toni.  I'm enjoying getting to know my favorite dead dream teacher as a person in Deidre Bair's biography of the great doctor.  But I already knew he was steeped in male superiority from some of his writings on the anima/animus archetype.  I remember practically throwing my copy of Symbols across the room when I read how sometimes rough treatment is the only thing an "animus possessed" woman can understand. Synchronistically, I was working as a counselor in the field of domestic violence, counseling recipients of  male superiority at its most toxic. Jung was enlightened perhaps, compared to contemporary patriarchal standards, but he held and benefited from many prejudices of his status in a patriarchal, "it's a white man's world."  He assumed knowledge of the Feminine Archetype, without understanding the impact of 6 millennia of vilification obscuring the long ancient  history of the Great Goddess.  Fortunately, one of his students, Erich Neumann steered a better psychic course when he published "The Great Mother" in 1955.

Levi makes some good points about our contemporary psychic jeopardy,  (points I also made at the start of the recent gruesome Presidential campaign). At the moment, metaphorically and literally, the Feminine Archetype is living in a "pussy grabbing" world.  From the upright Christians who want to restrict a woman's authority over her life and her body  to the Muslims, who go the extra mile and put women in sacks, to the secular patriarchal club that runs the world and wants women in bunny suits for entertainment,  women are facing new barriers to leadership and power.  Ironically, women are more powerful now than they've been in 6,000 years, in consciousness and in numbers.  More men are actively supporting women's progress than ever in that time, as well.  It's time for the obscene imbalance at the heart of patriarchal religion, the maleness of god, to get tossed out of our collective consciousness.

The Shadow we're up against is Patriarchy; - Trump, Putin, N Korea, regimes of oppression, exclusion and complete control.  Just take a look at the leadership; what do all these sinking ships have in common? Patriarchal despots leading the old boys' brigades around the world.  The mentality of patriarchy is subjugation, domination, exploitation, near sighted, self-serving religion.  The mentality of the Feminine Divine is that we are all one on this planet; what affects one, will affect the other.  What goes around, comes around.

The Shadow we're up against is of an old, fruitless paradigm that's dying of its own stagnation; this patriarchal shit is getting really old.  But, there's also a Bright Shadow we can't miss; the Feminine is emerging.  Women are taking the lead in creating alternative paradigms, and that's a fact.  Men are taking the lead in creating alternative paradigms, and that's a fact, too.  There's a consciousness revolution; more and more people just can't buy the old toxic ways.  More and more people are straddling the two worlds they live in, dreams and waking life, with awareness and grace,  transforming this dangerous, greedy old human race, slowly but surely.  It is the worst of times; it is the best of times.

Precognitive and Prophetic Dreaming

What good is dreaming the future if you can't do anything about it?  What purpose do precognitive and prophetic dreams serve?

I use precognitive and prophetic to describe dreams that subsequently take place in the dreamer's waking reality.  Precognitive are dreams that cover the a-z of dreaming the future, from an object seen in a dream and then viewed in waking reality shortly after, to a person we end up meeting, a job we end up taking, a person we end up parting from in sorrow or joy.

Prophetic dreams are life map dreams, often including collective unconscious material, like what the political climate will be like, etc.  In Jungian terms, they are archetypal, they are talking about a much bigger picture than our little hobbit lives encompass.  I've written about a few of mine, Howling Mary, being especially significant to me, but also, Crocodile Friday and my 1995 visit from dad, which though I didn't get the happy ending I was hoping for then, it continues to guide my present.

One of the great gifts Active Dreaming has given me is the triple door approach to dreaming.  1. I can go through the analytical door of my Jungian fondness and dwell on symbolic meaning as it relates to my ego led waking life. 2. I can accept that we dream the future all the time, so I journal regularly and take a reality check on every dream for possible scenarios in waking life. 3.  I can enter consciously into the other dimensions, the foreign inner-space countries, where my fortunes, luck and personal satisfactions are also made. I can walk through any of these doors to a dream, or sometimes, all three at the same time, as that's the way of dreams.

For this, and other vibrant approaches to dreaming, I recommend and frequently write about, Active Dreaming, created by Robert Moss.  His work opens new vistas into how we approach dreaming; it teaches us to live our best dreams and confront our worst with courage and creativity.

But back to the psychic gifts of dreaming; what good is it knowing the shit was going to hit the fan if you can't get out of the way?

For me the best answers come from my dreams and what they've taught me.

#1.  Physical reality isn't all there is; physical laws and statistical probabilities sometimes give way to the pure intention and whole-hearted effort of heart-centered people.  So be a heart-centered person.

#2  Pay attention to what you're doing in those precognitive or prophetic dreams and reality check yourself for what you can do in waking life now.  It doesn't have to be grandiose; it does have to be kind, self-less and contributing to the good of others, as well as of yourself.  Think outside the Box!

#3  Heal you're own inner wounding because it can blind you to what your ego is really up to if you don't face your unfaceable stuff, your shadow, your fears, your pain.  Patriarchy produces emotional stuntedness; all those thou shalt nots, cruel and illogical taboos, especially if you're a woman, add up to psychic wounding for many.  It's your own job, as a spirit leading a physical life, to find your way home, to the light.  It's the job of every one who finds their way to help someone groping in the dark. So, physician heal thyself is an ongoing mandate; dreams are important guides to healing, personally and collectively.

#4. Dreams keep me focused on the alternate realities that my spirit can access for sustenance and guidance (not to be confused with alternate facts, which have no reality).   When I'm overwhelmed by fear of the future, I remember that I dreamed this already and that dreams have and will always guide me on my best path forward.  I can take strength from remembering that I volunteered for physicality in this time and this place and so I can just continue doing what I'm called by my heart to do and carry on, best I can, until I cross out of here or turn things around.  Even when I do shuffle off this mortal coil, I'll volunteer for dream duty on the other side in gratitude for all the guidance I've received myself.

#5 I've heard baby-boomers joke about the surreal nature of our present reality, why not drop some acid again and get a level playing field?  May I suggest that dreams open the same portals that LSD opens, not every dream, but once we tune ourselves to living our dream life as fully as our waking, things make a lot more sense.  Not to mention, if you're really into experimenting, try conscious lucidity and self induced OBEs.

#6 Sometimes when there are no answers, there's purpose. Our Native American ancestors knew that dreams tell us the secret wishes of our soul.

One of my fondest dad dream visits was one in which he helped me escape some evil men, saying to me before he intervened for me to run, "You have no idea how important this mission is."

Okay dad, if you say so, I'll do my best.

Compassion, As Taught to Me in Dreams

Compassion, what does it feel like to you?

To me, it's not pity or "feeling sorry for", because that's like looking over the railing at someone's demise, sad for them, glad it's not me.  Compassion acts and takes risks on behalf of the other person; compassion finds some life line to throw.

We're more compassionate of others when we know ourselves well enough to need compassion from our own harsh self-judgements.

Jesus, with his usual astuteness, put it this way; don't judge the mote in someone's eye until you remove  the plank in your own.  It's easy to see the bits of personal rubbish in others; rare, it seems, for folks to see their own garbage.

It's much harder to be judgmental of others if you're aware and responsible for your own shadow. The more compassionate we are in the face of our shadows, the better we see others with compassion.  

Finding compassion in ourselves involves hatching out of the hard shell that is Ego and living in the physical, but connected to spirit.   Once I became aware, through dreaming, that my physical body and dreaming body are separate aspects of the consciousness I call me, I opened the magic doors to living in two realms, in one lifetime.  Dreams matter as much as things that happen during waking matters; it's me in both places.

Dreams are the most compassionate teachers I've known.  I like to use the phrase, they've scared the pajamas off me, but even my greatest nightmares have turned into my sturdiest allies.  Dreams will shock you out of complacency, but when you have the courage to pay attention to dreams, despite hearing growing up, it's "just" a dream, you find your wisest and most trustworthy life teachers.

Who can afford to be compassionate?  The wise person who's found she or he has nothing to lose by loving.  The person who knows, this solid ground is only one side of the story. How do we know? Dream explorers are leading the way, as are the growing community of near death experiencers, between them, our age-old questions about death and the after life are being openly and compassionately addressed.

We're living in a time of great spiritual advances in inner exploration and we're also living in a time of great physical crisis.  Feels like some kind of divine irony.

Life is joy; without joy, we're dead inside.  There are many paths to joy through dreaming that can ease our suffering and give us the courage to ease the suffering around us.

The mindfulness movement is an exciting spiritual movement, as well; it's Buddhist thought harmonized with the best of current psychotherapies.  We're moving away from the sin driven, punishment/reward paradigms we've endured for centuries towards greater awareness of the complexity of spirit or consciousness.  Despite the external atmosphere of hate, separatism, violence. religiosity and fear, growing numbers of us are keying in to love and compassion as the engines of action.

Following dreams helps us see that all is not always what it seems.  This is one reason I call dreaming "organic" spirituality; we're born plugged in.  We may have unplugged that connection based on believing things we were told or on the lack of guidance available to help us navigate those sometimes choppy waters.  Helping children with nightmare fears can be an opportunity to show them how to address their fears creatively.

Independent spirituality through dreaming isn't something religious enterprises endorse because it could cost them memberships; memberships pay for their existence, often in the luxury to which they've become accustomed. The scientific establishment, for its part, has confined itself to materiality,  with the wonderful exception of Physics. Yet, more and more, people are finding themselves pondering the possibilities of new spiritual paradigms for themselves.  I thank Oprah for sparking pioneering spiritual thinking in mainstream culture.

The time is ripe for all of us to turn inward; drop-in, tune-in and pay attention.  There's a great deal to be gained.  One of those things is greater compassion for ourselves, others and the pickle we're collectively in on this earth dimension.

2017 Year of Women, For a Change

One day recently, at Trader Joe's shopping for dinner, I found this card among their always excellent collection of affordable greetings.  It happens that a neighbor had gifted me a wall tile engraved with this saying that I enjoy hanging in the guest bathroom.

Seeing such a captivating image using the same quote, I bought two, with no specific plans for them.  It turned out to be a lucky choice, as I sent one to my grandniece,  after we spoke on the phone that day, along with her GS cookie sale check.

The second card, I realized when I looked at it again, is custom ordered for me.  It speaks straight to my psyche in a series of long established dream images that, if I didn't know how fluidly dream and waking interact, would be startling.  It often happens that the realization of meaning in a synchronicity lags behind the spontaneous, intuitive action that creates it.  It's deeply inspiring to hear the universe whisper in my ear.  "It's okay; how's this?  It all coincides; it all comes together.  Stay true; have fun."

Every year, I create a new dream journal for the year; it's fun to let synchronicity lead me to the images I'll use to decorate the front and back covers.  Sometimes, it takes me a while to find the right ones, but this year, I delighted across the front cover in December. This card is the back cover.  

I declare 2017 the year women step into their strengths and leadership.  I declare 2017 the year of women.

Ashé

Inner Resources for Challenging Times

Perhaps some of you, like me, are feeling the intense surrealism of this present time in our country. What just happened?  What is happening?  What will be happening?

What's feeding this bizarre violent nightmare playing out in our country and around the globe? It seems like a world hell bent on Armageddon.  But, it makes sense if you look at the motivating myths and religions of the battling forces.  It's like "battle of the titans"; the war Gods have demands and rules that we mere earthlings must carry out.  If we accept these myths, we are dreaming an apocalyptic consensus reality into existence.  But we don't have to.

When I feel overwhelmed by the oppression of  consensus reality, I often turn inward. I ask myself, from a much larger perspective, what am I supposed to do?  How can I contribute and what can I learn?

I write to share an organic spiritual reality with others that is ridiculously accessible and which can be a balm in these uncertain times when we may well be asking does love trump hate, or hate trump love?  If Love, the universal super glue, matters to you, dive inward.  Pay attention to dreaming. We live in our waking reality, but we also live in the dreaming reality.   If we don't know we're eternal and loved, we can be easily manipulated.

My favorite dream teacher, Robert Moss posted this quote the other day on FB; "Jung once told me that he thought the dream was always going on in the unconscious, but that it usually needs sleep and the complete cessation of outer things for it to register in consciousness at all." - Barbara Hannah, "Encounters with the Soul"  Robert post 12/19/16

There's a great tradition of spiritual literature that balks at the fetters of conventional and religious thinking, including in Jesus' own teaching, "the kingdom of god is within." Jung saw this inner kingdom (queendom) as the unconscious (which he categorized as personal and collective). He came to believe that without a relationship to our inner life, we are doomed to tragedy, personally and collectively.  Paul Levi, a Jungian scholar, writes on his blog:

Jung elucidates, “What future developments are being prepared in the unconscious of modern man…It depends on us whether we help coming events to birth by understanding them, and reinforce their healing effect, or whether we repress them with our prejudices, narrow-mindedness and ignorance, thus turning their effect into its opposite, into poison and destruction.”[xxix] We are potential spiritual midwives, who by ‘understanding’ the psychic nature of ‘future developments,’ ‘reinforce their healing effect’ and birth ‘coming events’ into incarnation through the womb of the psyche. The psyche, which is pregnant with open-ended possibilities, is the very cipher in which the history of humanity is being written. Jung writes, “The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man."

We need a relationship to our own psyche, our soul, our own spiritual life, just like we need a relationship for our physical love life. Spirituality is the love life of the soul.  We begin, as in any relationship, by paying attention to that connection and how it makes us feel, day by day.

We have inner resources.  When people say to me, (and I wish I had a nickle...) "I don't dream." or "I don't remember my dreams" my first question is always to ask, do you want to?  Do you pay attention?  People mostly smile and shrug their shoulders; many admit that they've never really tried, but would like to. Where to start? I've explained the practicalities of beginning a dream practice on my blog before, so for that advice, I refer you to the previous posts I've linked throughout this sentence.

One thing that blocks our access to inner resources is "lemming social behavior."   For instance, the "media" is something we imbibe in huge quantities on a daily, and for some, an all night basis.  TVs blare in every room across America, especially the "living" room of many, many houses around the country, with a mind-numbing consistency.  Unfortunately, an inner life needs some time of introspection, sleep time to dream, time to meditate, dance or abide in joy.  It's accurate to depict the media as shallow, gutless, full of deliberate and manipulative misinformation, but who is forcing a person to watch it?  Nobody.

Most of us have a choice.  I've heard people say that TV is "entertainment," or" relaxation" or "staying informed."   Add the computer and cell phone, that's a lot of ersatz experience substituted for the living, direct real thing. There are several generations now who've grown up on external, vicarious stimulus far more than on their own creative play and developing imaginations. I call it the "Disneyfication of American Childhood."

Dreaming is our inner reality; waking is our outer reality. Without connection to our own inner life, it's easy to become fearful and susceptible to external controls and idiot influences that cost us not just our money, but our essential life force, our souls. Let me emphasize that by soul, I don't mean some poor spotted white spirit, sin-tinged from the moment of conception. I mean the essential collective energy that is at the core of the Self.  In each incarnation, in each physical personality or ego, we are different, but we have an indestructible core that if we care to nurture, saves us needless grief.  The Soul does not need Saving; the Soul Saves.

We have an invaluable resource we came to the planet possessing; it can't be destroyed like our bodies can, though many willingly shut it down or belittle it. Through conscious dreaming, we become independent, spiritual beings with access to individual spiritual guidance as we tune in.  It's not about the meaning of one dream; it's about creating a dialogue with your inner world.  Over many years, you come to know that the foundation of your own being is unconditional love and endless creative life. You come to know for certain, that you are here for a reason and you are never alone.

May your inner resources grow robust in the coming year and may love energize all you do.