A Prayer for Sandy Hook

I'm sharing this moving tribute to the children and adults who crossed over in the tragedy of Sandy Hook, CT last week because I found it very healing.  It's written and performed by Eileen O'Hare, a teacher, who posted it on youtube.  Thank you, Eileen.

God and Huckabee

I share Mr. Einstein's dream for the future, but even so, Mike Huckabee's cannot possibly truly be the voice of American Christianity today, can it?  So God was absent from Sandy Hook and this is what we get?

It's time to hear from the real Christian America, the majority of Christian people who know what Jesus would do, how he would feel and act.  Jesus, the model for Christian practice, is compassionate and loving.  Huckabee sounds  like the lot Jesus called, Pharisees.  At any rate, I at least know this, Jesus would want to help in any way he could; he'd bring comfort, not callous words.

Please, anyone who wants to preserve American Christianity for Jesus, please fire the lot of hypocritical, loud ignoramuses that have risen through the media as the voice of Christian or Moral Majority.  Let's hear from the real Christians, the ones who love and the ones who care, just like Jesus.

I'm not in any formal sense a Christian; I don't belong to a Christian or any other church. I'm not big on religion.  I am very keen on spiritual practice and matters of the soul.  In a Huffington Post piece, a commentator  contrasts Huckabee's awful comments and the wonderful multi-religious speeches at the service at Sandy Hook.  Then she goes on to say that even if you don't have a religion, if you're an atheist...

See, that's where I'd like to widen the scope a bit.  Regardless of your religion or your spiritual practice, your belief or your non-belief, your heart cannot let you say such heartless things to those in grief.    Your heart should want to help.

So let's hope this is a tipping point for those who love their Christian faith and their country, for those who follow Jesus; fire those sorry-ass distorters of Jesus' Word and bring back a religion based on the Love Jesus taught.

Calling all Dreamers

We are reeling from the news of the brutal massacre in Newtown, CT., home to so many friends.  Everyone here, around the country and the world is stunned.  

Early this week, I began reading Dr. Raymond Moody's book, "Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones"  and did one of those nose dive's into a good book. Thursday morning, I walked to the computer still reading Moody’s description of the practice and history of mirror gazing, the ancient scrying art used to contact the departed.   At the computer, I opened Facebook; first post on my feed, Robert Moss: The Science of Mirrors.

http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-science-of-mirrors.html

After commenting to Robert about the syncro, I turned back to Moody's book.  Later, Thursday, I got to the part where he describes setting up his "modern day psychomanteum" - a temenos/sacred space for communication with our beloved departed, as practiced in ancient Greece.  As he tells the story of finding and equipping his sanctuary laboratory, I remember the wonderful post my friend Trish MacGregor posted on her blog last month about this very passage in Moody's life.  I love the story she tells, which he doesn't include in the book.  The two accounts are a wonderful compliment to each other. http://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=12817

So Friday, Friday the unimaginable happens in a neighboring town and we're again shocked by senseless, cruel, twisted violence, made more shocking because this time, it happens in our home state.  It's excruciating not just for its cold brutality and loss of innocent life, but for it's place in a stream of such events that have occurred over the last few years in our country.

I liken the impact of a tragedy such as this to the concentric circles on the surface of water when a stone falls in.  I stand in an outer circle because I don't have close ties to anyone who suffered this horror today, except the ties of community and caring. From this circle, as a resident of this state and country,  I join my voice to a growing community outcry:  Mr. President and all elected officials, control easy access to guns, especially automatic weapons.  We see over and over again, how one desperate, deluded individual can reek havoc.  Help public welfare trump corporate interests in arms dealing for profit.  Times of crisis are opportunities to do things differently, to transform our grief and rage to healing.  It doesn’t work to put profits ahead of humanity. Private citizens need automatic weapons?  Really?  

I heard the news of this massacre while sitting at our art gallery in Woodbury, CT.  A gentleman customer got off the phone after getting the news from his wife.  He said; “This must be terrorism”.   But, apparently, as in the past, it’s not the enemy without but the one within that attacks, often wearing the face of a lost boy acting out a private rage.  What can we do to stem the tide of violence that sweeps up some of our youth?  

Experts like, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Dr. James Garbarino, both authors of fabulous books on the subject,  have been telling us how to help for years.  I hope we'll all turn our minds and hearts to finding creative, daring, bold and working solutions to the violence, greed, small mindedness, lack of love and lack of soul that's plaguing us.  I dream a future where we all contribute creatively to our children's education and well being. We put their needs ahead of institutionalized rules, and design education around experience and incentive, not testing and categorizing.  

For those of us right now in this outer ring of the catastrophe, who are not understandably consumed with grief, we might ask ourselves; What can we do?  What can we do to alleviate the suffering of those who have remained and of those who have crossed over?   What can we do to ensure that this never happens again?

My Generation

Jim back then

When I think of the changes I, and many of my generation, have witnessed in our life times, and the iconoclastic lives many of us have lived, I feel deeply grateful.  We were born into an amazing time.  The fifties, despite “Papa Knows Best” TV pablum, had brilliant writers, free thinkers and artists laying the seeds for the 60’s.  Some of my favorite teachers were 50s rebels, I’ll always remember the passion of one of my high school English teachers when talking to us about any piece of literature.  He would turn the literary mirror on us and help us imagine, beyond an English test, what these characters were living and trying to do.  I got an excellent education in freethinking, as well as literature, from his class.  He must have had some freedom in selecting curriculum to suit his message because he introduced me to Sartre, Voltaire and  Bocaccio, among others.  For my senior thesis in his class. I first proposed, “Was Mary Really A Virgin” but settled for “The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church.”  He gave me an A+; I wonder if I have that paper somewhere?  I’m grateful to him and to the many great teachers I’ve had, in public schools, university and post-grad.

My generation was encouraged to think, to feel and to experiment. Yeah, there were definitely failed outcomes to some of those experiments, but we dreamed of making a better world through spiritual values: Peace, Love, Joy, and yes, song.  I came of age living the shifting paradigm of the 60s.  I always remind my peers that we, who have been very blessed, (I mean, come on…the music alone!) have to give back.  We’re not a generation that will fade away into “senior” citizenry. 

So, post-election I commit myself to making what difference I can in the service of those same values.  My spiritual path, of course, is dreaming, and my passion is to share it, as I do here and when I lead workshops.  I know many, many others, friends and teachers I admire of my generation, who are making a huge difference in their communities, country and worldwide following their own spiritual paths.

I admire many individuals from younger and older generations, as well, and I only mean to go on about mine for a bit to strengthen my dream that we will help enable a great shift in consciousness on this planet, all of us dreaming it into being together.  We elders have a great opportunity to help make that happen. 

By now, most people know that the date 12/21/2012, this Winter Solstice on the Mayan Calendar,  is not a prediction of certain doom, but represents the Mayan culture's astrological mapping of the ages of time.  (For a fascinating insight into parallels in Mayan, Egyptian and other ancient cultures regarding the ages of human history, view the fabulous documentary, The Pyramid Code, especially in Pt 2).

According to the Mayan’s, we're at the end of a particularly dark cycle of time, not at the end of the world.  Out of this authoritarian, patriarchal age, we’re moving into an age of balance of opposites, of new awareness and new organizational paradigms.  We can do it, as our parents use to tell us, in one of two ways:

We can resist the awakening and go kicking and screaming into a hell we help create.

Or we can embrace new possibilities, drop old worn out paradigms and dream a new dream of human survival based on our divine being ness that can never die.  I love the interview Eckhart Tolle did at Google with Google personnel; it’s on YouTube, worth looking up.

I wouldn’t have wanted a woman’s life before my own generation.  My mothers?  My grandmothers?  No, thank you.  I’m grateful, especially to my mom, since both my grandmothers died before I could know them, for going out of her way to ensure my education was unhampered by gender role expectations like hers had been.  She didn’t want me to follow in her footsteps, though her own accomplishments, as cook and seamstress, were legend.

Of course, women were shattering the cultural/patriarchal paradigm way before the 60s; Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Isadora Duncan, Betty Freidan, Ursala Le Guin, to mention but a few. My contemporaries are Gloria Steinem, Mary Daly, Sonya Johnson, Charlene Spretnak, Merlin Stone, and Starhawk, to mention just a few; I had so many women role models my mother and grandmothers didn’t have.  My generation of women opened the door much wider than my foremothers could. 

In this election, my peers helped champion what we deem important. Kudos to the PSA Leslie Gore did that helped me contribute my cyber bit by passing it around. Many of my women friends and I fought long and hard to overturn social and legal restrictions on any woman’s right to govern her own uterus, to earn equal pay and to have equal career opportunity and don't want to see ourselves restricted again.

As without, so within; the 60’s also burst the self-inflated bubble of institutionalized religion.  Many paths for spiritual exploration and practice were open to my generation and we’ve helped illuminate many spiritual paths for soul seekers today. Those of my generation are the grandmothers and grandfathers, the great aunts and uncles.  We have the opportunity to continue to dream our collective dream forward.  I think we are the silver fox warriors of new dimensions of transcendence.   Well, maybe I’m carried away, but I like that image. We’ve pushed so many boundaries and pushing has paid off. We still have a lot to do; the results of this election encouraged me to think that there are many of us, which makes for light work, pun intended.

I was never a fan of the band, The Who, but I can't help ending with this song.  

According to Wiki, “Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train and is said to have been inspired by the Queen Mother who is alleged to have had Townshend's 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighbourhood...Townshend talked about the famous line "I hope I die before I get old". For him, when he wrote the lyrics, "old" meant "very rich". 

The Who is still performing, the 2010 Super bowl no less. I’m sure Pete’s glad he didn’t die or fail to get rich, but the point is, we are still, many of us, going strong. I see us using that strength to create the world we want, to dream it forward; I'm talking bout my generation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MnDbWqe_kQ

Dreaming With Children in 2020

I’m happy to have met an amazing young man of 14 who came to our Robert Moss/ Gore Mt. dreaming retreat early this month with his mom, a wonderful dreamer participating in a Dream Practice Intensive training I’m leading.  He is so cool, sweet and true.  It’s very obvious that he liked what he experienced because he wants to come to some dream classes with his mom. 

I think young people and children like Active Dreaming because it stimulates imagination and reveals the fun it is to play with your dreams in a group of creative dreamers.  Our young mountain dreamer shared one of his dreams with our group and then directed us in Dream Theater, a game where the dreamer casts people to play out his or her dream. I got to play his cat, a part I enjoyed immensely, as I love cat companions and he has a really cool one.

Every time I share Active Dreaming with children and young people, I see how much they really appreciate innovative, imaginative ways to learn.  I’ll paraphrase what I heard renowned child psychologist and author, Dr. James Garbarino, say in a keynote to educators; ‘it’s a challenge for children to “survive the crashing bore” that is our conventional public and private educational system in this country.’  It’s a system that’s economically impoverished, yes, but the real poverty is in the curriculum and the structure, (not the teachers, with some exceptions). In other words, it’s the Spirit of education that in 2012 is impoverished.

As a teacher, I’ve always dreamed of unleashing, not harnessing and curving, our children’s curiosity and energy.  My vision of primary education is a lot of outdoor, nature based running and playing with very little time spent sitting and listening to adult blah, blah, blah.  Yes, they’d be guided in learning about many things in which they show an interest and the skills of reading and writing would be encouraged in them in creative ways, but learning will always be experiential, not rote and mechanical.

Young adults will be out in the community learning from gifted people in the fields of interest they choose. Dream explorers teach wonderful programs for children of all ages, including adults, to initiate and develop the art of dreaming.  Musicians, dancers, poets, actors, scientists and experienced spiritual healers, all of them dreamers, staff our educational programs.

I’ll add an idea proposed by a young mother in our Gore Mt. Group to my 2020 vision for education; our communities have created cyber classrooms in a central location we might call a “school” where through our amazing technologies, youngsters connect with others from all around the world and learn about each other’s cultures and life.

Dreaming the future to the year 2020, I see that our educational system is diverse and creative; its aim is to open the doors of imagination and to dreaming so that each child finds an authentic life path. Art programs will flourish as children manifest their dreams creatively and science will be based on developing the now revered powers of imagination. We all understand that consideration for all living things and the planet can drive our technology; we value strong dreamers in all fields and promote all creative activities. Einstein, of course, was way ahead of us;  “Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.” 

Right now, while dreaming this future, the best way to open dream gates for children is for their parents to open their own, first.  When parents know how powerful, wonderful and energizing it is to be connected to dreaming, they’re the very best teachers for their children.  As for dreaming itself, children are the experts, many spiritual teachers say it’s because they are newly transitioned from dreaming dimensions.  The most important practices for adults to learn are: to listen, not judge, not analyze, respect the dreamer and the dream, and offer only what might delight or truly help the child, like back up to face anything scary and to create something positive out of the fear.

Here are some great articles from Robert Moss’s DreamGates blog and two of my own posts on this topic:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/2011/05/the-first-things-to-know-about-childrens-dreams.html

http://blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/2010/06/when-children-dream-the-future.html

Here’s a story about my own experience-teaching children about dreaming:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/2010/09/dreaming-with-inner-city-kids.html

http://litadreaming.blogspot.com/2011/09/playing-dream-games-with-our-children.html

What does your dream of future education look like?  What can we do now to make our children's future brighter and deeper?

In Gratitude

Pundits are arguing about whether the election results issue the government a mandate; I revel in the joy of feeling that the mandate was issued to every person living in this country.  I think the mandate is to live and dream from our hearts, mindful of the impact of our actions down to the seventh generation on this earth, as native wise ones teach.

I'm in awe and gratitude to the voters of this country who clarified for elected officials what we truly care about, besides the economy.  I think we’ve only just begun to dream our best dreams into this reality and it's heartening to know there are so many people passionate about making a difference. 

I collect “dream” songs.  This is one of my all time favorites and it’s augmented by the fact that it’s talented author, Stevie Ray Vaughan, is on the other side, hopefully dreaming this dream even bigger.

Post Storm Dreaming on the Mountain

When a natural disaster strikes, many things occur, none of which are business as usual.  "Nature Trumps" would be a good bumper sticker on our foreheads right about now.

I live in CT one of the states where Monday’s hurricane left an indelible, and for very, very many people, a painful mark.  My elevation from the beach defended against flood waters that loomed ferociously imminent and luck kept any of the magnificent trees in our neighborhood from coming down, though some neighbors dealt with very large tree limbs falling.  We never lost utility services; our lives resumed as normal, except for the sorrow at our friends and neighbor’s troubles.

In news reports we hear regularly that this area has no power and people often say; "I had no power..." I avoid using these terms, as you see.  Here are my reasons:

A)   As a society we've managed to enslave ourselves to generators and electrical grid sytems for our survival, obviously a bad idea in the long term.

B)   “Lost power” isn't a good term to use psychically to describe our utility situation.  Our psyches visualize and image, so what's the message we're giving ourselves in the wake of situations that requires great strength and heart?

I won’t say “I didn’t lose power” to explain my good fortune, nor will I say someone I know "lost power.”  Electricity isn't my power, in the true spiritual enduring sense of the word. That we've allowed a modern convenience to threaten our own and our culture's survival is something to think about.  Aren’t we smart enough to come up with a more sustainable infrastructure in the long run?  Yes, I think, if we think with our hearts, we can.

I’ve just returned from a wonderfully renewing weekend with Robert Moss and a deeply loving dream community of friends on Gore Mountain.  My mind is a kaleidoscope of experiences that I’ll be journaling and blogging about for months.  As I  often heard this weekend, the time is Now, so I’ll begin my story with a shamanic dream journey we all shared and Robert led very relevant to our present moment in time, our journey to the year 2020.  Our quest was to dream the future we want, not tied to politics and elections, but rather to envision what we want realized by that year for the highest good of all. 

We take this journey because if we dream the future, if we imagine what we want in rich and brilliant detail, we can realize it in this waking reality.  Dreaming cultures steeped in spiritual dream practices  believe this reality is only one of our soul’s experiences and not necessarily, except for the breathtaking beauty of the Earth and the immense joy of loving one another, the best one.  Indigenous dreaming cultures today are trying to dream healing for the planet and teach non-dreaming cultures how to dream the same. They're trying to teach us to visualize with our imaginations the positive outcomes we want so we can know what steps to take in this moment of time to make this healing dream come true.

The message being taught is to be one with Spirit; to care more about what is divine and less about what is impermanent.  I’m fond of asking what is it we really can take with us?  Maybe that’s what Jesus meant; “separate the chaff from the wheat.”  Spiritual power can’t be lost, but it's thrown away by lack of mindfulness, dreaming, imagination and respect for Earth.  

I listened to so many wonderful visionary suggestions from my companion dream trackers that I'm inspired to continue my positive creative visioning and invite you to add to it as well.

In my vision, we value everyone's contribution, and together, we create only earth respecting technologies.  Yes, I know there’s a powerful oil lobby, etc.  But if we all really, really want it, dream it, imagine such a world for ourselves, but more importantly for all the children of this planet, then we can create it.  As John Perkins puts it from the wisdom of his indigenous shamanic teachers, “The world is as you dream it."

In my vision, we each carry this motto in our hearts:  “We need Nature and Nature needs us.”  or as I would prefer, “We need Gaia and Mother Gaia needs us.”  We began this dream journey on Gore Mt., sacred lands of native ancestors, of bear and fox and deer, of the birches and pines.  In my dream, when it came time to depart from our mountain dreaming, each of us leaves in a beautiful spirit canoe, gently, surely paddling the river in all directions, accompanied by our power animals and guides, passionate to spread this vision, each in our own way.  Our experience dreaming together teaches us spirit power is alive and love prevails. 

We each have the natural spiritual power to connect to what is dearest to us, to what makes us know our own divinity and helps us find our soul’s true home.  We can access that power in different ways. One is definitely to attune ourselves to dreaming.  The yin/yang of existence is the dance between realities, conscious living and active dreaming.

Robert Moss is a great teacher of shamanic wisdom traditions.  I’m very grateful for his passionate, committed and brilliant leadership as a dream teacher and author and for the rich tapestry of dream roads his work offers dreamers. 

To honor this journey, this post storm dreaming on the mountain, I want to make a wish. My wish for the very, very near future is that people vote as if their vote really, really counts.  I pray that people will stop and consider what they want their vote to count for.  There are consequences to electoral choices because we entrust decision making power to officials of the government.  I want to elect leaders who truly understands that continuing to suck nature dry without thought for damage and consequences will cost us a lot  more than money; it threatens our human survival and that of untold animals, of the entire planet.  I want someone who gives a shit about future generations of children and about children right now. 

So vote with your heart, not your wallet.  Don’t forget, it’s worn on your ass for a reason.

I intend to continue sharing with you about the weekend; love to hear from you and may our best dreams come true.