Happy Papi's Day!

I take this opportunity to celebrate my dad, mi papi, and also dads everywhere around the globe who love their children fiercely and participate in their lives joyfully.

My dad crossed over more than two decades ago, but thanks to my dreams, he remains close. On this side of the veil, my dad was my best friend. Since I was little, he spent as much time with me as he did with my older brother. He took me with them fishing and taught me, patiently, to bait my own hook. From dreaming, I know he's still got my back. He often reassures me just when I need it most and always reminds me of his love for me. Father’s day coincides with papi’s birthday by a few days, so his energy is extra strong around this time.

I met a lovely scholarly gentleman, a bit older than me, who was sitting near me at a conference the other day. When we were asked to pair up for discussion to share stories about how we experienced nature growing up, many of my stories involved my dad, how he took me fishing, taught me to ride a bike, throw and catch a baseball and solve geometry formulas from scratch so when I took the Regents exams, I wouldn't have to worry about forgetting one while doing a problem.  I got 100% on my geometry Regents, though it's a skill I haven't maintained. My new friend was very surprised that growing up in the 50s and 60s, I enjoyed such liberty as a girl.  Thanks, dad.

Papi loved to joke with people, he was always gentle and kind.  If he got angry, he didn't lash out.  My brother and I respected him and were happy to please him.  As a young adult, he let me make my decisions, even when he knew I might be mistaken.  I loved talking to him and, though we didn't agree in some things, he was very accepting of our differences.  

Of course, Dad sent a dream this anniversary as well; I'm knee-deep in pondering.  It's a wonderful consolation to know that Love bridges the Great Divide.  My dear friend Mally enjoys the same dreaming relationship with her departed father, as do many dreamers. It's not unusual or "woo-woo;" it's available to anyone who explores the dream terrains.  Robert Moss, creator of Active Dreaming, has written extensively about dreaming as a practice for dying and a bridge to our departed.

On this national Father's Day I want to applaud any and every man who loves children unconditionally, who guides them wisely and with compassion.  It's a great gift to have a father like I do; I wish everyone the same blessing. The song,  "Oh, My Papa"  has always evoked what I feel for my dad. In one dream of years ago, I'm walking the beach singing it full-heart throttle; this image brings me utter joy. 

Thank you, Octavio I. Chirino, for being my papi.

The American Dream

Most of us have grown up hearing about and dreaming the American Dream, a phrase that I find worth pondering.   Just this week, Donald Trump’s racist and derisive speech, made as his bid for the POTUS spot on the Republican ticket, brought the American Dream mythos front and center to my mind.

My favorite comedians and news pundits think it’s too funny for words.  Jon Stewart thanked DT for making the last 6 wks of his Daily Show career the best.  So ludicrous do many find his remarks, that they are just making jokes. Though I love laughing at the absurdity of these extremist thoughts, I find Trump's remarks chilling to the bone.

The question I have to ask myself is, how many people think that being rich means you’re successful, smart and worth listening to?  Blaming is a knee-jerk, primitive impulse that we lose when we live valuing Love above all, including more than money.  Losing this perspective about living from the heart can cost us dearly; that's the example of Hitler and the German people who put him in power.  

In his ludicrous speech, Trump devoted as much time to bragging about his many financial assets as he did to spreading hateful lies about an entire ethnic population.  What's worse is that he's appealing to our collective projections of what it is to achieve the American Dream!  Blaming an entire people for our ills, projecting our Shadow and Devils on a group we perceive as a less deserving group, where have we seen that before and what was the outcome? We each have a choice to make about whether we'll own our shadow or cruelly project it on to others.

Trumps sneering, balls-out, slanderous attack on Mexicans is not fact; it's his own bigoted, hateful and extremely not what Jesus would do, manipulative distortion of our neighbors and fellow human beings.  What if he said those things about Canadians?  Mexicans, by the way, enjoyed their culture and didn't have a lawless society until US drug prohibition created a criminal class that in Mexico and across South America, turned into a hideous Vampire economy, the Cartels.  The drug war is draining the blood, literally, from their culture and America bears a great responsibility in this.  I recommend a wonderful book, "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs."  We need to look for mutual and respectful solutions to our shared modern ills; blaming, hating and that old chestnut, brutal force,  are very dangerous roads to follow.

Listening to Trump, he seems soul-less; someone who, counting his gold, has forgotten to count his days.  Has he ever heard that quaint old saying; “you can’t take it with you?”  Is this the reason for this outrageous megalomaniacal bid for world power; because he sees nothing beyond the grave he might need to figure in to his accounts?  Does this man have any spiritual awareness?  Even if he goes to a church and is a big contributor, religion and spirituality are not the same.  

A soul-less person is dangerous and should never be entrusted with the power of office, with our national well-being, physical and spiritual. Trump’s saber rattling is not entirely funny to me.  If as a collective, we sink to his level, if we value money more than what we have that can't be bought with money, if we don’t know that we’re spiritual beings, hence non-physical beings, ultimately, having a physical experience, we may throw our lot in with those who weave a false dream, and elect a hateful bigot.  There are others who share the ambition and soap box with Trump who also have unsettling agendas cloaked in virtue and religiosity. They're candidates who unabashedly claim authority in religion, but our first leaders, who created the foundation of our democratic republic, did all they could to draft a governing model that safeguards against the very real dangers of theocratic government.

What is the American dream?  What should it be?  I dream of a culture who knows the value of Spiritual Love and Mutual Respect and allows each of us to live our soul purpose, to receive and contribute our best dreams in our own time and place.  A culture that knows there is something like a web that unites us all, a web of what ultimately Is, regardless of our own misguided efforts to Name it. That web unites every being on this planet, animal (which includes us) vegetable and mineral.

Anyone who wants to lead me into maligning the Other, making me into a negative, bullying, blaming and hating person is anathema to me, to my soul.  It’s easy to recognize a person who only values money and who has very little heart/soul.  What would Jesus do?  Hate?  Not likely.

So, if America makes this man, or anyone projecting our problems and evils on any group, president, what does it say about us?  The Good News is that there’s time to make sure that doesn’t happen.  I dream of a post election 2016 where Americans chose leaders who can help them, the citizenry, the body politic, to create a tolerant, heart-centered, creative, imaginative, laughing and dreaming culture, a culture of joy and possibility.  This will be the American Dream; we will pioneer uniting the worlds of Dreaming.  We will be leaders in this New Spiritual Age, the Consciousness revolution. We’ll abandon hatred and embrace love.  We'll once again walk on the Moon.

The world is as we dream it.

Again, The Shadow

I recently discovered two authors who write about Jung's shadow archetype.  Paul Levy,  "Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil" and Debbie Ford, "The Secret of the Shadow."  Both have other published work and are well known, though new to me. I haven't read either book yet, but heard them speak on YouTube and am reading some of their work online - fascinating stuff, the shadow.

I keep coming back to the shadow in my posts here, too.  Jung believed that anyone who wants to find balance and wholeness, to individuate, as he put it, must work consciously to shine a light on the shadow.  But it’s a Catch-22 because we seem to have a built-in denial mechanism when it comes to seeing our own shadow.  "Shadow, what shadow? You’re the one with the shadow." 

That would be what Jung called the ego talking. The shadow is every aspect of me which my ego, (that which I accept as myself) rejects, the "not me".  The quicker we are to say not me, the more that denial bears looking into. Here’s a good example from a recent experience I wrote about in my previous post, “Portrait of a Younger Self.” 

I said I would embrace all the wonderful characteristics I rediscovered about my 11-13 yr. old self in an old autograph book I found, but reading what others wrote about me shines a bit of light on my 13 year old shadow, as well.  I noted  how I skimmed over one particular entry when I first read the book. On reading it again, I had to admit to myself that I tried to ignore it because of the way it made me feel.  It was from a boy on whom I had a huge crush; he happened to sit in front of me in one of my classes.  It reads:

"Adelita.  It's been fun sitting in front of you during Cit. Ed., even if you did get my pants dirty."  

Argh!  How embarrassing.  I acted like a SILLY infatuated girl. If there's anything I'm not, it's SILLY.   I did not do dumb groupie stuff at concerts! (Well, I did hoot and holler for my favorite bands.) I love learning and thinking, not being a simpering teeny-bopper.  Ah, you see?  The Shadow.  I should high-five my 13-year old self for her boldness and claim some of that boldness, still.   I want to laugh and embrace my budding sexuality in the aspect of my 13-year old self and let it translate into embracing the mature sexuality of my Crone years.   In Jung’s view, integrating the shadow, accepting rejected parts of the self, leads to a release of creative energy that adds zing to a person’s life.  I think that's true.

I like Debbie Ford's example that resisting the revelation of the shadow, trying to keep from admitting something to ourselves, let alone others, is like trying to continuously hold a large beach ball under water.  That's why, once we join with the beloved cartoon character, Pogo, in admitting, "We have met the enemy and he is us.",  new vitality, hope and possibility becomes available to us.

Since dreaming is a direct path to attaining self-awareness, tracking our dreams and pondering their message in our waking lives can help us meet and integrate our shadow aspects. As Jung saw it,  the shadow can often be found in same sex characters in dreams, although any character can represent a shadow/rejected aspect in ourselves.  A clue to a possible shadow element is a strong, knee-jerk reaction or negative emotional response we may have to that dream element.

Our personal shadow aspects manifest in waking life, sometimes wreaking havoc in our lives, other times projecting havoc onto others.  Projection of shadow fears in the form of “not me, it’s you” is at the root of so much of the evil of our time.  On a personal level, it leads us to create our own messes; on a collective level, it plunges us into wars and other mass disasters.

That’s why acknowledging and somehow coming to a healthy balance with one’s own shadow is part of a dreaming practice.  The good news is that quite often these humbling lessons are delivered in dreams in the funniest ways.  As I was writing this post, I saw this clip of President Obama’s speech at the Annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  It’s typical for the presidential speech to be full of jokes about the relationship between the press and prez, but in this sketch, President Obama illustrates a very good use of the personal shadow. Kudos to him and Keegan-Michael Key

Portrait of A Younger Self

One of my student’s and I have decided to explore visiting our younger selves through dream re-entry.  The intention is to offer assistance to a past aspect of our Self with the hindsight and compassion of a wiser, older sibling.  This lets us revision a former self, perhaps healing a Soul part that might be injured or stuck from that point on in our lives.  Through the practice of dream re-entry, we can find a way to return that Soul vitality to our present time and present selves. 

The imaginal work that Active Dreaming encourages, just as Jung encouraged it under the name of Active Imagination and before all, as indigenous dream practices have done, is my favorite aspect of my dream practice, except for dreaming itself.

Synchronistically, I just found an artifact from my 11-13 year old self among my books; it’s a small white leather autograph book.  They were popular back then, I guess. I found that its pages contained handwritten well wishes from various friends, classmates and teachers, not to mention, from my older by two years brother. 

What a trip!  I read the whole book carefully, several times stopping to marvel at the piece of my past it brings back to me, making it so accessible to me, Now.  With this information, I can more authentically go back and dialogue with my sweet "pre-teen" self and discover more about her.

To honor the waking dream of finding this book and its great assistance to me in my exploration, I called my brother, who lives in the Midwest. I asked him what he remembers about that time in our lives, read him, (okay, teased him about) his entry, shared with him one particularly jaw dropping revelation and reminisced about the teachers and those days.  Funny how, given how much fun it is to talk about our past this way, we don't more often.   This is how  a dream practice activates our waking lives and animates our awareness of life's potentials.

If I empower the little girl I find in the pages of this book, a little book that she carried to school and passed to those whose signature she wanted, will she empower me, too, now?  My answer to that is, yes; definitely.

What do I really want?  Who am I really?  How do I empower myself to do what I desire to do, as best I can and with joy? A dream practice helps us each answer our own heartfelt questions in life, because it helps strip away the many ego illusions we're sold and kindly replaces them with a true mirror into Soul.

In his excellent book, “Dreaming the Soul Back Home” Robert Moss describes how dreams offer us endless opportunities for soul recovery.  In Active Dreaming, Robert uses shamanic soul retrieval practices as the foundation for a new direction in dream play he calls, "soul recovery."  A significant difference between soul retrieval  and soul recovery is that the former requires a trained and skilled shaman, while soul recovery connects each person to  lost soul parts through dreaming and dream practices.  Each person is his or her own shaman.

Although I'm thrilled for the energy my autograph book has generated for me, you don’t need any artifacts from any particular time.  You may find it helpful to pull out pictures or objects, but all you really need is your imagination.  I find re-entering a dream of a 12 year old girl, or of a dream location like the house she lived in, a school or other dream setting familiar to her, any of these is a powerful portal to the past.  If I dreamt it, it has energy for me to reveal and use for my benefit.  

Going back through old dream journals looking for a specific place or type of character is great fun.  I also practice meditating on the well being of that little girl and embracing all her wonderful characteristics as my own. I can release, sadness, shyness, disappointment, whatever, while embracing her good humor and kindness. Meeting her again brings me renewed energy by connection to the passions and freedoms that she carried in my heart at that time.

Living with a dream practice really does beat watching TV all the time

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The Unconscious and Dreaming

http://www.psycheproductions.net/index.html

I’m working with a wonderful student in a Master’s program who wants to do her final project 

on understanding the unconscious. Good luck, right?  I love working with motivated students  because their curiosity sparks and deepens mine.

I first met the unconscious when it hit me upside the head in dreams. As a  college senior, I experienced a whopper of a dream I titled Howling Mary; it was a powerful, precognitive, archetypal, life-mapping dream. I watched it unfold in waking life one unanticipated event after another. After this jaw dropping demonstration of the power of dreams, I embraced dreaming as a spiritual path and never looked back.  

I believe that cultivating a dream life amounts to living two lives (at least) at once, sort of double bang for your buck.  Dreams hold up mirrors to us reflecting what we need to know, nudging us towards what we need to do, prompting us to follow our own understanding and connect with our own vast souls. A dream practice can turn you from a passive persona in your waking life to a full-hearted, courageous creator of your own life in any realm. 

There are many bridges like dreaming into the unconscious, which is good because it’s better to experience the unconscious than to theorize about it. As Robert is fond of quoting from Mark Twain, "I don't want to learn about the moon from someone who hasn't been there."  Twain was a very strong dreamer and often referred to dreams in his writings.

In this new millennia, “psychology” (study of the soul) is transcending rigid objective and mechanistic paradigms. An example is the growing field of NDE, OBE, Lucid and other Dream studies.  For me, Active Dreaming offers expansive tools for inner exploration in a framework that's easy to learn and to teach, but all roads that lead Home are valid.  Each person knows their true north.

  

Develop your own dream practice and your ear is always to the ground of your Being, listening for what comes through. Dreaming is a bridge between waking and spiritual realities.  It's extremely personalized, only the dreamer can say what his or her dreams mean, but it's also universal. Around the world and across time, we all participate in a multiverse through dreaming. One dream can teach us that there is nothing to fear, not in life or in death. We're in a time of huge paradigm shifts and perhaps through our dream gates, help is on the way.  

Consider that dreaming isn't a left brain, simplistic, this or that, analytical brain kind of experience.  Dreams take place on another level of reality; they adhere to different rules, and come in many different varieties.  All dreams aren’t the same; life impacting dreams don't always come in neon. Often it’s those throw away or icky dreams that turn out to be valuable. 

When we say knowledge is power, we may be referring to consensus definitions of knowledge and of power.  But knowledge and power can also mean inner knowledge, Wisdom, and spiritual power, Love.  Mystical knowledge (spirituality) as the ancients taught,  is found in other dimensions, in dreams, visions, nature, meditation, prayer and near death moments.

Religion and spirituality aren’t the same thing; religion demands I follow rules and believe things that can prove detrimental to my soul. Religion often demands I give up my curiosity, my private search, and adhere to somebody else’s good idea about God. Spirituality, however, knows me for a spark of Divinity and asks me to act accordingly.  

One of the most wonderful things about Jesus is that he always challenged the establishment (but still listened to his mama).  What’s not to love about the guy? The kingdom of god is within; he wasn’t kidding.  But the god preserved on clay tablets is not the same as the living god/goddess of each soul. Your god may not be for me.   If you threaten to hang, quarter or behead me for following my own intuition and spiritual connection, I think you have anger issues. Vive y deja vivir.

Dreams are the royal road to my own unconscious and beyond.  Experiences in my waking life and in my dream life count equally and are the sum of my/this life experiences.  Following my dream life on a regular basis, and honoring the dream lives of others, has taught me many things that make hope possible. Isn't that why we have faith in "God?" 

I always make a small disclaimer about developing a dream practice alone because there are times for some when dreams are snarled in private nightmares rooted in traumatic waking experience. Thankfully, there are more and more healers in traditional and non-traditional roles, who can help a traumatized person rebuild that inner bridge. With time and support, may we each find our way back to center. 

The contemporary conversation on the nature of “Consciousness” is exhilirating. Does "that which we know to be ourselves" die with the physical brain or is our true nature non-physical, non-local, a spiritual reality.   And what about the Unconscious then, if Consciousness is non-local is it the same as the Unconscious? Is Consciousness a part of the whole that is the Unconscious?   Is it a matrix where each spark of consciousness glows forever?  These questions are from new frontiers.  It's an exciting time to be an explorer.

 “You are not just the drop in the ocean. You are the mighty ocean in the drop.”  

                                                                                                                                                                                      Rumi