Archive for the ‘Dream Work’ Category
What words, in our over- and hyper-communicated world, are actually worth writing?
There are cycles of creativity that motivate a writer to write just to get the inspirations out of our hearts and minds and into the world.
And there is an Internal Saboteur that thwarts our creativity with the question: What IS the Point?!
In an effort to reconcile this felt conflict, I share a recent inspiration. Yesterday, at the 16th monthly Women & Spirit in Business gathering in Hadley, Massachusetts, I experienced such a deep resonance with the dozen of us there that my Inner Saboteur, who has thwarted my queue of posts to be published, was herself overruled. || Read more
The coaching process is very personal and, for the person curious about what it can offer, I share this reflection that I had recently about why coaching is important. If this helps satisfy your curiosity, I welcome a call to discuss potential next steps of working with you.
The offering:
Together we look deeply into life experiences—into the triggers that stir up emotions and to the process for maintaining peace and calm amidst the storms of chaos. We begin by reflecting on how and why it is good to look deeply.
• Where do I receive support and resonance with my efforts to see below the surface?
• Who helps me to explore the roots, the causes and conditions of dis-ease?
• In which relationships or areas of my life do I find obstacles to trudge through, over and over with each new situation?
The process of looking deeply fills us with a mixture of hope and dread. Hope for resolution, for progress, for growth, for mutual understanding and respect, for gentleness … for love and inner peace—which is strong and able to weather any storm. Sustained hope is the core of a strong community and a global family. The dread we feel is based on past experiences, painful memories of our hope and good intentions being shattered. Dread that our difficult circumstances may never improve. Sadly, it can seem as if each of these past experiences leaves a layer of fine yet heavy sediment inside us that doesn’t ever fully clear away with even the freshest warm breeze. || Read more
I have been looking forward to this day for 36 days (I’ll blame the time extension on the New England storm and power outage!) because I have wanted to post this particular picture:
There is irony in waiting to post a picture about “arriving” given the message reminding us to arrive with the breath each moment right within the body!
It took me 24 hours to feel like I had truly arrived at last month’s retreat with Thich Naht Hanh. When I did fully settle in and release all the mental energy I’d had, I felt “home” in both my body and the retreat space. The collective energy of 1,000 people attending to their breath, their thoughts and feelings, and the environment was pure joy that I hope everyone can experience. This collective conscious effort is what the world needs now.
This last mindfulness post is bittersweet. Sweet because I’m typically a once a week or so blogger and I look forward to getting back on that schedule; bitter because the added effort I have put into mindfulness over the past month has had a specific purpose and I, like all of us, need sufficient motivation in order to attend to the subtle essences of life–like the breath!
My practice has certainly deepened and I have formally announced my intent to be ordained in the Order of Interbeing. It simply feels like the next step in a succession of over 12 years of steps toward greater mindfulness. But what has also unfolded is a richer awareness of why I am a life and business coach; appreciation for what I have to offer that is unique, profound and important. For that, for the continued mindfulness practice, and for being part of the large community of us reflecting on what it means to be alive, I am grateful.
Here are the words to a song I learned many years ago. Contact me and I will be happy to sing it to you!
I have arrived, I am home
In the here and in the now (repeat)
I am solid, I am free (repeat)
In the ultimate I dwell (repeat)
With this mindfulness practice unfolding I have made an important breakthrough. The 30-day “time” frame (of posting inspired insights) has been an important container, which I am compassionately experiencing as flexible enough to hold consecutive experiences yet not limited by my perception of 24-hour time. With this understanding of time “containment” also comes a metaphorical awareness of the span of my lifetime.
In this post I am exploring the phrase I’ve heard Thich Naht Hanh share, “by looking deeply we see the cosmos”. This phrase came back to me because of two triggers—a Jungian lecture I attended last night, and my subsequent dream. The lecture was about the process of integrating the soul with one’s ego, or developed character, through deepening the relationship with—listening to—the body. In this lecture, Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle was referenced, along with various spiritual practices of looking deeply such as Sufi dancing, Haitian voodoo, and contemplative movement. The reference to Teresa’s Interior Castle helped me instantly see the connection within the dream I had early this morning.
Do you ever dream that the people with you are simply versions of you? Aware that the characters (or enchanters?) at your side are your own person-i-fications, you become more motivated to pay attention!
In my dream I emerge from a lower level of this mossy, sprawling stone estate (through a hatchway of sorts) into an expansive, sunny interior courtyard. With my thin, vibrant, white/blond haired lady of the house “self”, I cross a short distance to a small cornflower blue painted wooden porch. I am impressed with her estate, yet the only thing she finds true joy from is the window she built that opens onto the porch from the dark dining room we have walked into.
I have many analytical interpretations of this, along with the other “me” characters in the dream (including Johnny Depp), but the point of sharing this dream is that the process of looking deeply does in fact reveal the entire cosmos. The woman’s one small window, which looks into the inner courtyard, is what each of us is building with our mindfulness practices!
To see the interior castle, the infinite kingdom within, is the rich reward for struggling to find both meaning within each of our experiences and joy within each of our relationships, each moment of each day. The practice of mindful breathing, speaking, listening, eating, drinking, living, is the practice of learning how to see.
Whew! It has been a roller coaster of emotions over the past 24 hours ranging from worries about my father’s health and precariously large aneurysm and our dog Shaggy’s lyme disease to social angst that got me writing an article about breaking out of mental prison all the way to an actually enjoyable scrambling to get a 100-document grant project printed and mailed.
Have I been mindful? Yes and no. I have forgotten to breathe mindfully much too often over this past day and a half — thank GOD we don’t have to remember to breathe!
What I have been mindful about is the support within my family and my spiritual community. Pictures taking me back to the energy of the mindfulness retreat I have been referencing throughout this 30-day blog were shared by a beautiful woman named Mari Lynn (her photo is posted here), and the morning meditation that my family is now doing together was led today by my daughter. I was too unsettled to lead and love to see how we all share the journey (and the effort) together.
After writing the article on breaking out of mental prison (which I’m still working on and embodying) I was in a funk and found myself perusing Facebook. I am part of two inspiring communities of writers and thinkers that left me feeling connected and refueled. How beautiful. This beauty is everywhere we look for it!
How are you supported each day?
I recently had a dream that is changing my life, a dream that could have been a nightmare but has inspired me to take dramatic action that is necessary at this evolutionary time in our existence. As someone who has reinvented herself both personally and professionally a great many times, this next step doesn’t feel so big—but it could be.
In the dream I am talking with my mother on a cell phone (this is often how we communicate since she died). I’m telling mom about a plan I had to “engage the most violent men in the most depressed neighborhoods.” She was listening supportively and then we concluded or disconnected, either way it didn’t faze me in the dream. Much of this dream centered around my vehicle being in one parking lot and then, just as I approached it after walking past a very scary house in the dark, another parking lot. 
On the porch of this very scary house in the dark, in a strange neighborhood, sat a gang of men and two or three women. I could not see them, but because of the streetlights, they could see me. Each comment made about me walking by got increasingly lewd and threatening. You can imagine my fear when I saw that my vehicle wasn’t where I arrived, but instead across the street from this very scary house in the dark.
A big black man (about 300 pounds) appeared close to me and I asked him if he’d watch my back. He smiled genuinely and said yes. Then he disappeared. I pictured the scary men in the dark hiding by my vehicle (even though it was under a spotlight) and smashing the windshield after I got in it. I feared using my cell phone, lest they assume I was calling the cops.
But then I asked God, in the dream, what I could do. I saw myself filling up with love and walking right up on their porch, looking them all in the eyes and telling them my story of how I met Ralph “Chitta”, a young black tattooed man who was listening to rap & laying across the only remaining bus seat on my trip out of Baltimore.
I woke up, not finding out whether or not this plan worked, but knowing that a seed of important action had just been planted. Since this dream I have thought about how fear shows up in the body and mind and how many approaches I have to acknowledging, calming, reframing and embracing fear. I now seek to help neutralize fears … in the darkest places where it exists.
Please think for a moment how important it is that we all pursue fearlessness. Won’t you join me in a free and anonymous weekly four-part tele-series, to engage with the forces that lead to violence within. This series is open to everyone but designed for men. For details click here.
I dreamed about having many guests in my house milling about. I was the last to finish eating a meal of breaded chicken wraps when we learned that we no longer had access to food outside the house. Before I could even think about assessing our situation and putting a plan together, my daughter had put a second meal together and was serving it. She’d used the rest of the tortilla wraps and made salami, lettuce and mayo sandwiches. I said no thanks (still eating chicken). Even though I was trying to express encouragement about her initiative, the larger, ambiguous frustration I felt was what was conveyed. She didn’t understand the need for a plan, nor did the others. The general energy was of ignorance and typical American optimism not based in a larger reality.
This dream illustrates a conundrum I have long felt about only seeing what is in front of our faces, unable to sense implications of short-sighted indulgence. I have imposed significant (and on the surface, unrealistic) limitations on myself and my family including intensely lowering energy usage (electricity, heat, water) and reducing purchases of clothing, electronics and other commodities. This has also been a significant struggle over the past ten years as the wisdom of my assertions for limiting consumption is not reflected in day to day living.
One example is in the grocery store where the offerings of good looking, cheap, yet nutritionally deficient (genetically engineered) produce is still much more plentiful than the organic produce. We understand organic is more nutritious but it doesn’t LOOK as pretty and we wonder if the cost is worthwhile (that’s another topic altogether). We buy what is attractive. Could it be because individually and collectively we are feeling less and less attractive all the time?
Feeling unattractive isn’t just due to an unnatural aversion to aging, resulting from the technological manipulations of nature and biology. It is that the basis of our decisions have become individual versus collective. We long for greater connection to one another, to nature, to God and spirit, yet we are consumed, flooded with thoughts about how we look, feel and seem – individually (this of course includes immediate family as it pertains to status in one’s community).
Who likes to feel ugly?! No one likes to see his own ugliness – whether it be surface ugly as in wrinkles or sagging skin, or unfashionable clothing, or the deeper character ugly as in selfish, fear-based thoughts and feelings. Yet without a good look at the ugly, we cannot make choices and take informed action in defining what is attractive, good and desirable.
Returning to the dream about eating breaded chicken wraps, one could easily see the metaphor in breaded (bread=money) chicken (chicken=fear) wraps (all neatly covered up) and the mid-meal awareness of limited supply of resources as a direct reflection of the financial chaos we are experiencing globally.
We all know this situation is a complicated mess of political posturing and promises. I know I have done very little to directly address what I see, believing that my voice is small and my political “power” too insignificant to make a difference. But I continue to look deeply and push to expand the edges of understanding in my family and my little center of influence.
Small steps. Every day.
It was just one itsy bitsy glass of wine – a delicious treat – and an organic, homemade one to boot!
Oh the trouble you caused. Why, oh why do you torture me so? And you had me at merlot…
Right as the clock turns 3am it happens… 
Flames shoot out of my feet and hands. Waves of heat crash along the shores of my face, my chest, my thighs! Oh for the love of God!
Insane incessant ideas skipped through my mind like a broken record – playing over and over and over…
Accepting the possibility that “the change” is coming, I have learned two things:
1. Writing about physical symptoms – how and when they occur – has helped me notice what triggers the heat issue (and poor circulation). Although this doesn’t mean I am happy in the least that the triggers are ice cream, chocolate and red wine 
2. 3 o’clock in the morning, according to the Ancient Chinese Clock, is the time of day when the liver energy is most active – cleansing out the toxins overworking my system perhaps?
So, while awareness is all very well and good, it doesn’t solve the issue of wanting an occasional bowl of ice cream or glass of wine AND a good night’s sleep. A remedy, according to a good friend, is to rub the right side of the body in the general vicinity of the liver. Hopefully remembering to do this before bed (post ice cream or red wine) will alleviate the symptoms.
Well I’ll just have to research that! And share your stories too!
