Dreaming does not exist in a vacuum. It does not exist in isolation. It is not in any way separate from the rest of our lives, from our waking lives, spiritual practices, belief systems, or relationships. Dreaming is absolutely embedded into the ecosystem of your psyche and of your life. Its constantly working with the waking life, and is ALWAYS trying to help the waking life. What do I mean by help? Dreaming is trying to help you fulfill the reason that you came here to this world. It's trying to help you in your spiritual evolution. It's trying to help you in your healing. It's trying to help you in your softening to love. It's trying to help you in creating the projects that you came here to create. It's trying to help you in your relationships. It's trying to help you help the people that you help, whether that's your children, your loved ones, your community, your clients. Dreaming is trying to help you with your destiny, which is how I like to say the reason that you came here.
Dreaming is in NO WAY separate from any of that. This tiny shift of perspective is both essential on the dreaming path, but also a common stumbling block. Dreaming often gets held it its own little bubble. What I hope is that we re-centralize dreaming into the rest of our lives; that we re-knit dreaming into the rest of our experience of our existence here and don't see it as separate. When we do that, the amount of healing, helpfulness and contact with the otherworldliness that this world is, grows and grows and grows.
Dreaming is working with your waking mind. In my blog post (and also podcast episode, where you can listen to many of these posts) called My Soul That Dreams Me and Why Believing This Matters, I wrote about my personal cosmology and the context that I hold dreaming within. What you believe about dreaming, the world, your life and your place matters! Because dreaming, what happens in your brain when you sleep, is working with waking, what's happening in your brain when you're awake. I want to encourage you to be really deliberate and intentional about what it is that we are choosing to believe. I know that that is a bigger task these days than probably it ever has been before.
Many of us don't have an unbroken ancestral cosmology that we inherited. We don't have an unbroken land-based cosmology that we inherited. We don't have a religious cosmology that we inherited. We often don't even these days have a political cosmology that we can totally align with. We're in this time of the Wild West where you can believe whatever you want. You can create whatever reality bubble that you want to create. You can dream whatever future you want to dream. Remember, we are the dreamers. We are the weavers. We are the woven ones. And that is actually quite a big responsibility. I want you to think really hard about that, that what we choose to believe really matters because that is a huge part of dream weaving the future for not only ourselves, but also for future generations and also for all of life.
I want to share with you what I believe about dreams, specifically in relationship to the waking life conscious steps that I take and apply to all of my dream weaving practices. These steps align with what I believe, with the best of me, with my heart, with the future that I believe in and want to see and create. These are the prayers that I am holding dreaming's and dreamweaving's context within.
The first is that we are all related. I believe that we are all related. I believe that all of us human beings are related to each other and that what one of us does affects the whole collective. Although this planet is just one big experiment in experiencing ourselves as individuals, what we are here to remember is that we are all connected. I believe that what I do affects you, and what you do affects me, and so that inspires me to do the very best I can to be who I am and to play my part in the role of this creation. It inspires me to do my very best to do no harm, to be medicine, to be a benefit, to be a blessing. In a practical sense, how I apply that in my dream weaving is that any time I have examined a dream to find the medicine within it, I always shape this in the context of a question: Where is the seed of healing? When I have found that medicine and that seed of healing, I first breathe and ground that into my body, my cells, and send that out across my history: past, present, future. And then I do the same for all beings: May the healing and the medicine that came in this dream be a blessing for all. All of creation, all of whom are my relations, my family.
It's not just the humans that I am related to, it's all beings: the plants and the animals. It’s those that swim in the sea, crawl on the earth, fly in the sky and wiggle underground; it’s the fairies, too, and the spirits. It's all of creation. We are all related. May every amount of healing that I receive from my dreams be offered out as a blessing to and for all of creation Offering that prayer elevates the healing. It elevates the vibrational frequency of what it is that we are doing and creating, and it is asserting and weaving that dream that I believe in, that we are all connected, we are all related, and that we are here to play our part. We are here to HELP.
I also believe that I am here on this planet, this beautiful blessed Mother Earth, to awaken. I'm here to awaken to the truth of who I am and why I came to this world; to understand what this world is and what it is that is mine to do. I see every dream as a love note of awakening. Clarissa Pinkola Estés said, "Dreams are a letter from home." So, my dreams are a letter from my home. What is my home? What is your home? My home is my soul. My home is a constellation of stars up there. My home is my people, the people that I come from. My home is all of this. My home is the divine mother of the universe. My dreams come from all of these places, and they come to awaken me, to help me on my path and on my spiritual journey.
I also believe that I am here to surrender to and remember the truth that is love. I believe that love is the strongest force in this universe, and I believe that all of my awakening is awakening to this love. My dreaming and my dream weaving practice should, if I'm doing it right, make me more loving, more kind, and open my heart more to experience more compassion and interconnection. I'm always tracking this: that my dreams and the meaning that I'm making from them and the actions that I'm taking from them, AKA my dream weaving, is making me more loving, kind, warm and helpful. If I am considering a meaning or an action that does not make me more kind, warm, loving, then that's a cue to me that I'm off track, that I might be slipping into ego or shadow or some other path. Ask yourself these questions when you are making meaning out of your dreams:
· Is this on the path of love?
· Is this on the path of warmth?
· Is this on the path of kindness?
· Does this walk me down the path of awakening?
· Is this something that home would send me?
· Does this meaning, and any action I take from it, help all of creation and not just myself?
I ask myself these questions. They're my check. They're my vet. They are my guide for the path that I'm going to follow.
You might want to consider what you believe about this world, because dreaming is working with those beliefs. The meaning and weaving of your dreams should be run through those beliefs that you hold. This is what I believe. This is the path that I'm on. This is the cosmology that I have created, and so dreaming is working with me in that regard. What I can assure you is that even if you completely disagree with those basic cosmological tenets that I just shared, it doesn't matter, because dreaming is still trying to help you. Dreaming will work with whatever cosmology it is that you do hold. If you resonate with my beliefs, then I invite you to dedicate any healing and any medicine that came for you in a dream out to the whole web of life and to all of creation as a prayer and a blessing.
May your dreams and their weaving serve all of creation We are all related. Thank you for being here. Blessed be.
