Your Greatest Spiritual Protection is To Know Who You Are

Dreamers should be safe travelers… but how does this actually look and feel in practice? What about spiritual protection on the dreaming path? One of the most important teachings I’ve received came from my beautiful friend and teacher Dr. Deborah Frances (Dancing Crow) and it’s this, “Your greatest spiritual protection is to know who you are.” 

Knowing who we are and what we stand for while trusting the goodness of our own hearts, feeds the light within us. This light, that knows itself as light, is the greatest spiritual shield we carry with us in this life. Know who you are. 

When you need reminding of this, as we all sometimes do, I like to refer back to the timeless story that has come to be known as The Two Wolves. 

I’m sure you’ve heard it, but it’s one we can’t hear too many times. As the story goes…

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

 He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

As dreamers, our task is to feed meanings of our dreams that grow our light, and not the other way around. This can be tricky when we’re first setting out on the dreaming path. As beginners, we often haven’t yet built up an inner bank of experience that proves we can dream of darkness - but not become it. 

Our dreams will show us the darker parts of ourselves. but they do this on our behalf, in order that we can see, and ultimately choose, differently.  Dreams show us the dark so that we can choose to grow our light. 

Life is challenging, riddled with suffering. It’s tempting to fall towards despair in the face of so much hardship. But I suggest a different path, and so do our dreams. Our task is to bravely choose light, choose life, choose soul and choose what we stand for.  Dreams help us grow this light, but our part in the deal is to believe in them.  We must have an unshakeable faith that dreams have our back, are on our side, from our soul and come from nature herself. Dreams want us to weave more creativity and light into this world.  They want this world to re-member herself back together, and for us to come along for the ride. 

In our dream interpretations, let’s beware the temptation to fall into meanings of I’m too much or I am bad or the world is out to get me or whatever tempting story of darkness and separation may be the case for you. We all have them. And we all have the choice to feed them or not. Choose to feed the light, dreamers. Choose to feed love. Choose to grow the good dreams by making meanings that support a flow of creativity and love through your life, and the world at large.  

The idea of protection always surfaces in conversations on dreaming. Because the dream world exists in the subtler planes, there is often a concern about traveling safely. And to this I say - yes, safety is always wise to consider. But there is a fine line between calling in that which we’re hoping to avoid, and avoiding it altogether. Sometimes by focusing on the thing we are worried about, we draw to us that very same thing by dedicating so much of our attention and life energy in its direction. 

These are not black and white matters, as darkness very much does exist in this world. 

The strongest spiritual protection in regards to dreaming is what I learned from my wise teacher: know who you are. Trust your light, your inherent beauty, and for goodness sake trust that your dreams have your back.

If we’ve experienced a hefty amount of trauma and/or have a hard time believing that dreams are on our side, perhaps set the dreaming aside for a bit. Instead, focus on cultivating a sense of safety and trust in the inherent goodness of life, self and soul.  The dreams will be waiting for you, ready when the time comes. 

This inherent trust in dreaming’s wisdom grows increasingly important the deeper we dive into dreamwork. For let me tell you, the dreams do get weirder and weirder, heavier and heavier. But they also grow brighter, broader and more magical than we’d imagine possible. The greater exercise we give our dream muscles, the more complexity and magic we are able to hold in our waking state. So the dreams turn up the magic volume for us once we’ve proven to ourselves that we can handle it.  

Dreams don’t discriminate between what we perceive as light and dark. The same is true of the heart.  Heart opening signs us up not only to feel more joy, but also to feel more depth of grief and pain.  We cannot skew the heart’s opening in only one direction. When we open the dreams, just as the heart, our capacity for feeling and experience expands on both ends of the spectrum. 

The more sturdiness we cultivate with our dreaming, the more nightmarish material we may experience. Because, other than in cases of mental imbalance and PTSD, our dreams don’t bring us more than we can handle. The more proficient we grow at handling dream material, the more expansive material we are sent and can retain.  

With nightmares we’d be wise to reflect upon and build the belief that, as Jeremy Taylor says, “there is no such thing as a bad dream, only dreams that take a dramatically negative form to get our attention.” This ever-growing belief in dreams, soul and nature becomes a shield of light that we shine upon nightmarish figures that show up in our dreams. 

This shield of light says, “Hey nightmarish figure, you look really twisted and scary, but I KNOW WHO I AM and I KNOW YOU ARE HERE to help. So show me how you serve life, love, nature and the good dream!”