TIMELY DREAMS

Living in the present is a goal that most of us have heard about or have been actively working towards. Pulling our energy out of the future and back from the past so that we can be alive here and now is taught in many traditions.

But what about our dreams? In the culture we are supposed to have dreams in our youth, which we stick to, or give up, or chase, or realize. It is generally recognized that having dreams is a good thing (unless all you ever do is dream), but that in practice many of us should "face reality", grown up and put them away.

Giving up on our dreams, as you know, is dieing inside. Our dreams come from Spirit and our soul, and in giving them up we lose ourselves. So we should stick with our dreams, in spite of mixed social mesages.

Recently I was working with someone and I realized that their space was full of old dreams. This is partly due to the funny things that time has been doing lately, so the "usual" linearity has begun to scramble a bit, meaning that the phrase "all things are now" is happening more obviously.

As I looked at these dreams though I noticed that being "old" they were therefore out-of-date. They had been dreamt in the past and had not really changed. Like many old things, frozen in time (even though they were wandering into the present), they were also somewhat lifeless.

It became clear that not only do we need to keep our dreams, but we should be refreshing them, letting them evolve with us and our experience and situation in the world. Perhaps more than other aspects of life they should not be cast in stone.

Imagine an artist who has a vision and then endlessly repeats the same work of art. What starts fresh and full of life and insight, becomes old and stale. The dreams of our youth, should not be given up, but they should be allowed to evolve.

How many ways do those of us who hold our dreams become trapped in them? Dreams are not something that should hold us hostage; they should set us free. Just as we know that dreaming someone else's dream is unlikely to satisfy our soul, dreaming an old dream is also out of sync with who we are today.

"Living the dream" is not acting out a dream from long ago, but speaks to allowing your dream to live, to grow and change, just as you do.

May your dreams be always fresh and full of joy and life.

(© 4/09)

HAVINGNESS

There is an old proverb about letting things go in order to receive them. This is usually referenced to relationships, how we have to release people in order to have them truly come to us. The hard part being that if we expect them to come back then we have not really let them go, have we?

Its not just relationships for which this may be said. In some manifestation processes the last step, after working on the vision of what we want in various ways, is to cast it out to the universe to come back to us. We have to surrender at some point in order to receive.

Surrendering is a state of neutrality, in which receiving or not receiving are both options. It is not that when we surrender, the universe will do everything the way we want it to. If we still have expectations, we still have attatchment.

Perhaps it is that if we are full of need and want, expectation and attatchment there is no space for the things we think we want to show up. Perhaps it is about the level of our being that we are experiencing? Is it the egoic level of judgement, need, and attatchment? or the spiritual level of knowing that we are held and supported Spiritually through everything?

In healing work the opposite is also true. Until you can allow something to be, it cannot change. Until you can have it, you can not release it. Until we move through resistance to a place of neutrality the deep healing can't happen.

This doesn't mean we have to like it, or approve of something, but we have to accept that it is there. How can you change something that is not there?

Several years ago I started some deep body work because I had some lower back issues. One of the first things that came up was pain associated with an old scar in my belly. A hernia operation when I was 3 months old, that I had been carrying for nearly 50 years. It never particularly bothered me, but it sure was painful when worked on.

I had to find it and allow it to be, before I could clear and release it. This is true on many levels and there are ways of safely working with deeper things. But when I stopped holding onto that pain, space was made for something else to be present. Knowing it was there I was able to make a choice to let it go.

To adapt the poet:
True havingness is a place beyond giving and receiving, in which Life is: flowing and changing. In that place were we can allow things to be or not be, anything is possible. Allowing something to not be we can create it, allowing something to be we can release it.

Join me on the journey to that place of havingness, in which process we may discover what we really need.

(© 4/09)