00:01:37.520Yeah, absolutely. Well, I guess we could start with opening up about your path towards dreamwork
00:01:46.840and the connections between dream worlds and conscious worlds.
00:01:52.160Yeah. You know, when I was a small person, I used to have really vivid dreams. And so I was
00:01:59.820intrigued by dreams from as young as I can remember. But my particular story is different
00:02:07.680from a lot of people in that I left home at a very young age. I was about 14 years old and I
00:02:15.560ended up living in the system and essentially not really having parents after that. And I think
00:02:22.520going through that kind of initiation meant that I didn't have any of that external guidance in my
00:02:32.400life. And I think this is true for a lot of people, that it turned me towards my inner life.
00:02:38.880And at that time, I received many sort of guiding dreams, often which turned into synchronicities, which maybe ties into your next, the second part of your question.
00:02:52.660But I really feel looking back on my life at this point, that my dreams were really parenting me.
00:03:00.120I come from the perspective that this distinction or bifurcation that we make between psyche or what we call dreams or the dream time as being distinct or somehow separate from the material world, the physical world from nature, is really illusory.
00:03:20.260And when we begin to delve deeply into the work with dreams and into the exploration of the psyche, we discover that there is a reciprocal conversation taking place between these two dimensions.
00:03:36.280And this becomes extremely obvious in moments of synchronicity, but instead of thinking of synchronicity as these sort of extraordinary events that intervene on ordinary reality,
00:03:52.820I think that they are actually the underlying dynamism of the cosmos, this relational dialogue between waking and dreaming, between physical and non-physical, between seen and unseen, which is really an ancient idea, you know.
00:04:13.540And I think any of those cultures that were observing what we call animism certainly were and are recognizing the sacred dimension behind the visible surface of things, right?
00:04:29.720Right. This is not new to us humans. This is part of our old ways. And there's an essay you wrote
00:04:39.200called Giving Up on Timelines. And you say, quote, you can grow your imaginal faculties by listening
00:04:45.500to your dreams and intuitions, following synchronicities and engaging your imagination.
00:04:50.700Eventually, you'll no longer be caught in the flat, rational existence of consensus culture,
00:04:55.740but begin to experience different ways of knowing. Languages that are not tied to words alone,
00:05:01.440but that speak in symbols, gestures, sounds, patterns, feelings, and rhythms that are layered
00:05:06.900with meaning." Gosh, I would love to learn more about how we can listen to our dreams in the
00:05:17.000sense that they can guide us towards new ways of understanding and listening, which I think in a
00:05:21.700way is learning how to treat our dreams as significant. Yeah, definitely. I would say
00:05:27.800that's the very first step. And even though it may look like a simple step, it's very complicated
00:05:34.480for us because consensus culture devalues dreams for the most part. And so there's a great deal
00:05:43.360sort of unhindering of those ideas around the bifurcation between the worlds that really
00:05:54.400originated, or at least was deeply ensconced around the 17th century and Rene Descartes
00:06:02.760and rationalism and materialistic thinking and all that.
00:06:06.780But this kind of unlearning or unhindering process is kind of complicated because there's so much evidence to the contrary that we get pulled by worldly demands that keep us in a kind of locked relationship with the physical world.
00:06:28.080And so this sort of stretching into the imaginal and practicing at animism and even exploring our dream time is a kind of privilege that is not available to a lot of people when sort of trapped in that context of capitalism and all of its, all the hydra heads of that whole paradigm.
00:06:58.080But I do believe that we can practice at rehabilitating that imaginal capacity.
00:07:09.580And like you said, the first step is, you know, this very basic idea that we have to give value to our dreaming experience.
00:07:21.020And most of us have been taught that, say, like if we wake up from a dream that is difficult or scary or repulsive or upsetting in some way, our first reaction is to push it away, is to get as far away from it as possible.
00:07:45.400and you know that's kind of an expected reaction when looking at something when being confronted
00:07:52.720with something that is upsetting or difficult but we have to really shift our mind frame
00:08:03.140to realize that when these difficult dreams come up to be seen it is in and of itself a validation
00:08:13.960of something that's ready to come to consciousness,
00:08:18.860something that's ready to be seen, to be acknowledged.
00:08:23.620And the other thing I think that is a big hurdle
00:08:27.100is often people will have dreams that will have content
00:08:31.740that echoes experiences that they've had in the previous day or days.
00:08:37.840And they think, oh, this dream isn't interesting,
00:08:43.280and what I really want is a mystical dream, but until we can actually value or love the dream
00:08:54.740that we are given, we aren't going to get those deeper dreams. It's a little bit like weeding
00:09:00.800a garden. If you want the plants to fruit and thrive, you have to make space around them,
00:09:10.660And part of that means looking at what appear to be superficial dreams and extending the possibility that those dreams are not meant to be taken literally, even though they contain image from your literal existence, but instead we have to shift our perspective to begin thinking symbolically.
00:09:35.640And this is a small but mighty step in the practice of recovering our dream life.
00:09:43.120I'd love to hear more about that but I do want to go back to the quote that I just read and
00:09:51.960there's something in there that you said the sentence eventually you will no longer be caught
00:09:57.460up in the flat rational existence of consensus culture but begin to experience different ways
00:10:02.980of knowing and I would love to dive in a bit more to what this rational existence of consensus
00:10:11.520culture is. Yeah, for sure. I mean, what I mean by that is when we explore the origins of
00:10:19.980rationalism and take it back several hundred years into history, we discover that so much of the
00:10:29.980culture that we have built is based on this idea that the physical world is the only thing that
00:10:39.140exists. Most sciences are based in this idea that if it can't be seen, if it can't be observed,
00:10:46.500if it can't be proven in evidence, then it doesn't exist. And so everything that doesn't
00:10:53.520fall under that purview from dreams to the feeling life, to the subjective experience,
00:10:59.740to the creation of meaning, to the intuitive faculty, all of these things are more or less
00:11:08.860disposed of in that process. And all of us can relate to that in the way that we live in a day
00:11:16.160to day way around calendar and time constructs, you know, where we have so much focus on linear
00:11:27.500types of thinking around being able to accumulate wealth, around being able to find our way up in
00:11:38.420our profession through the various social ladders, being able to achieve things on
00:11:46.100linear timelines, and all of these things, the clock and calendar constructs, right?
00:11:51.640And all of these things are important. I'm not saying that we should dispose of these things. But I think everything that falls to the margins of that way of thinking is more or less neglected in our culture. And when something is so neglected, it becomes devalued or dismissed or just not acknowledged.
00:12:16.940And so the work of bringing things back into balance is about learning how to value those things at a very personal level, learning how to make time for our dreams, for instance, and to give a part of every day to paying attention to maybe even writing down and perhaps even doing ritual around the dreams.
00:12:46.700that we do receive and or creating responses or enacting changes in the way that we live
00:12:56.160our lives and the way we are in relationship as a response to the promptings that we get
00:13:02.160from our dreams so that we can start to engage in a kind of reciprocal dialogue with that
00:13:08.740larger governing intelligence that is written into the nature of life.
00:13:19.080Beautiful. I wanted to read another quote from, well, this time your website, where you say,
00:13:26.400dreamwork is a practice in which we coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation,
00:13:31.720and in so doing, restore our membership and belonging, end quote. And yeah, I think about
00:13:37.940this idea of separation, particularly in relation to the deep longing and yearning we seem to have
00:13:45.000in our culture or this over-culture. Yeah, I'm just picking up on also, it seems that
00:13:51.420so many of us are craving something and yet we have difficulty naming exactly what that is.
00:14:00.240So I'm wondering how does dream work engage with this separation and belonging?
00:14:05.920Yes. So I wrote a book on the topic of belonging, and it's called Belonging. And I was just like you, Ayana, I was really struck by that question in my own life about this deep yearning for a place of belonging.
00:14:23.820And yet, in as much as I had been searching for it over the course of my life, it seemed
00:14:48.540And so I began to notice that in my own life, this deep longing to belong was, in a sense, unconsciously driving me to make certain decisions in my life.
00:15:02.940And I wanted to understand, really, what is belonging? How do we achieve it if such a thing
00:15:13.220is possible? And I also wanted to know if other people were feeling something similarly to me,
00:15:21.400even though it felt like a very taboo subject to even bring up, because it's one of those things
00:15:26.640that just kind of runs silently in our background underneath the conversations we're having in
00:15:32.920the open, right? Like, will I be liked? Will I be loved? Do I belong here? Is it okay for me to be
00:15:39.760here? It's like this constant refrain that's happening for so many people unconsciously.
00:15:45.020Why do I feel like an outsider? And so I started to ask this question really just as a personal
00:15:50.780inquiry. And as I did that, I started to receive all of these dreams. And at first, it was just me
00:15:57.140journaling page upon page about more or less a kind of refinement of that question as it became
00:16:05.020more complex. But also, I was receiving teachings from my dreams that seemed to be saying to me
00:16:12.720that there was an entirely different way of understanding belonging than the one that I
00:16:20.380had inherited. Instead of thinking of belonging as something that was outside of myself that I
00:16:27.280was perpetually in search of, that actually belonging was a skill. It was a set of competencies
00:16:36.940that could be developed, could be grown. And it's just that in modern consensus culture,
00:16:45.920we had lost or forgotten those competencies, that skill. And so I began to talk to people
00:16:56.160in my life and in my community and in different walks of life about this question. And I was
00:17:02.780amazed to discover that so many of the people that I came into contact with had this same feeling
00:17:10.940of longing to belong, even when it looked from the outside looking in, that they had established a
00:17:18.240place of belonging to the outside observer, you know. But when asked their secret feeling, they
00:17:24.740too felt this sense of longing to belong to this something greater, as you've said, that
00:17:29.860is so difficult to me. And so after a while, I realized, oh my goodness, I think I'm writing a
00:17:36.620because it was just, it just kept going deeper and deeper. I realized that somewhere along the way
00:17:46.000that we had, as a people, experienced different kinds of estrangement. And from what I observed,
00:17:59.260this happens at three levels. The first level, of course, is the personal. So this is your
00:18:06.120personal story. And we all have these moments where we felt like maybe the way that we were
00:18:13.540was not enough, or that it was too much. And so we began to alter ourselves in order to fit in.
00:18:24.080And fitting in is very different from belonging. It requires us to cut parts of ourselves off in
00:18:31.820order to gain acceptance. The image that I like to use is the old Grimm's version of the Cinderella
00:18:39.880story. In the more modern Disney version, you know, the stepsisters just don't fit into the
00:18:45.660glass slipper. But in the Grimm's fairy tale, they actually had to cut off their toes to try and fit0.80
00:18:53.160into the tiny slipper. And I think this is a really gruesome but accurate image of what we do to
00:18:59.300ourselves on a psychic and emotional level and spiritual level when we're trying to fit into
00:19:05.560established norms. And this can happen in our family homes, it can happen in our churches,
00:19:12.680it can happen in our schools, it can happen in our workplace, and so on and so forth.
00:19:19.360So this is the personal level of estrangement. But then the level above that, of course,
00:19:25.120is the cultural level, where at the cultural level, there are just things, as we were sort
00:19:31.360of touching on earlier, that are considered acceptable, and other things which are just
00:19:38.120considered not valuable, or maybe worse, they're derided, or maybe they are just undiscovered.
00:19:48.140But we do learn those things in certain social milieus about what is acceptable in the culture and what is not.
00:19:57.100But coming back to your question, Ayanna, was about, you know, how does that tie into dream work?
00:20:02.120Well, I believe that psyche stretches far beyond the personal, what we call consciousness or vision of mind contained within the scaffolding of the human body.
00:20:17.140Psyche extends into the larger collective, what Carl Jung called the collective consciousness.
00:20:25.300And even further than that, into all of nature, sort of circling back to the original topic we started on around animism.
00:20:35.840And Psyche contains within it the entirety of the appendix of our species experience.
00:20:45.560And not only that, but I believe that there is a greater intelligence, which is governing the interconnected harmony of the entire ecosystem and inclining us to growth, inclining us to a sense of wholeness.
00:21:10.300And what that means is, from the Jungian perspective, certainly, that we come into this world not as a sort of tabula rasa, not a blank slate, but as containing a kind of inborn story that we are meant to live.
00:21:28.840Some people might call that destiny. You know, a great analogy is also in the DNA where there is a story contained at that subatomic level, which contains the possibility of the larger organism within it, given the right conditions.
00:21:47.340And so in our dreams, we see glimpses of that. And the way that we know this is because when we say understand a dream correctly, the next dream that we have built upon the understanding of the last dream.
00:22:08.580So what that means is having been given the previous dream, something in us knew what we needed in order to go into the next evolution of our becoming.
00:22:19.980There is something within us that knows who we are supposed to become.
00:22:26.540And in our dreams, we see evidence of that.
00:22:30.340And when we learn the symbolic language of dreams, we can get better at following or living in harmony with that ordering principle.
00:22:41.940Well, now I really don't want you to stop because I want to hear more about this ordering principle.
00:22:50.240I think a good way to explain this is with recurring dreams.
00:22:54.960So somebody could have a recurring dream for five years or even 20 years.
00:23:01.900And each dream is a little bit different.
00:23:04.500But for the most part, the theme of the dream is the same.
00:23:07.860Something happens over and over again.
00:23:09.800And when you wake up, you feel a bit exhausted because you think, oh, not that dream again.
00:23:15.240right? But the reason why we have recurring dreams is because we're kind of stuck in a loop
00:23:22.880of recurring behavior. So let's say you have a dream of being chased by a grizzly bear,
00:23:33.260and you have this dream every time you are confronted by a moment of rage in waking life
00:23:45.640and maybe you haven't even made this connection yet but let's say that's why it exists because
00:23:52.440perhaps somewhere in your history it was taught to you that it was not okay to express your anger
00:24:01.360So in that estrangement we were talking about, you worked very hard to separate yourself from that anger. But as a result of pressing those inclinations down and not being in relationship with them, you would have these dreams of a scary grizzly bear chasing you and pursuing you, trying to get your attention repeatedly every time you get into a situation where this rage was triggered in you.
00:24:31.360And so this is sort of how the anatomy of a recurring dream works.
00:24:36.260A similar or a familiar threat confronts us, and we have a very similar or recurring reaction
00:24:48.560or strategy to that threat, and it results in a recurring dream.
00:24:54.060So it's the inability to get out of a patterned way of thinking that causes this recurring dream.
00:25:02.220So until you can find a new perspective, which usually comes quite simply from exploring the dream and trying to move deeper into it instead of trying to run away from the grizzly bear, actually turning to face it and trying to embody or understand what it wants, then what happens is the dream usually disappears.
00:25:32.220So suddenly, the recurring dream is complete. And then the next dream that we have is an evolution
00:25:40.220upon that theme. So maybe in the next dream, you now have a dream where you come nose to nose
00:25:49.560with a grizzly bear, but this time you don't run from it. You just feel its breath on your skin,
00:25:57.100and you feel your fear, but you hold your ground. And in waking life, you're doing something
00:26:03.320similarly, which is allowing your rage or your anger to express itself in your body,
00:26:11.480perhaps not unconsciously and without care, but just making contact with that visceral energy
00:26:20.380that's in your body. Okay, so here we have this idea that the dream has evolved. Well, maybe we
00:26:27.580can even just fast forward five years down the line. And let's say you step into a position of
00:26:34.700leadership that requires you to enact very strong boundaries in order to be successful in your role.
00:26:44.220And you recognize that this would not have been possible had it not been for those earlier
00:26:51.220teachings around embodying your anger and learning how to use it in a productive way.
00:26:58.280So something in us knew at this early juncture that we needed to move through those hindrances
00:27:10.660And so this is just a very simple example, but these stories can get quite complex over the course of a person's lifetime. And many people report looking back on earlier dreams and seeing that they were foretelling of the person that they were meant to become.
00:27:33.520And so the conclusion that we can make from all of that is that something in us knows what our potential is.
00:27:42.740And when we work in relationship with that something, then we can begin to move into greater and greater belonging, not only with ourselves, but then that belonging actually becomes a shelter for others to take refuge in our own life.
00:28:12.740Beautiful. Yeah. It reminds me of something that I think I spoke with Stephen Herod Buhner about
00:28:40.020years ago. And I think the sentiment was walking into the fire or walking towards your fear.
00:28:47.320And I think there's something so potent and of course, scary, but also
00:28:56.740almost relieving about that because it's almost scarier to me have the fear at my back than to
00:29:06.740confront it face on. I mean, the confrontation feels maybe anxiety producing, but I actually
00:29:12.580think for me when I avoid that, it builds in my mind. And so, yeah, I just really appreciate all
00:29:20.860that you're speaking to. And honestly, I feel like I could just keep asking you questions about
00:29:26.640this topic because it feels so rich and there's so much here. But I also wanted to go back to
00:29:33.280belonging for a moment and talk about false belonging, which is something you discuss in
00:29:38.980your book. And you also discuss these initiations by exile. And yeah, I would just love to dive a
00:29:46.500bit more into this and think through some of the ways we are almost quote sold or marketed a type
00:29:52.600of belonging that ends up alienating us further. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm glad that it's as
00:29:58.920thrilling to you to discuss as it is to me, because this is my favorite sort of soapbox to
00:30:06.800be on. But I'm glad that I'm not alone in being fascinated by it. But yeah, so I came across the
00:30:14.580term false belonging in the book Anamkara by John O'Donohue. And I loved that word coupling so much
00:30:24.500that it inspired a chapter in the book for me, in which I talk about false belonging. And I
00:30:32.660sort of touched on this earlier as being those places in our lives that, like you said, sort of
00:30:40.520market an idea of belonging to us. And they're very seductive. It could be like belonging to a
00:30:49.600group most often, but it could also be belonging to a spiritual path. It could be belonging to
00:30:59.240a relationship. It could be belonging to a job, career, or vocation. But often these places of
00:31:09.100belonging are conditional, which is to say there is something hidden in the silent contracts of
00:31:18.920acceptance in these places that says, we can belong so long as we don't dot, dot, dot. And
00:31:28.020that can look different for all of those scenarios, right? Like maybe, you know, the relationship is
00:31:34.240a, you know, we can stay in this relationship and be happy so long as we don't talk about money,
00:31:41.340So long as we don't explore anger, as long as we don't need each other too much.
00:31:52.300Or it could be something like a career that for a number of years, I worked in the music
00:31:58.560industry and I was an executive at a record label.
00:32:03.920And I used to sit in these boardrooms that were 99% older white men.
00:32:10.420And I would be usually the only woman in the boardroom. And there was conditional
00:32:17.460acceptance of my being there so long as, and I'm sure you've heard these ideas before,
00:32:25.420I wasn't too aggressive, or I wasn't too emotional, or, you know, all of the things that we
00:32:31.900traditionally expect of the gender divide. And so things like this, right? Or maybe it's a
00:32:39.000spiritual group that like you can belong to the spiritual group, but we don't want any negative
00:32:45.580thinking or so-called negative thinking or negative talk, or we don't call into question
00:32:52.520the structures of this environment. That's a big one, right? And so these are what I call
00:33:01.540places of false belonging, because it isn't true belonging. It's something that requires us to be
00:33:08.620smaller and to leave parts of ourselves behind in order to gain acceptance in those places.
00:33:16.060And, you know, this can be fine and instructive for a while, but usually what ends up happening
00:33:23.220is you butt up against those limitations enough times, and it starts to become increasingly
00:33:32.140intolerable to you. And eventually, something from the unconscious is going to burst out in you
00:33:40.920and say, hey, this is not okay with me. And maybe you become a whistleblower, or maybe you have that
00:33:47.800blowout fight in your relationship, or maybe you speak out in your spiritual group or whatever it
00:33:55.140is. And often what happens is a kind of shattering. You get exiled. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's
00:34:04.620a demotion. Maybe you get fired. Something terrible often happens where you get pushed
00:34:11.400outside of this false place of belonging. And sometimes I will add that if you haven't addressed
00:34:22.680these unconscious disagreements. I call them sacred disagreements in the book because we
00:34:29.940talk a lot about sacred agreements, but we rarely talk about sacred disagreements because
00:34:35.280these are ultimately disagreements in some way at a moral or emotional or physical level. You
00:34:43.320disagree with this place of belonging in some way. If you don't express them, then sometimes
00:34:50.780what happens is they will manifest in a crisis. So either that will be self-chosen, like in the
00:35:00.860ways that I described, or it could come in another form, like suddenly getting fired for no reason,
00:35:08.860or suddenly developing an illness. Or there are ways that it may manifest in the physical world
00:35:17.360to somehow create a separation from you and that falseness.
00:35:22.960And this is where it goes into what I call initiations by exile.
00:35:29.100And I call these moments of exile initiations
00:35:33.960because I do believe that there is a task being asked of us in these moments.
00:35:43.500And that task is, in as much as you may be grieving that the door has been shut on this old way of life, there is also a call, as faint as it may be, towards true belonging.
00:36:04.620And that means really sifting and sorting through all of those extraneous arguments to get to the core of who you are, what you believe in, what you stand for, and what is your soul's truth.
00:36:30.040And if you really want to live a sort of heroic story for your life, there is almost always, you know, if you look at the mythic tales of heroes and heroines, there's always a period of exile in which the hero or heroine must come into the true medicine of their vocation.
00:36:57.500and this can be a really painful process and it can last a lot longer than the stories in the
00:37:06.140stories there's always just this very brief period of oh and then I got trapped in a dark forest but
00:37:11.140I found my way out and I found a helper and and then all ended well and I was given a place in
00:37:18.260the castle or what have you. But in real life, sometimes these periods can last a decade.
00:37:26.480A good example of this story is the break that Carl Jung had from Sigmund Freud. I find it to
00:37:35.020be quite a touching story because, you know, you can imagine psychology was a brand new field.
00:37:43.500And Jung and Freud. Jung was a student of Freud's, but he was also a colleague. And the two of them were two of the only people on earth who were doing this work at the time.
00:37:59.360They were pioneering the field and they had a great and deep friendship, but there were some ways in which Jung deeply disagreed with Freud's way of viewing the unconscious as a kind of repository in a sort of reductionist way of debris from a person's lifetime.
00:38:24.240sort of in the way that we've already discussed. He believed that there was this inborn story for
00:38:30.900our lives, that if we could learn to follow it, that would lead us somewhere important.
00:38:38.100And so he had a break with Freud that was surrounded by a number of powerful synchronicities.
00:38:45.040But Jung went into a 13 year dark night of the soul. He still kept up his practice and was helping people in the consulting room. But for the most part, he sort of withdrew from society and just turned towards his own dreams.
00:39:06.760And at many points in this journey, he thought he was crazy, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to come out into the world with some of these ideas, which even by today's standards are considered radical and even occultist, you know.
00:39:26.340so just to tell you that little story as an example of how long these initiations may take
00:39:36.180and hopefully it isn't that long for our listeners or as extreme but it can happen
00:39:43.520and it requires a huge amount of bravery which is why it's so helpful to have a relationship
00:39:50.160with your dreams. Because in those dark times, our dreams can offer the only guiding light
00:39:57.860sometimes in an otherwise obscuring darkness. Oh, there's so much in your responses that I'm
00:40:06.300sitting with and wanting to pull the threads on. But staying on this thread of belonging,
00:40:13.620I'm so fascinated with the way you describe an ecologically rooted idea of belonging,
00:40:18.520you know, tapping into reciprocity across species and consciousness and ecosystems.
00:40:24.720So I'm wondering, how is this belonging particularly important in times like these?
00:40:29.180And how can we deepen this connection beyond the superficial or the surface level?
00:40:35.780Yes. Well, you know, coming back to that idea of the separation that we uphold in consciousness
00:40:43.340between matter and psyche. One of the ways in which that is incredibly destructive is that
00:40:54.160we don't see ourselves anymore as belonging to the ecosystem in which we are embedded.
00:41:02.140We've constructed this whole notion of being sort of this apex species and we're sort of
00:41:12.840rooted in these theologies of dominion over nature, which allow us to have this incredibly
00:41:24.500destructive relationship with the environment, with other species, and to be disconnected
00:41:32.200from the impact that we have on the world.
00:41:36.220But when we are practicing in the animistic way of thinking, that all things are connected, and that psyche spills out into the physical world around us and is constantly in varying kinds of conversation with us.
00:41:56.520And that includes our own bodies, the holobiont, which is made up of so many millions of other organisms that are other than human organisms.
00:42:09.340In fact, they outnumber us 10 to 1 in the human body alone, which is kind of a mind-blowing fact.
00:42:16.520But when we start to take up this perspective that psyche is everywhere and psyche is constantly in conversation with us, just in different kinds of forms of expression, then we begin to care about those reciprocal conversations.
00:42:39.560It makes us more porous. It makes us more sensitive, which in turn impacts the way that we interact with the world around us.
00:42:50.620And so developing this sensitivity is key, really, and perhaps even we could say foundational to making any of these other changes we would like to make, say, around climate change and species care and even, you know, socially in the human world between races and genders and, you know, all of the differences we have between us and the world around.
00:43:20.620Because unless we are able to change things at the level of consciousness, we're never going to be able to have the kind of sensitivity necessary to really create a diverse and inclusive culture.
00:43:50.620I'm thinking too about how shadow work
00:44:19.860and exploring our consciousness brings up the ways we are raised. And of course, for a lot of
00:44:27.080people that brings up religious or spiritual connotations, but so many of us have been
00:44:32.560wounded by that world. So how do we reconcile with all of these influences and find an open
00:44:40.660path forward? Yeah, that can be tricky, hey, if you have received a sort of dogmatic
00:44:48.000idea of spirituality or religion, that you might take refuge in more of a scientific
00:45:01.140path or maybe even atheistic. And those are valid ways of going. But yeah, I mean,
00:45:12.980I have a similar story because I was raised as a Sufi in Sufi community. And a lot of people hear
00:45:21.440that story and they think, I think they have some sort of glamorous idea of what it's like to live
00:45:30.080in spiritual community, particularly Sufism, because a lot of people know and love the poetry
00:45:36.180of Rumi and the whirling dervishes. And there is so much beauty in Sufism. There's a kind of
00:45:45.140idealism of that world. But the truth of the matter is there was a profound shadow cast in
00:45:52.720the spiritual community that I was part of, where we would see much of the same things that we see
00:45:59.340in many organized religions, where there is a sort of proselytizing of this purity or ascension
00:46:07.940consciousness. But meanwhile, behind closed doors, there's a profound shadow that is being cast. And
00:46:16.320that could look like, you know, say, somebody who's a leader in the community also being
00:46:23.480violent behind closed doors or abusive in some way. Of course, this is very famous for happening
00:46:31.100in the Catholic Church with the abuse of children. But it's true of a lot of religious
00:46:38.120organizations that have that incredibly polarized view of good and bad, good and bad, good and evil,
00:46:49.640God and Satan. And so for me, it's really been a lifetime of wrestling with that paradox to find
00:47:01.980a way forward for me. And I think at this point in my life, it is still an organic process. My
00:47:12.720relationship to spirit is an organic process. And I sort of call myself an aspiring animist.
00:47:21.020And this is because I wasn't raised with animism, as many indigenous cultures have been. And this
00:47:29.160is a sad fact. And so I have a lot of, as I was talking about earlier, unlearning to do in order
00:47:39.020to come into a depth practice of joining these two worlds, material and psychic, in my own
00:47:50.480consciousness. And so I think of myself as a work in progress in that way. But I don't think of it
00:48:01.020anymore as as spirit being beyond the material. I don't frame it in that way. I think spirit and
00:48:11.740or what you could call God or what you could call nature or what you might call divinity is for me
00:48:21.640inseparable from the physical world. And this is why we see magic in nature everywhere if we're
00:48:32.620looking. Even in quantum physics, you know, there's so much magic to be seen about the relational web
00:48:41.600that we call nature. And so I do believe that it is a practice. And for me, that practice looks like
00:48:53.060a very simple act of everyday paying attention to my dreams, writing them down,
00:49:01.320questing to understand their perspective, trying to understand not what I can acquire from them
00:49:13.020and what I can get out of, say, interpreting a dream, but instead sort of making a courtship
00:49:20.740of that dream to discover what it longs for, what it wants, and then to try and move my life
00:49:29.460in such a way as to attempt to fulfill that longing, which is hidden in the dream.
00:49:37.700And often that looks like nothing much, really. Maybe just taking a pause before I say yes to
00:49:49.480something or taking longer to say something out loud because I want it to be true to what I'm
00:49:59.900hearing in my own dreams. But it also looks like physical practices like enacting small rituals,
00:50:11.460which are either an attempt to further enflesh what I am hearing in my dreams,
00:50:21.860which is to say maybe making an altar to bring those images further into my waking life
00:50:30.760and into my space and into my consciousness.
00:50:35.260And by those images, I mean the symbols, which are living symbols in my dream.
00:50:39.680Or it might look like making an offering of thanks, giving gratitude in some small way for receiving guidance that comes through the dream.
00:50:53.160And of course, supporting others with their dreams is a big part of what keeps me connected to that field.