Spiritual development requires letting go of the way we identify personally with the events in our lives, which means we have to give up our hope of controlling events around us. We can move in that direction by holding an inner space within us, connected to our awareness of the overall. In doing this, we can be guided by the grace of something greater, rather than struggling to do everything on our own. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
Jeane: In this dream, it feels like not so very long ago, but long enough that I’ve adjusted, that maybe I’ve separated from a relationship. I have a cousin or a girlfriend who has come over to visit me, and she also seems to have separated, but more recently, so she’s still a little in that kind of stage you’re in when it’s a recent separation.
When it’s time for her to leave, I drive her home, and even though this is a cousin actually on my dad’s side of the family, she’s living in my mother’s mother’s home. I go in the house with her and she’s staying there, and it feels like a girlfriend of mine from childhood is staying there too.
And then a man comes over, who is recently separated from a relationship, and the three of them are talking but, because it’s late at night, I’m actually kind of tired so I have kind of laid down with my head on the table to rest awhile before I drive home, listening to the conversation.
I know there are some things that I could even add or counsel them because I’ve been separated longer than they are, and also having been a therapist I kind of know some of the stages people go through, but I just keep my mouth shut and listen.
At one point even a girl comes to the back door, a young woman. She must not be appropriately dressed because she comes to see the guy, or talk to him, or maybe she just is looking for something, I don’t know. He goes to talk to her for a minute and it seems like when I look at this gal it’s almost like a comic book in that maybe because she’s so skimpily dressed that they’ve censored it, you know, like there’s a band across maybe where her eyes are, and there’s another band across maybe where her top was because she wasn’t wearing much.
Whatever she is wearing is black, and I figure that’s just part of the adjustment the guy is going through right now. He talks to her for a few minutes. Then I decide that it’s time for me to go home.
Well, when it’s time for me to leave, no one walks me out to the car, and it’s gotten really dark out. So as I walk out to the car, suddenly I’m having a little bit of trepidation because I’ve shut the door behind me and I can’t remember if I have a key to my car.
Then I decide my key is in my pocket, but then what if I didn’t lock my car and someone has gotten in it? I just suddenly am having that trepidation, and I wished they would have walked me to my car because it’s so dark out and I think that’s when I wake up.
John: Your dream is about this idea or process, that one has to have, of a kind of stability. And so you’re shown, or required I should say, to have to compare that which is able to be in sync with a stable old change that you’ve learned to abide by, which has grounded you and rooted you in a kind of balanced overall. Versus that which is volatile in nature, which is ungrounded and therefore lacks a certain kind of energetic prudence.
And the nature of that which is recent, meaning causing you to go through reactions based upon something that has become used to a habitual past, is that you are finding yourself having to act more out of holding on to habits than you would be reacting if you had learned to carry the conditions as they change.
And so the dream is a dream that’s trying to show you how to understand, for yourself, the importance of maintaining an overall presence that supersedes the comfortabilities of the control on the day-to-day level.
In other words, you are being required to feel the difference of how you can have the day-to-day variabilities, which can cause your attention to lurch forward into this day-to-day variabilities, and you’re comparing that, on an energetic level, with what it’s like to have the stability that comes with a long-term, overall rootedness, which has become natural and accepting and has found the space of balance over time because it has given itself permission to take on a Wholeness as opposed to a reactionariness.
You’re feeling all of that, and of course you’re putting this into the context of something in which some part of you is saying to yourself that you know that whatever one does in the short-term is disturbing.
Then the dream progresses, because you’re all parts of the dream, and so you then become a person who has been affected, and been in a household or in an environment, in which you’ve been hit by, or affected and impacted by, the herky-jerkiness of habitual energy that is trapped and caught in its nuances. In other words, that doesn’t have a sense of overall presence and balance.
And what that does is, that creates a shorting out so that you lose your sensibilities. You lose the sensibilities at the time that you’re in such a house, and the disturbance that that creates continues, so that when you go outside of the house, or basically when you then have to function in the overall with the presence, you can find yourself disoriented too.
And this is a tricky dream because on one level it shows the importance of the presence in terms of maintaining a Wholeness of yourself, and on the other level it shows the importance of, well, it shows that you actually lose the key to your own being – if you don’t hold a space.
And of course you leave that space and try to go outside, instead of being able to hold the space, and balance that space out – inside the house. So then when you go outside, and because you have given up on the idea of holding the space because you have a sense and you know that this has got to end badly for people that don’t know how to settle back and allow things to adjust, so when you then go outside, which means it’s your way of moving away from something like that, your key to understanding and holding a benefit for the Whole was in staying in the house, when you go outside to try to get in the car, or to distance yourself from something that’s awkward and imbalanced, you can’t find the key.
You find the key by being able to contend with what’s thrown in your face, because in the dream you’re also the part that has the rootedness, the understanding of the presence, that’s longstanding. And you know that about yourself, but you also then have the parts of you that are reactionary to something that changes, and affects it, which creates an immediate disturbance because it causes you to lose a connection, or threatens you in terms of losing a connection to that which has the grounded, rooted composure.
And so if you fight to maintain the composure, and move away from something like that, or find yourself leaving and feeling glad and free that you’re able to leave that sort of thing, as if it’s going to be better, that sort of abandonment, without you having absorbed it, and taken it in, and solidified it, because you do have the deeper center inside of you that can do that, will leave you disconnected.
In other words, mentally speaking, the idea of pulling out of a confusion and away from a confusion tends to make sense, rationally speaking, but energetically speaking, it causes you to remain lost, or to get further lost, because you’re abandoning some part of yourself that you’re meant to be able to take in and contend with, because you have – deep, back, in a depth of yourself – you have the understanding and the abilities to hold that as part of an overallness, with a respect, and a grounding that you know you can trust, that has run the test of time.
But in the dream you’re seeing the foibles of things that are short-term. You’re feeling the long-term effect. You required to take and hold that. You’re given that choice.
When you take and inadvertently think that you can move away from the other, because you know that that can’t end well. In other words, you have your understanding in terms of relationships that are freshly wounded, that they tend to gravitate to woundology decisions, as opposed to grounded decisions, and so you come to the conclusion that you don’t need to go through that, you don’t need to contend with that.
But the dream scenario is a scenario in which you carry a soundness that you’re refusing to apply, and so when you refuse to apply the soundness to the need of the situation, and you move away from it instead of being there for it, you yourself then lose what you had. You lose your key. You too become, then, scattered and confused, because you failed to meet the challenge.
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