Hi all,
So, we have been exploring how dreams can help us change narratives we learned as kids and have carried our whole lives. We have explored how they change narratives about our day-to-day lives as well as our inner, spiritual lives. We have explored how changing narratives even can change the way our brains work, the ways our neurons fire and connect and disconnect. We have explored how dreams know that we need to learn and relearn what is new so that we can practice, so we can change. That it takes a lot to say yes to the changes and then step into them.
The dreams also know that we will forget, too. The dreams also know how to show us the flip side of what happens when we forget.
Which we will do.
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First, before I got too far into this, I want to say that the process of change is not a linear march from point A to point Z. Change is not a process where we learn a thing and then we just do the new thing.
Not linear. Instead we usually go back and forth and round and round. We dip into the new, feel the freedom, our neurons connecting and firing in all kinds of new ways.
And then, we dip out. We dip out and slip into the old ways, slip into the old neural pathways that feel familiar. We may believe old stories, we may do old behavior.
Back and forth, round and round.
Which is normal. Which is part of the process for most of us. The trick is to hold space for ourselves to be human, to be in the dance that is change. To be curious instead of judgmental and harsh to ourselves.
Curious about our process. Curious about the return to something old and curious about the return, then to the new.
Okay, let’s go back to a real life example from my own work and let’s keep it in the same threads that we have been exploring.
So that means to go back to the dreams from years ago where I was caddy to my father or on the sidelines. Sidelined.
Which was a true part of my experience with my father.
Fast forward to recent dreams where I have sidelined my amazingly large female lion, who will not be ignored anymore and the dream of thinking I am someone’s assistant.
Yes, the places I sideline myself.
And. There is a flip side to this. Of course. Where I am not the victim of being sidelined – either by a parent or by my self in some unconscious way. There is a flip side where I sideline people I love, the way my father sidelined me.
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When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was known for disappearing. Back then, there was no cell phones, no internet, so it was kinda easy to do. I would just – not answer phone calls, not listen to message on my answering machine.
I was known for this. My college roommate still gives me so a little grief for the years I have disappeared on her. We joke about it – and she is very kind with me because she loves me and understands me.
But I have sidelined people I love.
With my college roommate, it was years. With one of my other college friends, when her mother got ill, I was living across the country and felt helpless, so instead of being there for her, I disappeared on her. Sidelined her the way my father sidelined me.
I can be curious about this in me, even when shame comes in. I know that this was the way my father reacted to his trauma and it is the way I learned to react to mine, too. Get scared, get gone.
I have had a story about this part of me that I hate and that does not track with who I feel I really am. A story that, like my father, I just couldn’t handle love. Couldn’t handle hard stuff. Couldn’t handle anything.
I know it was not that. Part of what I have learned from my dreams is that I have been scared of love. The love I feel for people I love and the love I feel from people who love me. Since I experienced a lot of my early trauma with people I love and who love me, it is understandable.
Curious, not judgmental. I have friends who, when I try to sideline them, try to disappear, won’t actually let me because they know it is a way I am disappearing from myself when it happens. Unconditional, this kind of love. I am learning how to live this in new ways because of these loves in my life.
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And, I still do this. I have a friend, dear to my heart, that I just dropped off the planet from a year ago. I sidelined her, our friendship, all our years. I am trying to find a way to make my way back to her. To make amends.
And to stay with myself in the process. And to dig into what happened for me.
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Spiral, circle, labyrinth.
Just because I fall into old patterns does not mean I am not doing my work. Not working my work. For me, I can feel old things rising and moving, I feel a circling back and around. If I can stay curious and not let the shame take the process, then I will circle back.
I will circle back and let the process be a labyrinth. Because the process is just that.
Which brings me back to the idea of practice and why it is important.
It is important in moments when we do circle back to old patterns, circle back to old ways that are harmful to ourselves and others, circle back and believe that we are stuck and can never change. Practice, as given to us through our dreams, is the way we circle back to ourselves again.
As I work with what happened for me with this particular friend, I let the lion come and plop her tawny body on me so that I stay with myself. Stay with my sadness and regret. Stay with myself and work with trying to mend what I broke.
As I work with this process, I also work with remembering I am not anyone’s assistant and I do not have to default to that position, even when I am at fault.
As I work with the process, I also work with the kind man who helps me search for something I have lost.
Turn and turn again. This time with love. This time learning, again, how not to be my father. How to make new ways. How to be with love in new ways.
How to keep turning.
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