Lucidity in a dream can be like a handful of sand. You have it – you’re looking right at it, but even while you do, it’s sifting through your fingers. When your hand is empty, you don’t realize it. You’ve forgotten what you were holding.  You’re submerged in the drama of the dream. 

Life on this plane is like a dream.Spiritual awareness is like lucidity. The handful of sand phenomenon applies.

To make matters worse, we are buffeted on all sides by a cacophony that would drown out our inner voices and by strong waves that would pull us back down into the dream.

It is challenging to hold onto that sand. 

In three of the podcasts I recommended last time, Christopher Moors talks about the need to first withdraw and observe your patterns without acting on them. Start where you are, he says, quiet the mind and observe without reaction. When the drama surges, let it pass by. 

I have been consciously trying to master my emotional reactions for years now with only limited success. I am a person with a whole lot of water going on. I have a big barrelful and I easily slosh over the top.I think a big problem was that I’ve been consciously trying. You cannot consciously master unconscious processes. You need to deal with the unconscious directly – in its own language. 

Listening to Moors talk about “letting it pass by,” an image came to me wherein I was sitting calmly on a bank at the edge of a wood watching a river rush by me. Somehow the image spoke to me on all levels, so I’ve adopted it as sort of a mental talisman.

This is a day-by-day, step-by-step journey. Some days are better than others. Nevertheless, with this image in my mind, I have been much less swept away by my reactions. Progress, not perfection. 

A test came in a family event some weeks ago – an annual event that I always dread because of the negativity that permeates it. My family is a bit oddball, but there is a very conventional couple in my extended family. They are financially well off, politically conservative and — in my view — narrow minded in their aspiration to middle brow American culture. I have nothing in common with them except this extended family connection that forces us to socialize at least once a year. 

The husband is basically good natured, but the wife is arrogant and judgmental. She sits aloof in a closed posture of arch superiority and provides negative commentary throughout the day. She doesn’t approve of me and makes it known with several put downs at each gathering. Since she is my mother’s age and this pattern goes back to when I was a child, her put downs have a powerful effect on my barrelful of water. 

In recent years – mainly since I quit my managerial job – her put downs have focused on my writing – specifically on my lack of what she would call “success” as a writer. She makes it clear she thinks I should stop my silly scribbling and resign myself to the “real world” (i.e. climbing the corporate ladder, owning a big house, raising kids, voting Republican . . .). 

This time my mother, my aunt and I were talking about email behavior when it struck me that “Reply to All” would be a funny name for a satirical novel about the contemporary corporate workplace. Unfortunately, I blurted the thought out, forgetting that my critic was sitting nearby. “And I have an idea for the picture on the cover . . .” I said playfully. It was all supposed to be a joke. My idea for the cover art was going to be the punch line. Maybe it would not have been funny in that setting, but that did not matter because I didn’t get a chance to finish. I had stepped out of line and my critic was already snapping back.

“But you don’t have the content for the book, now do you? There’s where your writer’s block comes in.” She was looking away with a smirk on her face – arms akimbo, one leg crossed over the other. Awkward silence fell around us. 

Does this comment seem mean to you? To my ears in the moment, it was sneering and dripping with contempt. In the past, I would have taken it like a kick to the stomach. I would have felt completely humiliated and worthless. 

This time I saw that wave coming, but I sat on the riverbank and watched it pass by. 

Okay – truth be told, I did muse to myself about how she is going to look eating crow at my book-signing party. BUT this wee bit of a MILD reaction is a HUGE improvement for me, sloshing barrelful of water that I am.

Um, did I have something in my hand a little while ago?    

Image by my husband, used courtesy of a marriage license 

I am deep in process now. It’s where I need to be. For years I was stuck at the gate, rattling it in frustration. Now I am taking my first steps in. I have a long way to go, but I see where I am going. I am in no rush, despite the hour. Step by step, the journey is the process.

Chances are you’ve heard it, too — that strange inner calling. That half-tuned in radio station playing in the next room. For me it was always there, but I didn’t know how to move in that direction. There was no direction to it in my mind. It was just a nebulous droning that over the years intensified into a distinct but still poorly understood imperative. I felt I had a purpose to fulfill in this life . . . I confess I fancied it a special purpose. But I guess it’s often experienced that way.

Years passed. I had recently graduated college. I was standing at the first major crossroads of my adult life — completely confounded and carrying this maddening impulse within me. By day I was lost and afraid. By night I was dreaming about being on an elaborate multi-stage quest that I could never fathom upon waking.

One such night I dreamt I was in a small band of travelers following a white unicorn or horse on a path through fields and forests. We were on a grand quest that would solve the riddle of everything.

I was so engaged and excited. This is what I had been waiting for my entire life. In a semi-lucid moment, I thought that the quest would make an inspiring novel and that I must remember it to write it upon awakening. All of the other dream characters continued on unaware, but an elderly couple in the party responded to me as if I had spoken the thought aloud. They were smiling and nodding emphatically.

“Tell the tale and live it,” they told me.

The quest itself did not survive the dawn, but I came away from the dream with what I felt was a directive. One that validated my lifelong love of stories and story telling with the stamp of a higher purpose.

Tell the tale and live it.

Not live the tale then tell it. Like an expert. Like a memoirist looking back on a thing done.

No, tell the tale and live it.

I felt “the tale” was the grand quest of all quests. The inner grail quest that I felt relentlessly drawn to but didn’t understand. Telling it meant writing a grand novel. At least one.

Years passed muddled in frustration. This was far too grand a tale for me to tell. I had no clue. I tried to live it, but for the most part I was circling around, endlessly searching for a way in but always stuck outside the gate.

Then weird little things started happening in my life. The more I paid attention to them, the more frequently they happened. The little things got bigger and formed chains that became undeniable. I spent some time on the web looking to see if anyone else was experiencing what I was experiencing. I found a lot of things, to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.

A new wrinkle came in the fall of 2006 when I started getting synchronistic nudges to start a blog. The nudges came from outside me. Blogging was not something I wanted to take up. I thought it would be another jones-driven distraction keeping me from “telling the tale and living it” and was therefore avoiding the whole blogosphere. But the synchronistic message was strong. It took me a long time to get rolling, but I heeded the call.

The urge was to come out as a seeker and share my experience with fellow travelers. NOT to put myself forward as some kind of expert and dish out bullet points of wisdom. Instead, to share from one seeker to another – here is my personal experience from where I am on the path . . . can you relate?

This was a scary prospect for me. It was a side of my life – of me – that I did not often share, even with my husband and closest friends. My socialization told me it was the kind of stuff that you just don’t talk about or people will think you are wacko. Nevertheless, what I often looked for from others I would try to put out there myself.

Here I am several months and a better blogging platform later. Little did I know when I started that putting my journey out there on this blog would unlock the gate for me. Previously I was looking for something out there to let me in, when actually I needed to put something out there to turn the key.

Now I am finding things that I’ve long been looking for. Books I knew about but never felt inclined to read now call me and turn out to be revelations. Pieces of the puzzle are clicking into place in big clusters. Understanding that long eluded me now flows easily. And I am starting to connect with other travelers around me.

Tell the tale and live it.

So now I am processing. I am pausing to find balance in my new surroundings. I am learning to make that calm space within so I stop getting swept up in reactions to daily drama. I may continue to be relatively quiet for a few more weeks while I process, tend to my garden and finish setting up this blog. But I would like to say that the podcasts over at Occult of Personality have been very helpful to me. There are too many good ones to list, but I particularly recommend the following four if you relate to the rattling-the-gate syndrome: Podcast 32: On the Spiritual Path with Christopher Moors, Podcast 41: Journey to the East, Podcast 47: Exploration of the Inner Realms and Podcast 46: Fraternity of the Hidden Light’s Steward, Dr. Paul Clark.

Namaste

Lately the synchronicity stream has me awash in one-offs. I jolt awake at 4:43 and 3:44 and 4:45. My timestamps are 3:33:34 and 4:44:43. My electric toothbrush stops inexplicably at 2:21 minutes while I am still trying to brush. People inadvertently send me emails at exactly 1:10. The best was the QA test I received at work after I finished telling a friend I am always one off lately – the auto-generated title was “Sanity Test 11:10:10.”

I feel off. The perennial contradiction between my job and what I see as my true work in the world has me spiraling down. I hate that I spend most of my time and energy working for The Man. I hate the idea generally, and it only makes it worse that my job is absurd on every level.

It hurts my head to do my job. I don’t know how else to describe it. Work is an energetic river – I guess all activity is – and dipping into this particular river does violence to my mind and spirit.

It’s not that my job entails activities are in themselves difficult – far from it. But they are crude and inane – and far beyond one person in volume.

Ultimately, though, the work is fundamentally non-aligned. You could say that I work for the defenders of those who would put a spigot on air and force us to pay to breathe.

It’s painful to turn to that frequency.

To those of you in the same boat as me, I ask can we agree to stop this? Spending our days working for the wrong team in grossly mismanaged situations, banging our heads into walls, trying to accomplish nonsensical tasks given to us by bosses without a respective clue, doing the work of whole departments because they keep laying people off, driving long, harrowing commutes back to heavily mortgaged homes . . . By the time we’re home, we’re mentally and physically exhausted, but then there many household tasks that every good suburbanite must do. We’re just starting to feel human again when it’s time to go to sleep. Next thing we know, the alarm is ringing and we have to go back.

I don’t want to go back.

There is something else I long to do that I think would be a much more worthwhile contribution, but it doesn’t often pay a living. I’ve been trying to figure out a way, but the health care/health insurance issue is a stumper.

I may not have figured out an alternate route yet, but I do know we are all better than this. Our time, our will, our creative power should not be wasted and misused in this way. This is NOT who we are.

I really liked Charles Eisenstein’s post “Money: A New Beginning” on Reality Sandwich a while back. He captured the absurdity of the artificial scarcity that we are living in. He writes:

For indeed, we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities, but cannot afford to buy them. Other people would love to supply these necessities and do other meaningful work, but cannot because there is no money in it.

When paying work is meaningless at best and destructive at worst and when meaningful work doesn’t pay enough to sustain the worker, the system is obviously unsustainable.

“Contribution” image by my husband, used courtesy of a marriage license.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I attended the Omega Institute’s “Being Fearless” conference in April. I’ve been turning over the impressions and insights that I collected there. Here’s what I am learning:

1. I can be the space that I seek.

All my life I’ve felt that there is no true space in the world for me, and deep down, this has made me feel unworthy and afraid. I’ve been searching for my Right Place, and over the years, I’ve done some “wild and crazy” things on that quest. But for the most part, I’ve been living like a figure in an Emergency Exit sign – always rushing to the door. Whether rushing to meet the next external demand or to run from it, I’m always trying to be where I am not.

I’m usually earlier than I needed to be, and I’ve usually done more than I needed to do. Where has that gotten me? More demands but not more rewards. And the price is that I haven’t taken care of myself in my perpetual rush to respond. So there is no space for me.

It’s true I don’t like my job. And I don’t like where I live. Neither of these places is a good fit for me. They give me blisters. But does that mean that there is no air for me to breathe where I am? No. Yet I’ve been experiencing these places as if they are suffocating me.

I’ve been chastising myself for feeling this way, but this only feeds the cycle of bad feeling. At the conference, I attended Tara Brach’s workshop and got a glimpse of the way out of the cycle – to be my own Right Place wherever I am, not through superhuman feats of willpower or gut wrenching fortitude, but through radical acceptance.

The idea is not to repress or deny or overcome the pain you are feeling, but instead to PAUSE in it. Fully RECOGNIZE in detail what is happening and how you feel about it, and then to ALLOW it. As Brach said in the workshop, “to hold it in kindness.”

This opens a space where previously there was none.

Brach told a story about a man who in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease agreed to give a presentation to a sizeable audience. Although he had prepared thoroughly, his speech left him at the podium. He went blank — every public speaker’s nightmare, no doubt all the worse for someone who knows that a mind-robbing disease is the culprit. Instead of fumbling for words or racing for the exit, the man stood firmly where he was and proceeded to acknowledge and honor aloud every nuance of what he was feeling in the moment. Brach said he had the audience in tears – not because they pitied him but because he was demonstrating the concept of radical acceptance.

The story moved me.

2. Wholeness means accepting the gift of my shadow.

In a workshop entitled “Discovering the Gifts of Your Dark Side,” Debbie Ford talked about how we learn to repress certain aspects of our personality. She likened these repressed aspects to beach balls that we are forever trying to keep under water and out of sight, lest we appear “bad” in the eyes of others. Of course, the constant beach ball management effort is exhausting, and when a ball gets away from us, it explodes out of the water in a potentially destructive way.

I like the analogy. I’ve been smacked in the face with more than a few projectile beach balls, so I know what that’s about. The alternative to repression is to look for a constructive way to use the aspect, accept it and thereby integrate it.

3. Don’t hide my cracks.

It seemed that everyone at the conference told the story of the Golden Buddha, each with a slightly different take on its lesson. If you haven’t heard it already, this is the story of a 700-hundred-year-old solid gold Buddha statue that long ago was encased in clay to camouflage its true worth and thus protect it from invaders. When the people who did this died, knowledge of the inner gold of the Buddha died with them. So the statue was thought to be a plain clay statue of modest worth for time out of mind. In the 1950s, it was damaged as it was being moved. Someone looked into the cracks and saw a glint of gold within. They chiseled at the cracks until the golden statue was fully revealed and all were amazed. The statue is now known as a national treasure of Thailand.

It is a simple but rich story, so it’s no wonder so many speakers at the conference referenced it. We, too, have gold within us, waiting to be revealed. This is the gold of alchemy — our evolutionary potential. But the key point for me is that exploring the cracks – wounds, if you will – led to the discovery of the gold within. Far from being something shameful, the cracks were the gateway to transformation.

I’m still turning these lessons over and processing. For now, I will focus on standing in the four corners of my feet where I am . . . and breathing.

“Emergency exit →” image by OwenBlacker, used courtesy of a Creative Commons License.

When I was four years old, my older cousins – all boys – came over and my father took us to the neighborhood hobby shop. I suspect that the only reason I was included was my mother wanted me out of the house for a while. My father was taking the boys to get model rocket making materials – model rocketry was one of my father’s passions, and he was introducing the boys to it. Being only four and female, I did not fit into the plan.

At the shop, I was bored with the squares of balsa wood and tubes of glue they were poring over, but I was in rapture over a huge case of slim little phials containing beads in every color imaginable. I wanted those beads!

The boys were heading for the register. I stopped my father and begged for the beads. No, no, no. There was pleading on my part met by skepticism. But what are you going to do with them? MAKE THINGS! You won’t make anything with them. He was probably thinking I was too young, but I didn’t see it that way.

I WILL TOO MAKE THINGS! My father relented. Okay, you can have ONE color. If you make things with that, we’ll come back and you can get more.

How could I possibly pick just one out of that endless array of color? I hemmed and hawed. My father told me to hurry up while he tried to corral the boys, who were chasing each other in the aisles.

Finally I chose: orange.

I remember the car ride home so vividly. It was late afternoon, probably late summer. It was still warm but the sun had that orangey gold September angle that I love to this day. I was sitting in the back seat, holding my little orange phial before me as if it were a candle, or maybe a chalice. All around was that orangey gold light. I was so excited. This was just the beginning. Soon I would have a rainbow of beads and I’d be making all kinds of fantastic things.

It didn’t turn out that way. I’m not sure what happened. My mother probably didn’t want me to play with them out of fear they’d end up in my mouth, or maybe I just didn’t know what to do with them, I don’t know. But I didn’t have materials to make jewelry. And ultimately I wasn’t inspired by only one color of beads. What had inspired me in the store was the array of color, and possibility.

So the phial of orange beads ended up at the bottom of the family junk drawer. I remember unintentionally digging them up several times in the years that followed. Always they were a symbol of guilt and shame. I didn’t make anything with them. I wasted them. I didn’t follow through.

It never dawned on me to pick them up and make something with them when I was a little older. Instead, I felt I had already failed, which made me feel bad. And feeling bad made me want to push them out of sight.

Meanwhile, my cousins – sons of a high school art teacher – were growing up with all the resources of an art supply store at their fingertips. Oils, acrylics, canvas, cameras, tripods, clay animation equipment, sculpture tools, their own darkroom . . . plus every musical instrument imaginable. I was writing stories on notebook paper and illustrating them with crayons while they were making movies, performing their own music and having one-man art shows at the county art gallery.

I was a little girl with a strong creative vision of my own, and although I didn’t make anything with the beads, I was active creatively in my own right. But I couldn’t help comparing myself to my cousins and feeling inferior. Whatever I did and whatever recognition that brought me seemed rinky-dink next to them. My art was child’s play – it might be good for grammar school but it wasn’t good enough for the real world.

Time passed and I forgot about the orange beads. When I turned forty they came up in a meditation on my creative block. For the longest time, I’ve been feeling guilty and ashamed for “not following through” on my creative vision, for “being unproductive” and basically wasting it. Not for lack of trying, of course. Just not breaking through the wall.

I realized that everything I’ve been feeling about my “failure” as a writer, I felt as a child about those damned beads.

More than that, I’ve been stuck in that hobby shop story — longing for the freedom and array of possibility with which to create grand and fantastic things but meeting only skepticism and relatively meager resources until I prove myself worthy.

I haven’t proven as an adult that I will make things. Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing that I can.

Not that I have given up. Quite the opposite. I’ve been obsessed with the dream of becoming a full-time novelist. Unwisely, imprudently, incorrigibly obsessed. But I see now that my dream is the equivalent of earning all the beads in the case so that I am finally free to express my creative vision. In the here and now, however, I am always trying to make something with the orange beads. I’ve been so caught up in trying to satisfy externally set prerequisites that I haven’t allowed myself the freedom of opening the door to inspiration, allowing fallowness and flow in kind, and expressing whatever comes in. I haven’t allowed myself to enjoy my creative work in the moment and to just BE.

No wonder I’ve been stuck at the gate.

But I can stand now and look into the shadow of shame and self-doubt. My creative expression has been blocked. What has the block given me? Well, it has driven me to look deeper than I would have looked if my expression had flowed into the world without resistance. It has driven me to look within and to seek a transformative path. Maybe I have something more valuable to say than I would have said otherwise. Maybe the block has been an alchemical flame.

I accept the gift of the flame and release the idea that I need to fulfill prerequisites to prove myself worthy of expressing my creative vision in the world. Nevertheless, can we say that I made something with the orange beads by writing this post?