How are you at opening doors? Doors will open in life but do you step through? Or do you hesitate? Do you wait for someone else to open them? My journey through one door led to Soul Coaching® and it started many years before Denise Linn’s book fell off my shelf and everything I had learned clicked into place. As so often is the case, we can only see the path clearly by looking back over the terrain. Here is where it started, and though I’ve shared this story before, now I’m giving you the whole story, in shorter posts, so you can pause to ponder your own journey. Even though all beginnings are somewhat random, we will start here…..yet even “here” had a before, in which I had to open a door…..
Beginnings
We live in post-Freudian times and many of us grew up learning that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious”. And they are, but they are more than that. They are another form of opening doors for us. The first time I became aware that dreams were hinting at something larger than my own personal psychology was in an unlikely place for a revelation. The year was 1997 and I was sitting by the hotel pool on a very hot Philadelphia weekend. Danny Stein had just celebrated his Bar Mitzvah and my kids, numbering four, were cooling off in the pool along with all of Philadelphia it seemed. I sat in a lounge chair, watching the kids, watching people and reading Joan Borysenko’s “Fire in the Soul”. In it, she wrote, “A Parable: Safe Passage Home”. I read it and gasped. Then I cried under my sun hat. Somehow, in a few words, I found out why I was so interested in dreams, why I was a dreamer. Borysenko wrote,
“The fledgling souls took many roads Home. Each Way had its own Story and each soul responded to that Story with the gift of free will, embroidering new stories on the dream-tapestry of the One Great Dreamer.”
With that sudden understanding, I could now see what wasn’t there a moment before. In that moment, I reconnected with my Creator, with myself and to all dreamers in a way that I wasn’t connected before. Before, I felt like an orphan; now, suddenly, I belonged. Before, there had been an intellectual understanding of the psychology of dreams, now it was personal and it was spiritual.
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
In that moment by the pool I realized that I dream—you dream—because God dreams. Being “created in God’s image”, a familiar passage from the Bible, now took on deeper shading, as the idea took root in my heart and in my soul. Life was a noisy, hot day by a pool one moment and reality was where I had left it. Yet, a moment later, my eyes were opened to a broader perspective and I understood. I dream because God dreams! Yet, as everything changed, I still had work to do, children to raise; wood to chop and water to carry.
I was born of the One Great Dreamer and to dream is my birthright and my gift. At the same time, it is both natural and supernatural. My fascination with dreams had come into alignment with creation. Yet this sudden spiritual awakening —my poolside satori—threatened to dissipate as I struggled to understand. Am I dreaming all of this? Am I dreaming my life? My children? (My deliberation paused as I counted heads in the pool.) And if, like my Creator, I dream or create my world, are my own children, or anyone else for that matter, dreaming a different dream? Are common dreams what creates community and binds societies together? If my mind can play with the possibility that I’ve created my own reality, and I’ve dreamed this life of mine, then I have to also consider the possibility that God is a dream as well. Who’s dreaming whom? (And is it time to get out of the sun?)
That was the beginning of my chapter in Soul Whispers II, a book written by Soul Coaches for people who are on their own journey….and it still is as active within me as it was when I wrote it a few years ago. In my next post, I will continue my journey to Soul Coaching®…..
How is your journey in life going?
2016 has been one of the most challenging years in a long while for so many of us. If you pause to look back, you might see patterns, gain a higher perspective and find insights from this 20/20 hindsight that you didn’t see while in going through those experiences. Many doors closed this year and many of you have experienced endings, as I have. But we have a choice: to stay in the room with the closed door, or open it and walk into another room or hallway in life to a new beginning. I hope you will follow along in my exploration of how I got from there to here; from then to now! What a trip!
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