Blog o' Gnosis

Fall fell with a thunk today, as the air turned from summer-fog-wet to winter-is-coming-cold. You have to live here for a couple years at least to feel the shift, but California does have four seasons, and they change roughly at the cross-quarter days: May 1 for Summer, Aug 1 for Fall, Nov 1 for Winter, and Feb 1 for Spring.

We have been socked-in all summer here, with only occasional glimpses of sun. This has been fine with me, since I find the quality of light under cloud cover to be extremely conducive to creativity, and besides, all you need to do is travel 10 miles inland to be in the hot sun again.

As weather anomalies go, I think the California coast got the better part of the deal compared to the rest of the country this summer. It has been a prolific season in the garden; all the flowers and herbs are going out of their way to celebrate the cool greenhouse-like conditions, and the colors have been extravagant. Here is just one bouquet I picked last month.

Everybody warned me that planting mugwort was akin to saying I wanted my entire property covered in mugwort. With some extreme pruning and digging up of runners over the winter months, I am happy to say that so far it is staying put in its bed—but it has taken over the entire bed, crowding out the other artemisias planted there and providing me with a lifetime supply of mugwort in just one season.

Last summer I made the mistake of harvesting the mugwort too soon; only afterward did I read that you’re supposed to wait till it flowers to pick it. This year I have been much more patient, but even now, late in the summer, it is not quite ready to harvest. The cool weather has delayed its ripening, but it is the most amazing slow-motion transformation. As the buds develop, the stalks and leaves turn a burnished purple-red and the plant gets strongly fragrant, reminding me of another common psychoactive plant (one that is much more lucrative to grow, sadly for me).

My friend Corey came over and asked what I was going to do with all this bounty, but I haven’t quite gotten that far. After hanging it to dry, I will use some of it to make dream pillows, but that still leaves about 90% unspoken for.

Mugwort tincture seems excessive; it is such a strong plant already that putting it into tincture form could be more harmful than helpful. Mugwort oil sounds like a good choice, but I would love to hear from others on what works best. Are there any dreamers and/or herbalists out there with great suggestions to share? Meanwhile, here is another view of the garden, where Pacific mugwort, yarrow and rosemary all mingle and kvetch, overheard by a nosy strand of passion flower.

I had a great conversation with Dr. Joan Borysenko this morning on Dream Talk Radio. We talked about dreams and mind-body healing, and at one point discussed the limits of what can be taught in a workshop. I commented that there should be a workshop titled “The Art of Getting Up Again,” since that is the summation of pretty much every piece of advice ever given to anyone, in any context. She laughed and we went on, but the idea has stayed with me all day.

By definition, life hands us tough knocks from which we have to recover, regroup, and press on. Getting up again is what we do after we’ve been knocked down, or have lain down to rest. It is standard business advice that getting up again is what determines whether you will actually achieve your goals. It is equally true for everything else.

Everything we try to do, whether it be meditating in the mornings, remembering our dreams, quitting smoking, eating better, marketing our business, being nice to contentious people—everything comes pre-loaded with about a hundred ways it might not work. The secret to making it work is getting up and trying again that 101st time.

In aikido the art of falling, called ukemi, is very important, because getting thrown is inevitable. Falling allows us to flow with the movement of the incoming energy. It lessens the physical impact of a throw on our bodies, and gives us several strategic options for getting up again, which we decide on as we hit the ground.

How we get up from a fall in aikido is one of the subtleties of the art that most shows a person’s skill level. It can be fluid and graceful, as though it were a seamless weaving of the last fall and the next strike. When you see two people training and they show no energetic separation between one throw and the next, you are watching true aikido in action.

Getting up again in real life does not always demand this level of skill from us, thankfully. But we do need to keep in mind that falling is an art, not a failure. If we relax into it, our bodies can use that energy to find the best way to come back up again.

Metaphorically speaking, we make the fall hurt more by berating ourselves for falling, blaming others for our fall, or denying that we are indeed about to hit the ground. How much more sensible it would be to let the fall help us organize ourselves for rising again—to make getting up as effortless as possible, a seamless part of trying something until we eventually succeed.

I am not happy about publishing only one post in June, but while not writing I have been very busy mulling over how to make the best use of this space, and all the other spaces I have on the web. Some of you may have seen Jason’s post about the changes at Serpentine Music this summer, to which I would only add that if you want great deals on great music, the albums are going fast so order now!

Serpentine Music was my first business, a start-up back in the home-based business craze of the 1990s. It has been my do-it-yourself MBA, a crash course in music production, publishing, distribution, planning, niche marketing, sales, web design, direct mail, customer service, database management, and small business ownership. Winding it down has taught me a ton about how to carefully assess which pieces of a business should be tossed out for the useful stuff to thrive. Having an objective eye for something that you’ve poured your heart and soul into, and not being afraid to kill things that don’t work—that is tough, and it is also exactly where transformation happens.

This summer I have also undertaken the birth of a new business, Creative Content Coaching, which combines my experience as an educator and writer with everything I have learned about small business, consulting, and building a public presence. Shifting in such a short time from one business model to a completely new one, while not really shifting the essence of what I do at all, has taught me the biggest diy-MBA lesson yet: business is magic.

Allow me to explain. I have spent years helping people understand the spiritual messages in their dreams, while my dreams were advising me to make all sorts of changes in my professional life (which I followed). Eventually, the spiritual and practical streams in dreams merged for me, and I began doing dream seminars for businesses, while clients came to me looking for career guidance in their own dreams. (It is easy to find once you know how to look.)

Similarly, I started this blog on a whim five years ago, mostly to write on spiritual and personal topics. By hanging in there month after month, I’ve built up a large readership, leveraged it into writing for the Huffington Post, and now know more than most business coaches about the different kinds of web-based writing and how to do it well.

Magic is the art of sensing patterns, following the energy, and doing it all while staying centered and tapped into your creativity. What emerges is total transformation. What can also emerge is a very practical application of all that esoteric stuff, a vehicle through which we can use our whole skill set to bring positive change to the greatest number of people, while living by our core values. In other words, a very cool business. I hope to blog more about magic and commerce in the near future, and meanwhile I welcome your thoughts.

A few days ago I woke with a vivid dream: I am watching someone skim the surface of the pool I swim in, running the big blue net back and forth across the calm water. Suddenly the net picks up something other than leaves and bugs: a big black tar ball appears in the net and is scooped out of the water. But how did it get there in the first place?

In the Gulf, tar balls appear on the beach sand in advance of the spreading crude. It is a gruesome, sickening sight from a disaster that continues to grow and spread and affect millions of lives both in the water and out. Not even a lap swimming pool on the opposite side of the continent is out of harm’s way.

Three weeks ago I was out enjoying our local Friday happy hour in Bodega Bay, and struck up a conversation with some weekend tourists from inland. One couple was nice and chatty, but another woman kept her sunglasses on and an aloof expression on her face, barely managing an occasional smile as she sipped her wine and looked out over the bay.

After a while the other couple left and she and I sat next to each other in silence. I was racking my brain for something to say to this obviously reserved, conservative person, when all of a sudden she spoke up. ”I keep imagining what this would look like if the oil spill was here,” she said.

What could I say to that? It sank into the heart of what every person there was thinking, what I myself had been thinking all day and was at the moment trying to forget. She didn’t want to talk about the politics of offshore drilling bans, she was in shock, and was sitting there trying to grasp the magnitude of what has happened to the ocean.

People come out here from all over the country to recharge. The ocean has a powerful psychic pull, along with the lure of physical beauty, recreation, great food, and fresh air. It exists in the collective imagination as our ancestral home, source of dreams, origin of all life.

This was not the first conversation I’ve had with a total stranger who is soul-stricken about what is happening to the Gulf of Mexico. It is not a laughing matter to anyone. People know how bad this is, and they are taking it very personally. This alone gives me hope.

Oil has already reached Barataria Bay, and is just a hurricane’s breath away from destroying New Orleans for good. The mighty Gulf fisheries are gone, as are the beaches, the nesting grounds, and all deep sea life, for the foreseeable future.

The news sinks like a stone to the depths of our psyches. What will we do when the tar balls stir the waters of our dreams as well?

Okay, I know this doesn’t have much to do with the main subjects of this blog, but in addition to everything else I tutor middle school kids in math. Not very complicated math—I excel at introducing algebraic concepts to 5th and 6th graders, while helping them understand fractions and decimals. I am not a math pro by any means (I wilt at the sight of logarithms) but I love helping kids figure out how to approach and solve problems.

One of the first things I tell my students and their parents is that every single kind of math was invented to help solve a problem. Math is not just a blunt weapon designed to hasten children’s introduction to nihilism. It actually has a point, and that is to help people look at a problem, figure out what they need to know in order to solve it, and then go about finding a solution, step by step. Mathematical thinking—logic, pattern recognition, decoding—is really creative thinking.

The presentation below is made with a super cool new technology that will make PowerPoint obsolete one of these days. If you’ve never seen it before, head over to Prezi.com and see how it works. It takes a while to load, but when it does just use the right arrow button to forward the presentation. To see a full screen version, click on “More” and then choose full screen. Thanks to Alison Blank, the creator, for beautifully illustrating/animating one of my favorite education rants!

One of the most telling stories of the mystic journey comes from the Talmud. As told by Rabbi David Cooper in his book God Is a Verb,

The Talmud contains a famous story of four scholars who “entered the Pardes” (garden/orchard). The Pardes in this context was not an ordinary garden, but a realm of expanded consciousness, some say Paradise. The experience these four sages had was so overwhelming, one died, one became demented, one gave up his faith, and only one, Rabbi Akiva, survived unharmed.

That seems right to me: about one in four survive. Many should have been dissuaded from the journey to begin with, and perhaps would have found their way in time to other pursuits. Then there are those who did not really survive the journey but remain among us, cautionary tales of how giftedness and good intentions can go awry.

Jewish mysticism may have a dictum that “The work of the chariot may not be taught to anyone, unless this person is a sage,” but as this story illustrates, even sages get wiped out by waves larger than they can handle. And what of those fragile sages who are teachers themselves, until something slips and they become search and rescue stories?

I had the unsettling experience last week of meeting one of the fragile ones, a former teacher of mine whose psyche was not quite stable enough for the wisdom that could come streaming through it. I’d learned a lot there for several years, and a few years ago when things started to feel a little “off,” I found a way to bow out gracefully without making waves or burning bridges.

Our chance meeting brought that past connection flooding back, and I fell into a deep sadness. It was not fun to see someone I cared about so unmoored in space and time, and I saw how concern and right action on anyone’s part could easily feel like betrayal from the other end.

One of the first things we learn from our teachers is discernment: the ability to tell truth from fiction, to know when we have lost our center and how to find it again. Discernment is also one of the last things we learn, when we feel our paths diverge and we must separate from our mentors in order to stay true to ourselves.

There is little comfort right now in knowing that I made the right choice. I do not enjoy seeing people suffer, nor do I take pleasure in watching my concerns come to pass. My sadness is not just about this particular person, though. It is also a reminder of the limits of my own ability to fix things.

The Talmud doesn’t mention whether Rabbi Akiva had survivor guilt, or what he might have said to the followers of those other three rabbis. I imagine that then, as now, everyone has their own story about what is going on and what healing is possible.

For me, with a lifetime habit of too much caretaking, it is very important to see exactly what is, and acknowledge that I can’t change it. Equally important is the ability to talk about it openly, with compassion. There is a huge stigma around mental illness, and a strong culture of denial, in the realm of spiritual teachers. And yet…one in four. It is so important to know which one that is.

Do you listen to your dreams but have no one to talk with about them? Are you looking for a circle of fellow dreamers to help you explore dream messages? The perfect solution may be at hand.

Introducing The Dream Tribe, a members-only online community where you can get instant feedback on your dreams, connect with experts in many different kinds of dreamwork, and find your place in the worldwide clan of dreamers.

The brainchild of interfaith minister Amy Brucker, The Dream Tribe launched just days ago. At the center of the effort are what Amy calls the “Dream Team”—professionals who are experts in different aspects of dream research and interpretation. (Full disclosure: I am part of the Dream Team.)

Each of us make ourselves available to site members by participating in the online forums, offering discounts on classes and private sessions, and distributing exclusive content through the Dream Tribe site. As a members-only site, the only people reading and responding to your posts about dreams are those who are truly interested in the healing potential of dreams.

It is a great value for people who want to learn more about their dreams but don’t have access to a local dream group. Registration is open for a few more days, so I encourage you to check it out, and take advantage of Amy’s no-risk membership offer.

I will blog more about my experience as part of the Dream Team—this is an experiment for all of us, remember—but for now I want to welcome the worldwide network/clan/tribe/consortium/consulate of dreamers to our virtual tribe!

I’ve got to hand it to Jason over at the Wild Hunt Blog, he does not shy away from the tough issues. In response to this horrific story, Jason raises a concern many of us share about the decentralized nature of nature-based spirituality:

A vast percentage of modern Pagans aren’t part of any established group, or are members of groups and traditions so small they hardly count as “established” on any national or even regional scale. This creates a culture where we tend to ascribe a certain amount of legitimacy to any individual practitioner as a common courtesy, which creates fertile grounds for those who want to abuse that trust. I’m not saying we should stop trusting, or that everyone should join a national organization if they want to be taken seriously, only that our decentralized nature makes us uniquely vulnerable to con-men and monsters.

It also makes our organizations susceptible to undue influence by the attention-seekers, power-mongers and loosely-tethered personalities among us. This has been an issue in Reclaiming for decades, and also to some degree in organizations such as COG and Cherry Hill Seminary. If you are a small group trying to do a big thing, you need all the helpers and volunteers you can  find. The common courtesy that Jason describes goes a long way toward explaining why we give difficult people the benefit of the doubt, instead of questioning their motives and making sure they don’t wield undue influence in the group.

I have seen many a well-intentioned group grind to an absolute halt by the dissention and ill-will caused by a single individual. In response to the current case, Jason is putting out the call:

What can we do about it? Along with a culture of love and trust, we also need to create a culture of responsibility and frankness about what will and will not be tolerated within our communities, and make in known to the wider world.

Having been through this in recent years, trying through our local teacher’s guild to establish standards for ethics and transparency in the international Reclaiming camp network, I wish him well. One thing that process taught me is that no matter how long the process takes, it is a very good thing to have ethics and standards on the front burner in our various subcultures. The longer it is up for debate, the more reasonable people will come to realize that holding ourselves accountable to an ethical code is not a loss of freedom, it is a gain of maturity, and insurance that our group’s vision and goals may actually come to pass.

Long, long ago, before the legends were made, before the stories of heroes and magic were passed like flagons around a peat fire, Avalon was a green jewel of an island floating in an inland sea. The way to this island was always by boat, each vessel woven by hand, and guided skillfully through thickets of willow and sedge, following the winding, ever-changing paths formed by water and land.

The people of this land learned to find the high spots in the water to build their villages, and stayed away for all but the summer months, when the flood waters receded. This land was called Somerset, “land of the summer people.” It is among these first people that all our stories of the Sacred Isle begin. Avalon was sacred first simply because she was there: a refuge from the rising tides, a source of food, of fiber, an anchor and place of safety in a land ruled by the fickle gods of the waters and the weather.

Avalon is an island of mirrors, then as well as now. In the beginning, it was surrounded by mirrors: the smooth surface of the lake reflecting the deep blue sky above, or cloaked in mist so thick that it veiled the land and obscured all beyond range of our fingertips. And today, our Avalon, the Avalon of our myriad stories, is a mirror for all our longings, our yearnings for the past and our deepest dreams for the future.

For the stories that have been handed down to us have taken twists and turns of their own on their way through the marshes of time and memory. They sometimes reveal vistas, reward us with nourishment for the soul, only to vanish again or be lost as a new story appears to take another’s place. There is no true path anymore among these stories; no way to follow the sure path through the wetlands and step foot finally onto dry land. The levels have long been drained, and people dwell today where none were in the time of legends.

All we have now are our mirrors, and some beautiful ones there are. We dream of a lineage of priestesses, a place of wisdom, a school of mysteries, all the things our hearts yearn for. We can see it, feel it, enter there and journey in, around, and through that landscape clear as day. And then our mirror fogs with mist, and we see instead a steep, sheep-grazed hill crowned with the ruins of an ancient church.

Where do we go when we visit Avalon? Why do we seek it? What do we hope to find? When we come together to invoke Avalon, we create a brilliant mosaic of mirrors, our stories of what might have been. Together we rebuild the waters, re-grow the willow and sedge, weave our own boats and journey to the beat of our own drums, through the mists of time and down the winding path formed by water and land.

We seek the Shining Isle; how could we not? And yet, that is not where this journey leads. In the center of the mirrors is always our own heart, our own Story. And who but ourselves will tell us when we have found dry ground at last?

I have had the distinct pleasure over the past few months of immersing myself in some wise and erudite books on dreams. Here, rising to the top of the pile, are two books that I consider essential to the serious study of dreams in history and practice.

The first is by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and author of many worthy books on dreams.Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (2008, New York University Press) is a book that finally answers the basic question: how did people in ancient cultures view dreams?

I call this a basic question, because anyone who spends a significant amount of time working with their dreams inevitably wonders how it was done in the past. In your religion, in other religions; by your ancestors, by other people’s ancestors. Dreams call us to understand our place in the world, and Kelly’s book answers the call because it addresses the problem with both comprehensive scholarship and also a deep love and appreciation for dreams.

In the book’s first three chapters, Kelly covers Hinduism, the religions of China (mostly Confucianism and Taoism), and Buddhism. He then branches out to the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Judaism), the religions of Greece and Rome, then Christianity, and Islam. In the final three chapters, we learn about the religions of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. A whirlwind tour to be sure, but with Kelly’s flair for laying out a clear overview combined with meticulous attention to detail, one is left after each chapter with the feeling of having had an excellent introduction to a fascinating, and ever-changing subject.

This book is required reading for my class at Cherry Hill Seminary on using dreams in spiritual direction. It gives the student of Pagan religions a valuable sense of perspective, and the student of dreams a glimpse at the rich possibilities for dream interpretation and understanding in the continuing evolution of our dreaming minds. I highly recommend it.

The second book is not new at all, but is certainly new to us. Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1940 (Princeton University Press, 2008) is the English translation (finally!) of a seminar conducted by Carl Jung with some of his more advanced pupils, and is the most accessible, understandable presentation of Jung’s dream theories  that I have ever read.

Here we have the master in action, explaining his theories and then showing in great detail how he applies them, using examples of his patients’ earliest remembered dreams. In the first chapter, Jung lays out all of his methods of dream interpretation, which is invaluable in itself but also helps focus the later chapters, as each dream analysis follows the steps first introduced here.

Each of the later chapters include his students (among them Marie-Louise Von Franz, Aniela Jaffe, and Jolande Jacobi) presenting a dream or dream series, then analyzing them using Jung’s rubric. Jung makes comments, clarifies ideas and answers his students’ questions. The conversational style highlights Jung’s skill as an educator, and reading it one has the sense of witnessing the development, there in that room, of the practice of analytical psychology. It is a fascinating and inspiring ride.

This beautiful English edition of Children’s Dreams was a project of the Philemon Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing into book form Jung’s unpublished works. The Philemon Foundation also facilitated the publication of Jung’s Red Book last year; they do beautiful work. Children’s Dreams will make you realize just how much of your ideas about dreams are from Jung, and at the same time will show you just how little of Jung you really understand. I find the combination exhilarating; I am sure you will too.