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Where Listening Becomes Revelation
While tidying up my desktop last week, I happened upon some notes that I'd apparently put together on the type of spiritual soul listening required for dream tending, and was immediately struck by a strong desire to make something of them. Here’s what...
Practice for Soul-Making
Lending ourselves to what the poet Keats called ‘soul-making’, we are invited to make something out of what we’re being given. Every morning when we set aside time upon waking in order to tend dreams, we are therefore soul-making, tending the soul of the...
Everything Dreaming All the Time
The Dreamtime, or “Yorro Yorro”, or Everything Dreaming All the Time, or Everything Standing Up Alive, are different ways to convey an orientation to the world as connected and ensouled, rather than, say, imagining it as a bunch of separate objects jumbled...
Pop Ups and the Destiny Strand of Things
Pop Ups and the Destiny Strand of Things (or How to Be Fully in the Dream We’re Actually In) Pop ups are images that specifically try to get our attention. I call them “pop ups” because of their activity—because they try to pull the dreamer’s focus—and because I don’t...
On the Light of Dreams
Once upon a time, while making preparations for a retreat that featured the works of James Turrell, our old friend and mentor Robert Sardello posed a direct question to me: Where does the light of dreams come from? I’d been secretly chewing on the same question for...
Memento Mori: Seeing Through the Dead
Recounting the death of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, it's said that the proper practice of philosophy is "about nothing but dying and being dead." As dreams generally blur distinctions between the living and the dead, it seems that, like philosophy, the dreamtime...
Forgetting as Dream Activity
“It’s here somewhere,” she says, scanning the pages of her dream journal. Then, turning the big, black, hardbound book upside down, the dreamer flips through its pages from the opposite side, her play-by-play trailing off as she tilts her head sideways to read...
What Are Jump Cuts?
In an effort to make Dream-Centered Living ever more accessible, this is the first in what I hope will be a series of short video answers to frequently asked questions: Why do dreams suddenly jump from one scene to another? Well now, I imagine you've all experienced...
Everything Belongs and is Connected
In our continuing series of Starting Places and Radical Givens of Dream-Centered Living, we want to highlight that Everything Belongs and Is Connected (just as we are). We might say that this is the premiere starting place of Dream-Centered Living, for without this as...
Action Versus Activity
Once upon a time, I promised to “orient dreamers and dream tenders alike to some of the ‘Starting Places and Radical Givens’ of Dream-Centered Living.” No sooner did I make this promise than all sorts of utterly unexpected events occurred, keeping me from my original...
Dreaming With Plants–a weekend workshop
Dreaming with Plants--a weekend workshop In his Per Amica Silentia Lunæ, William Butler Yeats writes: I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of...
Revelation, Radical Receptivity, and the Angel of Courtesy–a new contemplative dream offering
This is how it happens. While passing through the pantry this morning on my way to the laundry room, I noticed a few random things lying on the floor, fallen, it seems, from the neglected pile of fundraising fliers, car-wash coupons, and kids' permission slips on the...
Be Vigilant While Sleeping
Today I want to begin by inviting to shift our attention from the contents of dreams to the activity of dreaming itself by introducing a well-known alchemical engraving from the 16th Century, entitled “The First Stage of the Great Work.” Featured in Heinrich Kunrath’s most famous work on alchemy, Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, the engraving depicts what Kunrath asserts is the necessary and important interplay between alchemy, magic, and the cabala.
Like Morning Feet
Like Morning Feet As restlessness seeks devotion, a community of small birds chirp, chirp, chirps the morning news. What can be so cheerful and exciting this early? And how can what’s happening out there on that tree also be happening here, inside these...
Further Preparations for The Day of the Dead
The word theatre comes to us from the Greeks; it means "the seeing place." Aristotle took the Mysteries and more or less made them public through the form of drama. Individuals were introduced, taken into, and exposed to something so utterly unknown that it crumbled...
Practicing with the Twelve Senses–a new course
Healthy senses are the vital wellsprings of our life. In a profound—yet simple and straightforward—way, through exploration, lively discussion, and practices, we will explore the twelve senses as brought to us by Dr. Albert Soesman, a family physician who lived and...
The Divine Sensorium and Questions as Living Beings
Some time ago, and again more recently in preparation for the upcoming soul retreat--Earth as Divine Sensorium--here in Los Angeles that we'll be giving from April 3 - 6th, Robert Sardello posed the following question: Where does the light of dreams come from? What I...
How to Practice with Recurring Dream Images
The general assumption regarding recurring dreams is that they are trying to get our attention. This is true, of course, but not only because they are trying to tell the dreamer something about him or herself, as is often assumed. As difficult as this may be to...