Renee Coleman's Blog, page 3
February 26, 2015
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 feet? Feet, it turns out, are not merely flexible structures of bones and […]
October 9, 2014
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 all they knew or thought they knew. It is this […]
September 17, 2014
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 worked in the Hague, Holland until retiring in 1983. Dr. Soesman has written a […]
May 19, 2014
Day of the Dead Dream Tending & Ritual Retreat
You’re invited! To tend dreams in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the annual Day of the Dead festivities this fall, 2014. Join me, and become a part of the indigenous soul and mystical experience of this fine city and its incredible people, if only for a week. About the Day of the Dead: Dia de los Muertos […]
March 11, 2014
New Dream Group Starting
I’ve been asked to start a new dream group with “younger” folks in mind. It seems that the timing may be right, so I’m putting out feelers, and trying to get the word out. And, as I’m sure to be asked what “younger” is, let’s follow Auntie Mame’s lead and decide that younger is anyone […]
March 4, 2014
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 found in trying to answer this question in a once-and-for-all […]
January 15, 2014
How to Practice with Recurring Dreams
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 accept, recurring dream images want our attention for their sake, not merely ours. When we give our attention to dream images for their sake, however, we are at the very same time bringing attention to what is "between" us, between the dreamer and the dream images, and therefore to the connectedness of things.
I find it helps to regard recurring dream images as one might a "toddler." As illustrative example, you may recall that marvelous scene in It's a Wonderful Life--the holiday film classic with Jimmy Stewart playing the part of George Bailey. It's Christmas Eve and George has just learned that 8,000 dollars from the Bailey Building and Loan has gone missing. He is completely undone and utterly preoccupied with the implications of what the missing money will mean for him and his family, and for his business.
Meanwhile at home, and unaware of this latest development, George's wife, Mary, and the Bailey children prepare to receive the extended family for a holiday celebration. Click on the link below to watch the film clip:
It's a Wonderful Life . . . George Bailey and Family
Fully five times Tommy says, "Excuse me," while tugging at his father trying to get his attention. Like little Tommy, recurring dream images try relentlessly to get our attention. And just like George, we too are also mostly impatient with the intrusions.
But this scene also illustrates for us the "timing" of recurring dreams. Whether they take place over a few days or weeks, months, or even years, it seems that recurring dream images are trying to puncture our self-preoccupation. Suffering, as is the case in this scene with George Bailey, makes us "feel" as though we are separate and isolated, utterly alone. Our place in the "center" of the drama, therefore, becomes highlighted.
This is precisely when recurring dream images come along to try to get our attention, to remind us that we are not alone. And, because of their persistence, they're actually very good at it. Like little Tommy Bailey, recurring dream images can be quite relentless. Too often, however, we turn the image's hard won attention back on ourselves by asking, "What is this recurring image trying to tell me about me?"
Rest assured that if recurring dream images are trying to tell us anything about ourselves, it's that we are too pre-occupied with "feeling separate and isolated."
We have forgotten that we are but small dreamers in a much larger dream. And we have likewise forgotten that the medium is the message--that dreams are trying to companion us, take us out of feeling isolated and separated, and into noticing, not only that we are connected, but how we are connected. That is why it's not generally the content of the recurring images that penetrates dreamers so much as the appearance and reappearance of the images. Dreams, and especially recurring dreams, remind us that we are never isolated, never separate, regardless of how it sometimes feels.
It all comes down to a practice of noticing. When a dream image's recurrence is firmly established, what we want to do is to acknowledge its creative persistence. It recurrence shows us that it is really interested in, and devoted to, getting our attention.
"I see you," therefore, is a good way to start acknowledging a recurring image. You might want to follow this with a gesture of gratitude: "Thank you for your tireless devotion." Next you may want to offer yourself to the image for its sake: "Is there anything you want of me, or from me, or somehow through me?"
And finally, and most importantly, resist the temptation to answer this last question in a fill-in-the-blank sort of way. The practice is simply to ask the question in an ongoing way without looking for an answer.
Unfortunately, we are in the rather dreary cultural habit of looking everywhere for answers. The dreamtime, however, is not a realm that is terribly concerned with answers. The dreamtime IS concerned, deeply and intimately, with responses; it is, in fact, a Call and Response realm. So just our capacity to ask these kinds of questions, and to keep asking them, is what opens us up to connected, imaginal relatedness and creative receptivity.
I find it helps to regard recurring dream images as one might a "toddler." As illustrative example, you may recall that marvelous scene in It's a Wonderful Life--the holiday film classic with Jimmy Stewart playing the part of George Bailey. It's Christmas Eve and George has just learned that 8,000 dollars from the Bailey Building and Loan has gone missing. He is completely undone and utterly preoccupied with the implications of what the missing money will mean for him and his family, and for his business.
Meanwhile at home, and unaware of this latest development, George's wife, Mary, and the Bailey children prepare to receive the extended family for a holiday celebration. Click on the link below to watch the film clip:
It's a Wonderful Life . . . George Bailey and Family
Fully five times Tommy says, "Excuse me," while tugging at his father trying to get his attention. Like little Tommy, recurring dream images try relentlessly to get our attention. And just like George, we too are also mostly impatient with the intrusions.
But this scene also illustrates for us the "timing" of recurring dreams. Whether they take place over a few days or weeks, months, or even years, it seems that recurring dream images are trying to puncture our self-preoccupation. Suffering, as is the case in this scene with George Bailey, makes us "feel" as though we are separate and isolated, utterly alone. Our place in the "center" of the drama, therefore, becomes highlighted.
This is precisely when recurring dream images come along to try to get our attention, to remind us that we are not alone. And, because of their persistence, they're actually very good at it. Like little Tommy Bailey, recurring dream images can be quite relentless. Too often, however, we turn the image's hard won attention back on ourselves by asking, "What is this recurring image trying to tell me about me?"
Rest assured that if recurring dream images are trying to tell us anything about ourselves, it's that we are too pre-occupied with "feeling separate and isolated."
We have forgotten that we are but small dreamers in a much larger dream. And we have likewise forgotten that the medium is the message--that dreams are trying to companion us, take us out of feeling isolated and separated, and into noticing, not only that we are connected, but how we are connected. That is why it's not generally the content of the recurring images that penetrates dreamers so much as the appearance and reappearance of the images. Dreams, and especially recurring dreams, remind us that we are never isolated, never separate, regardless of how it sometimes feels.
It all comes down to a practice of noticing. When a dream image's recurrence is firmly established, what we want to do is to acknowledge its creative persistence. It recurrence shows us that it is really interested in, and devoted to, getting our attention.
"I see you," therefore, is a good way to start acknowledging a recurring image. You might want to follow this with a gesture of gratitude: "Thank you for your tireless devotion." Next you may want to offer yourself to the image for its sake: "Is there anything you want of me, or from me, or somehow through me?"
And finally, and most importantly, resist the temptation to answer this last question in a fill-in-the-blank sort of way. The practice is simply to ask the question in an ongoing way without looking for an answer.
Unfortunately, we are in the rather dreary cultural habit of looking everywhere for answers. The dreamtime, however, is not a realm that is terribly concerned with answers. The dreamtime IS concerned, deeply and intimately, with responses; it is, in fact, a Call and Response realm. So just our capacity to ask these kinds of questions, and to keep asking them, is what opens us up to connected, imaginal relatedness and creative receptivity.
January 14, 2014
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 accept, recurring dream images want our attention for their […]
December 12, 2013
Miracles of Beauty
This morning upon awakening in a "mood" of snow and the cold, surrounded by a nostalgia of images--of sun dogs, and hoar frost, and the northern lights--I set out to once again exalt the singularly unique, lit-from-within beauty of dreaming. For the dreamtime never ceases to amaze me with its creative, infinite beauty--the way it's always, always generating new images to freely give us, and how no two images are exactly the same. So, while searching through pictures of ice crystals, I stumbled upon many that were taken by William A. Bentley, better known as William "Snowflake" Bentley.
Snowflake Bentley was born in 1865 in Jericho, Vermont--an area known as the "Snowbelt," with an annual snowfall of about 120 inches. He spent his life living and working on the family's farm and was fascinated with the natural world that surrounded him."But always, from the very beginning," he said, "it was snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm folks, up in this north country, dread the winter; but I was supremely happy, from the day of the first snowfall--which usually came in November--until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May."
On his fifteenth birthday, William Bentley received a microscope. He spent the next two years in a small room at the back of the farmhouse peering through his microscope at ice crystals. He made hundreds of sketches of what he saw but was always disappointed with the results. One day he chanced to read that it was possible to take photographs through a microscope. Somehow, and with the help of his mother, he persuaded his father to buy him a bellows camera and a better microscope.
He experimented with the camera, the microscope, the dry plates (that were used at that time to record photographic images) and snow. He knew nothing about photography and endured failure after failure. But with patience and persistence and a genuine love of snow, on January 15, 1885, during a snowstorm, William Bentley made the first ever photomicrograph of an ice crystal."The day that I developed the first negative made by this method, and found it good, I felt almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and worshipping it!" he said. "It was the greatest moment of my life."
For the next 47 years, William Bentley went on to capture images of more than 5000 snowflakes! He was so good at it that almost no one bothered to photograph another snowflake for close to a 100 years. In an article that appeared in Popular Mechanics Magazine in 1922 entitled "Photographing Snowflakes," he wrote: "Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of Nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer."
Gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. This is exactly what it is to work with dreams! Like snowflakes, no two dreams (or dream images, for that matter) are exactly alike (even those that are referred to as "recurring" dreams). Isn't this because no two dreamers are exactly alike? And yet every time we ask what a dream image "means" we forget this simple truth.
Like William Bentley with snowflakes, I too am "possessed with a great desire to show people something of the wonderful loveliness"--of dreams: the nature of dreaming. The good news is that with dreams no special equipment is required. All that's needed is a dreamer and a heart that is willing to turn toward the light of dreams.
Now, no photograph of a snowflake has ever kept even a single snowflake from melting. So even though William Bentley fancied himself something of a "preserver" of snow, what he really did was to get us to take a much closer look. By inviting folks to look more closely, to see what he saw, William Bentley introduced the world to what he called "miracles of beauty." Snow crystals were a kind of portal for him; they showed him the astounding beauty of Earth.
Dreams can likewise be a portal. It's no use, however, trying to "preserve" dreams, if preservation means pressing dream images onto slides for viewing and photographing. And anyway, this would merely preserve a "record" of the dream. But if this record, like William Bentley's photographs, invites us to take a closer look, if we are introduced to, and allowed to mingle with, the miracles of beauty in the dreamtime, and we set to work in a spirit of discovery, we may indeed find that this helps to keep the dream from melting altogether.
If, as "Snowflake" Bentley suggests, Nature combines her "greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes" isn't this also true of dreams? Of dreamers? In this season of miracles, whether one celebrates the miracle of light or the miracle of divine birth, or the miracles of unity and culture, is it not also worth celebrating that each and every one of us is a lit-from-within, unique and dreaming miracle of beauty, a masterpiece of design in Earth's dream of us?
Here's to all of us. Happy Holidays.
in dreams,
Renée
Snowflake Bentley was born in 1865 in Jericho, Vermont--an area known as the "Snowbelt," with an annual snowfall of about 120 inches. He spent his life living and working on the family's farm and was fascinated with the natural world that surrounded him."But always, from the very beginning," he said, "it was snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm folks, up in this north country, dread the winter; but I was supremely happy, from the day of the first snowfall--which usually came in November--until the last one, which sometimes came as late as May."
On his fifteenth birthday, William Bentley received a microscope. He spent the next two years in a small room at the back of the farmhouse peering through his microscope at ice crystals. He made hundreds of sketches of what he saw but was always disappointed with the results. One day he chanced to read that it was possible to take photographs through a microscope. Somehow, and with the help of his mother, he persuaded his father to buy him a bellows camera and a better microscope.
He experimented with the camera, the microscope, the dry plates (that were used at that time to record photographic images) and snow. He knew nothing about photography and endured failure after failure. But with patience and persistence and a genuine love of snow, on January 15, 1885, during a snowstorm, William Bentley made the first ever photomicrograph of an ice crystal."The day that I developed the first negative made by this method, and found it good, I felt almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and worshipping it!" he said. "It was the greatest moment of my life."
For the next 47 years, William Bentley went on to capture images of more than 5000 snowflakes! He was so good at it that almost no one bothered to photograph another snowflake for close to a 100 years. In an article that appeared in Popular Mechanics Magazine in 1922 entitled "Photographing Snowflakes," he wrote: "Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of Nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer."
Gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. This is exactly what it is to work with dreams! Like snowflakes, no two dreams (or dream images, for that matter) are exactly alike (even those that are referred to as "recurring" dreams). Isn't this because no two dreamers are exactly alike? And yet every time we ask what a dream image "means" we forget this simple truth.
Like William Bentley with snowflakes, I too am "possessed with a great desire to show people something of the wonderful loveliness"--of dreams: the nature of dreaming. The good news is that with dreams no special equipment is required. All that's needed is a dreamer and a heart that is willing to turn toward the light of dreams.
Now, no photograph of a snowflake has ever kept even a single snowflake from melting. So even though William Bentley fancied himself something of a "preserver" of snow, what he really did was to get us to take a much closer look. By inviting folks to look more closely, to see what he saw, William Bentley introduced the world to what he called "miracles of beauty." Snow crystals were a kind of portal for him; they showed him the astounding beauty of Earth.
Dreams can likewise be a portal. It's no use, however, trying to "preserve" dreams, if preservation means pressing dream images onto slides for viewing and photographing. And anyway, this would merely preserve a "record" of the dream. But if this record, like William Bentley's photographs, invites us to take a closer look, if we are introduced to, and allowed to mingle with, the miracles of beauty in the dreamtime, and we set to work in a spirit of discovery, we may indeed find that this helps to keep the dream from melting altogether.
If, as "Snowflake" Bentley suggests, Nature combines her "greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes" isn't this also true of dreams? Of dreamers? In this season of miracles, whether one celebrates the miracle of light or the miracle of divine birth, or the miracles of unity and culture, is it not also worth celebrating that each and every one of us is a lit-from-within, unique and dreaming miracle of beauty, a masterpiece of design in Earth's dream of us?
Here's to all of us. Happy Holidays.
in dreams,
Renée
Miracles of Beauty
This morning upon awakening in a “mood” of snow and the cold, surrounded by a nostalgia of images–of sun dogs, and hoar frost, and the northern lights–I set out to once again exalt the singularly unique, lit-from-within beauty of dreaming. For the dreamtime never ceases to amaze me with its creative, infinite beauty–the way it’s always, […]
