What is power, that illusive thing we yearn for or push against?  Power – as in the personal kind – is one of those terms, that for most of us, we have some vague sense of but would be hard pressed to actually define.

The definitions I find most helpful come from ecofeminist author, Starhawk, in Truth or Dare, Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. In this book she describes three kinds of power we humans have: power-over, power-from-within and power-with.

Power-over is the one my generation loves to push against (that is we did until we got to the top – since then we’ve seemed to grow quite fond of it).  Power-over is the power that comes from position within the hierarchy.  That can be a position within an organization like the power that comes with the role of supervisor or CEO or owner.  It can be the power that comes from the culture, for example, like the power of the police over the speeding driver or the power of money to influence and acquire.  The physical force of violence and war are examples of power-over in its most raw form.

Elected officials have a tremendous amount of power-over.  They get to make decisions that will impact millions of us (and some times the whole planet) for years to come.  They have many opportunities to express their opinions and have people listen to them.  They get to be in charge, to take charge, to execute their will to be or to do or to have.  (And I hear they have a good health care package.)  All of this power, though, is easily lost in the next election.

Power-from-within, on the other hand, is not up for vote.  This is the power of self that each one of us has.  It is the combined force of our self esteem, our emotional intelligence, our sense of our own moral compass, our connection to our core values, our spiritual awareness (if that supports our belief system), and our knowledge of ourselves. It is our ability to navigate the river of life in reference to what has meaning for us.  When wielding our power-from-within we have an inner locus of control, meaning our reference point is within us.  While we love and care for others and want the respect our our tribe, we are not tossed about by the need to please or to control others.

Dr. Geo Trevarthen, celtic scholar and author, talks about the grail-like container of self that is both the vessel and the ambrosial fluid within the vessel.  If our container of self has holes in it, our fluid life force can leak right out.  Or if we constantly over-extend ourselves we are likely to “burn out” our inner juice, our energy.

As adults it’s up to us to stoke our power-from-within by taking good care of our container of self and keeping our inner juice replenished.  That’s what personal life coaching is often about – how to build individual power-from-within.  When we have solid containers of self and we’ve found ways to keep them full of our life force, then we are much more likely to thrive right through the many challenges of our lives.  If, though, our power only comes from what position or money or fame gives us, then losing any of these can be devastating. (And as a fallen politician things could be quite bleak until we get our really high paying lobbying job.)

Power-with is the power of partnership.  It’s the power of the political party, the labor union, the family (when functional), the carpool, the co-op.  When we combine our power-from-within with others’, we create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  We create a new system with a shared purpose.  And systems, like people, are adaptable, generative, and capable.  Relationship coaching is all about helping partnerships – whether those of two individuals or large organizations – develop their power-with each other.

The vast majority of the issues we are addressing today are way more than any one even extremely powerful person can completely solve on their own.  Despite our many stories of awesomely capable superheroes, the age of the power of the individual is over.  (Yikes, did I just say that?  Yes, I did.  More posts to follow this, I know.)   Yes, we can and do, each of us, make a difference.  And, when we work well together we make more of a difference, we have even more power.  Power-with is the answer to all of the really tough questions.

So, for this now infamous politician facing his tough questions, I’m wondering about the strength of his power-with — his wife, his party and his constituents.  I’m imagining his power-from-within is being sorely tested.  Since power-over is the hardest of the three to hold on to, especially without the power of self and partnership, time will tell us more of this story, won’t it?  Forget the photos and internet sex, the really hot part of this one is the flow of power.

A hidden cavern deep within me has been echoing with the hollowness of broken promises.  Not just an occasional relapse from a well-established practice, absolute abandonment is the cause for this stubborn ache.  I have deserted myself.

The hardest promises to keep are the ones we make to ourselves.  And when we keep making them and breaking them we gouge a rut of untrustworthiness into our spirits.  What perfect ammunition for our inner critic to use against us at every turn.  “Why even bother with that big idea?  You know you’ll develop these elaborate plans and get nowhere – because you lie.  You don’t have what it takes to do what you say you’re gonna do.  Crawl back into your hidey hole, you lying coward.”

OK, so maybe your inner critic isn’t as nasty as mine.  Lucky you.

Yes, there have been very good reasons that I haven’t been keeping my secret promise to myself – work and health and family needs are just some of them.  And I have had many other outlets for my creativity that I have enjoyed.  Most people would consider me highly reliable and trustworthy.  Timing is everything, too.  I know you don’t plant tomatoes in Colorado in the winter.  Compassionate understanding for the challenges of heroic proportions that we all face runs deep in me, and I do usually extend this compassion to myself.  Along with all this justification, understanding and compassion, hollow regret still echoes in me.

That’s how I know it isn’t an illusion or my critic’s distortion or yet another “should”.  It is a persistent desire I have, this secret promise to myself that I must fulfill. It is one of those promises that I am compelled keep for the pure joy of it for me. It is a promise I will long regret breaking if I do.

As a life coach I know we all make promises to ourselves.  Some we keep secret for fear of ridicule or objection.  Some we blab to all who would listen.  Whether it’s learning a new language, building a straw bale house, writing a book, running a marathon or reaching out to an old friend, at some point in time we have to follow the restless and undeniable yearnings from deep within.  There are some promises we simply must keep – including those wild and formidable ones we make to ourselves.  The cost for not doing so is simply too great.

In the midst of the bright lights, music, laughter, shopping frenzy, and food of the season it can seem way out of place to be talking about darkness.  Yet in the northern hemisphere this is a time of long dark and often cold nights.  For some of us it is a time of inner reflection and stillness.  And for many of us facing financial, family, or personal turmoil the harshness and danger are not very far beneath the bright lights.

If you are facing a long dark night or feeling a bit lost even in the light of day, here are a few things I’ve learned about making it through the night:

Throw out the map. You can’t see it in the dark anyway.  Get dreamy and creative and feel your way.  First remember who you really are and where you are standing now and what you are standing for.  From there you’ll know the next best step.

Lead from your heart. It’s in our animal nature to be afraid of the dark and the unknown.  Love brings light wherever it goes.  Do what you love, be your love, act out of love, share with those you love.  At one of the darkest nights in my life, when I was doubting everything and everyone, when my body and mind were betraying me, I remembered that I loved my child.  If I, broken and crazy, could feel love, then I knew love existed. I clung to that knowing and found my way back to my true self.

Trust yourself. You are creative, capable, and resourceful.  You have made it through darker nights before and will again.  No matter what inner or outer critics might say – trust yourself.  Think of it – you might believe in Divinely given free will: such ultimate trust of you!  Or if you don’t, then consider this exquisite evolving universe.  Evolution is fundamental to this system.  A system in which evolution is fundamental is one in which trust is fundamental.  The universe trusts you. You can trust yourself to be able to handle whatever the unknown presents you.

Undress for success. No, not as in stripping for cash.  As in take off the costumes and masks we all wear because we think we need to hide our true selves from the world.  In the chatty and festive light of day we may feel that hiding our unique brilliance will make us more likely to succeed.  Even if that were true in the daylight, it is not at all true in the darkness.  We need sure and fluid movement, comfort in our own skin, freedom to explore possibilities, confidence to express ourselves.  We absolutely have to stop worrying about what others think of us if we want to find our way.

Dream as much as you can - and then dream some more. Dreams hold our hope, our songs, our creativity, our solutions, our best selves.  Sure, we need to put legs under our dreams and the darker the night, the more dreaming we need.  The doing will come soon enough with the dawn.

Get a regular dose of belly laughs. One winter when there was a collective frenzy of worry about a pending flu epidemic, I decided to follow Norman Cousins’ way of healing through laughter.  For 6 weeks we watched nothing but comedies on TV.  No dramas, no dead body parts, no mysteries or reality shows.  We rented all the comedies we could find. We laughed our heads off.  And it shifted everything about us.  We were happier, more optimistic, more gregarious and not one of us got the flu or even a sniffle.

Be a really good friend – to everyone you meet. The way we have survived as a species through ice ages and very long dark nights has always been as a community.  We need our strong and healthy relationships, we need to gather around the fire together and take turns being on the look-out.  Changing our focus from what others can give to us to how we can help and befriend those in even more need is pure magic.  Try it and see.

I know there are others of you, my readers, who are really good at navigating in the night.  I’d love for you to tell me your stories, to share your hard-earned wisdom.  That’s one thing we can all do to support each other – share our stories and be generous with our encouragement.   Holding hands is always good, too.

One starting place is the flip side of speaking: listening.  Deeply listening with our focus on what is alive in the speaker can be one of the greatest gifts we can give someone.

“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”    Karl Menninger

To really listen we have to momentarily suspend our need to be heard, our urge to respond and move the conversation along in the direction we desire.  Instead we have to slow down, be present and be open to receiving the thoughts and feelings of another person.

“To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.”   Mark Nepo

As a personal life coach I have been shaped and changed by the stories of my brilliant clients.  Part of the success of life coaching is that someone with no agenda other than ours is deeply listening to us and prompting us to our own inspiration and power.

What does it take for us to really listen to someone else?  For me to be open and willing to be changed by what I hear I have to stop and focus.  I have to completely forget my agenda, my time schedule and my to-do list.  Multi-tasking is a no-no (you know what it’s like to be on the phone with someone that is reading their email or texting – no deep listening is happening there).  It might be the best evidence of respect for someone when I set aside my opinions and desires long enough to hear theirs.  My whole being needs to be like an open hand rather than one closed to hold on to myself alone.

This can be monumentally challenging when I have strong opinions and know I’m right!  Ask my husband or my son or those with opposing political views and they’ll tell you.  I imagine if we really could listen to our political opponents and have them deeply listen to us, both of us with the willingness to be changed by what we hear, the problems we face together would be minor in comparison.

It definitely requires our superhero powers to keep our mouths shut and our ears open!

Of course I can’t be willing to be open and changed if you aren’t because then it would be a win/lose proposition with me the loser, right?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

There’s nothing to lose by listening with our hearts.  Even if we can’t hear the words enough to be changed by them, we can hear the feelings behind the words.  And we can acknowledge the feelings.  I can get that you are excited, angry, sad, exuberant, frustrated, or scared.  I know what it’s like to feel these feelings.  When I can’t hear the words I can hear and be moved by your feelings – if I so choose.  Marshall Rosenberg says we have to meet at the level of feelings before we can really hear or be heard, especially if we are experiencing deep feelings.

So what if we leaned in, softly, and really listened to someone we usually only half-way hear?  What if we gave our beloveds the gift of our full attention, listening with our ears and our hearts and our open selves?  What might be possible in our relationships when we really hear each other?  I’m thinking this gift-giving, open-hearted, sappy holiday season could be a good time to find out.

Swainson’s hawks arrive in Colorado in the spring – after spending our winters in Argentina.  Read that again, please.  These hawks fly (by flapping their wings – not in coach class) from Argentina in very South America all the way to mid North America.  And they do that in a few months.  It boggles my mind to think of traveling such a distance by your own power in such a short time.  I’m in awe of these birds just knowing this.

Once they get to my part of the world they hastily build or squat on existing nests and get serious about the business of reproducing.  My bird watching partner (my honey) and I frequently laugh at Swainson’s hawk nests.  You can tell there is no time to paint and decorate before the babies arrive.  They set up house in whatever jumble of sticks and leaves they can find, in nests frequently way too close to roads or looking like a good wind will blow them over, which unfortunately sometimes does happen.  One year a nest we were watching blew down yet the determined parents hastily built another one and had time to successfully raise one baby.

These new young birds have to hatch, survive summer storms (with no basement to run to when the wild weather of the plains is in full splendor), and then make it through the fledgling stage of learning how to leave the nest and fly.  And they have to do all of this in about 4 months.  That’s because at the end of the summer the whole family is flying back to Argentina. Think about that – as a young Swainson’s hawk you’ve just learned to fly and catch your own food (grasshoppers being one of your favorite dishes) and now you’re off on an unimaginable marathon.  At least you’ll be traveling with thousands of your peeps.

That’s because these hawks get really friendly and gather in huge groups, called kettles, to make the long trek together.  Bird brains, I mean wildlife specialists who know these things, say that the young aren’t born knowing their way to Argentina so they have to be taught by the adults.  I’m thinking that as a human I would have to be taught the way to Argentina a bunch of times before I could remember the whole route (that means remembering it all with no MapQuest).  More mind boggling happening here.

Maybe that’s another reason why they travel in large groups: it’s their version of “it takes a village”.  Maybe it takes a kettle to remember the way up and back.  Or maybe they cheer each other on when they are exhausted and still have thousands of miles to go.  Or maybe it’s to ensure some of the young make it even if their parents don’t.

Whatever the reason for kettles they are pure magic to behold.  And a bit tricky to find because the hawks generally don’t send word to humans as to where the secret gathering place is each year.  My honey and I have spent the last 8 years scouring the plains in late summer to find them.  Some years we have seen hundreds.  Most years we get excited if we see 30 to 40 in one field together.  Every year we enjoy the quiet vastness, the excitement of the hunt and the possibility of crashing the pre-game party.

What makes it even more thrilling is that when we find the kettles we call the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program (www.rmrp.org) so that the injured or sick orphans the RMRP staff and volunteers have cared for can now be returned to the wild.  When the kettles are being formed is perfect timing for the release of the immature birds.  They are welcomed into the village, reunited with their peeps and ready for the journey south.

These magnificent birds have taught me tons:  Things don’t always have to be perfect (especially in the house keeping department), because often good enough for now will do just fine.  The impossible to imagine really can be accomplished, every year, over and over again.  It’s always more fun to do really hard things in the company of your peeps.  If a good storm trashes your plans, try again, quickly.  When you feel the inner timing is ripe, listen to it and go.  Whenever you can on a long journey, ride the thermals and conserve your energy.  (I’m still hoping that some day they’ll teach me how to fly.)

Hunting hawks, taking care of wounded birds of prey and then releasing them back into the wild are priority passions of mine.  Exquisite joy and bone deep satisfaction come from living one’s passion and from being connected with the natural world!  I highly recommend both.

How about you?  What do you do just for the sheer joy of it?  What “hawks” are you hunting?

(For you delightful Gen Ys and Millennials when I was growing up the word “woman” was  considered a pejorative term for females that just wasn’t used in polite society.  Women were called ladies and were expected to behave as such.  Period.)

This lady lion tamer was a living, breathing actual wonder woman for me.  She shattered my young notions of possibilities for women.  More than a decade before the modern feminist movement roared into our shared consciousness this one woman I experienced for very brief time nudged me along a life time path.

No, I’m not a circus performer nor am I all that into whips.  I do love to hang out with wild animals, though.  And I’m devoted to being in the company of wild women.  Actually I’m devoted to bringing out the sparkly, bold, courageous, wild power of women.

Wild as in connected with instinctive and intuitive knowing, breathing freely, able to roam with awareness through inner and outer territories, capable of using innate talents. Wild as is not overly domesticated, not focused on outer approval at the expense of personal truth.  Wild as in authentic, sure of self, daring and not so eager to trade comfort for freedom.  Wild as in aware of our power-from-within.

We absolutely need access to our wild and wise power-from-within right now because we are all facing snarling and snapping dangers in our lives.  Weird as it may sound, I don’t think the danger is in what we’re facing.  It’s not the lion or the job or the relationship or the checkbook.  It’s in how we want to face what’s before us.  Because it is really, really dangerous to be in this world without a great deal of inner power.

Today I’m standing in front of a beastie of a to-do list and a full spectrum of delicious distractions.  It will definitely take my power-from-within to keep my focus, to stay clear and aware and moving in the direction I know is best for me, to not be defined or confined by limiting thinking.  Good thing I’ve got my whip, high boots and sparkly regalia.

How about you?  What wild women in your lives have inspired you to step into your inner power?

Maybe being mortal humans in a dangerous world means there will always be some form of background drumming or strumming that keeps us on our toes, ready to fight or flee.  And maybe how noticeable that scary music is depends on our own inner rhythm.  It still seems to me that the background music to much of our shared experience resembles the suspense building, adrenaline pumping, terror inducing soundtrack of horror movie.  We all are on our toes, really quick to take a swing or run away or go completely, frozenly numb.

(Or maybe this is just me, because, as my friend Lynne says, for each of us “it’s always all about me”.)

Whether about the little me or the bigger me that includes many more of us, I’ve decided that I want to become more aware of when I am acting from fear and how I can do that more consciously.  I want to become aware of the background music and decide for myself how I want to dance to it.  I want to get past numb and knee jerk fear so that I can clearly tune into my inner knowing, my inner rhythm, my inner awareness of the best steps for me to take no matter what tune others are dancing to.  I want to know what I really need to be afraid of and how to best respond to that fear.

I was inspired by something I read in Robert Moss’s book, The Three “Only” Things, tapping the power of dreams, coincidence & imagination (highly recommended!). At one point he writes about the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands off of the coast of India. They somehow knew about the December 2004 tsunami and fled to the highlands before it wiped out their coastal village.  I write this again – a group of what we might describe as primitive people knew ahead of time that there was a real danger they needed to act upon and they did so.  They survived because they listen to the messages in their dreams.  According to Moss, “By tradition, the fierce Andaman islanders are group dreamers who gather at night in their community ‘big houses’ to dream the means of survival and progress for the whole community.”  And they listen to the wind and the animals, letting their deep connection with nature inform them.  They trust their inner knowing and are not afraid to act on it.  They trust their dreams for their survival – and it works!

That’s what I want – the ability to get the messages from my dreams and on the wind and through the songs of the birds and the courage to act on this knowing.  When I think of the Andaman Islanders I am in awe of their ability to simply walk away. It seems to me that this is the hardest part about trusting our intuition – we have to be willing to walk away from, to completely drop, anything else we are attached to.  How many of us could simply walk away from our homes and possessions? How many of us can just drop a closely held set of expectations?  How many of us might respond to an urgent intuitive message with something like “I can’t do that now because I have to meet this deadline”, or “I have to quickly answer this email”, or “I have to stay on the course already set for myself right now”?

I want to feel the fear that comes from my inner knowing and pushes me to act in possibly outrageous ways, if necessary, for the sake of my long term survival and thrival (my invented word for thriving).  I don’t want the fear that is the distracting background music, part of the group mind that keeps me agitated but unaware of actions to take that are right for me. That background music of fear is keeping me from hearing the wind, noticing my dreams, trusting my own choices.

Hmmmm…. How do I get what I want?  (Because it’s all about me getting what I want.)

I’m thinking a first step is to stay aware of the background music, really aware, so that I am able to sort out what’s out there and what’s within me. A next step is to pay attention to my dreams and the messages on the wind which means taking time for the subtle, for the ephemeral, for being in nature.  After that maybe it’s to look at what I’m holding onto so tightly it might be holding me back from acting on my inner knowing (I’m guessing that’s a big hunk of stuff to sort through.) And I’m pretty sure I need to be ready to trust myself even if it seems foolish or out of step with the popular beat.  I sure do wish I had a community to dream with each night.

At first this cracked me up.  The term buffet anxiety stuck with me, though, and now I’ve come to see that we all – or at least all of the people I know – have some form of this  tragically funny dis-ease.  Most of us are at the feast of life.  An entire banquet of intriguing and potentially delicious delights are laid out in front of us.  We have so very many choices of people to be with, ways to connect with them, recreational activities to divert us (even if there are 57 channels and nothing on), books to read, classes to take, food to eat, amounts of food to eat, information to collect, blogs to read and even jobs to explore.  Yep, we are at a feast alright, a buffet teaming with possibilities.  Even if it feels like we have few choices for the vast majority of us in the industrialized world we have a very, very full buffet before us.

We are ill-equipped to handle this vast and virtually unimaginable feast of choices.  Think of it.  Think about how many fewer choices our grandparents had.  Our grandparents and ancestors before them had way fewer personal choices to make (due to cultural limits) and many fewer consumer choices to make (due to products available) and way less people to connect with (due to communication and transportation technologies and a smaller population).  Yes, they may still have been at the feast of life, but our feast is over the top compared to theirs.  So, no, we aren’t all weak or crazy.  This is a very big adaptation for us to make as a species.  It’s perfectly understandable that as individuals we haven’t figured it out yet – or grown another stomach so we can digest it all.

With this unprecedented array of possibilities before us we are all like my colleague’s husband – we are suffering from varying amounts of buffet anxiety.  We can agonize over our choices, we can gobble everything in sight so as not to miss anything good, we can completely forget what we were hungry for, we can make ourselves sick eating it all, we can starve ourselves out of fear of making a wrong choice, we can become intoxicated with the joy of all the experiences.  We can completely lose our sense of direction and attention to what we really want when plates of dark chocolate covered strawberries catch our eye.  Seriously, mountains of dark chocolate!  Who could pass that by?

Those of us who have a hard time saying “no” to anything know what I’m talking about here.  We are so far beyond some idea of boundaries.  We are in way over our heads, drowning at the feast.  I see the impact of buffet anxiety on my clients all the time. Many people come to life coaching because they want some balance in their lives.  Or they want to finally reach that one elusive goal. Or they don’t even know what they really want because they’ve been overwhelmed for so long.  All of these are feast related. The depth and breath of the choices before us and the resulting challenges so many choices present are way more than “just say no” or “make a list and do it” strategies can address.  How we want to be while enjoying the feast of life is one of the big classes that each of us will take (and probably retake multiple times) at our individual Mystery School of Life (You know – that esoteric school we’re all attending as we figure out who we are, why we’re here, and what we need to learn in order to thrive and give our gifts).

There are many ways to approach buffet anxiety from a life coaching perspective.  You’ll read more about my strategies over time here because I am intimately experienced with the challenges of abundance (for which I am very, very thankful).  In fact, that’s one of my first steps – gratitude.  When overwhelmed with choices, when plates of dark chocolate (in any number of forms) are waved before me, if I can pause long enough to simply be profoundly grateful for all the possibilities, something in me shifts.  Gratitude some how brings me, even briefly, back to myself. It creates a momentary gap in the anxiety and frenzy of the experience.  In this gap I can breathe and remember.  I can regroup and reconnect with what has meaning for me.  And out of that meaning I have a little more of a solid place to stand while I gaze at the feast.  Being thankful doesn’t guarantee I’ll pass up that dark chocolate.  It does give me some awareness and that’s one of the best starting place I know.

What do you notice about how you approach the feast of life?  How are you with making choices, keeping your balance, knowing what satisfies you, saying yes and no to requests and possibilities?  Passing up plates of dark chocolate?  Or not?

At the very same time I ache with the pain of loss for two missing young women from my community – one now known dead, one vanished completely a world away.  I cry warm tears for them and their families.  I ache for the water and animals and people drenched in unimaginably huge amounts of oil.  As I witness my brave and beloved friend help her son heal from a drug overdose, as I support my awesome clients – many of whom are facing enormous personal and professional challenges, as I walk with so very many loved ones who are experiencing their own bone deep sorrow my heart seeks to entrain with theirs.

How do I hold such joy and sorrow at the same time?

It seems like the intensity of both of these feelings has increased in me over time, perhaps in sync with my personal and spiritual growth.  It is my intention to be aware of the wonder of the world as well as the suffering within it.  It is my desire to be with what is, not to flinch or deny or run away.  Being with the wonder comes pretty easily.  Being with the pain at first is not so difficult because we are an empathic people.  Being with  suffering and not having any ability to end it is almost unbearable.

Once in meditation I got that to surrender without my will is to be a martyr or a door mat.  And to hold on to the full force of my will without surrender is to be brittle, to need to control or forcefully exert power-over.  To fluidly and deeply live my personal power I need to hold will and surrender simultaneously.  I need to stand straight and clear, sure of my intention and desire without hesitation or doubt and at the very same time to dissolve into surrendering to the moment, being open to what is unfolding around me. With my thinking mind this is almost impossible to understand, just as it is almost, but not quite, impossible for my heart to hold so much joy and sorrow at the same time.

I’ve found that to really know the truth of something we need to be able to hold the polarities of it.  We need to be able to stand in the apparent paradoxes, the wide poles of the situation.  We have to be able to live in both/and rather than either/or – because we live in a both/and universe.  Light is wave and particle.  There is always life and death, joy and sorrow, endings and beginnings.  We are loved exactly as we are and at the same time we are evolving.  We can be in absolute gratitude for our many blessings and still want something more or different.  We can be giddy with delight and desperate with sorrow.  And maybe the agony of the stretch of mind and heart are part of our becoming even more than we thought possible.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  -Marcel Proust

I’ve always been a dreamer.  Night dreams, day dreams, free flowing dreams, self directed dreams – I love them all.  Even my nightmares have been dear to me. All of those entertaining, mystifying, illuminating, amusing and puzzling visions have touched me.  Some have cracked me wide open, others have delighted me, a few have tormented me.  All have made me feel alive.

For many years I retreated a bit from my dreaming life, focusing more on the “real world” of work, family, and living well.  I did what I needed and wanted to do to take care of my self and my family and to live up to the expectations of my clan. (My logical mind works just as well as my dreaming one and it certainly gets more recognition for its achievements.)  Navigating our collective idea of what is real and therefore worthy of attention – consensus reality – shouldn’t be all that difficult if you get your head out of the clouds and pay attention, if you narrow your focus to what’s in front of you.

Eventually, though, the narrowing of my focus led me into a constricted box canyon.  My body was first to sound the alarm, the first to let me know that the way I was going wasn’t leading me to where I wanted to be.  Long sleepless nights and trips to the emergency room with my heart racing off the charts woke me up from the illusion I was living.  The truth for me is this: I can’t live without dreaming.  We can’t live well without dreaming. Daily life without dreaming diminishes us, separates us from a vast source of power and can lead us very far from where we want to be.

We are all doing the best we can to navigate the very challenging territory of consensus reality.  The only way for me to make my way in the real world is with my dreaming intact.  Because with my dreaming eyes I can see the bigger picture – the hawk view – as well as the next step in front of me.  My dreaming mind keeps my real world choices fed from a deep well of meaning.  My dreaming body knows its way to my truth, to my true north.  My dreaming self married to my grounded, mundane self gives me a much better sense of direction and capacity to face the obstacles along the way.

So I invite you to tilt your head a bit and shift you focus ever so slightly so that you, too, can see through the dull and deadening illusions of daily life. We are all so very much more than the job description, than the consensus reality based, limited sense of our selves.  We are all on heroic journeys of mythical proportions. We are all facing enormous challenges that demand our full capacity and super powers just to stay alive.  And it takes considerable dreaming and daring to make our way.