If you’re like me, you have a dream and desire for spiritual work that both excites and intimidates you.
As you look ahead to this year, I hope my thoughts here can help you understand better how to turn those dreams and desires into plans, and then into reality. To start, let’s talk about dreams…
DREAMS & IMAGINATION
Dreams are a powerful force in our lives. Dreams have one foot in the spiritual or “imaginal” realm and one foot in our human aspirations. If the term “imaginal” is unfamiliar to you, just think of it as related to the world of our imaginations. It is a spiritual-energetic realm that holds the dreams, hopes, and fears that live in our hearts and minds. When we imagine the future, this is the “place” we draw from for ideas, images, inspiration. It’s like a storehouse of humanity’s visions.
We often think of imagination as kind of mental fantasy we invent, and it certainly can be this. However, imagination takes on a whole new power when we think of it as a spiritual faculty of our hearts and minds.
We each have a direct line to the imaginal realm, the storehouse of the future. And so, by our imagination and dreaming, we invent more than just fantasies. We literally invent reality. When we attune to this truth, using our imaginations becomes more like a kind of perception or remembering. It’s not some kind of illusion - it’s a channel of higher spiritual guidance we all have access to.
Those of us called to spiritual work have strong dreams and imaginations. Yet fear and ego often shut the door on them, reminding us “you have to be PRACTICAL!”
But our dreams and imagination hold the seeds for what is possible in our spiritual work.
So I encourage you to keep the door of imagination open for your work in this new year.
How do we do this?
FELT PRESENCE & BODY WISDOM
It’s important that we hold dreams lightly. If we get overly attached to them, they get distorted by the needs of our ego. One of the ways that we hold them lightly is through grounding in our body.
Dreaming by itself can be flighty and mercurial. On the other hand, the body is a grounding source of wisdom. It’s earthy and it contains a certain truth detector. We know we are tapped into body wisdom when we experience ourselves as having a Felt Presence in the daily flow of our lives.
This Felt Presence often holds insightful hunches or intuitions, and we can access these through a subtle, deep calm and quiet. This space is often referred to as contemplative listening. The key here is that the information is coming more from bottom-up sensations than from top-down thoughts. Rather than trying to push our way into the imaginal storehouse, we wait peacefully at the door until it opens of it’s own accord.
Once the door opens, then the work is to take the dreams that emerge and hold them lightly, within this place of Felt Presence. Our minds are often tempted to grip on tightly here, and get carried off with the fantasy aspect of what we’ve just imagined. Instead we have focus on carrying our dreams in our bodies. Moving this yearning into the body center is not about throwing a wet blanket on our dreams. It’s about refining our dreams in a way that is aligned with our deepest knowing.
PLANNING
Once we feel in our bodies that the dream aligns with our deep knowing, only then do we go into the head and do some planning. The mind is a really good at planning. It likes dates, numbers, practicalities. In their proper place, these can help the seeds of our dreams flower. But this order of operations is really important, and too often we start with the mind, quickly degenerating into anxiety. Without connecting our dreams to our Felt Presence, the planning process is likely to go awry.
So, I encourage you to dream and imagine, to ground into the Felt Presence of your body wisdom, and then do some wise planning.
This is how, in this year and years to come, you can be a midwife of Spirit, in a world that needs your help.
Shoutout of appreciation to Mark Silver at The Heart of Business for planting the seed for this blog!