Dreaming a new dream
I was sorry to hear about yet more mass shootings in America earlier this week, and reference made to this becoming an ‘American tradition’ quite in contrast to the notion of the American dream.
Strangely I was reading about that the American dream the same night I heard about the shootings, but in the context of drugs and poverty and how this notion of the ‘American dream’ leads to disharmony for so many because there is this notion of this ideal that people are fed as a reality, and yet many never attain it due to a combination of factors including socio-economic conditions and cultural/ethic and racial discrimination.
This then leads to feelings of discontentment and frustration, of never being able to make it, which feeds all sorts of neurosis and can, in theory, lead to numbing out in all its many vices from illegal and legal drugs to excess food and other destructive activities/tendencies, let alone the anxiety, depression, resentment and hopelessness it creates. And of course the need to go and shoot people.
But let’s face it, how real is the American dream anyway. Sure, there is this notion of it, and people try their hardest to manifest it, but even they appear to be living the dream – thinking celebs here – it comes at a cost to their mental wellbeing or relationships status, highlighting that you can’t always have it all. Yet in the West we are continuously fed the notion by media that you can, that it is a reality if only this or that happens.
As a humanity we really do need to change the narrative, to shift the collective consciousness around this concept of ‘reality’. Reality is what we make it, it is a projection of the way we think. The more we buy into the conditioned idea of what life is about, the more we feed the illusion of what is reality. But it’s no easy feat to change the way we think and to open our mind to greater possibilities because we are always up against the depths of our conditioning.
I have been stumbling up against my own conditioning these last nine months as my heart has demanded that I make changes, that cause my life to be lived less traditionally or main stream, les goal orientated and achievement based. It’s not easy! Not because of anyone else and their opinions and judgements (although that did used to concern me a lot, which is silly, to limit ourselves because of our fear of what others think about us, when we know that thoughts and opinions change like the wind), but because of my own mind that says, “hang on a minute what about this or that, about the way you’re supposed to be living to feel secure, fulfilled and like there is a point to your existence”.
This because my mind’s been taught to see the world a certain way and to open it to other options can, at times, be frankly terrifying. But I’m also aware that there is no choice, not really, not if we are attempting to live consciously and with awareness of the heart and bigger picture. I mean we always have choice, but it becomes uncomfortable when we ignore that part of ourself that knows that life has be to be lived differently, that there are other ways that may be different to the way that we have been trained and taught to see and live within this world necessarily.
We can bumble along convincing ourself that all is fine, that we are happy toeing the line, but there comes a tipping point, the squish then, a moment when we just know that the nudges from our body and heart are trying to tell us something that requires our deeper listening. The deeper listening generally reveals a knowing that’s been bubbling away but we have been ignoring, a deeper knowing of another way, which offers no certainty beyond the moment by moment unfolding, which by its very nature can be both - paradoxically - contained and yet freeing at the very same time.
We’re not taught or encouraged to live moment to moment, always there is a future orientation towards some form of achievement; education, exams, career, professional qualifications, certainty, security, mortgage, organising, children, planning, pensions, making things certain. And that’s all good and well. I know how it is to have children and the need to organise, but we can plan our life to the extent that we’re not necessarily even conscious of what we’re doing, of the choices available to us and the decisions we’re making because we do what we do because there is an expectation and a belief about how it should be, based not only on how we’ve been taught to see the world but also how we’ve been taught to think.
Essentially we’re taught that we can have it all if we work hard enough and do what is expected of us. It’s not the American dream per se, but it’s an illusion nonetheless. New age spiritualism doesn’t help with its focus on ‘love and light’ and ‘the dream’ and I’ve had to dig deep into my conditioning around these, because I did buy into new age spiritualism for a good while, and allowed it to shape my mind. What I’ve realised though, is that we cannot have love and light without the shadow and to deny that will only create greater inner disharmony, war then, which will be reflected to us in the outside world, which of course is what we are seeing now.
Furthermore, we prevent our true authenticity being expressed and seen by the world, which has implications, not least in our relationship with ourselves but also with others - people like authenticity, they like knowing the truth of a person. This point was highlighted to me recently when a student mentioned how shocked she was when her spiritual teacher, who promotes herself as love and light, showed anger around something that had happened in the class. The student was struggling to come to terms with the humanness of her spiritual teacher, because she had put her on a spiritual pedestal, fed by the spiritual teacher herself, who usually only let her students see the love and light, not her darkness and shadows!
There are many lessons in there of course, it’s a common pattern, we pop our spiritual teachers up on spiritual pedestals, falsely thinking that they’re more evolved and have made greater peace with themselves than we have done, and are lucky to experience a constant state of peace and harmony. Then we realise that these teachers are as human as we are, and are still working through their karma and patterns and we can feel disappointment to the extent that we might reject them.
Later, we will come to realise that the spiritual path is not what we thought it was, that it’s a constant process of letting go and surrendering everything which isn’t our essential self – and that this can be messy and challenging. That it’s not about the external and the image we choose to present to the world, but about the internal and about being our self regardless of the company we keep and the situations we find ourselves in. Essentially it’s about deeper love and compassion and freedom.
The mindset around the dream has been tricky to shift too. I do believe in dreams and our ability to realise them, but I have expanded a huge amount of energy over the years in trying to control the process and turning them into goals, something to achieve, which leads to a constant orientation towards the future and a lack of ability to be truly present to the moment, impatient for the dream to manifest and for life to finally settle and make sense. I realise how I had merely continued feeding my old patterns but under a spiritual guise, still buying into the illusion that life will be better in the future somehow.
Furthermore, in focusing solely on achieving the goal (the dream) I neglected to pay attention to the present moment and frequently overlooked the abundance in it, not being grateful for what I had, simply because of my emphasis on what I didn’t have - my mind had been trained to always want more, accomplish more, experience more, achieve me, be more, desire more, more, more, more, more!
I remember clearly after having Elijah, which had been a dream for so long, feeling almost empty because I didn't know what my dream was now. It was much the same after publishing my first book, while I was jubilant in making that dream come true, but the feeling quickly passed, my life carried on as it had done previously, and I tried to work out what my next dream might be, so that I could shift my focus to that instead rather than face the emptiness of just being OK with the moment and its emptiness.
I realise now how much I have used ‘dreams’ as a way to distract myself from my current reality because of the lack of alignment and balance in it. It took me an awfully long time to realise my patterning – that when life got tough and desperately uncomfortable, that I would throw myself into my work and into manifesting the dream so I could pretend that whatever was happening wasn’t happening. In the process I kind of numbed myself from the actual reality, rather than facing it head on and doing something about it, or even just acknowledging it.
Over time I have come to realise that we don’t need to force our dreams to come true, that we just have to follow our heart and all that this reveals to us moment to moment. Furthermore, the dream is never as we imagine it to be and always there is a sacrifice that needs to be made. These have been difficult decisions for me to learn as there is a certain trust and faith that is demanded and a continuous letting go of trying to control outcome and making things the way we think they should look like.
I have also noticed that sometimes things just happen, those moments that we could never imagine, that change the course of our life and its future direction. They don’t look like the dream as we imagined it, but they will likely lead us there in a convoluted and strange way that doesn’t follow a path that has been lived previously, that is unknown and uncertain and likely turns our world completely upside down. We need to be aware of what we are wishing for and the dream we would like to live!
For example, a chance encounter in a dolmen at sunrise back on the spring equinox in 2021 changed my life in immeasurable ways, it wasn’t something I could ever have imagined and while I had no idea at the time, it fed a dream that I had previously given up on in my quest to control things, that has become clearer since then so I am now aware how much the universe was prodding me and providing the opportunity, even though it didn’t make any sense for a good year or so, and brought with it many lessons including one of sacrifice, trust, faith, cosmic joke and going with the flow.
All of this helped me to re-orientate to the present moment in a way that I hadn’t previously. It is a constant awareness and work in progress however, because living in the present is not easy when society is conditioned towards a future orientation. As a company secretary much of my professional life was about organising future events and my mind easily falls into this patterning as it is comfortable and known, and I notice how I do this when I am particularly stressed or feeling insecure about how life is unfolding, and want some certainty - I’ll plan something!
I also started playing around with the idea of not having a dream or a future orientation and found it initially uncomfortable, as if my life was then purposeless, and my big thing has always been about living a life of purpose. I started realising how much that idea too is also an illusion, a mind game. Is it not enough to simply be alive? Is that not purposeful in itself? Just by playing a role in the balance of things, of breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out?
It was a helpful enquiry and shifted my perspective and awareness and there was greater recognition of all I have and gratitude for the abundance and joy in my life NOW. This was brought home to me one morning recently, when I was walking back up the cliffs after swimming at the naturist beach below, and just realising that I have everything in my life that I ever wanted or needed and that the moment itself is the dream in reality and while it demanded a sacrifice, the sacrifice was worth it for the shift in perspective that allowed me to see the joy of the moment.
This helped me to realise that the dream is often about a state of being, of what is happening on the inside, rather than how it looks externally. Ultimately it is about harmony; living in harmony with ourselves and living in harmony with others. When we set up a false notion of reality, like the whole idea of ‘the American dream’ then we can easily fall out of harmony with our heart and soul – our essence then - because we try to live in a way that has been sold to us as being ‘the way’ but isn’t necessarily the way for us individually.
We all have our different ways and they certainly don’t look the same. Yet often we end up following the trend, believing it will give us all we seek, as it has been sold to us as the way that we all need, just look at the way the trend has moved from say smoothies and yoga to cacao and shamanism. Somewhere along the way we have to accept our reality and the chaos and messiness within it and do our best with the choices available to us.
Over time the need for props drops away too, we realise we all the crystals in the world won’t make us happy, any more than the most expensive all singing and all dancing yoga mat (still flummoxes me how there can be so many yoga mat choices on the market and so many that are so ridiculously expensive, you don’t even need a mat to practice yoga!). That really all that is important, is inside of us. And all the props and trends, while helpful at times, become even more of a distraction, certainly when we come attached to them.
Collectively we need to shift the narrative of ‘the dream’. We might not be party to the American dream living here in the UK, but we are party to this notion of having it all, come what may – feeding the power/control/money patriarchal paradigm. We need to realise that this approach to living on planet earth is not sustainable and doesn’t provide us with the peace and harmony that we seek, that all is does is keep us trapped in an illusion of always needing more and this being about the outside, not what is within.
It seems to me that the universe is prodding us to make changes, that the escalating food and fuel prices are asking us to evaluate our priorities and reflect on the way that we are living and indeed thinking, and taking note of what is essential and what is not - what actually fills us up and what doesn’t, what helps us to experience greater harmony and what doesn’t, what allows us to feel more positive and what doesn’t, what helps us be a better version of ourselves and what doesn’t, what allows us to be in true presence, and what distracts us from this, from our being.
Furthermore, it feels as if we are being encouraged to live a simpler life, the kind of life that so many enjoyed during the pandemic lock-downs that talks of greater freedom despite the containment (again the paradox). Much of this is mental, in so much as
Ultimately though I have a sense that it is time that we started dreaming the dream for the entire planet, that talks of love and freedom and contentment. That encourages us to live lightly and respectfully on this earth, with greater harmony and settling more fully into the reality of being – and being our true selves beyond the mind games that keep us feeding into more of the illusion. Once again this asks that we make a sacrifice, but hopefully the sacrifice is worth making, the cost of not making it will only lead to more disharmony and war and more people suffering.
Happy end of week.
Love Emma x
