Friday, 8 March 2013

Collaborative Dream Activism

What's so amazing about Dream Activism?

Anyone can do it
Has powerful impact
Practical application generates an unconventional activism
 
You may have heard people like Dr. Bruce Lipton say "Heal yourself heal the planet." Let’s face it healing ourselves is a gargantuan task! Humans may have advanced like gangbusters on the science and technological front, yet on the emotional and spiritual growth fronts, we find ourselves sitting squarely at the early adolescent phase. Healing and growth is definitely in order – but how?
Here’s what I believe: working with your dreams is one of the most basic, personal, inexpensive, powerful types of activism you can engage in. Dreams reveal all manner of unknown-knowing, emotions, perceptions, attitudes and patterns of behavior that need our conscious attention. Working with our dreams heals us at the personal level.

Now here’s the key. Each of our efforts to heal ourselves at our individual level is something ONLY the individual can do. I can’t do it for you and you can’t do it for me, yet it has to be done to heal the planet. When we heal ourselves, we powerfully change the initiating fractal of EVERYTHING in our world.

Let me go one step further tell you what else I believe: dream activism can lead us to discern practical actions that will facilitate the healing of relationships with people, land, money, the past, the future, the good, the bad, AND the ugly. But to do all that we first must begin to learn the language our dreams speak and get the conversation underway between ourselves and whatever you call the Universe or Source.

I’ll tell you how I know all this. Well that and how I came to work on a Facebook page with a wonderful tribe of people we call Collaborative Dream Activists, and why I invite you to get acquainted, maybe even come work with us. But first, let me share a dream I had this week.   

I’m somewhere that I have figured out that global warming has caused all the ice to melt in the world’s oceans. Where the surface of the ice used to reflect the heat back out into the atmosphere, now the water is absorbing that heat, causing climate change that threatens the entire Earth and her inhabitants.

Suddenly I have this awareness that if I tie a solar panel reflector to my back, I can reflect a tiny bit of the sun’s light back out into the atmosphere. Further, if all of us tie a solar panel to our back, we collectively will reflect out the heat that is endangering us all. 

The dream seems to end where I see an infinite winding path packed with humans carrying these solar reflectors on their backs. Together we are leveraging the very thing that factored greatly into getting us into this mess – ourselves - to individually do the very work the ice can no longer do for us. As the line extends beyond my vision, I can see that our efforts are effective. In the process of individually addressing the challenge, we save ourselves and the planet.
This dream segment is one of many I am guided to working with as I heal a major theme of fear and helplessness I feel when projecting what humanity’s future looks like without major changes now. The dream shows me making progress as I address the powerlessness I wrestle with in waking life to impact, my individual as well as humanity’s collective, sustainability.
My own exploration of the power of dreaming with intention began in the mid-2000’s. Back then I was battling a pervading sense of powerlessness as I surveyed the potential individual and collective landscapes rolling out in front of me, I was. Personally my economic, marriage, and health landscapes were looking frightfully unsustainable. At the collective level phrases like "corporate social responsibility" and "prioritize people, planet, profit" were well ensconced in the public relations arena, even as government and corporate interests actively undermined all sustainability efforts rumored to stand in the way of the almighty revenue stream.

During that time I had an unexpected business development opportunity fall in my lap. I was to meet with Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at a United States ivy league institution’s graduate school of business. The economy had tanked, and I was in dire need of new clients. This providential opportunity seemed like an invitation to solidify a powerful new connection and bring in new clients. My personal economic sustainability could be restored if I could just impress the gentleman I was set to meet eight weeks hence. Voila!

EXCEPT, the drawback was I had not graduated high school, much less college. My fear of being perceived as "unqualified" weighed heavy.  The full story is in the audio interview at this link http://bridge2vision.com/library.html  but suffice to say, this was when I was desperate enough to try something unconventional. A series of synchronicities led me to prepare for my meeting (a practical action) using my dreams, seeded each night by the question "What should I do tomorrow to prepare for this meeting?"

The next eight weeks I began to learn my own language with Source, actively, intentionally tapping into my own unknown-knowing through my dreams. This effort yielded all kinds of "right-brained" data in the form of symbols, synchronicities, and leads that I doggedly followed. 

The talent I had brought to the corporate world was an ability to listen, gather individual awareness and insight, and weave it together into a "sum" that was greater than the parts – the end products would then be used for training, calibrating, communicating, etc. 
About five weeks into my eight week process I had a dream that indicated I was to apply the same approach I used in my corporate work to mindmap, then generate a collective knowing summary. Using all my own dream and synchronicity data bits (ideas, interviews, books, impromptu speaking engagements etc.), I wove together the resulting theory, and prepared a presentation that would show the gentleman I was to meet how I gathered data from disparate sources and generated an end product that communicated a collective understanding.

I traveled to my meeting armed with an example of my work as well as the theory that this process had taught me. It wasn’t a rocket science theory, some people already understood my new awareness, I just now knew it for myself, having learned it in this unconventional way.

 My dream-generated theory articulated I am/you are the basic building block to global sustainability - ergo global sustainability begins with discovering our own personal sustainability. Like they say, heal yourself, heal the planet. 
My theory also gave me some strong awareness around how to recover personal sustainability.

In a nutshell working with my dreams showed me the path to our personal sustainability picks up the pace when an individual hits a rubber-meets-the-road experience that takes us lower than we have ever been and from which we have no idea how to recover. In desperation we finally abandon familiar patterns that no longer work and try something unconventional, like using dreams and synchronicity, to reveal practical action that will help recover our personal sustainability. 

Following the dream data I learned the "unconventional" approach involves turning to our right brain, intuition, Spirit or Source, or the Divine, whatever you call it, to tap into the infinite creative source. It is there we discover infinite love, healing and ultimately articulate our soul’s purpose to ourselves. Whatever right brain way you do it, painting, music, dancing, stand-up comedy, dreaming, environmental restoration projects, needlepoint, writing, etc. - the collaboration with creative source will heal you, provide insight, and allow you to trust that within the vast creative source you will always find answers you need to sustain whatever part of yourself is endangered. 
From personal experience, I know this process reveals time and again that each of us has access to a bandwidth of wisdom and creativity that awaits our engagement.

Others have said this before me, but now I KNOW from personal experience: to heal the planet, first we have to heal individually, then heal each other, then in our healed, loving and expansive state we will collectively create and innovate our way through the challenge of healing the planet - otherwise known as global sustainability.

All of which brings me back to the Collaborative Dream Activist group. In the way I used right-brained activities like dreaming and synchronicity to tap my own unknown–knowing, this group does the same. Then we collaborate using the power of our combined left-brains to discern the practical action our "right-brain data" infers.


There are a few differences of course: The first is the intention statement we go to sleep with: 

"I am grateful to be living in a Multiverse filled with peace, harmony, and balance for all sentient beings" 

Secondly, moving out of isolation, we work collaboratively to strengthen our personal understanding of our individual language with the Universe. As individuals are inspired to post a dream they had, members consider the imagery represented and if inspired, share what the imagery means to them, what questions it calls for them to answer. Eventually we weave it all together and discern what practical action could be taken. The more we engage in this conversation with the Universe, the more we understand our personal language, and now in this group – our "tribe’s language accent." From there we generate an understanding of the practical action the Universe is calling for us to do in support of the group’s stated intention.

Unconventional? Yes. 
Results Oriented? Yes. 


Open to anyone inspired to hold our intention, dream, and collaborate from anywhere in the world? Yes.

This tribe has been convening for just a few short months, but the insight and synchronicities between us is nothing we could have strategized. Inspired to come check it out? Get your Unconventional Activist self over to Facebook and search on Collaborative Dream Activists. Join. Activate your contribution to healing the planet.

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