Group: Yule, dreams
Dec. 19th, 2001 02:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattlistenerWent to my group this evening. "My group" is 5 people and myself who are experienced in the field of client-centered therapy, all sharing and listening and together living the values of our approach. We've been meeting biweekly for almost a year now, and the level of trust people have for the group has gone up a lot. Every night something major happens for someone.
I spoke of my experience at Yule this weekend. I realized that my experience won't be quite done until I call my family and ask how it was for them, especially Amelia. Long-term, I'm hoping she'll be able to come to Rites of Spring with Brandi and I (a three-day event in the Berkshires). I really enjoy being able to open the door to the community of pagans for her, and hope for more connection with her as well.
My fellow group members drew me out on the details of the ritual, which was nice -- I tend to report the undercurrents and personal meanings and leave out too many details of what was said and done for my audience to understand it. One of them especially values hearing about my experiences in paganism, and says she gets a bit of the experience in herself just from hearing it. I've shared information about events with her and encouraged her to come, but she's been neutral to the information, so I've been careful not to push it overmuch.
At another point in the evening two of them were talking about transformative dreams they'd had, and a third eventually responded with how he's always been attracted to the dream world since he knows how powerful it can be, but himself rarely remembers dreams, nor gets much meaning from them when he does. That spurred me to share with him something I learned this Fall at Twilight Covening. I'd joined "Dolphin Clan" for that event, which focused on dreams, for similar reasons -- dreams are attractive to me as a source of wisdom and transformation, but aren't currently an important part of my life. After the first 24 hours, I realized I wasn't going to get more than I'd gotten at that point from my work with the clan, because the work really presumed that dreams were already an important part of your life, and I didn't have good material to bring to the exercises they were doing. I was able to change to "Crane Clan" which was learning Chi Gung and was able to jump right in.
In processing my experience with Crane Clan later, I realized that I already have in my life much of the kind of experience they were talking about being in dreams. I *daydream* -- not in a disciplined way, but in a more than idle way. From time to time I find myself letting my mind play out ideas or scenarios or images without deliberate or conscious direction, and my unconscious gets to take the reins for quite a while. Often I get new information or emotional shifts from these kinds of experiences. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember and have gradually gotten deeper with it somehow.
Realizing this, I feel less left out of the "transformative dream" party -- and my fellow group member took similar heart from it. Further, i realized on sharing this that my frustrations with meditation are probably related. I've tried a few times to cultivate a practice of meditation in my life, and dropped it out of frustration and not-feeling-right. The discipline I was trying to practice involved being aware of my body and empty-minded, and when thoughts came, *noticing* them, and letting them go. I think now that my mind was starting to do what it needed to do with the quiet time, and the idea I was trying to meditate was getting in the way of some very useful daydreaming!
I spoke of my experience at Yule this weekend. I realized that my experience won't be quite done until I call my family and ask how it was for them, especially Amelia. Long-term, I'm hoping she'll be able to come to Rites of Spring with Brandi and I (a three-day event in the Berkshires). I really enjoy being able to open the door to the community of pagans for her, and hope for more connection with her as well.
My fellow group members drew me out on the details of the ritual, which was nice -- I tend to report the undercurrents and personal meanings and leave out too many details of what was said and done for my audience to understand it. One of them especially values hearing about my experiences in paganism, and says she gets a bit of the experience in herself just from hearing it. I've shared information about events with her and encouraged her to come, but she's been neutral to the information, so I've been careful not to push it overmuch.
At another point in the evening two of them were talking about transformative dreams they'd had, and a third eventually responded with how he's always been attracted to the dream world since he knows how powerful it can be, but himself rarely remembers dreams, nor gets much meaning from them when he does. That spurred me to share with him something I learned this Fall at Twilight Covening. I'd joined "Dolphin Clan" for that event, which focused on dreams, for similar reasons -- dreams are attractive to me as a source of wisdom and transformation, but aren't currently an important part of my life. After the first 24 hours, I realized I wasn't going to get more than I'd gotten at that point from my work with the clan, because the work really presumed that dreams were already an important part of your life, and I didn't have good material to bring to the exercises they were doing. I was able to change to "Crane Clan" which was learning Chi Gung and was able to jump right in.
In processing my experience with Crane Clan later, I realized that I already have in my life much of the kind of experience they were talking about being in dreams. I *daydream* -- not in a disciplined way, but in a more than idle way. From time to time I find myself letting my mind play out ideas or scenarios or images without deliberate or conscious direction, and my unconscious gets to take the reins for quite a while. Often I get new information or emotional shifts from these kinds of experiences. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember and have gradually gotten deeper with it somehow.
Realizing this, I feel less left out of the "transformative dream" party -- and my fellow group member took similar heart from it. Further, i realized on sharing this that my frustrations with meditation are probably related. I've tried a few times to cultivate a practice of meditation in my life, and dropped it out of frustration and not-feeling-right. The discipline I was trying to practice involved being aware of my body and empty-minded, and when thoughts came, *noticing* them, and letting them go. I think now that my mind was starting to do what it needed to do with the quiet time, and the idea I was trying to meditate was getting in the way of some very useful daydreaming!
