Dreams For Peace

Posted on December 26, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Unleashing Greater Love by Processing Hurt and Anger

Love is a very powerful invisible capacity that is potentially available to every human being on the planet (and probably in other star systems as well). It allows us to be attracted to what we are doing, to other humans, and to every living and non-living organism. When the force of attraction is present and activated, love has the ability to allow us to be so fully engaged that time seems to disappear. It gives us that positive insanity that allows to be carried away into unfamiliar spaces.

Attraction in the current materialistically focused world seems to have become a fixed and limited object. In other realms, like in the dream world, you can be attracted in ways that would seem really far-fetched in the world of time and space and gravity. How many hundreds of dreams I have read or listened to where someone is very happily engaged in a current relationship only to find themselves having sex in a dream with another partner or another gender. Is attraction inflexible? It is fixed? Perhaps not.

When your attraction mechanism has gone a bit awry, there are two negative emotions worth looking into, hurt and anger. You could say that they are almost like contrary siblings both trying to get you to stop being in love or being attracted to worthy pursuits. Both are strong protective impulses and both keep you from your heart’s desire. Rather than waxing on and on about them I am going to try to make the paradigm of change easy so that we can all learn how to deal with them effectively.

While hurt can stand alone without anger accompanying it, it is rare to find anger that is not preceded by some kind of hurt. When you feel enraged, which requires a lot of calming, you can be sure that after the calming of the anger, hurt will come knocking on your door. It is inevitable. Be ready for it. Anger is the doorway to tranquility which is a quality of the mind, whereas hurt is more of a doorway to closeness and intimacy, which are qualities of the heart. Let’s deal with anger first because it is usually the first one that bursts on the scene even though it is the second one felt. For instance, you can experience severe betrayal, which can make your heart feel like it has been ripped out and stomped on repeatedly, but you are more likely to be raging like a burning fire filled with anger as your presenting feeling. If you can stay in hurt without going to anger after something like a betrayal, then you are a very evolved being. Most people cannot.

Anger after hurt allows your ego body to be filled with raging energy so that you can act in protective ways, mostly to create distance from the one causing the pain. Anger takes you far away emotionally and even physically so that the possibility of further hurt does not happen. Anger inflames the mind (literally heats up the mind) and then readies you for a head on fight so that you don’t have to think about getting close to the person who hurt you or the group that hurt you. If it was an authority figure who hurt you in some way, such as a parent or boss or teacher, then your being will tend to fight against anything to do with the concept of a higher power or an inner authority. It will be difficult to allow yourself to be carried away by love’s insanity because the memory of the betrayal with the authority figure keeps you in a state of inflammation and fighting protection. The authority figure should have practiced true closeness, but maybe used dominance instead. So now when the desire for intimacy arises, all you get is anger and inflammation and fighting.

To work with the anger that is present the first step, if the anger comes from abuse of authority, is to make sure you are safe in the real world. If you are not safe, anger will not be the presenting emotion. The presenting emotion will be fear. We won’t deal with that in this post.

The goal in dealing with anger is to cool the mind, and the reason for this step is because you can not use your mind effectively if it is overheated. It just doesn’t think well. A lot of people like to make a lot of public statements in anger towards others like other groups because it gives them the hope of some kind of distance from the source of the anger, like a terrible authority figure. The problem is that no matter how much anger you have toward others, the thing that kills you inside is the hurt. You can keep the people who hurt far away, which may be the wise thing to do, but as long as you do not deal with the hurt, you will never be able to experience the insanity of love.

There are two things that are really difficult about dealing with anger. First is that it is already on the scene throwing punches before you even realize it is there. It is way ahead of you because your calm energies like patience and serenity are underdeveloped. I usually tell my clients that they have to learn how to catch themselves being angry in the first stages of dealing with it, because once you catch it, you can start to learn how to have an amazing energy like patience or calm. Patience is so powerful that I try to practice it everyday especially when I am in traffic. I tell myself that this is a chance to practice patience. Patience is the capacity that takes time out of the equation. The second problem with anger, which is even worse than impatience, is that anger rushes blood to your body and head, makes you feel energized, and if you use it to regain power, becomes a drug. This is where anger can be an addiction. It is really problematic. Even worse is when you think your anger is justified, like you are right. Being attached to being right and holding onto anger takes you down a really dark path.

What the higher mind likes about all things is not be pressured by time. It likes to stay in calmness so that effective solutions and understanding can occur. An inflamed mind is like having no brain. Fortunately I was born with a lot of calmness so I never feel like I need to go to classes that teach meditation or slowing. I have never gotten through more than a couple of pages on books about mindfulness. When it was all the rage, it felt to me like what is the big deal. This stuff is so easy, but I recognize that it is not easy for most people. Calming the mind is the objective of dealing with anger, and every course you can take to deal with it is worth pursuing. Tranquility is like gold.

Once that the anger has been transformed into more tranquility, then it is time to deal with the hurt, which is the doorway to love. The big, huge problem with all hurt is that when you let go of it and enter into the realms of love, you lose a lot of control. This is a good thing, but it can be scary to learn how to trust in love. You can think of love as glue or a web-maker. It is the force that binds everything together, but it is totally out of your control. It is controlled by attraction to other positive energy which it cannot resist.

Unlike anger which is more energizing so that you will fight, hurt takes you inward to a place of loneliness and isolation. When, for instance, someone attacks you with criticism that causes hurt, your heart shrinks, your ability to connect goes AWOL, and then you are left stranded on an deserted island. It is pain itself. However, if you can realize that the pain of hurt is the vehicle through which you get to love and closeness, then you can begin to take steps toward its energizing power. If you think of hurt as a shrinking of the heart, love and connection is the expansion of it. I always work with hurt metaphorically. I ask myself and my clients, when it presents it self, what it is like. It can be like being thrown under the bus, stabbed in the back, your heart ripped out, or being dragged through the mud. The end result is pain and loneliness, not being able to connect. Here is the key of all keys when dealing with hurt. Hurt lets you know that you haven’t developed enough in the area of connection and attraction. If you had been more developed, you wouldn’t have experienced the hurt. You would be above it. A lot of the hurt that stunts the connective capacities begins early in childhood in a culture of criticism, abandonment, dominance and abuse, and most of it starts in the home.

The first step in letting go of the hurt is to let go of the negative feelings you have toward the perpetrators of the hurt. It is not easy, but as long as you hold onto negative feelings towards them, it is not going to be possible to connect positively to what you are doing or to other human beings. Forgiveness can be a really long process. While it helps to say it, “I forgive you”, it can just be shallow words or worse yet, forced words. Don’t say them if you don’t mean them. That is hypocrisy. Take your time. Also forgiving someone doesn’t mean that you have to relate to them. Wisdom dictates that if they are not safe, you can set a boundary on your interaction with them.

The next step is to change the negative metaphor into its positive opposite so that your positive being connects with the positive energy in your work and in the positive energy of those around you. For instance, if you were metaphorically thrown under the bus, then, the metaphoric change would be to invite people onto your bus and ride lovingly together with them. If your heart was ripped out, the goal is to feel the connection in your heart between yourself and others. (not necessarily the person who did the ripping because they may not be ready). If you were stabbed in the back by gossip or backbiting, then the goal would be to heap praise on others by finding their positive energy and acknowledging it. Love is experienced in the mind in a textural way, usually softness. You can feel the softness and connect. Changing the metaphor and then feeling the metaphoric energy changes the attraction and then takes you out of loneliness and isolation. The world becomes connected. You start building huge webs.

In sum, deal with your anger and then deal with your hurt and you will have an amazingly rich wonderful experience of life. Remember that attraction is flexible and only becomes rigid when there is a lot of buried hurt.

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Posted on December 11, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

How to Avoid Getting Sucked into the Politics and Religion of Being Against…

It is the afternoon on a normal school day, not that much different than any other day. The 2nd grade classroom is a bit chaotic. We are all a bit out of control probably from having had to sit so long in our learning process. I am playing some form of tag, which is clearly not on the teacher’s lesson plan. It is a nice break for us. Suddenly a large hand grasps the back of neck. It is too big to be a fellow student’s. I am turned forcibly and marched aggressively by the school principal to his office. He is a tall black haired man who is known for his meanness. Everyone in school is frightened by him, and now that I am sitting in his office, I am all the more terrorized. He reminds me of another incident a few weeks earlier in which I accidentally broke the handle of a school gate. Then he opens up his bottom drawer, slowly pulls out a large paddle, which he uses for punishment. There is no discussion, no pleading my case. There is only the paddle and fear. He tells me that the next time I am caught doing something wrong the paddle will be used. I totally believe him. He has absolute congruence. It will take me another decade before I have enough courage to question authority and stop complying to that kind of leader, but today I will do whatever he asks.

For some absurd reason, our culture, maybe the world culture, has a penchant for putting people who are highly critical and mean in places of leadership as if being mean and critical makes you a strong leader. If you can fire a lot of people, it means you are tough enough to do the work. It does have its downside however, as history can attest.

The problem with this kind of leadership style is that it is constantly scanning for what is wrong with others and then attacking it believing that if you get rid of the negative or in the case of religion, the evil, then everything will be great. It becomes very conservative. Solutions to problems are simplistic mostly negative. Creativity and a positive future are seen as enemies. The goal for this type of leader is to always go backwards to a safe place. They are terrified of positive possibilities and completely unable to cooperate with others.

The mistake that those of us who are more possibilities oriented often make when dealing with a leadership style or group that is primarily “against” is to get into a fight with them. We get angered by their actions and then attempt a counter move. We usually lose out because they are so much better at being against than we are and need no logical rationale for staying against. Logic doesn’t work, and being against them publicly makes things worse. They know how to find out what is wrong with you, where you are weak, and then exploit it to their own ends. The first thing we can realize is that their underlying goal is safety. They feel unsafe in the world all the time. People like us who are full of possibilities are a threat to safety because there are too many unknowns when we do something new and different. Equality is a threat to safety, for instance, because it will upset the way things currently are. An unknown future is full of fear of things going wrong.

The leadership style that is actually much more effective than the “against” strategy of my grade school principal combines cooperation, looking for positive possibilities, finding the strengths in others and utilizing those strengths, keeping positive things that are producing good results, and having firm boundaries. “Against” leaders find it extremely challenging to work in a cooperative environment because there are too many unknowns. Unknowns make them feel insecure. It doesn’t take a huge cognitive leap to realize that people with an “against” style have a history of feeling extremely unsafe when they were attempting to be their own unique selves usually when they were children. If you can accept that “against” leaders are trying to protect themselves from feeling unsafe, then you can understand that getting into a conflict or using logic with them does not work. And because they rely so heavily on being against others, they usually end up losing the people who were once closest to them. This is because they cannot cooperate even with the people who are supposed to be their friends. They try to control environments and agendas so that negative doesn’t come to them as it did in childhood.

So we know now that conflict with “against” people sets you up to be trapped because they are never going to be in a “shared space based upon equality” and do not want to allow new possibilities to flourish. It is too dangerous psychologically for them because their own trauma gets stimulated when they go for their areas.

What can we do?

The first and most important step is to feel safe and secure in your own true self. When you are secure in who you are, the “against” people cannot move you in any way. At 7 years old facing off against a big scary principal I had no security in myself at all. No one had even begun to recognize who I was and what my strengths were. As I matured, I began to recognize that I could think for myself, was very adventurous, and had lots of friends. I started to develop a growing confidence in who I was. Then when I faced “against” leadership styles like when I was in the military, I didn’t have the same kind of fear that I had as a 7 year old. I had a lot more choice in dealing with them. When I left the fight with them, remembered who I was, then lots of new and positive doors opened up for me. The positive doors are waiting when we leave the conflict zone.

Be secure in your own self by remembering your strengths, let go of the box you are currently in with “against” leaders/people, and then new doors will open. Believe me when I say that this is sure formula for success.

Where do you feel insecure in yourself? Where is yourself vulnerable? This where we do our inner work. Then the “against” people do not rule over us.

Photo by alexandre saraiva carniato on Pexels.com

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Posted on November 16, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

My Bus Dream with Erika

Erika is my daughter who passed away in January, 2022 from a brain disease. She was 45 years old when she died.

In the dream Erika and I along with some family members are at some kind of fair. There are lots of people around. Instead of being in the state she was in when she was ill, she was healthy and speaking normally, In the dream I said out loud to myself that it seems like maybe she is going to heal. Then I got on a bus, the destination to which I didn’t know. I think that she got on the bus with me. The bus was in a winding mountainous area. In the dream the bus driver took a turn too fast while going downhill. The bus flew off the road, into the air, and over a lake. As it was going over the lake, I started preparing myself for the crash and thinking about what I could do for others, ready for it to go in the lake, but instead of it going in the lake it flew past it and looked like it was going to crash into a cliff or mountainside. Then I knew that it would be much more serious, but instead of crashing, it somehow made it back onto the road, we got the destination with everyone safe. The bus driver was shaken.

With almost any dream there are multiple meanings and multiple ways of seeing things. I am going to mostly look at the dream as extremely positive. The two most positive elements for me were that Erika was healed and that I could remain calm and focused on helping others despite the imminent crash.

I am going to choose to think of Erika in the dream, not as herself, but as the part of me that is like her. There are many things that we shared, but the most significant one is our more intuitive abilities. Her being healed in the dream and me reflecting on it seems to indicate to me that the intuitive part of myself is healed, which went somewhat missing when she died due to grief.

What was positive about the bus ride was that despite the threat of the bus crashing, I was never overcome by fear. I managed to keep focused on helping others. It let me know that despite having a long history of reckless bus drivers, I haven’t lost my abilities. What is a reckless bus driver? A reckless bus driver is an authority figure who doesn’t have everyone’s interests in mind. They only have the goal of getting from point A to point B as fast as they can for their own benefit.

What does this dream tell me I can start doing? Since the intuitive part is healed and I am no longer in intense grief, I can start driving the bus. This means that I can drive my own projects that I couldn’t do when I was in the grief state. I know enough about grief to realize that it is never fully over, but this dream indicates that enough of it has healed to allow me to be in a more up state that is required for driving projects.

What can you take out of the dream that is meaningful for your own life? Since we are all connected in the great web of life, one person’s dream is everyone’s dream. Feel free to comment.

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Posted on October 17, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Dealing with Venomous Snakes (Poisonous People) Who Come into Your Life

This is a difficult subject to write about because most of us have the inclination to do things in the wrong way. If you have had a dream about a venomous snake in the past, this post is definitely for you.

Suppose you have a really great workplace where you are working with a fantastic team of people who are doing all kinds of creative and interesting new work, the place where a lot of us really thrive. Can you feel the energy of it. Then imagine that someone new comes to join the team who is really out of their element, is uncomfortable doing creative work, and can only point out negatives and try to under mind what is happening. Unfortunately this is much more common place than we would like to think. In a more traditional approach the idea would be to find ways to approach the person so that their venomous ways stop. Indeed in some circumstances cutting off the head of the snake is what is needed. I am going to share a different approach.

When a venomous personality comes into your workspace or social space, their focus is on finding the negative in others and then gradually making the negative more pronounced in others. It is deadly to the group because it stops the creative juices from flowing, which is the snake’s intention. The snake is uncomfortable with creative environments so its intention is to stop the creative flow. If you are a part of the creative team that has been productive, then you will recognize the snake when it enters the group. It will create a negative feeling of discomfort inside and then you will want to do something to alter the snake, usually in form of trying to get them to be more like the group. It will always fail. The snakes are too clever to stop their venomous ways by being talked to.

The key to dealing with snake starts with recognizing your own emotional state. Usually it will be some kind of annoyance or even full blown anger with a lot of frustration. As soon as you feel the annoyance inside it lets you know that the venomous person has already put their poison in you. Your system is already affected, and when you are affected, the tendency is to strike back with negative recommendations to them to stop doing what they are doing. This is what they feed off of. Don’t do it.

The first step is to deal with your anger, annoyance. Feel it and then see how it drives your ineffective actions. The next step is to understand what the anger or annoyance is calling you to a capacity which you have not yet fully developed. It calls you to patience and calm. Patience and calm allows you to detach from the poison by recognizing it, but being unaffected by it. When you have the desired state of calmness, then the snake is in big trouble. Instead of trying to get the snake to stop the poisonous behavior, the goal is to listen to the person’s difficulty with becoming a creative teammate. Being creative will be a frightening experience for them that will bring up trauma from the past. The venomous behavior is there as a protection from having to deal with the past trauma.

Instead of reacting with anger and then trying to get them to stop, the goal is to feel calm and patient and then start reflecting, paraphrasing back what they are saying. Speak extremely slowly and calmly in a listening mode. The goal is help the person access their creative self the way others in the team are doing. Their inner spirit want to be more creative. They are just in over their head at the task at hand. Patience and calm starts to put them into process. The key is to not react to the venom, the negativity. It is just a protective defense.

Sometimes patience and calm do not work well if the person being venomous has authority over others, but for the most part, when you are in an equal relationship, it is extremely powerful.

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Posted on October 12, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Metaphoric Surfing Part 2: Riding the Cutting Edge When the Environment Gets Conservative

Two nights ago I had another wild surfing dream where I was not only surfing waves, but also in all kinds of buildings and stairs. You name it, I was surfing on it. If you read the last post, https://dreamsforpeace.org/2025/09/22/my-surfing-dream-riding-the-way-of-the-cutting-edge/, you will know that surfing is a metaphor for riding the cutting edge of your life, and that the real edge for humanity right now is learning how to relate to other human beings. We are on a wave of new learning that is going to transform everything.

But what happens if you are cutting edge type of person living in an environment of very conservative people who do not want to go out there in the new territory. It can be a scary place especially if the authority figures have dug their heels in about remaining in the past. I have been thrown out of more than one position when I was trying to “surf” in these conditions, but recently I found a key process that has changed everything for me. Here it is. When you go out into the future and see the new things being implemented or achieved, it signifies that the future self already knows how to make it to the goals. It is only your current self that does not. Your current self is incapable of overcoming the conservative leadership or culture, but the spirit of the future self knows what to do. That future self has a voice, and that voice will tell you have to safely navigate the current treacherous waters. Then you can embrace your goals.

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Posted on September 22, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

My Surfing Dream: Riding the Way of the Cutting Edge

So a few nights I had a surfing dream the details were not really that clear to me other than I was with my best friend growing up, we were at beach that was like the beaches of my childhood in southern California, and I loved being in the water waiting for the next wave. The dream was entirely positive.

Surfing is a metaphor for being on the cutting edge because it is where the world of the spirit, the ocean in this case, meets the material world. It is where positive ideas make there way into real-like applications. For the last couple of decades the cutting edge in the culture seems to have been centered in the world of technology. To be cutting edge has meant to be involved in the high tech world. But in this dream I am with my best friend growing up, which tells me that the new cutting edge is not in the high tech world like artificial intelligence or robotics. The cutting edge is in the area of human relationships, in the ability to get close to others. I am pretty sure that the Microsoft founder believed that technology was going to save the world, but it hasn’t. The new cutting edge is in the world of emotions and relating to others. Obviously when we get close to others and love each other as a planet, we will be “saved”. That is common sense.

Although closeness involves many capacities that are far more intricate than a computer chip, there are two that are good starting points. The first is the ability to see the positive in others and acknowledge them. It is fairly straightforward, but as most of the world has grown up in cultures that are focused on criticism and pointing out the negative, the ability to acknowledge positives can seem a bit strange when first starting to do it. It is also easier, for instance, if you are a politician, to point out the negatives in the other side, and for people to accept that the negative words spoken with conviction, can make it seem like the other guys are evil. When you begin to acknowledge the positive in another human being, like your children or your spouse, then an invisible connection happens. The doors of the positive energy open, and then you can more easily work together to achieve what you set out to do. When the focus is on the negative, when people are the enemies, there is very little cooperation.

For most people when they think back to who there favorite teacher was growing it or the best work environment, it was the teacher, leader who saw the best in them and then encouraged and demanded the best. The time periods when we are the least productive, and research bears this out, is when we are criticized and berated constantly. It turns out that far more is achieved when one’s positives are acknowledged. So the first cutting edge principle in human relations, seeing and acknowledging the positive, turns out to be very highly productive.

The second capacity for closeness, which requires a much higher degree of ability, is that of being able to sit with another person’s worst pain and then listen non-judgmentally. It requires many virtues like patience and calm, and it also rests on the belief that when people can be truthful about what is actually happening to them, they can begin to move past the pain. Pain sitting inside, unexpressed, leads to a lot of negative behavior. We are no longer living in a world where toughing it out works. It destroys families. I wish that I could go on further in the post about this ability. It is amazingly powerful. When judgement is taking out of the equation, the flourishing begins.

When we lost our daughter to a brain illness a few years ago, the pain and grief was indescribable. I am not sure that anything compares to it. What helped me the most is when others gave me the space to have my grief. I knew that I was going to be in a lot of grief for a long time and it would take time. Being non- judgmental with myself about how long it would take rather then burying it and trying to tough it out, helped the process, which still goes on, immensely. We can listen to each other’s pain and not rush their process for our own selfish reasons.

What is the barrier to closeness?

The biggest obstacle in the way of implementing the first two abilities is jealousy. If jealousy were to disappear overnight, the world would be a much more peaceful and harmonious place. Jealousy is the negative emotion that tries to protect and increase whatever unfair advantage you have. When jealousy strikes in your life, it is because you used to have an advantage, a place higher up the “ladder”, and now it is either being threatened or taken over completely. The destructive part of jealousy is that it makes you want to eliminate the threat, to pull back to a time when you were on top. Your mind goes into an “against them” mode where people are seen as enemies, rather than friends. Jealousy makes cooperation nearly impossible because it is very difficult to be in a process where things can be mutually beneficial if you see others as enemies. You pull in and protect, and commit negative actions towards others beginning with vicious criticism.

The first step in dealing with jealousy is to see ourselves as our own worst enemies, and then to let go of seeing others as evil. It can be a long difficult process. When love replaces jealousy, then the thriving really begins.

What is your jealousy? What advantage are you holding onto so that you don’t have to see the positive in others and work together?

How would your life change if you could be closer to everyone on the planet?

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Posted on July 31, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

On the Capacity to Take Initiative

In July of 1998 my wife and I left the safety of North American living to start a new adventure living Brazil. There is nothing that really prepares you for arriving in a place where your language, which you are so competent in, has no value in day to day living. When we arrived in Brasilia, I did what I normally do in a new city, at least back then, which was to go out for a run to explore the city. 1998 is still pre GPS. There are no Google Maps. I am relatively good at remembering landmarks, but on the first day in Brasilia, a city that has no street names and where the apartment blocks all look the same, it wasn’t long before it got dark and I was totally lost. It is scary being in a place where you cannot speak the language and you have no idea where you are. Finally I saw a place that looked like a police station (really it was a station for battered women). I went in trying to say I was lost, but saying something like forgive me. I got some pretty strange looks. It took about an hour to find the telephone number of my supervisor who eventually came to rescue me from the ordeal. Welcome to adventure! Some other time I will write about being lost in Cambodia.

There is only really one virtue that helps us when we are facing that amount of newness. It is the virtue of taking initiative, the courage to dive into new waters over and over and over again. Without initiative our lives are pretty much stagnated into the rut of expecting someone else to provide for us, to save us. Having the ability to take initiative opens doors. It makes things happen, but on the path towards learning how to dive in, there are several internal enemies that we all sooner or later face. The biggest one is fear, but shame is also a formidable foe that rears its head. Embarrassment also keeps us back. Diving in requires having a vision of a positive possibility, setting aside the negatives, and then making the plunge. When we sit on the water’s edge in hesitation, something we all do, contemplating whether or not to dive in to the positive space, it is because our beings are being held back by one of the big three, fear, shame, or embarrassment.

Fear

Much of what we fear in taking initiative has to do with failure, in performing poorly, or being in last place. If, for instance, the fear of failing or being in last place strikes us, it is because it has already happened. We have already tried and already performed poorly. The mind remembers the failure, protects more failure into the future, and then we sit on the shore, which means that we sit in our fear and hesitate. The problem with holding the memory of having done poorly, of being in last place, is that it keeps us from doing the thing that will bring success, diving in and then diving in again and again. When I entered the battered women’s station in Brasilia, I was in last place in terms of competency in the language. Two year olds were much more accomplished. Diving is not the only thing that makes us successful in learning a new language, but it ensures that we will be in the middle of the action, in this case. Lots of mistakes happen in learning something new. It is a requirement. Hesitation slows down the achievement.

Shame

Shame is an attack on a person’s true self, their true identity or character. When our inner spiritual selves are attacked repeatedly, then we feel shame which distorts our self image. Instead of being big and full of life, for instance, we become small and listless. We engage in coping behaviors to survive instead of doing positive initiatives that come from our true beings. It often comes from repeated humiliation in the form of constant criticism or violence or sexual abuse. The goal of the person doing the attacks is to actually make us less than, smaller than, even invisible. If we feel like we are invisible in our life, it is because of shame. When we dive into new things easily is comes from a healthy sense of who we are and what we are capable of. We see yourself as positive beings. Then taking initiative is easy.

Letting go of shame is not necessarily an easy process and often requires a lot of help. What is helpful is having the fundamental belief that who we are as human beings is positive, full of unlimited capacities.

Embarrassment

Whereas shame is an attack on the self and identity, embarrassment is an attack on one’s enthusiasm or up energy. It keeps us from being enthusiastic about diving in. It often comes in the form of put downs or being laughed at in public for what happened to us. When people laugh at us or put us down for a mistake or poor performance, our tendency is to want to hide away and keep our up energy down. Enthusiasm makes us more visible in public. When embarrassment strikes, it is hard to feel up and then full dive in or engage. It makes it harder to be in a public place where learning or action might take place.

Letting go of embarrassment requires turning off the memory of the negative voices of others. Diving in is facilitated by replacing the negative voices with positive ones inside. Then enthusiasm can appear like a bright shining day. It is like having your mind full of positive cheerleaders.

Jealousy

Jealousy is not an obstacle to taking initiative, but it is the motivation behind others trying to inhibit initiative. Jealousy in the person doing the attacks arises when they feel that someone’s positive initiative threatens their position or material advantage. It happens because the jealous person has not developed the ability to be close to others, to be spiritually intimate. Instead of having a large part of their up feelings come from closeness, they rely on position and material advantage to make them feel up. Jealousy happens because they are always feeling threatened that someone who takes initiative is going to take their position.

Dealing with jealous people is akin to dealing with a venomous snake. We have an advantage, for instance, with dealing with jealous leaders who feel threatened all the time, when we have already developed love and closeness with other human beings or with the environment. It is what they do not have. In previous generations jealous leaders had much more of an advantage, especially in cultures that were authoritarian or patriarchal in nature. In the current world the ability to take initiative is much more universal especially with the advent of worldwide instant communication. Our systems are much more decentralized. One person or one central government trying to control everything doesn’t work because it doesn’t take advantage of the virtue of initiative.

How would more initiative help your life today? Can you see yourself taking beginning steps to let go of fear, shame, or embarrassment? Let’s all dive in.

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Posted on May 3, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

The Nightmare That Won’t Go Away by Trying to Live in the Imagined Glorious Past

Most of us have been affected emotionally over the past several months from the political ideologies that want to take their countries backwards to an imagined time when everything was so great and glorious. We who work in this field of helping people move forward in our lives just kind of shake our heads and say, WHAT!!!!!!!! That is because the people we work with on a daily basis have such a difficult time getting detached from the past that was such a nightmare for them. For most people that past wasn’t really that fantastic. The illusion that the past was greater than it was arises from the practice of burying past nightmares, the forgetting of the negative by blowing up what was perceived as positive.

The problem with buried nightmares and falsely imagined glorious pasts is that they tend to make us fearful and then protective from outside forces. Instead of engaging fully in the world, we make practices in ourselves that lock us away. We all have it. We all do it. In the larger outer political world we see it being played out by politicos who have unresolved childhood family issues. Literally they are trying to protect themselves from the family that they grew up in, and so are we.

The nightmares show up in the dream world as well as the outer world, but if you are good at burying negative memories, which highly traumatized people are, then you might not remember any of your dreams. It is a protective mechanism that tries to keep us safe. It is a tariff that the ego mind uses so that we can forget what happened. Furthermore it makes an illusion of what the positive was like, and how much more evolved the past generation was, that the current generation has it so easy and expects everything to come easily.

The fact of the matter is that most households were authoritarian nightmares. Most families lacked true intimacy and closeness. We have just allowed some of our leaders, who have had the same nightmares, to think that they are going to protect us from the next boogie man. Is is NOT going to happen because it is a failed strategy. What it will do, like what is happened in Vietnam and now in other wars that go on endlessly, is to keep the collective world in a long nightmare, until we learn what we are supposed to learn, which was the same thing that we were supposed to learn in our families, closeness and cooperation.

If you have had an inkling of intimacy growing up, then the transformation process to the new world of working together cooperatively is going to be a much easier process for you, but no one has it that easy. This is all new stuff. We are collectively going to a new world, and it takes a lot of inner work. Throwing people out of the house is very temporary. The nightmare inside of being abused or neglected does not go away from protective measures. It goes away with a lot of inner work, daily over a long, long period of time.

The first thing we all need is a safe haven to process. Most of us have grown up in cultures where the primary value expounded was to be absolutely tough and stoic under all kinds of duress, what you would expect as a soldier. “Soldier on.” Toughness. Showing any kind of vulnerability was a bully’s paradise. Instead of processing the trauma or pain, we buried it like a soldier in battle who has just lost his closest friend in a fire fight. When I graduated from high school, I went to military academy thinking that what I need was more toughness. I even decided that I wasn’t going to quit because it was too tough. It took me 3 years to realize that what I was really searching for was close relationships, which I ended up making a lot of there. But the journey from being protective to open and honest with yourself about what you really need is not a short road. It is a long, long road and requires a big investment. When we have a safe haven, safe people to process with, then we can move forward into new areas, and for most people that will be about spiritual intimacy.

A safe haven is usually a small group or partner or professional where you can begin to feel like it is OK to feel like you can share the darkness inside without feeling any kind of judgement coming from the group. In that kind of environment you can let go of the false bravado and fear and then gradually move your life forward. If you start getting the relationship right, everything else tends to fall into place. Start small and find safe group. Don’t choose people who tell you what to do. Choose people who listen and support you, and gentle help guide you to your path.

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Posted on April 6, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

The Dynamics of Getting Out of a Funk

So you are finding yourself in an emotional funk. You feel stuck and cannot seem to move forward. Not to worry. I am going to give you some easy steps to get yourself moving again in a positive direction. If you know the principles and can apply them, you can move out of your negative energy and into a more positive state.

Why do we get into funks?

Everyone gets into funks, into negatively being stuck in places that are hard to move out of. No one escapes. It is not unnatural to be in a state that is hard to move out of. It is actually an essential part of life of being a human being. Being a human means that you have an internal impulse to grow and develop new aspects of yourself. It is hard-wired in us to constantly being a process of evolution. So what happens that makes the road to change bumpy? Let’s say that you are a very good manager of an organization in that your organizational abilities, trustworthiness, and responsibility to do tasks are second to known, but you have a problem with risk-taking, with trying out new things, and for your organization to grow it needs some new directions. The first thing you need to know is that the positive qualities that you already have like being organized will always serve you everyday of your life and in your management. You will not get into a funk because of organizational challenges. What gets you into a funk, then? What gets you into a bad emotional state is the inability to take risks because as soon as you have to take them, the first thing to show up is fear, probably fear of making catastrophic errors. When you feel the fear and then your incompetence, that is exactly the moment that the funk happens. You have a great set of abilities, you need a new one, the new makes you afraid, and then you go dysfunctional and into the funk.

The first step in getting out of the funk actually has nothing to do with the fear or the new ability. The first step is to remember all of the positive qualities and abilities that you already possess. Those are the reason that you have been so successful in the past. You need to recall those abilities, feel the positive energy in each one, and continue to use them. They will continue to produce. You do not want to throw out the baby with the bath water because you cannot take risks. I cannot emphasize how important this is. Before you tackle, fear, especially fear engendered by trauma, you need to remember all of your strengths.

I like to have people name their best qualities, then go into their memory using them and actually feel the positive energy. What does it feel like to be organized, to be responsible, to be trustworthy? It will feel awesome. And they will continue to be available.

The first rule in developing a new ability in yourself is take it slower than you think you need to take it. It is like racing a long distance. To be able to finish the race I always had to tell myself to go slower in the beginning. Somewhere in the middle, after taking it easy in the beginning, some kind of really strong energy kicks in, and the finish is faster than expected. If you do development of something new, too fast, too soon, then you will never make it to the finish line of a fully integrated new capability. If you take the example above, where the person was fearful of catastrophic failure, the first thing you need to know, is that the new ability, which is like a baby, is sitting next to big negative energy of past memories of catastrophic failure. If you go in too quickly, then the catastrophic energy will take over. And guess where you will be? In a BIG FUNK. Going slowly in the beginning should be your watchword. You have to be able to get used to the fear without it putting you into a funk.

You will have two energies sitting side by side, the baby energy of taking risks, and the seasoned veteran of catastrophic failures. In the beginning catastrophic failure is much more powerful. It creates huge fear and is capable of throwing you into a bad emotional place. So take it slow, remember your strengths, keep using them and do the work gradually and persistently to develop the new part of yourself. Going slow does not mean backing down. Backing down and not developing risk taking is actually more catastrophic.

If you know the structure of the capacity, then it can gradually replace the negative. For instance, taking risks means that you see a new possibility, focusing on a positive end, a positive outcome, and then you dive into or jump into action. The past memory of catastrophe is going to want to stop you by presenting negative outcomes. So you set the negative outcomes aside and then see the positive and jump into action. At first, it is important to do risk taking whose failure does not matter much. The people who are good at risk taking learn from everything that goes wrong so that they can improve each time. Obviously with high risk behavior you have to take into consideration safety issues and plan for them. You can do something like trying a new recipe for only yourself to eat. Then if it works out, that is great, but if it doesn’t, it is not catastrophic. What makes it easy to increase risk over time is the fact that organizational and responsibility capacities are already in place. So you can take risks in a responsible manner.

I sometimes like to have people write the two energies on separate sides of the same piece of paper so that they can see the energy that ends up in a funk and they can see the energy that is coming online. When new energy is baby like, you want to give it time and space to develop so that it can gradually be integrated into real life activities.

What are your positive qualities? What do they feel like in action? How do they make you successful?

What is the new process that wants to come into being that is like a baby inside? What is it up against? How can you create a safe environment for it to develop?

And when you have had a lot of trauma and it is easily stimulated, you can go for help and accompaniment.

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Posted on March 29, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Being Imaginative Can Enhance the Transformation Process

Last week I was working with a client who has a tendency to imagine that the worst things are going to happen to his family. The images are not based on concrete reality. It is like his mind goes on walkabout trying to think of dark things. He was having thoughts about his sisters dying, And when he had these thoughts, it would paralyze him from doing the goals he set out to do which may be something that happens to you.

Basically your dark imagination has two kinds of origins. The first one is related to actual negative experiences that you have had such as when you have been verbally or physically attacked. This kind of imagination comes because your mind remembers the attacks and then goes to imagining similar things happening in the future. The other kind of negative imagination comes from feeling all alone or abandoned in the world. When you feel alone, the imagination can go on all kinds of expeditions into dark areas without any bounds.

So when I was dealing with my client, I said to myself that he has a really active negative imagination that takes him to inaction, a kind of freezing. The first thing I did was to have him list the activities that he wanted to do more of. He told me that he wanted to play music more, study science, and meet more girls. So I started the process of change by asking him to think of his music instrument as a person and then ask that person what he wanted him to do to improve his music. The musical being told him to practice 3 times a day, and when we did this with the science guy it turned out if he could think of science as playing music, then he could study much more. It was the same for meeting girls. Turning the activity into a person allows the feeling of being all alone to disappear. If your piano is a person speaking to you, you are not alone when you are playing it.

The point here is that the active negative imagination is not the enemy to be switched off. It just needs some help and support in being redirected in a positive manner. A person with a strong negative imagination also potentially has a very strong positive imagination that can be used successfully. Traditionally the teaching profession was governed by the principle that you have to put your nose to the grindstone, which implies that work and study is hard. But what if your math problems were communicating with you or dancing with you. Dance your way through your dishes.

The above example is especially useful when feeling alone is the thing that presents itself. When fear is present, you can use your imagination in all kinds of positive ways. A lot of what happens in your imagination when you have experienced childhood trauma, is that your mind makes the whole world the enemy and makes them huge. Instead of having courage or feeling optimistic, fear makes you go back to feeling like you are a defenseless child.. So one of the things that you can do when the fear is present and it seems like the whole world is against and really big because now you are a defenseless child, is to have a strong imaginary companion with you internally like a soldier. It is absolutely amazing how fast the fear vanishes when you have an internal companion that keeps you from going back to helpless childhood state.

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But that’s not all when it comes to imagination. The next visualization is something I try to do each morning. There are a lot of variations on this theme. So first you decide what is the priority challenge that you need to do for the day. And then you can ask yourself what quality you need to do the challenge. For instance, today my challenge is writing, and the quality I need the most is being in a relaxed flow. When I look ahead to my writing time, I am seeing myself flowing down a river wondering where the writing is taking me. I cannot see the place it is taking me, but I can feel the flow. This helps me to write.

Your imagination is your friend and you can use it. When it goes dark, it has just lost its way. You can use it to get you back on your path. Here are some excellent questions to process.

How does you mind go on a negative walkabout when you are feeling alone in the world?

What kind of voice do your goals use with you to call you in a positive way toward achieving challenging tasks?

What kind of companion do you need inside to keep you from returning to your childhood fearful self?

What kind of animals go along with your positive qualities? Do you have a lion inside, a dolphin, an otter? How would your otter give a presentation?

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Posted on February 26, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

How to Process a Dream that Has Positive with Negative Elements in it

Let’s just imagine that you are having a dream where you are up in the air flying and controlling the flight. When you want to get up off the ground and fly you are able to do this. Then at some point in the dream you start getting shot at and tumble to the ground. If you have read the post that I wrote about positive dreams, then you know that when your dream is only positive, it means that the positive energy that was felt in the dream is also available in real life. It doesn’t mean you can actually fly, but that you can uplift yourself and do things as if you were flying.

When you have a positive dream with negative elements, it means that while the positive energy is available, you are not going to be able to sustain the energy for a long time unless you deal with the issue that is presented in the dream. In the above dream, it is about being shot at. It tells you that when you are flying toward your positive goals in life, that someone is going to try to shoot you down. If you don’t solve the shooting part, your flying days will be over. It turns out that being shot down is a metaphoric way of how people use criticism to try to stop positive action often out of jealousy or fear. So if you can let go of the way criticism affects you, then you can fly endlessly.

Often, when you first have a positive dream, you can immediately put it into practice so that you can feel what the positive energy is like when applied in the real world. But after that, your being is going to want to sustain the energy even when circumstances become trying. It is one thing to be enthusiastic about where you are headed. It is quite another to maintain enthusiasm when a majority of people are against you, which is often the case when you are doing experimental things. New energy is going to be tested. It is how it matures and endures. Facing the difficulties and transforming them allows for having the quality to be permanently fixed within you.

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Posted on February 15, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Creating a Vision for Yourself that is Congruent with Your True Self (Not Your Ego)

During the past couple of months I have been experimenting with various small groups on the ways to create a positive vision. Part of the idea came to me because so many people fail at their New Year’s Resolutions, which are kind of a mini vision to better oneself for the coming year. If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know that the theory of human beings that I subscribe to is that human beings have two natures, one that is rooted in the earth, the material self, also known as the ego, and the other the true self, which is non-material or spiritual in nature. The ego houses what we often call are dark side, our shadow, or physical nature. The material side is not inherently evil or bad. It is concerned with survival and protection. It runs mainly on negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, hurt, envy, and jealousy. It can create all kinds of patterns of behavior that do not serve us well such as being dishonest, theft and greed, brutality, and timidity. The other nature is the true self, which is home to our higher virtues such as compassion, courage, honesty, determination, friendship, and optimism to name a few. It creates patterns that are essentially beneficial for humankind. The relationship between the ego and true self can get extremely complicated, but here I want to keep it simple for everyone.

There are another couple of ways of defining human beings that are problematic in my view. I will describe them briefly. First there is the idea that humans are essentially apes with a larger brain that at some point developed a sophisticated degree of consciousness. The other view is that we are essentially evil in need of saving. With the ape thesis, change or health, is often seen as returning to a state of equilibrium such as when the body is ill with a high fever. The goal is to cool the body back down. So if you were to be fearful or anxious, for instance, the goal is to calm or get rid of the fear so that equilibrium can be restored. If you define humans as evil in need of saving, then, like the ape with a larger brain hypothesis, you end up trying to eliminate the negative such as getting rid of dishonesty or impurity. In both cases the goal is find a place where not much negative exists.

If you have made a New Years resolution to lose weight or stop gossiping or stop smoking, then how you view yourself as human is one of the two in the above paragraph. Most of these fail because change is mostly about addition, not subtraction. In the two natures view of life, negative emotions such as fear or anger are seen as catalysts to more advanced growth, not a force that you have to do away with. They are a form of communication to your being that new growth is needed. This is because the true self is in perpetual hunger for new development, new capacities. It has unlimited potentialities that are yearning to be developed. Something new is always wanting to come out. When you have a fear, it stays until the new growth occurs. Then it leaves. The true self is constantly being thrown out equilibrium, constantly tested, so that it can grow. There is no escape, no resting on your laurels.

When I am having people create a vision for the time period ahead, the first thing I try to get them to do is to remember the positive capacities of what they have already developed. This is because the ego tends to take up so much more space in a person’s mind. The ego is trying to push the agenda by pointing out weaknesses so that the person will survive and be protected. But before you tackle ego issues, it is important to remember the capacities within you that are already bringing success. Where’s your “money”? Your success to this point is founded on positive qualities. The first thing to do is to list the top 5. You can do more, but five will suffice. Maybe you have a lot of self discipline as in you are the person that does all of the exercises that the physiotherapist prescribes. Or maybe you have a lot of creativity always seeing new ways to do things. Or maybe you connect well with everyone you meet. Whatever your abilities are list them.

After you have listed the 5 capacities, take time to go through each one and experience what it is like in your mind to do them. You can do this by remembering times when you performed them. What does it feel like to be friendly, to be courageous, to be honest, to determined? This is an extremely important step. This tells you where your success is, where the “money” is. After finishing this part of the exercise, find at least one or two others who can add to your list. (This is why it is such a good group activity).

Now that you are fully immersed in your positive, successful self, the next step is start by feeling all of your positive qualities and then allowing a vision of what your true self wants to do in the upcoming future to appear. This is not a cognitive, figuring out exercise. It is an allowing exercise. It may come as a metaphor. The last time I did this exercise with a small group, my true self wanted me to learn how to be more “surgical” in how I work with people. It saw me almost like a surgeon, very precise. Since the 5 capacities tell you how you already are successful, the envisioning exercise allows you to know where you are headed with your true self. In my case it is to develop more precision.

It is impossible to do this kind of visioning without doing the steps of finding where you are already successful. If you do it without acknowledging and feeling your positive abilities, you will wander out into an ego vision and get lost there. The true self is by nature the sum of all that you actualized plus the unlimited potential that lies ahead. But it doesn’t like to engage in wishful or vain thinking. It is systematic and sequential. It knows what the next step is for you and wants to take you there. Let it. It is building on the foundation of the past.

Once you have created the visionary step, then you can ask the vision to name some things you can do to reach it. I usually suggest that people name 3 practical things that they can do to move toward the vision.

What made you successful in the past will continue to bear fruit in your life. Do not throw out the old and start over from scratch. Build on what is already there. If you are a leader of an organization, don’t make the mistake that the oligarchs are making. Don’t believe you can throw everything out and make sudden changes. It doesn’t work. Take the time to form a relationship with everyone and find their strengths. Find out what works. Then take the next step in the evolution.

Even if you have hit the very bottom and your life is spinning out of control as in the case with addictions, this principle works. We only add one energy at a time after the positive past has been restored.

Have at it. If you would would like me to work with your group to facilitate this process, I am happy to do a zoom chat with you wherever you are in the world. dreamsforpeace@gmail.com. There are a couple of other interesting things to do when you do it as a group that enhance the process even more. Join the fun.

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Posted on February 13, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

Positive Dreams: How Do You Process Them

Last night I was running with my wife in a park. We had a really nice pace and had a line of animals like geese following us. Then I saw someone who was shot by a gun, at which time, i organized the people around me to get him some help. The overall feeling was positive with very little negative energy. I have had a lot of running dreams lately.

Since my wife doesn’t actually run in real life as a form of exercise, it just shows that “running” in the dream is a metaphor. It stands for being able to do the activities in your life that are related to goals at a good pace without a lot of resistance. The wonderful thing about a positive dream is that it tells you about the energy you need to make your life work bundled in a metaphor. When you embody the energy from the dream and then act as if you have the energy, the magic begins to happen in your life. A positive dream tells you that the energy in the metaphor is now available, so start to use it.

But what if you are married and you find yourself having sex with another woman or man? Does it mean that you should just go out and find the woman or man and have sex with them? Of course not. This is the problem the fundamentalists and a lot of scientists have. They take everything literal and then it gets them in conflict with the world. Sex is a metaphor and so is the other woman or man. Sex is the symbol of intimacy or closeness, and the other person in the dream stands for qualities that you haven’t fully actualized in your life. The dream is saying to embrace or be intimate with the positive quality that the other person has. Maybe they have enthusiasm or courage or calm or strength. When you have a dream like this one, you need a lot of self discipline. You can’t be in a literal mindset even though your body will feel up as if you are ready to have sex. You are being asked to be up with the new quality.

Sometimes what we think of as very dangerous animals like grizzly bears or lions appear in a dream without any fearful energy attached as if the animal is friends with you. This tells you that the quality that the animal represents is available to you to start putting into practice in real life right away. With a bear it would strength, and with a lion it is courage.

What happens if your dream has a lot of positive, but also some negative in it. Many dreams are like this. For instance, a lot of people dream that they are flying wonderfully for awhile then they either crash or get grounded or run our of gas. What this kind of dream tells you is that while the positive energy of being up and going for things is available, to get amazing results you need to address the issue that the negative gives to you in the dream. In the above scenario you might ask yourself how you start flying on a project and then crash emotionally or run out of energy. You get the dream to tell you that you do not have a problem in accessing and embracing the up energy, but if you don’t solve the crashing problem, you are going to crash again in real life. The dream comes before your next crash so that it doesn’t happen. If you solve the crashing problem, then the you will have much more positive “air” time. You will be able to maintain your energy.

The all positive dreams tell you that you are like a child with the new energy. You are free to play with it so that you can learn it and make it a permanent fixture in your life. But just as a child runs into obstacles in learning, you can expect obstacles to appear shortly after the positive dream. Each new obstacle strengthens the energy until one day it becomes part of your identity. Don’t get hung up material identities. Material things come and go like the blink of an eye. Focus on the inner non-material, qualitative identity like creativity or playfulness or strength. Then everything works.

The dreams that we call nightmares, the ones that wake you up terrified, where you were happy that you woke it and that it wasn’t real, require the most amount of skill to work with it. They come because an energy that you were supposed to be developing was blocked by something that happened in the past, usually a traumatic event. When soldiers come back from war and have the same dream repeatedly night after night, it means that the energy that they are supposed to develop in themselves like peacefulness or compassion, is stuck in the memory of the battlefield. When children experience violence in their families, their dream lives are going to be terrifying. What they are supposed to develop, like playfulness, is stuck in the fear of the violence. The difficulty in dealing with the negative dreams is that the mind thinks that the negative is going to happen again, that the conditions are not safe. The work is to get the mind to believe that it is safe to develop the missing quality. It would be wrong to assume that if you are in the middle of a battle again in a dream, that the quality you need is the courage to fight. The qualities that are needed are the ones that caused the fighting in the first place, most likely cooperation and compassion.

When you have nightmares, you know that you are at the beginning of new process of growth, but unlike a positive dream, you have to deal with the trauma in order for it to develop. When there is a feeling of safety, then you can run with it.

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The tendency in the culture is to tell a child or an adult that it is just a nightmare, to try to go back to sleep and forget about it. The reality is that the child’s mind is not going for forget the negative energy that they feel in real life. The best thing that a parent can do is to provide a safe environment where the child is free to be honest with what they are feeling. The same is true of returning soldiers.

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Posted on January 23, 2025 by dreamsforpeace

My Dream of Being in a Big Mess: Moving toward Organization

The dreams that have recurred the most for me in my life are the ones that I had when I was attending the US Air Force Academy, a university to train young people to become officers in the US Air Force. I was there from the age of 18-21. As I have changed over the years, so also has the way the dreams present themselves. The central theme is that I have re-enrolled and am facing a particular problem. In this particular dream I am in my dorm room which is a bit more like an apartment because it has more than one room in it. I have two other roommates. What is unique is that the rooms are really messy, which is uncharacteristic of the way dorm rooms look at a military academy. What I want to do in the dream is relax and rest, but the room is a mess. It is hard to find a place to lay down and relax.

In reality my experience in the Academy was that to outward appearance everything looked extremely clean and orderly, inwardly,however, young men’s lives were a big mess. Everyone, to a person, was unhappy with the system, but very few of us could go against the force of conformity. In the face of a long standing way of doing things, I imagine that they felt powerless to do anything but go with the system. What made it difficult to be true to your inner self in that environment was the culture of constant criticism, of the belief in finding out what was wrong with you. I was under pressure to have everything perfect with no breathing room for creativity. You were not allowed to make mistakes less some higher ranking officer might look bad and lose his position.

The dream presents a problem of organization, how to get the space organized, but in order to organize my life in a better way it cannot be done on the basis of conformity. The first challenge for me, as I think about it, is to dissociate from the culture of mistake mongering. There I was, here I am, in an institution that highly valued tradition and conformity. Many people in such institutions advance through finding out what is wrong with others, in pointing out weaknesses, in criticizing mistakes. For some unknown reason to me a lot of people were seen as strong if they could criticize their subordinates. They were seen as capable leaders. I never saw them that way. I always saw them as the worst possible leaders.

The problem i have in the dream, which is the problem living in the modern world or even the ancient world, is to organize my life around the positive energy internal to me. It is in conflict with a culture that wants to organize lives in conformity with what the traditionally based leadership desires. The first principle of organizing one’s life seems to be the ability to find the positive energy that exists in oneself and in others and then to relate to that energy. This is because we are both independent beings and social beings. You cannot organize your life apart from others, on the one hand, and you cannot be like anyone else on the other. We must be our own unique selves and also live fully in harmony with others. The Academy was teaching us that we did not have a unique self. We only were to develop a self that was in conformity with the wishes of the higher leadership. It is why the room is such a mess.

Much of our self-help literature focuses on the uniqueness part, but it often fails to put that self in a social context. For instance, you hear the same thing from many people who are successful athletes at the highest level. They say that if you set your goals high and work really hard, that you can achieve anything. “Look at me. I did it.” But if you are a woman living in Afghanistan right now, your unique self is highly unlikely to win an Olympic medal. The social context does not allow for it. In order to thrive we can relate to all of the positive energy internal to us, and then live in a supportive manner with those around us, each encouraging our own paths.

The mess in the dream is caused because the leadership did not recognize that people are unique. They wanted to mold us to be what they wanted us to be for their own ends. And when you were not in conformity with how they saw it, which I never was, then they pulled out the “unity” card. They said you were causing disunity by not doing things exactly as the leader wanted them. In the 1960s when people started to raise their voices over the dangers of too much conformity, the traditonalists in America had the slogan, “America, Love it or Leave it.” In the new millennium it was, “You’re with Us, or You’re Against Us.” And the fundamentalists’ unity card says that you are either with us or you are going to hell.

So why am I getting the dream now? What is the reason that I am being in such a messy room? I don’t have a problem with going against tradition, of leaving conservative ways behind. What seems to be calling to me is the need to understand that those around me need much more support to be their own unique selves than I realized, that, while it was always easy to put tradition aside for me, it is not that easy for others. The mess caused by attachment to tradition is much greater than I realized. My role is to encourage others to find their uniqueness and run with it.

What is unique about yourself? What are your highly positive qualities? What new qualities do you want to add to make you even more effective? How are you tied to your traditional past that hampers your growth? What is unique about your family members? Your friends? How can you support and encourage them?

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Posted on December 26, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

Running in Your Dreams: What does it Mean?

Last night my wife and I were running a marathon in my dreams. When we crossed the finish line, i was told that I did one minute faster than my fastest marathon time ever. I was really amazed and wanted to tell my other running mates. In real life my life doesn’t run at all and it has been almost two decades since I have run a full marathon. When I woke up, I had wished that the dream was literal and about real running. I had even had a really great run of about 8 k the day before.

If it is not about real like physical running, what is it about?

The metaphor of “running” has to do with being able to move more quickly with where your positive energy wants to take you. So if you have projects to do and you can run with them, it means that you can get them moving in real life fairly rapidly.

What are some of the issues with running with things in your life? Here are some questions to reflect on.

Who is likely to throw an obstacle down in your path or a roadblock to keep you from running with things?
How does memory of past failures make it difficult to run with things?
Do you have clarity around where you are headed?

Try running with something small and then gradually build up level of difficulty.

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Posted on December 8, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

Freeing Up Your Positive Future: How to Own Your Future

I have been called into the director’s office. I know it is going to be bad. No one is called into this director’s office to be congratulated. I try to get into a supremely calm state of being, but the fear is creeping in. He begins his lashing out including telling me that no one has done anything as bad as I have done in his 30 years of administration. In my calmness I repeat back to him what he is so angry about. A voice from inside of me tells me to throw caution to the wind and let him have it. I do. I tell him that I have never seen such bad administration in all of my years in schools. He stops, pauses, almost in shock, as if anyone would dare to hurls insults at him. He tries to regain the advantage, but it is already too late for him. I win the fierce battle and he knows it. I win because he was hoping that I would cower, be his subservient slave when he was in the one in the wrong. I didn’t cave. He caved. He then pulls out the threat card. It is what bad administration does when it is threatened. I ask him if he is going to fire me. I am calling his bluff. He recoils and assures me he is not. He is lying, but what else can he do when he has already lost. It takes him nearly six months to remove me from my position by trying to make it look like I was incompetent. A couple of months after my removal I see him, approach and greet him in a friendly manner. He literally starts mumbling garbled sounds and cannot say my name. It is sure sign that despite not having the same position, the future belongs to me, not him. He has no future. He is clinging to a past where he had the advantage by keeping people in fear. I took it away from him.

In my new position in the same school, one with much less administrative authority, I continue to be experimental, creative, and adventurous because I didn’t let an unjust leader rob me of the future. The future belonged to me. He had no future. He is swimming in his fear.

Photo by Tobias Bju00f8rkli on Pexels.com

While it is not always wise to be as bold with your speech as I was in that meeting, the principle of not giving up your future to a lower entity always holds. I have been in other situations where I had to use restraint and caution, which I am sure was the correct thing to do. Sometimes you have survive so that you can re-emerge on a different day. The goal is to own the future, not give it over to tyrants, because they have no future whatsoever.

Creativity, optimism, hope, courage, enthusiasm, and being adventurous. When you have these qualities in abundance, it is a good indicator that you own your own future. When you are having difficulties going forward with your life, It means that the energy of one or more of the above qualities is blocked in some way. The place to start in uncovering the blocked energy so that you can thrive is with what you are fearing. Fear is the message that tells you that you do not have enough of one of the qualities that are future-oriented.

We see a number of leaders in all parts of the globes who rally people around the theme of taking us back to the past. The past was somehow glorious, and if we would only get to it, then all of our troubles would be gone. It always starts with trying to expel one group or another. When you hear this kind of rhetoric, the first thought that should come to your mind is that the leader is terrified of a future where creativity and hope abound. If creativity is alive and well, it means that they have no place in it. If you have a society where men have been dominant and can do as they please to keep people subservient, they are not going for want a world where there is equality between the sexes. The same holds true for race and religion. The dominant group is terrified of a culture of equality because then it means they have to develop themselves, and developing yourself always means facing your worst fears. Going backwards means going backwards to dominance.

When you think of creativity, what is the fear that comes up inside of you? When you think of being more courageous or bold in your life, what is the fear? These are the important questions. However, there is a very powerful way to have a lot of momentum going forward so that facing the fear isn’t so scary.

Here it is. Make a list of 5 or 6 of the most positive capabilities that you have. They could include things like you have a great ability to solve difficult problems, you are loving and compassionate, you are truly honest with yourself, you have self-discipline or you have a lot of determination and endurance.

When you finish the list, go inside and feel what each one of the qualities feels like when you are experiencing them. It will be a very positive experience. Then you can take yourself in your mind out into the future with all of your positive energy. Your positive self automatically by nature loves the future. It will want to start using all of its positive energy to achieve things. When you feel the will of the positive self out in the future, write down three things that it would like to achieve or focus on. It will feel so delighted with what you chose.

The next day as you begin to implement the future activities, the undeveloped parts of you, will begin to communicate with you principally through fear. So you have a positive self that can do a huge amount towards achieving goals, and then you have new qualities coming into development that will take you even further into future. You know that you need something new when you feel the fear. It will be some aspect of one of the above qualities such as creativity, hope, or courage. As those qualities develop you will completely own the future.

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Posted on August 23, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Shame Code: Attacks on the Self

Before understanding the negative emotion of shame and what it is trying to wake up in us when we feel it, it is important to understand that shame is not guilt, even though people often confuse them in speech and in writing. Guilt, which I wrote about in a previous post, is the feeling you get when you are not living up to an unrealistic or incorrect standard that is usually set by someone else. It often takes you off your chosen path and shuts down your true inner guidance.

Shame is the emotion you feel when your inner, true self has been distorted in some substantial way. Who you truly are and who your ego presents you as are two completely different images. The shamed self is often small, usually weak, and can be disfigured as in the case of eating disorders. When you feel shame, it means that you need to see yourself in a positive light in the life situation you are in, but, instead, your distorted self is stimulated so that you act from it, rather than a better self. The message of shame is that you have work to do to get to the positive self that you truly are.

When you have guilt, it arises from the question of an outside source asking you why you are not doing much better. Shame doesn’t ask that kind of question. Shame originates from being regarded as lesser or of no importance or worthy of being mistreated. Who you are is of marginal value. When you see yourself as smaller than others or weaker or disfigured, then you know you are feeling shame. Almost everyone who has been abused or abandoned, or has been marginalized is going to have issues around shame.

When you feel shame and then it triggers the negative image which then makes you want to hide yourself, the first mantra that should come up to you is this. “This is not the real me. This is a distortion.” The real you is beautiful, loving, courageous, worthy and capable, among other things. Shame covers up the beautiful you, sees you as lesser, and then tries to get you to hide away.

I usually recommend that people think about simultaneously having two images of themselves when they first start dealing with shame. The first image is the distorted one, while the second is the positive, capable one. It is very useful to see how each self acts and which one is likely to be dominant and when. Try it.

Fully becoming your positive image may take help from outside people who have dealt with this kind of issue before especially is you have been traumatized by abuse or abandonment. It takes a lot of validation, which usually requires having a strong positive inner voice of encouragement inside to overcome the negative voices and negative behavior of the past. Imagine someone like Jackie Robinson, the famous baseball player who was the first African-American to play in the major leagues. He was constantly being regarded as lesser, but somewhere inside he had such an amazing image of himself and such a positive encouraging voice that he could perform at the highest level in spite of the negative environment. We all need to find our inner Jackie Robinson because there will be jealous people who will want us to be less than them.

Who is your inner Jackie Robinson? Who is the you that is truly capable?

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Posted on August 16, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

Dreams with Famous/Accomplished People: What Do They Mean

Last night I dreamed that I was hanging out with Tom Brady, the famous American footballer. We weren’t playing American football. We were just visiting during a game. Later I had a dream with Barack Obama, but I couldn’t quite recall the content. In the past I have played tennis in my dreams with Roger Federer.

When you dream about being with a talented person who has achieved a lot, the dream is calling you to the virtue of excellence. Excellence is the quality that allows you to set a high standard and then make continual efforts to get there. It is not to be confused with perfectionism which is trying to reach a high place without any mistakes. The truly accomplished people gain excellence by understanding that failure and mistakes is part of the learning process. They keep their eyes focused on the goals ahead and keep moving forward with efforts. Perfectionism tends to be fear based almost like trying to be god-like, whereas excellence is the ability to be more relaxed as you go for what seems to be impossible at times.

Where people get into trouble with excellence is when they seek recognition instead of the joy of moving towards the positive end.

What are the high aims you are seeking to achieve? What are the efforts that I need to make today to move towards them?

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Posted on August 15, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Guilt: Setting Your Own Standards; Finding Your Own Inner Guidance

There are actually two types of guilt, one is positive, the other negative. Positive guilt evokes a feeling of remorse when you do something that breaks an ethical standard. When you feel it and then take steps to correct your actions, that is an extremely positive thing. When people say someone is God fearing in a positive sense, they mean that they live according to high ethical standards such as treating others with equality, equity, and respect.

The other type of guilt is when you feel bad about not living up to a standard that is set by someone else’s ego. Since guilt can paralyze your actions or set you off doing all kinds of activities that have nothing to do with your own path, it is best to learn how to transform it into a positive. How does guilt take you off your path, and how can you get back on it or find it for the first time?

The most common form of guilt-mongering comes from parents who have their own desires for your success or behavior which are mostly about impressing others. Their motivation is recognition. They set the standard of your performance based upon what it will give them in return in the eyes of others. If you were to score 95% on an exam, they would not focus on the 95% positive. They would make you feel bad about the 5% that was lacking. And they would withhold acknowledgment of the good work so that you will see all the mistakes and then improve them. If you become a physician or high paying lawyer, for instance, then they have something to show to their friends, relatives, and acquaintances. It is not about you. It is about them. Feeling guilty when you make a mistake or are not performing to someone else’s standard, lets you know that you have taken a left turn off your true path and are hugely lost.

The reason that it is so destructive to yourself and to the world is that it makes you act in ways that are contrary to how your own inner self would act. Since your own inner self is aligned with the higher spirit, when you are acting according to the misguided recognition-seeking standards of guidance of others, your spirit is in big pearl. You do things that go against the dictates of your own true self. The difficulty for most of us is that we have had parents and grown in cultures where they appear as god-like beings. They are “all-knowing” in our minds. Deconstructing their standards as falsely misguided can be a long and difficult process. For instance, maybe you are a successful lawyer or in another occupation that you had no choice in, you have a family to support, and financial obligations. You dislike what you are doing, but are stuck. Here is some good news.

When you process the guilt correctly, it takes you to your own path without jeopardizing the stability of others who depend on you. Of course it is much easier to wake up as a young person to who you are and then find your own road, but having a mid-life crisis or a late life crisis can be really exhilarating in what opens up. You can use guilt as a guide.

Here is how it might work. Let’s say you are successful physician or teacher or carpenter, but they were things that were chosen for you. If you are having success in the area of work you are in, it means that despite your inner yearnings for another path, you still have developed some pretty impressive skills. They do not have to be thrown away. You can honor them and keep using them. The guilt comes because you have other yearnings. In my case I developed really good skills as a teacher and as an administrator, but I had a huge longing to be a personal counselor right around the age of 40.

I felt guilty for trying to develop my counseling skills because it wasn’t going to pay the bills and support the family. Nonetheless, the drive was there. Rather than abandoning the teaching and administrative skills, I developed the counseling ability on the side, helped people when I could, and then used it more fully on retirement from teaching and admin.

Here is how guilt works. It acts according to someone else’s standards and then shuts off all internal guidance and inner problem solving abilities. It puts you on someone else’s path and makes you listen to their voice, not yours. When you feel guilt, the first thing that should come to your mind is this. Whose voice am I listening to? Whose misguided standard am I am following? When you can recognize the false standard and voice, then you can begin to shut it off and listen to your own inner voice and path.

Your inner voice will guide you correctly because it is connected to the larger spirit. So you feel guilt, find the negative voice and standard, detach from it, and start listening. In most cases the first steps are always quite small to get onto your path. They are not dramatic because the larger spirit has no interest in you disrupting your family’s stability or your own stability. The code that guilt awakens is the code of inner guidance. In other words, when you feel the guilt of not living up to someone else’s standards, it is the doorway to listening to internal guidance.

As human beings we can put some really bad guilt trips on ourselves like the belief that we have to save the whole planet or be first place all the time. When the guilt is felt for not saving the planet, it just means that the actual guidance is not being listened to. We are listening to ego, not the true self.

In sum, guilt comes from listening the wrong voices and standards. The goal when dealing with guilt, is to find your own inner voice and standard. It will guide you.

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Posted on June 14, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

A Word or Two About Bullies: Building Social Capital

I was hoping to write a post about guilt and then shame as part of the series on the codes of negative emotions, but I wanted to write a bit more connected to the subject of hurt, specifically bullies.

I suspect that we have all had to deal with our fair share of bullies in life. In my case a lot of them appeared after I developed a lot of competence. I remember particularly when I became a school administrator , that people had this kind unspoken expectation that good administrators are mean and unfeeling, that you had to be tough to be successful. It never worked for me. I don’t think it ever worked for them either because toughness meant that they relied very heavily on using the threat of firing. It wasn’t like they were mentally tough. It was more like they were incompetent with solving problems faced by the organization or in helping people to grow into their roles. I think the old strategy was based on the idea that if you tell someone what they should do, that they are somehow going to be able to fully competent very soon into the work. And when they are not, they get fired. That is what tough management is. It is kind of like the absurd philosophy that we used to call tough love. It would have been more correct to say that it is incompetent management or incompetent parenting. The administrator was the one that needed firing not the kids.

The problem area for bullies is that they haven’t yet developed capacities to be competent in relationships. Because they are lacking in social abilities, they have a tendency to rely on power or intimidation to get what they want. Somewhere along the way the lack of relational closeness warped into power seeking, and when the use of power makes you feel good, it becomes an addiction, like taking a powerful drug, maybe even better.

To be effective in an organization the first step is always to build social capital. It is easier to get work done and to solve problems if there is a personal, positive, connection within the organization or group. And in that regard it is better to continually focus on what is going well rather than what is not working. I always had two questions in my mind in working with teachers. What is working in your class? And what is your biggest challenge or most difficult student? The first question tells them to keep doing what is giving results, while the second one zeroes in what is the priority for change. But you cannot use this approach if you do not have a connection with the person you are working with. You have to build rapport and trust mostly by focusing on the positive in the other person. Then they are willing to be vulnerable and let you know what is really happening. You have to make it safe for people to share what is really going on without being under threat all the time.

With bullies, so-called tough administration no one shares anything, and the problems remain elusive because no one is willing to share anything. The bully is the blamer and is often defensive when faced with criticism.

If you are being supervised by a bully-type, this is what you can do. It is not an easy solution, but it is very elegant. First of all you need to be aware that bullies do not have the ability to create social capital. Their methodology is more control-oriented, fear-based with a focus on punishment. They want recognition in the organization to be centered on them personally so that they can be considered the star and get an unfair share of the resources. What they always do is to leave space or leave a “hole” in their control where there is not much recognition to be gained. For instance, a school team or performance group brings a lot of recognition to a school because they play in public, but p.e. classes are invisible and do not matter much for entrance into universities. So the admin will attend to the school teams, but not to the p.e. classes. The p.e. classes represent the place where the bully admin does not want to go because it doesn’t give the bully recognition.

Bullies play the short game. They want results in the short term so that they can get recognized and have a lot resources flow to them. When you play the long game in areas that are open, and completely avoid conflict with the bully, then you are always going to win because the bully will go away. Bullies cannot play a long game. They can only play a short game. They weaken over time, because the strategy is so negative and doesn’t produce long term results.

If a bully fires you, then you can be pretty certain that you were on the right path. Sometimes it is just inevitable. If you stay on the right path, other opportunities will open in time. Going for justice with bullies is a tricky subject. It takes a certain amount of wisdom. Sometimes it is the right thing to do, and sometimes you just have to call it a day especially if the bully is connected to the people who are deciding on the justice.

For children parents, teachers, and administrators need to do everything in their power to protect the child from bullies. It is not the child’s responsible to deal with the bullies. It is the adult’s responsibility to make the environments safe for children.

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Posted on May 1, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Hurt Code: Door Opener to Loving What You Do

For the longest time my presenting negative emotion was grief, especially after the untimely death of my daughter two years ago. Grief is such a challenging emotion to deal with, primarily because when it strikes, it takes your energy down. You feel depressed. It is no wonder that anti-depressants have been so easily prescribed by professionals who orientation to life is primarily physical/scientific disregarding the emotional states. If you feel down because of loss and cannot get back to an up state, taking a pill seems to lift the body for awhile. The problem with it is that you don’t learn what the grief is trying to teach you. Mostly, grief is about learning how to endure, to stay positive for a long time. If you do the grief work honestly rather than trying to run from it, knowing that you are going to have periods of feeling really down, then you end up so much stronger than if you only take pills to deal with the grief. I am not against taking pills. I am against seeing grief as a physical ailment. If you go to a family doctor because you are feeling down and he/she has 30 more patients to see that day, you are not going to get many questions about the spiritual state of your being. Still, there are many ways to boost the body physically while going through grief like homeopathy, traditional medicine, and naturopathic medicine to name a few. And antidepressants may be part of the healing, but it is never the full picture of healing with grief and depression.

Anyway, I do not want to write about grief. I am just happy right now that it is not the presenting emotion. What recently presented itself to me was hurt. I was so excited to be dealing with hurt because my experience has always been that when I process it, I get a ton of positive loving energy released. But before dealing with hurt it is important to realize that grief takes a lot of time, patience, and hard work to deal with. It is totally worth it. Read my post on grief. https://wordpress.com/post/dreamsforpeace.org/2949

Hurt is the emotion you get when you experience a lot of pain from what someone or something did to you. Whereas grief is about a loss that you cannot recover, hurt is very much present tense even though it may have happened a while back. For instance, your partner or co-worker can betray you, making you feel like you were stabbed in the heart with a sword, leaving you feeling devastated and holding negative angry feelings towards them.

The first step in dealing with hurt, which may be the most difficult, is to let go, to forgive the culprit. The reason this is not easy is because of how the pain feels inside to you. The tendency of the ego mind is to hold onto the pain so that something bad can happen to the culprit. It is an extremely dead-end approach to life. As has been said, holding onto hurt and then getting angry is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. Or when you are seeking revenge, dig two graves, one for the other and one for yourself.

It is much easier to let go of the pain if you can see the positive energy that the hurt is trying to help you wake up to. The positive is always exactly the opposite of the energy of the hurt. I always use a metaphoric approach when working with hurt because it has such brilliant results. Think about all of the metaphors hurt can appear as. It can be like being stabbed, run over by a truck, burned alive, punched in the face, wrestled down and stomped on, pulled the carpet out from under, dragged around by rope, tortured, or any of a number of others. Once you have the metaphor, then you can find its positive opposite.

When you feel hurt, it means that the hurt you are feeling from what happened has the possibility of changing into a positive. Take for instance the most common form of hurting others, being put down or criticized. It can feel like you are cut by a knife, stung by a bee, or even shot down. If it is just hurt, then the relationship or situation can be turned around into hugely positive energy. If there is a lot of fear that goes with it, it is a different story. Hurt lets you know that things can turn pretty quickly. Fear of being hurt may mean that the relationship is not capable of being repaired because of the abusive nature of the person giving it. If you can read the emotions, you can know how to proceed.

When you have recognized how hurt feels in a metaphoric way inside, then you can ask yourself how it makes you act. Do you get protective, anti-social, combative, both anti-social and combative? Are you scheming about how to get back at the person? Whatever behavior that comes out of the ego mind tends to be bad for both sides. It further widens the gap that already exists. The first step is to forgive or let go of the hurtful behavior from the other person. Don’t underestimate how hard this can be and don’t try to fake about the forgiveness.

The second step is to find the positive metaphor that replaces the negative one. So if you feel cut or stung, then the metaphoric positive would be something like being in warm waters. What solves the situation is the opposite behavior, to find the positive in the other, feel their positive energy, and say it out loud. It is often a “big ask” when you feel hurt, because it requires trusting in the more positive energy. Where there is a lot of criticism, there is a lot of unrecognized positive energy that is having a hard time being accessed. Letting go of your protected state and feeling the positive energy and calling it out in another changes the relationship instantly. It is almost miraculous. There is one caveat to this solution which is why the differentiation between fear and hurt are so important. If you just feel hurt, the door is open to the relationship that was wounded, but if you feel fear it may be that you have to proceed with caution because of the danger of the criticism turning into abuse.

a. identify the negative metaphor and behavior

b. change the negative metaphor into its positive opposite, feel it.

The third step is acting in a positive manner that the positive energy in the metaphor calls for. In the above case it would be actually telling people about their positive qualities.

What is someone betrays you as in having an illicit affair when you are supposed to be in committed relationship? What to do always starts with how you feel, and then describing it metaphorically. What if when you found out, you felt as though your heart was cut out. There you are sitting in misery with no heart when you were the one betrayed. That is a big hurt. The key to a metaphor like this is that your heart is extremely damaged by the behavior of another. The opposite metaphor is to find your true heart and have it seriously beat in a positive way with a lot of energy.

The big issue with hurt is that you are the one feeling miserable when the other person did the wrongful act. It is totally unjust, right? They deserve justice, right? Revenge. The above steps, even if they take some time to accomplish, not only give you back a positive state, but they also strengthen that state to a brand new level. So actually the revenge is that they get back the negative energy that they were trying to put on you because you are no longer affected by it. If a person criticizes you, but it has no effect, then the power that they get from criticism, doesn’t happen for them. What they get instead is fear. In other words it goes back on them.

It is important when dealing with hurt and the transformation that it requires to not avoid the mistake of reacting negatively with your behavior immediately. Feel the hurt, transform it into new positive energy, then let the new positive energy be your guide with your behavior, not the hurt energy. For instance, if you have been betrayed, then it may be that is good to end the relationship, but it is untimely to decide that while you are stuck in hurt. When you are at a higher state of loving energy, your higher self can make the decision, but it will be much more detached and better for you.

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Posted on April 4, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Jealousy: Getting Out of Extreme Protection and Guarding What You Think You Have

Jealousy is a particularly difficult negative emotion to write about for me, probably because I have mostly been on the victim side of people being jealous of me. I have more experience with trying to cope with jealous people than being jealous myself. It doesn’t come up that often for me. I will do the best I can in explaining it so that when it comes upon you, you can have some awareness and tools about how to deal with it. It can very destructive.

Jealousy is the feeling you get when what you have (materially speaking) comes under threat of being lost. Most often, people talk about jealousy in terms of relationships like when a committed partner spends time with others outside of the committed relationship, but it is quite common with leaders as well. When you feel jealousy, it means that you feel threatened that you are going to lose what you perceive to have, but what it should indicate to you is that you are lacking in basic relational capacities around closeness and intimacy. Feeling jealous means that you have issues with developing intimacy. If the jealous feeling takes over the person, then the ego mind often tries to use power or intimidation to keep what it has. Instead of doing the inner work of developing intimacy and closeness with others, the tendency is to use power in the wrong way to keep what you have. If you feel jealous and you are resorting to trying to force your will on others, then it means your relationship or position in an organization is already in big trouble. When you get jealous, the ego mind tries to make you think that the other person is the problem not you. People, who try use power and intimidation, always end up where they actually are when jealousy strikes, empty and alone.

Relational abilities, where you are trying to get close to others, are largely built on the fundamental process of seeing the positive in others and acknowledging them. When jealousy takes over the mind, people make small negatives into big threats. It takes them away from closeness rather than getting closer. You need an act of self-discipline to humble yourself to get out of the addictive state of using power when jealousy strikes because the use of power can be a drug like state. In extreme cases of territoriality people can become addictive to abusing and killing others because the use of power is such a strong feeling especially when intimacy is so hard for them to feel.

Jealous is not the same as envy even though people use them interchangeably. Jealous is about protecting what you have, whereas envy is about what you don’t have. Jealousy makes you use power to keep what you have like a title, whereas envy tries to find shortcuts to getting what you don’t have.

What can you do if you feel jealous?

Step 1. Recognize the feeling, especially the tendency to blow up small negatives in others so that you feel justified in ending the relationships with them.

Step 2. Get counseling help or some type of outside support so that the addictive processes of power do not take over you.

Step 3. Believe that learning how to get close to others in positive ways is extremely more satisfying than being protective and threatened all the time. Humble yourself so that you can begin to learn what you do not know how to do. If you have used charm to get in a relationship, then you are going to have let go of your arrogance about how good you are. Charm is not closeness. It is attracting someone for your own gain. There is nothing mutual in the use of charm.

Step 4. Inevitably the roots of jealousy stem from having been abused; so you are going to need help in dealing with the complexities of abuse.

Photo by Maksim Goncharenok on Pexels.com

It is actually very rare for people who feel jealous to seek help because the belief that they are right and others are wrong is so strong with them. They also believe that intimidation and power and the use of constant criticism can keep what they have.

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Posted on February 15, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Envy: Killer of Relationships/Door to Intimacy

Before we go too far into understanding about envy, we first have to differentiate it from jealousy, because even the dictionary has it wrong (at least in my understanding). It is useful to have a clear distinction. Envy is the emotion you feel when you desire an end state, hope that it will happen, but then do not make efforts to get there. The end result of envy is that you get nothing and kill the positive relationships in your life. Jealousy, on the other hand, is when you already have something like an established relationship or a title, and then you feel like it is under threat, so you become protective.

So imagine that you see a couple who is affectionate, loving, and caring towards each other. You would be caught in the snare of envy if you found yourself desiring the state that the couple has, maybe making an effort to reach out to a potential partner, but unable to engage in practices that foster closeness. Envy is a hope without any work. It destroys relationships because it causes you to think love is coming your way without making positive efforts. For a long time in the culture of movies the myth of happy-ever-after or being taken care of was thoroughly perpetuated in most romance films. There was little understanding that relationships have their own science that make them work. Thinking that you are going to automatically be loved forever or have everything positive come your way without engaging in positive relational behavior is the definition of doom.

It doesn’t help that positive relational behavior is never taught in school in the way that the principles of mathematics or physical sciences are taught. There is virtually no relational curriculum in schools.

If you would ask me what are the keys to a successful relationship, I would give you the following four things to work on.

Find the positives in the other person and acknowledge them constantly.
Listen non-judgmentally to what is going on with others without trying to fix anything.
Do more than your share of the work. Absolutely avoid comparing.
Feel free to establish boundaries with others.

If you get struck with envy, it probably means you are missing at least one of the above processes. Envy is the messenger that comes when you have not developed certain heart related processes. So when it strikes and then you get nowhere, you have some place from which you can start the inner work. Being loving and intimate with others means you are in control of the relational processes and can use them effectively. It takes lots of efforts, to learn how to become intimate with others.

If you have envy for what your neighbors have like a bigger or more elegantly decorated house or the type of car that they have, it means that some relational processes are missing in you. If you try to feel better by having a better house (not that a nice place to live is bad thing), you have forgotten to work on the self that lives in the house and relates to people. Work on your relational self first, then improve your house. This is because your higher self wants to have positive relationships that are loving and close first. Then you are ready for a space to be in together with others. Thinking that the physical space will bring you closer to others is a recipe for disaster. It actually takes you further away.

Mostly envy kills your relational life by living in hope of something positive happening to you where you are NOT the primary actor. Envy is when you have hope and then give the control of it happening over to someone else or some organization like the government or your employer.

There is also a large sector of almost every population where their hope for a better life is in the past. They actually want to return to a former state of affairs to make themselves happy. In every case where people want to return to the past for their joy you can see that they are having a hard time negotiating their current relational life. Instead of putting in the effort to develop relational skills, they want to return to some fictitious time where they got along with everyone else, when in actuality they are just forgetting that they never did learn how to work cooperatively with others. They almost always have some sort of history of being abused or abandoned.

Work on the basics of relationship building and then you will always have lots of friends and joy!

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Posted on January 14, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Grief Code: Doorway to Endurance

Before I explain grief, which is a very challenging negative emotion, I am going to do a quick review list of the negative codes we have already covered.

Disappointment: Attachment to the wrong expectations that brings energy down and makes you think you have to change everything. Code: Let go of expectations, remember and do more of the positive processes that are already working.

Frustration: Attachment to the wrong processes or ways of doing things. You keep doing the same things only maybe more intensely that give you the same bad results. Code: The goal or expectation is correct, but the processes are not. Change the way you are doing things, while holding onto the goal.

Anger: Attachment to something or someone outside of yourself being to blame for what is happening. Literally the loss of a cool mind. Code: Let go of blaming, go into a peaceful, tranquil, detached, patient state so that you can get guidance to move forward.

Anxiety: Attachment to the negative imagination that your mind makes up to keep you from moving forward. Overwhelm is the blowing up in the mind of negative non-realities. Origin is abandonment. Code: Let go of negative imagining, recognize it came from being all alone, then have the confidence to act with abilities that you already have.

Fear: Attachment to a negative outcome because of a memory/memories of negative experiences that makes it difficult to go for new things or a positive future. Code: Let go of negative experience, then have courage to dive into new things and develop new abilities.

Grief is the experience you have when something comes to an end that you didn’t desire such as the loss of job or a friend or the death of person close to you. Disappointment, frustration, and anger are emotions that signal that you are still in a situation and need to keep going. Grief and sadness come when something is over. The big difficulty with grief is that the loss takes down your energy putting you in a depressed action state. It is very difficult to move forward or get back on your feet when grief strikes because there is no energy. You get stuck in down feelings.

Before we talk about the attachments with grief, everyone should know that it is nearly impossible to not feel down when you experience loss especially with losing people that are close to you. Time is often your best friend with grief so that you can accustom yourself to your new life without the person or the job.

There are two types of attachments that occur when you experience grief. There is first of all the attachment to the memory of the loss. The mind gets stuck remembering the person or job being with you and how it went away. For instance, if you lose a family member or close friend, you remember the loss, the person going away, and then you get very stuck in staying down. The second type of attachment with grief is the false imagined hope that someone or something new is going to take you out of the negative state so that you can feel up again. In both cases you have to go through a process of letting go of the attachments. The challenging part is that grief keeps your energy very low so you often feel you cannot move the energy.

It is hard to imagine when you have lost a loved one or a job or an important contract or game that life is going to ever get back to some semblance of an up state. You can give yourself plenty of time to do it. When you are able to realize that letting go is the first step, and then begin to let go of the attachment, the actual code is to remember your positive abilities and be able to use them endlessly. Endurance, which is the ability to stay positive for a long time while doing positive capabilities, is what grief is asking out of you.

Grief tells you to play the long game, not the short one. It is difficult to have a lot of gratitude for what you have already developed inside of you when you are down and attached, but being grateful for your gifts and preparing yourself for doing things for a long time takes you instantly out of grief and depressed action. It does this because it lets you know that you didn’t have to achieve results in a super accelerated manner. You can keep using your abilities and then keep using them some more. The results will accumulate over time.

It is not as easy as I stated because there are a lot of feelings to work through. When I was fired from particular jobs that I had and then lost all of the programs that I had helped to build, I didn’t want to go somewhere new and start again. It is because I didn’t have the long vision. I didn’t see that what that the positive I had done was never lost. It still exists today in the minds and hearts of all of the students I worked with.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

The next stage after the loss is a continuation of the same, but it is hard to see it at the time. Whatever has given you success, will continue to give you success. That is the message, the code, of grief. Stay in the game and keep playing it. The attachments will want to make you give up especially if the loss comes from betrayal or sudden deaths.

Grief does not require you to develop something new in you. It asks you to remember the positives developed in the past and keep doing them forever. Fear is the emotion that requires new development, not grief. It is easy to throw in the towel after a great loss and try something new or give up completely. The code is to back to what works and keep doing it endlessly. When we lost our daughter a couple of years ago, one of the things that helped a huge amount in the grieving process was to take long hikes in the forest. It was like i could practice being in something for a long time, but it took me more than a year before I could start running again consistently. It was like the grief knocked all of the endurance out of me, and then I had to learn how to stay in things for a long time.

Endurance is the quality that lets you know that things will be lasting for a long time if you can remember the positive processes.

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Posted on January 10, 2024 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Disappointment: Beware of Expectations.

It is a little over a week since New Year’s Day. It is a good time to write about disappointment if you have already given up on the resolutions you might have set.

Disappointment is the negative emotion we feel when an expectation has not been met. It has the effect of taking the wind out of our sails, like having the our balloon popped. In that regard it approaches something like grief or sadness in that the energy we are left with is quite depressed. Whereas frustration lets you know that you have the wrong process in getting there, but the right goal or expectation, disappointment is the communication you receive inwardly that tells you that the expectation is incorrect, but the process is not.

For instance, you are home for a Christmas holiday expecting to have deep and loving connections with family members and friends. After a week of hoping, you are left with emptiness, maybe loneliness with little connection. The expectation was that others were going to connect with you, but they didn’t. When disappointment strikes, it wants to give you one very clear message, which is to drop the expectation of what you might get from others, and then engage enthusiastically in the process that will help you connect with others. Disappointment tells you that you need more active process without expectation. When you engage enthusiastically in practices that connect deeply and profoundly with others, good things will eventually happen. If you expect that others will do the engaging work, you are in for some depressed times.

Suppose that you enter a race with the expectation of a fast time or perhaps going for a job interview with the expectation of getting the job. When you don’t get the fast time or get the job, disappointment is likely to strike. You can ask yourself what you were hoping to get out of the fast time or securing the job. What is the fast time going to give you? Whatever you were hoping for is the wrong expectation. What is needed is to remember the positive practices that allow you to be a good runner or the positive abilities that make you great at your work and then do them more. Since disappointment brings a person down, remembering the right process and then being enthusiastic about doing it keeps you up and engaged and brings great long term results.

The tendency with disappointment, such as when a team loses a championship game, is to focus on the things that they did wrong and make lots of changes. What is actually needed is to focus on the positive processes that they did to get to the championship game and keep doing them enthusiastically. The loss doesn’t matter. What matters is what was developed in the athletes and the team along the way. When a team wins a championship, they can experience temporary elation, but then quickly can slip into big disappointment because what they were hoping from the win, like recognition is only ever a temporary thing. The real joy is in what was developed along the way, the creativity, the determination, and the comradery.

Most of us tend to expect more out of leaders than they are capable of giving and when we get the top job in a company, we tend to be a disappointment to ourselves because of our misguided expectations. Leadership works when the the leaders remember and practice the processes that work and are enthusiastic about them.

It is so important to differentiate anger and frustration from disappointment because when you have frustration for not getting to a goal it means that you are stuck in processes that do not give you good results. It is the differentiation of the feeling that is absolutely vital. If you watch a coach yelling at the players for a poor performance out of frustration, it means that he needs to learn some new ways of doing things. If disappointment sets in, it means that positive processes need to be remembered and practiced enthusiastically. Before a recent game I heard coach talk about what the most important ability was in competitive match was to make positive adjustments along the way. What if you as a coach or manager had the understanding of the difference between frustration and disappointment? You could go to the midway break in a game or to the next game and know how to focus. If you feel disappointment, keep doing the positive things that work with more enthusiasm. If you feel frustrated, change what you are doing. It is an amazing formula for success.

What is the wrong expectation? What is the correct process to be done enthusiastically?

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Posted on December 21, 2023 by dreamsforpeace

The Code for Frustration: Right Goal-Wrong Process to Get There

In the last post we discussed the negative emotion of anger and how it takes you out of your calm and cool-headed mind with a lot of fire. If you were to have a dream where your house is on fire, you know that your anger is calling you to being cool-headed.

I like to discuss frustration closely to anger because it has the same kind of strong active energy to it. Sometimes people confuse anger and frustration or may have a combination of the two emotions. While anger is about having a really hot head, frustration is about banging your head. When frustration presents itself, it means that you have a goal in mind, but your attempts to accomplish it or make adequate success have failed repeatedly. The huge tendency with frustration, when failure has occurred, is to do the same activities with more energy and more often. It is as if you believe that doing more of the same thing that failed is going to give you a different result. It doesn’t.

The attachment with frustration is to the process or method of getting to the goal. This is what educators traditionally tried to do with students who presented learning challenges. The idea was to give more repetition of the strategy that didn’t work, and take away the places in the child’s life where they were having success such as in sport. Obviously it was a failed strategy, but people attached to a single-process such as repetition were in the belief that children with learning challenges were just stubborn. You know when the process is incorrect because frustration is the feeling. When we discuss disappointment, you will see that the opposite is true. Disappointment means that the goal or expectation is incorrect, but the process is on the right track. It just needs more energy.

What should you do if you are stuck in frustration? The first step is to recognize the feeling by saying it. ” I am really frustrated!” That lets you know that you are attached to how to make it to the goal. If you can allow yourself to let go of your attachment, which may not be all that easy, then you can start to have some flexibility and creativity about how to get to the end. While the go to positive energy for anger is patience and calm, the energy called for with frustration is flexibility and creativity.

If anger is mixed with frustration, then first you calm yourself, and then you invoke your creative and flexible parts. In many cultures people get stuck in thinking that hard work, toughness, self-discipline, and responsibility will solve everything because they are so valuable to a person’s life, but there are places where love and compassion, patience, peacefulness, creativity or encouragement are what is needed. Sometimes courage is what you have to be. Frustration let’s you know that a new something is needed.

Sometimes the attachment associated with frustration is there because there is a fear of trying something new. What if the solution to a relational issue is NOT toughing it out? What if you had to be closer or more loving? That would be very threatening to some people who haven’t developed that virtue yet. By letting go of the attachment to doing things in the same manner that you are used to but is not getting results, you open up whole new avenues of where you can develop. It is as if you are adding more tools to your toolbox. It is particularly problematic for people who are gifted intellectually, but are not so in other areas. Gifted academic students may find it very easy to breeze through classes without ever having to put in much effort, but have a terrible time in relationships because the relational tools don’t come as easily as the academics do.

If you can think of frustration as one of those great doorways to new develop, you can actually be excited when it appears. You can say, “Yay! Frustration!” ”I get to try something new.”

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Posted on December 14, 2023 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Anger: Doorway to Tranquility, Patience, Detachment, Calm

It is rush hour, the traffic is heavy, you are trying to make a left turn into busy traffic. It seems like it will take forever to make the turn. Worse yet, you have been recently cut off by other people in a hurry. OR you are in a meeting giving a proposal or ideas that you hope others will accept, but a few of the key decision makers do not see your point of view and remain stubborn in blocking you. Worse yet, your country is in the finals of a big worldwide tournament, and towards the end of the game, one of the players of your team makes a serious error that costs your team the championship.

When you get angry because you cannot get to where you want to go or have the result you were hoping for, your ego wants nothing more than to become heated and then unleash blame on everyone else in the world. Anger is the energy that tells you that something is not going your way. It expresses itself in all kinds of ugly ways. It can get violent both inwardly and outwardly, but mostly it takes you nowhere and gets you nothing.

Some people seem to think that is therapeutic to get your anger out in a violent way like taking up boxing or hitting a pillow or throwing things. No doubt, when a leader unleashes an angry barrage of insults at a team, the leader feels better for having gotten it out or you probably feel better for a second when you beep the horn in traffic when someone cuts you off, but the temporary responses do not address what is really happening internally. They tend to grow more negative over time if left unchecked.

Expressing the anger is helpful, but only when it is done in a manner that keeps the responsibility for solving it with yourself. When you yell at someone or honk your horn loudly, your intention is to give the problem over to the other person to solve. It doesn’t help you in the long term. The other day I was in a conversation with someone who kept subtly invalidating what I was saying, while making what he was saying much more important. At first I didn’t recognize what he was doing, but then I felt really angry inside and had to use all of my will to stay calm and patient. Later I told my wife what was happening, which was very helpful for me. In the midst of telling her I could see that the issue was that I was feeling invalidated. By getting the anger out in a calmer manner I could see that I could begin addressing the issue of invalidation and let go of what the other person was doing.

If you can feel the anger and then name it, then your higher self and conscious mind can begin to understand what is really calling to you. Anger tells you that you need to develop one of four major virtues, calmness, patience, detachment, or tranquility. If you live in country like the U.S., where how fast you get a job done is so important, then the virtue calling to you will most likely be patience. It is interesting that when a new president is elected in the U.S., it is the first 100 days in office and how much they can get done, that seem so important to everyone. The best advice I ever received when I became an administrator in a school or department was exactly the opposite. It was to wait for a year to make any big changes.

Patience allows you to take out of the equation of your life. It says, “What if time didn’t matter?” because it really never matters as much as we think.

Calmness allows you to ride the wave of other people’s anger and disruptions.

Detachment allows you to not have to feel really negative feelings when results do not go your way or people act in really absurd ways.

And tranquility allows you to be at peace with how bad things currently are or have been.

Having these virtues are like pure gold to your life. Every time you feel angry, it means that the virtues that are going to be golden to your life are calling you.

When are you likely to get angry? Which of the 4 golden virtues is calling you?

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Posted on December 2, 2023 by dreamsforpeace

The Code of Anxiety 2 Examples

In the last post I talked about how anxiety is the negative emotion that is trying to wake up confidence in yourself. Confidence is the ability to embrace the positive abilities that you already have developed so that you can put them into action. It is almost like a feeling of being grounded in yourself. I like to have people actually feel their bodies especially their feet on the ground when they are developing confidence. Anxiety tends to throw you into an airy space that is a bit nauseating.

Here are a few examples.

Being a workshop leader in a class. Anxiety tells you that you have the skills already to lead a successful workshop, but something is making you feel like it is all going to go wrong despite your preparation. It often happens when you change jobs or locations or the groups you are working with. You focus on the uncertainty of the new environment and not on the ability you already have. You can remember positive experiences in the past, embrace the positive energy, and then be present, being aware of what adjustments you need to make in the new environment.

The condition of the world. Today there is a war in Israel and another one in the Ukraine. When you put your focus on it and blow it up, your mind has a tendency to think that your world is going to fall apart, you are going to lose all of your resources, and then you have to be protective in the way you live your life and manage your resources. When you have confidence in your own abilities and embrace them, then they are going to work where you end up next even if you are a refugee or have to move entire continents. It is the emotion of anxiety that puts you in the air and sees negative, but it is the confidence that when you do what worked before, you are going to get great results again.

Anxiety is not fear. Fear lets you know that you have to develop something new in order to be successful. Worry lets you know that what worked before will work again. It is an important distinction. Fear is more of full bodied experienced. Anxiety is an up in the air feeling.

Your children’s or spouse’s future. When you worry a lot about your children or spouse, it really messes up the relationship with them because they want to have no part of being with you. Your worry causes a rift because your energy is so nauseating. If you are worried, it means you already know what what works with them. You just do not know how to embody or embrace the positive abilities that you have and keep practicing. You probably know that being supportive, being a good listener, being encouraging, and having good boundaries work. But worry makes you do things that don’t work. Then distance grows between you, and they have to figure out things on their own.

If you have fear for their future, then it means you haven’t developed an ability, usually being more encouraging. It usually means that you are very critical.

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Posted on November 23, 2023 by dreamsforpeace

The Anxiety Code: Moving Towards Confidence

Anxiety, for me, is like the emotional pandemic of our times. If we could all find a way to do a better job with anxiety, we could all be so much more productive. What is anxiety, aka, worry, and how does it operate?

I like to start talking about anxiety by comparing it to fear. Many people use the words interchangeable as if they mean the same, but they are very distinct emotions with very different outcome energies. Fear has the intention of developing something new inside by overcoming an experience that you or someone close to you has gone through. When you think about the doing the new thing, the mind remembers the bad thing that happened and then resists forward movement. For instance, I had the fear of some heights for some period of time because every time I would start feeling really up and high about what I was accomplishing, someone in leadership would get jealous and then I would be fired. I remember feeling this on canopy walks in the jungles of Southeast Asia. What the mind imagines as fearful is based on having had specific negative experiences.

Photo by Jeffrey Pariu00f1as on Pexels.com

Anxiety is different than fear in that the mind makes up negative imaginations about the future that are not based upon any real world experiences. The origin of anxiety is some sense of having been abandoned or alone. In the state of unsettled abandonment the mind does all kinds of crazy things that are negative in nature. The more alone you feel the more you think the illusions are real. Feeling overwhelmed, which is like a type of anxiety, is when the illusions seem really huge. It tends to give a person paralysis of action. The most important thing in dealing with anxiety is to try to get into action. I remember reading how Lionel Messi, one the world’s greatest soccer players, would get very nervous before a match, but as soon as the game started and he was in his body acting, then all of the memory and confidence returned into him.

When you have anxiety, your mind suffers from a kind of memory loss. It cannot remember how to do things or that you are very competent at them. Instead it creates some type of illusion in the future which puts you in a state of inaction. The solution for anxiety is confidence. Confidence comes from being able to access the positive memories of what you are already able to do. Confidence gives you the ability to act knowing that you are going to get positive results, and if things go wrong, to learn from them and keep adjusting. Without confidence you always feel like you are on shaky ground, that something bad is probably going to happen, but the bad things only tend to happen as a result of inaction and not from what you are doing. It is because you are not acting or acting with a lot of nervousness that things go wrong.

The first step in being able to get to a confident state is to recognize that worry is an illusion. It is not real. It is also important to understand that the origin of your worrying habits began when you felt profoundly alone. You will notice, for instance, that when you are with a friend or a positive colleague or a good team of people, that you are much more confident than when you are alone. A lot of people experience overwhelming feelings when they are in big crowds all alone. Their minds go into memory loss and then they freeze.

To get the confidence going when you are going into a crowd, you can remember what works for you. If you have anxiety, you already know what to do. You just don’t know how to access it. It is not like fear where you have to develop something new. With anxiety you already have the ability, just no confidence. Your mind is making up ghost like experiences.

It is important to know what you are feeling and then trust the code. If you know that you are nervous, the code says that you already know how to do thing you want to do, but your mind goes off into la-la land from feeling alone. You cannot treat anxiety in the same way you treat fear or grief or hurt. It has its own code. The code is that you already know how to do the ability. It is a memory issue, not a possibility issue.

If you are worried about your children’s future, for instance, it means that you already know what to do. If you act from a worried parent , you will really mess up parenting. If you do the things that work, they will work again. Have confidence, meaning have memory. Do what already works.

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Posted on November 21, 2023 by dreamsforpeace

Breaking the Code of Fear 2: Examples

In the last post I introduced what having fear means, which, in the simplest terms, means that you are being called to a form of courage. Remember to see my videos on tiktok. They are also very informative. I am “dreamdoctor9”.

Fear of Being Constrained. This often occurs when you have been parented by a perfectionist or have one as a supervisor. Metaphorically it is like a constrictor snake like a python. The tendency when being constrained is to try to do things without mistakes which is impossible. This then leads to inaction. The fear is trying to take you to more freedom in action which is part of creativity or playfulness. It usually resides in the lungs or throat. The important thing is to not fight all of the rules and procedures that perfectionists demand, but to embrace freedom in action such as being much more playful in your artwork.

Fearful of Being Dominated/Overpowered: The origin of domination can be parental such as having a parent who uses to force to keep you from moving in a direction that is consistent with your own true self. It can also be cultural or experiential such as the domination of men over women, one race over another. When you feel the fear of being overpowered, it results in feeling weak and lowly, unable to act. Metaphorically is like an angry grizzly bear. The fear goes away when you are your own grizzly bear of empowerment and strength inside. Inner strength keeps you going even when the odds are against you.

Fearful of Being Attacked Fiercely: Being attacked fiercely is like what happens in a sexual assault or an aggressive theft. It tends to be a single event that leaves you feeling completely completely defenseless and vulnerable. When you have this kind of fear, then you need an assertive type of courage. Assertive courage allows you to attack a goal as if you are a shark biting into it or a lion pouncing. The strength energy is a bit more enduring, but the assertive energy is required only for short burst to get things moving forward.

Fearful of Loud Noises or Crowds: Crowds or loud people have a tendency to shut down your ability to listen to your own inner guidance and wisdom. It is like a noisy, negative politician who is trying to prevent the truth from coming out or prevent people from from actually thinking about issues. Metaphorically the energy needed when you have this fear is the ability to go inward, to be a true introvert, cave-like. Being able to go inward for guidance keeps you on your own path rather than being subjected to someone else’s path.

Fearful of Drowning: The fear drowning has a lot to do with being in a really bad relationship where you are immersed in another person’s negative energy. It could also be a group of people like in a workplace. When you feel like you are drowning in a relationship, it means that you need to have the ability to related to other people’s positive energy, to connect with the positive energy in others. As you develop this ability the person that is drowning you will fade away.

Feel free to tell me about what energy your fear is calling you to.

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Dreams For Peace

Dream Interpretation, Therapy, Transformation

Unleashing Greater Love by Processing Hurt and Anger

How to Avoid Getting Sucked into the Politics and Religion of Being Against…

My Bus Dream with Erika

Dealing with Venomous Snakes (Poisonous People) Who Come into Your Life

Metaphoric Surfing Part 2: Riding the Cutting Edge When the Environment Gets Conservative

My Surfing Dream: Riding the Way of the Cutting Edge

On the Capacity to Take Initiative

The Nightmare That Won’t Go Away by Trying to Live in the Imagined Glorious Past

The Dynamics of Getting Out of a Funk

Being Imaginative Can Enhance the Transformation Process

How to Process a Dream that Has Positive with Negative Elements in it

Creating a Vision for Yourself that is Congruent with Your True Self (Not Your Ego)

Positive Dreams: How Do You Process Them

My Dream of Being in a Big Mess: Moving toward Organization

Running in Your Dreams: What does it Mean?

Freeing Up Your Positive Future: How to Own Your Future

The Shame Code: Attacks on the Self

Dreams with Famous/Accomplished People: What Do They Mean

The Code of Guilt: Setting Your Own Standards; Finding Your Own Inner Guidance

A Word or Two About Bullies: Building Social Capital

The Hurt Code: Door Opener to Loving What You Do

The Code of Jealousy: Getting Out of Extreme Protection and Guarding What You Think You Have

The Code of Envy: Killer of Relationships/Door to Intimacy

The Grief Code: Doorway to Endurance

The Code of Disappointment: Beware of Expectations.

The Code for Frustration: Right Goal-Wrong Process to Get There

The Code of Anger: Doorway to Tranquility, Patience, Detachment, Calm

The Code of Anxiety 2 Examples

The Anxiety Code: Moving Towards Confidence

Breaking the Code of Fear 2: Examples

Richard Hastings

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