The Global Dream Initiative....Dream Tending

The Global Dream Initiative calls for a recognition of the trauma in the world and the need to participate in its healing. We assert that the world’s suffering appears in the living images of dreams and that we can creatively respond via the dream.

Dream Tending, a practice developed over 30 years by Stephen Aizenstat, experiments with a worldview that playfully and soulfully sees the world as alive and always dreaming. He advocates we go to the very depths of experience, to the level of the anima mundi—the soul of and in the world—and listen. At this level of experience we engage the voices of the world's dreams, effortlessly arising and speaking on their own behalf and asking for response. 

The Global Dream Initiative will develop a forum to see and hear the world's dreams and to begin utilizing them to create new and more generative ways of responding to the trauma of the world, ways that are not trapped in the cultural, political, economic, and environmental approaches that now are failing us. Joining other like-minded efforts worldwide, the Global Dream Initiative is a call to action.


Stephen Aizenstat

Thank You, Dr. Seuss!

"You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

You're on your own.

And you know what you know.

And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go!"

- Thank you Dr. Seuss!

Women's Dream Circles

....a creative wellspring - the dream. Imagine your dreams, your known and unknown self, while entering into a playful and joyous discovery of the subtlety and elegance of the metaphorical meaning of the images.

What is being asked of us?  That is a question women ask themselves in regards to family, partners, friends, professional demands…. 

As women, we respond to that question frequently – nurturing, preparing, anticipating, planning….

How often do you pause with your dreams and openly, curiously wonder, what is the imagery in my dreams asking of me? How do you listen to the strange and wily stories YOUR psyche offers night after night through the years? This imaginative counsel of figures and landscapes that are too delicious….as James Hollis says, “who makes this up?”

Liz Brenneman facilitates Women's Dream Circles just for this purpose and she is wondering, curious to see who wants to show up!  

In essence the goal is for you to begin to form a relationship with dream as a living guide and creative source - to embrace images of all kinds as embodied helpers, healing agents, wise companions – archetypal figures who are not to be feared but rather welcomed and anticipated.  We will journey through a deeper understanding of ways to explore, understand, and experience dream. And as a result you will travel hospitably in the company of others who are ready and willing to enter this realm alongside you.

Please accept this invitation to move beyond the familiar.  If you are interested, please contact Liz at lizbrenneman@icloud.com for more information.   A Dream Circle will include three hours with six women who have decided now is the time to explore dream.  The cost for each monthly group is $90 per individual, per session. I look forward to hearing from you!

RE-COLLECTION (TO GATHER ONCE MORE) FROM CHILDHOOD

The first night of a new move, from city to Island, I wake to talking, my parents settling into this new place, a beach cabin squatting in the sand.  Eight years old, I leave my bed, alive with excitement, and pad down the hall.  I ask to walk on the beach and my parents are agreeable.

2:00 AM finds me alone on the beach, my small frame courting a white cotton nightgown and bare feet.  I can feel the giddy anticipation of this August pre-dawn hour – it is the late 1950’s.  Voluptuous salt scents ride the breeze, pressing complex sea life into my senses.  Lunar light vibrates, millions of bouncing brilliant white fragments cast among currents like glimmering churlish fish breaking the surface.  My nightgown, illuminated, is now an aural glow flanking my body, buoyed by the wind.  Shallow tide pools capture the direction of damp night air; thin, narrow wavelets skittering to the edges of their reach.

I hear the slap of wet sand cool under my small feet as they dance to the shining undulations of the tide retreating and advancing on the shore, tugged by the moon and the sun.  Looking East toward the Cascade Mountains, low-slung lights of the Seattle skyline, flat against the shore, stretch into a single diamond strand, interrupted only by the solitary pendent of the Smith Tower, a lone skyscraper keeping watch.  I imagine myself a woman bold enough to wear such finery.  In that dream moment I know it is possible.

Standing at the furthest reach of the sand spits curve, where our beach cabin is barely visible, the unknown darkness reaches around the corner.  In my moment on that curve where the shore bends, I know that my world is this wild free place – the place of a dream come true.

This New Sense of Place

I wake into each day

knowing some belong

so naturally

without question 

their safe attachment 

as easy as breath

guides their way.

and others, 

i know,

have no place

where their feet settle

like old friends on a worn path

and belonging is a longing

that guides their way....

i wake into this knowledge

and can see it both ways

and know each

lends itself to it's own vision

and light

and darkness

and each 

has a song line 

unto itself.

so i listen with them

listen for the sense of belonging

that lives in both places

and together

we watch the veil

flutter to the ground

when we lift our hearts 

and rise to embrace

rise to embrace

this new sense of place

The Ecstatic Longing

In Stephen Levine's book, A Gradual Awakening, there is a chapter called Snaring Enlightenment.  I am interested in the last paragraph where he states  "...."not enlightened" and "enlightened" are both just thoughts.As we watch the mind, we see how shallow thought is because the movement of thought lies mostly in words.  But at a deeper level there is a movement in mind which can be experienced when we are no longer relying on words, when we're just experiencing.  At this level we experience an urge we could almost call a "homesickness for God," and ecstatic longing to come home, to return to the source, to be complete.  This is the unconditioned endlessness beyond mind, pure undifferentiated being."

I just returned from a four day visit with a family member who was lovingly placed in a " memory care" home.  That is a gentle way of saying end of life care for Alzheimer's patients, otherwise known as "residents."   The experience was breathtaking.  My particular family member had several "themes" that were revisited over and over again  prior to her memory slipping beyond her reach....and ours.  One theme in particular was accompanied by a deep unrelenting restlessness - it was the theme of "going home," the desire to return to the source so to speak, to be complete.

When I read Levine's view of "snaring enlightenment," I couldn't help but notice the similarity of "undifferentiated beings" and the many speechless, yes, wordless individuals who sat so still hour after hour waiting....in the "unconditional endlessness" of the moment.  Is this the deeper level of thought - the movement of mind beyond verbal communication?

In the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman tells the story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong girl whose epilepsy was diagnosed in Merced, California. The title of Ms. Fadiman's book describes the Hmong translation of the word "epilepsy." 

In our culture, individuals who are touched by a "different" brain chemistry are referred to as "disordered."  The DSM IV is the psychiatric "bible" for the clinically inclined allopathic purveyors of healing.  Allopathy is defined as "the method of treating disease by the use of agents that produce effects different from those of the disease treated."

Unlike the Hmong, whose words, "the spirit catches you and you fall down" honor the epileptic experience as one of spirit and body (the mind is very much a part of the body), we in the West label brain "dysfunction" as particular disorders.  These labels often alienate us from ourselves, our families, and our communities.  We don't have the time, the money, the political imperative, or the support of our culture to care lovingly for the vast numbers of individuals whose spirits are differently abled due to a brain chemistry that is undeniably outside the norm.

I don't want to suggest here that I believe we should disregard the benefits of allopathic
medicine.  I do want to vigorously beseech our human community to entertain the possibility that we can honor those who suffer from a mental illness.  Whether it is Alzheimer's or Schizophrenia, Bi Polar or Dissociation, there is first and foremost an individual who sources from the heart and soul, not unlike everyone else.  

The "rambling" of psychosis can be terrifyingly astute.  An uncanny intuitive knowing is present - you think something and instantly the individual "hears" your thoughts and translates the truth for you - without those nice acceptable buffers we are so accustomed to.  There is a razor-like accuracy that lies at the core of a rage - it is undeniably difficult to hear it when standing in the face of the force with which it is delivered.  

Understanding metaphor is essential to understanding psychosis....and Alzheimer's and psychosis can be eerily similar.  Delusions, paranoia, visions, a brain whose chemistry has jumped the tracks of linear thinking and delivery.  There is always a
story lying beneath the spoken word.   Sitting with my 83 year old family member, following her every word - I could not fail to see that where ever her mind took her - it was her momentary reality.  And her awareness of me was almost a visceral recognition - she didn't really remember me, yet she knew me.  Reality is subjective - I have to admit it was really rather refreshing to set mine aside for a while and ride her wave - an endlessly entertaining, heart felt excursion to all manner of places.  I am so appreciative to have had the opportunity to see her in all her aliveness - rather than experiencing her as tragedy.  Illness is more than tragedy - it is another way of knowing.

I have wandered a bit here....I suppose what I really hope to convey here is this.  Whether Alzheimer's, or Schizoaffective Disorder, Epilepsy or Diabetes, Cancer or Heart Disease is the diagnosis.....first and foremost there is a person who deserves to be honored, heard, seen, loved, and cared for.  Can we as individuals and as a culture reach to the deeper level of mind - reach out to the spirit, the heart and soul that is part of the undifferentiated knowledge of being - can we tap into our humanity and reach beneath the labels to embrace the people whose spirits may catch them, taking them to places we don't recognize?

The Right Tools

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein, (attributed)

US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

How many times have I heard clients lament the limitations of personal tools needed for making change. People are complex systems living within even more complex systems and each individual has unique needs and characteristics that deserve to be met. I have in my tool box an eclectic array of tools that are artfully chosen and integrated to meet the specific needs of each individual. The goal....new tools, different results.