For nearly 50 years, facilitating dream work with clients has been a central thread woven into my private practice. I’ve come to see that dreams are one of the most powerful access ways to the deeper voice and directives of soul—because they are totally organic. Unlike our waking thoughts, we don’t control them; they are wildly unexpected, often bizarre, and carry no agenda other than an invitation to honor our own deepest wisdom.
The Resistance and the Revelation
I remember a powerful time in my life when I was unexpectedly facing the decision about whether to remain a key member of faculty at the University of Santa Monica. I had been there for 16 years, and my identity was thoroughly interwoven with my prominent role in the University’s growth. After my 15th year, I was astonished by an inner prompting, an intuitive sense that it was time to move on to the next season of my life’s expression. I fought this inner directive, this sacred invitation. It scared me, for I was a most beloved, member of the University community. I was paid well, and I loved the teachings. I never imagined I would be leaving.
However, the more I resisted the inner directive inviting me to move on, the more my dreams at night started coming to me incessantly, insistently. The message of these dreams was consistent and crystal clear: “This season is complete. It is time to let go.”
“To not honor your truth would be to go against the grain of who you are. My dreams were the revealing agent because they didn’t have an agenda I had programmed.”
Working with a Jungian therapist, I began to gradually allow myself to consider that the message of my dreams may actually contain wise direction. It took a year of inner work to come into cooperation and surrender with my emphatic inner guidance—into a trust that a deep place inside knew me and my highest life trajectory so well.
The day when I finally honored that inner wisdom, when I sat in my office and dared to push “send” on my resignation email, my entire world shifted. I moved into a deeply fulfilling, full-time private practice. I began the sacred process of homeschooling my two sons for the next 7 years. I had time for cultivating a healthy relationship with my body—and to build a few dear, life-long friendships of the heart. Very simply, I opened to a profound level of peace and contentment that I hadn’t realized was missing.
Indeed, my Soul had guided me beautifully through one life passage to another—into a new life that had been magically prepared for me as a divine gift. All I had to do was listen, trust and surrender…
Harvesting the Wisdom of the Night
In my work with clients, I often use a few “golden keys” for unlocking the power of the wisdom often interlaced within our dreams:
The Mirror of Consciousness: Consider every character, every river, and every landscape in the dream as a reflection of your own consciousness and “seeing.”
The Inner Dialogue: Try having an aspect of the dream—perhaps a mountain or a stranger—enter into a revelatory dialogue with you. This back and forth organic dialogue can open up vistas of possibilities and directions beyond your imagination.
The Aboriginal Way: I’ve always been moved by how the indigenous Aboriginal tribespeople in Australia gather in a circle each morning and share their nighttime dreams. They believe that the flow of revelation in a dream doesn’t stop just because we wake up—it is a continuous stream that remains available to us—which we can re-enter to find direction for our lives. The entire tribe selects one dream and then collectively re-enters the dream consciously—they share what they “see” as it continues to unfold in new surprising ways. They trust with their entire being the dream’s guiding, revealing wisdom, and always find that it assists them in addressing the important matters currently facing the tribe’s collective well-being.
Welcoming the Process
Whether it is through a seemingly bizarre dream, a revelation while walking in nature, or an undeniable intuitive presence carried by the words you captured in your morning journal, your wise inner guidance is always trying to get through to you. It is an invitation to surrender as a way of living life to its absolute fullest.
I’d love to hear from you: Have you ever had a genuinely surprising or “relentless” dream that refused to let you continue living your life as you had been? What was it trying to tell you? How might it have changed the course of your life? I’d love to hear from you about your experience…
With gratitude for the journey,
Gavin
Working With Me
The journey back to your authentic self is the hero’s journey of this lifetime. If you are dedicated to evolving, becoming more conscious—and releasing the unconscious patterns you carry inside—I invite you to explore my website and schedule a complimentary 45-minute conversation with me to explore the possibility of us working together.
