What do you DO with your dreams?  Literally.  What is the first thing you DO upon waking?  The difference between really “inspired” people and other people is that inspired people DO something with their guidance.  Everyone gets inspiration.  But it takes focus to let that stream of big information flow through you into words and actions, blogs and art pieces, conversations and businesses.  It takes attention and diligence to repeatedly create a living bridge between your dreams and the behaviors and physical forms of your life.   But, it’s pretty much the only game worth playing while living a human life.  That is, if you want to know and feel and experience the crazy awesome pleasure that comes from creating in integrity with who you really ARE. So, you might as well get GOOD at it.

How do you wake yourself?  What thoughts are habitual at that tender moment of bridging this world and the other world of dreamtime?  Do you pause to receive your dreams?  And do you take the time to thank your life and pray your way into the day?

Here’s some tips from my own practice of navigating waking.

What do I do upon waking:

Listen.  Stay as still and as quiet as possible and listen to the tender bridge between my dreams and my waking.  Occasionally, I will write them down.

A yawning big-cat stretch.  Taking a few moments to feel the soft animal of my body.

Here’s what my inner self talk sounded like:

Long listening silence, simply feeling.

“Good morning beauty.  Good morning dreams.  Good morning breath.  (Big breath!)

Thank you for my life.”

Listening to my dreams:

What often comes for me, these days, is something like a directive.  This blog, for example.  This is what came through my dreams to DO, to SHARE, to co-create a more awesome and evolutionarily optimal conversation with my world.  But, sometimes, what comes is visions that aren’t so easily translated.  These are fun.  Other times, what comes is the need to feel into something disturbing, or to let myself thing and feel long and hard about some old unresolved loss.  It is always a healing opportunity.  And, if I am honest with myself (about my honest feelings, pleasant or not) and present with the dream images themselves, the healing bundle always reveals itself.  Dreams can be subconscious or superconscious, lucid or non-lucid.  All of them are valuable.  The more present you become to them, the more lucid and superconscious they often become, and the more powerfully they inform the living of your life.

Remember, even if you feel grumpy or stiff or a bit hung over, this is YOUR day:

All the world: the bird, the dawn, the smallest green thing, is saying to you, “LOVE YOUR LIFE.”  All that life wants from you is that you soften and open to living.

It’s up to you to listen and to STAY AWAKE.

Originally posted at: Samantha Sweetwater blog

Lau Tzu said:

I’ve been dancing with water since my early teens – at the ocean, in rivers, in lakes, in my body.

This time last year I turned 40, and entered a whole new level of connection with my fluid nature. Because, whatever I hold onto or fixate on – emotionally, mentally or spiritually – quickly becomes a painful armor that prevents me from experiencing my true health, ease and sensual joy in my body and in my life.

As I dance the river, I contact a deeper, more sustainable and subtle sense of LIFE-FULL-NESS and power - all the time, in every dance, in every thought, in every act.

This Summer, how can you be soft and strong?  How can you yield rigidity and fixation to embody more holistic power?  How can you overcome by letting go?

Come, discover this River in the Dance.

Contact Mark at markdaquila(at)yahoo(dot)com

www.jialovelife.com| www.facebook.com/1newlove

Travelling is learning.  Whenever we venture into foreign lands, some part of us wants to grow.  We want to expand our horizons, test our edges, and experience greater unity with our global human family.  Sometimes this connection comes in obvious ways – in a smile, a kind gesture, in the convergence of a pod of people standing together in awe of a rainbow or a sunset or a soaring bird, in the laughter or tears of a child, in something given, in something received.

In my experience, I it rarely comes in the ways I expect…  Human beings are preferential creatures.  I, like just about everyone, am a creature of habit.  We gravitate towards what is comfortable and easy.  But, travel can be testing, at times.  Growth often comes when I don’t get what I thought I wanted or intended – when a bus gets delayed for 5 hours in the heat of an Indian afternoon, or the tickets to Machu Pichu are sold out, or I get stuck in the Brazilian jungle for an extra week with two strangers and a misanthropic Royal Parrot named Ed.  I find that, if I allow space in my heart for the bumps and the kinks, I always get what I need to soften and open more fully to love.

I’ve been travelling in South and Central America for two months, now.  I’m saturated in the colors, flavors, smells of this land of mysterious and diverse cultures and climes.  Like a stone in the river of life, my edges have been polished by the rolling, sometimes disjointed, rhythm of constant movement.  I started this trip in the windswept Sacred Valley of Vilabamba, Ecuador, then headed North up to the technicolor lakes, jungle volcanoes and tribal textiles of Guatemala, Belize and Southern Mexico for a 20 day tour of the Mayan Heartland and a week at Lago Atitlan.  Then, I flew back down to Peru, where I am now, high in the mountains above Cusco, at over 11,500 feet above sea level (wow!).  I’m travelling with a Peruvian friend and staying at the home of one of his mentors and teachers.  We are living life en Español… a language I’ve never studied and am only now beginning to stutter into.  What a challenge.  What an opportunity – an opportunity to let go of all my ideas about what I think love and loving is and to live more quietly and wholly into something real and practical and responsive – something I recognized this morning as unconditional love.  It’s really ridiculously simple… and very worth taking note.

Given that we are, by nature, preferential beings.  It seems to me that living unconditionally is about shaping my preferences according to the natural patterns of unconditionality.  God, I love paradox!

8 Keys to Living Unconditional Love:

1.) Love who you are with.

The person or people in front of you are your opportunity to love.  Period.  Right now, there is no one else with whom to give and receive that mysterious currency called love.  So, turn towards who ever you are with and give them your eyes, your awareness, your listening, your curiosity and compassion and see what happens.  You don’t always get to choose your company, but you always get to choose how you attend to and respond to them.

2.) Let love be it’s own language.

Giving and receiving requires no words.  Presence requires no language.  Gestures form a complete language.  And, in the absence of language, it is easy to feel the heart.  It’s as simple as a smile, a gaze, a giggle, an exhale in the face of stress.  Let it be light.  Let it flow.  It will grow!

3.) Learning is a way of loving.

Whether traveling internationally or connecting with a new friend or lover in your hometown… everyone has a different language of love.  We ALL want to connect, to share, to understand and be understood, and we all do this differently.  So, love motivates us to learn how to observe and to communicate.  It’s really helpful to learn the language and customs of our new friends so that we can more fully understand and be understood, give and receive.  And, regardless of shared language, we can observe the habits of another with curiosity and respect to discover the non-verbal and gestural language beneath language.  We can also ASK QUESTIONS.  With observation, communication and questions, we can respond more coherently to our friends day by day.  Love invites us to rest into observation and learning BEFORE imposing our own ideas, opinions and preferences on a person, a people and a place.

4.) Love is a stillness.

Sometimes there is nothing to do.  Have you ever noticed those old couples who sit together in easy silence?  Non-doing is a place where shared peace, contentment, presence and delight are available.  Chill out.  As an American, I can be rather obsessed with optimal experience, with getting somewhere and gettingh things done.  In these South American (and many indigenous cultures) the value of not doing is penultimate.  People value relaxation and enjoying the moment above achievement and efficiency.  This can really confront the ego program that says “I am valuable because I achieve.”  Yeah!  By sitting still… we simply are OK. Tranquillo….

5.) Love waits. 

“Patience, my love.”  In the absence of shared language, we have to be patient with our selves and our companions.  Relaxed, patient presence is one of the greatest things we can give or receive.  It takes time to look up that one key word in the dictionary… it’s worth it.  The greatest suffering when travelling generally arises through our impatience, the frustration of not being able to communicate or immediately get what we want, and the shame that we don’t have all the answers.  Travelling sometimes implies the bumpy process of communicating at the level of a 5 year old.  It implies letting other people do things for you, which means not being in control.  It’s a fantastic opportunity for ego death – for letting go of more ideas, opinions and preferences and being grateful for what is available in the moment.  Patience then, becomes a foundation for peace and enjoyment.

6.) Love does not need to “be understood.” 

Words can really get in the way of loving.  Our obsession with understanding and being understood is often the biggest block to simply sharing love.  I’ve been recognizing that I generally enter into relating with a perceived need to “be understood” as a prerequisite to that relationship working.  And, that what I really mean by this is that I want to have my worldview and my private inner world affirmed.  I’m realizing that this perceived need is more a function of insecurity than of love and loving.  If I am secure and grounded in myself, sharing is easy.  And, I don’t project an imagined need to be affirmed into the space of the relationship.  I mean, really…. It’s not the responsibility of my friends to understand all my little distinctions and the specific details of my perceptions.  This is just a projection of my ego desire not to feel alone.  Understanding can come in the silence, in the patience and in the gestures.  It really isn’t necessary to “be understood” in order to love and be loved.

7.) Love acts/responds. 

It’s the little things.  Every mother in the world is overworked.  Everybody appreciates getting a little shoulder rub, or having a cup of coffee poured.  Every person in the world appreciates a humble bit of help.  Whether you speak the language or not, you can clean the kitchen, do the laundry, hold the baby, fold the towels or give an old man a ride down the hill.  Love is a poetry of action.

8.) Love let’s go. 

“If you love someone, set them free.”  When travelling, we often love more freely and fully when we know that the connection is temporary.  We’ve all had that experience – the fierce, beautiful and fleeting love that will not last but that fills us with memories to last a lifetime.  This, in and of itself, is delicious.  But, the grace here is the capacity to hold lightly and wholly the object of our love.  If I can translate this to ALL of my relationships – to hold and to let go, to pour myself into the precious moment and hold the outcomes loosely – then I can really love!

~s.s.  November, 2012

Reposted from Samantha Sweetwater’s blog.

Re-posted from Samantha Sweetwater’s blog:

Some thoughts on information overload and the path of non-violence.

Lately, I’ve been present to how information overwhelm is a subtle form of violence – a stressor on the nervous system that prevents me from actually embodying peace.

Have you noticed the way your body feels when you are working to take in all the information coming at you – to answer the phone, the SMS’s, the Skype, the IM’s, to read all the emails, to stay up to date on the latest breakthroughs, to track the emotions of your friends and partners, to maintain political participation, etc, etc, etc…???

There is a subtle and very important distinction between working in a curious and disciplined way to expand your capacity to assimilate new information, connections and experiences, and the place where it becomes an overwhelm to your system and thus inhibits optimal presence, assimilation, integration and action.

PEACE means navigating a healthy boundary between expanding your capacity and weeding your garden.  It means breathing into the more to find flow.

Elegant, implicate presence and action arise in the space of “nothing extra” – a less-is-more simplicity that includes the full spectrum – from extreme momentum to doing nothing.  This supports an inner experience of non-violence that cannot arise from over-pushing; it can only arise in flow.  Listening for and acting from the “nothing extra” supports you to navigate this this post-2012, post-information, neo-time era, when the fields of time, space and information are nearing singularity, in a graceful way.  It supports you to BE the zero point in action and in essence.

Questions: 

• How can you ground your nervous system in the context of immense amounts of information while staying open, alert and curious to new and important information and patterns?
• How can pattern recognition create a filter for information?
• How can you be ok with what you can’t attend to while vibrantly offering your presence and attention to what you can?
• How are expansion and containment related?

And, I love it.  I am ALL ABOUT the Big Yes to love, to life, to intimacy, to more life… I’m all about the delicious bio-chemistry of embracing my life.

But, really folks, have you taken a moment lately to celebrate NO?

NO it the other side of the big YES.  Without it… we’re just a ceaseless, unbounded, amoebic blobs.  Without no, we are unable to negotiate our time, energy attention, and intimacy.  Without it, we are unable to create healthy boundaries, to make coherent choices or to be effective in our leadership.

But, we are really afraid of the no. 

We are afraid we will disappoint, upset, off-put or loose out.  We are afraid to be perceived as negative.  We are afraid that NO will inhibit the yes.

We have equated no with negative.
What if no IS profoundly positive?
What if NO is the secret ingredient in a coherent system?
What if NO is the key to living a sane and healthy human life?
What if NO is also part of the BIG YES of oneness?

WHAT IF YOUR STRONG, CLEAR, NO FREES AND SUPPORTS THE BIGNESS OF YOUR YES?

Really… if I were a cell, and I only said YES, I would soon become a cancer.

• If I were a gardener, and I only said yes, I would only have a plot full of weeds.
• If I were a mother and I only said yes, I would exhaust myself and my child would grow up without healthy boundaries or respect for others.
• If I were a woman, and I only said yes, I’d be recapitulating the same dysfunctional I came here to heal this lifetime.
• If I were a leader and I only said yes, you would walk the other way….   Wouldn’t you?

I am here today to firmly and lovingly, joyfully and lightly, embrace NO.  Sometimes it takes a BIG NO to create an even bigger YES.

Originally posted on: Samantha Sweetwater’s Blog

We embody mind. Essentially, we ARE awareness in Action. Our energies move inward and outward through the vehicle of the body. In terms of meditative awareness and the experience of stillness, it is not so important whether our physical bodies are still or moving. Rather, what matters is where we rest our minds. Dharma dance and other movement meditation forms train our focus on the moving truth of Stillness. In placing awareness, feeling and sensation completely in what we are doing, we learn that doing and stillness are not separate. In DANCING this awareness, we are honing the creative principle of being-ness, inviting active meditative awareness, skillfulness and surrender in a graceful flow with our lives.

The Buddha described all existence as a simultaneous, interconnected sea of subjectivity: Dependent Co-arising. Nothing exists without its dependent parts. The tree is in the forest because of the earth beneath it, the sun shining on it, the air around it. The leaves are its children. Without the leaves, there would be no trunk, no sap, no bark. Nothing exists distinct from existence. In this same way, action and perception are always simultaneously interwoven. And now, what the masters knew, the phenomenologists, quantum physicists and cosmologists confirm: Creation is The Mind of God. Dharma Dance is a grounded and complete experiential entry into the truth of Dependent Co-arising. As we dance with a partner, we are both leader and follower and neither, we are wound into the seamlessness of the creative flow. We drop in to the place where we are neither seeking nor grasping for the dance, for any particular thing to happen. Instead, we enter a state of being-ness where impulse is in effortless continuum with action and sensation. Dependent co-arising describes effortless action as well as effortless awareness. No doing is required, only the drop into the seamlessness of sensation and the willingness to remain in the now.

This dance is spontaneous creation, a jazz. All great jazz comes out of skillful relationship to change. This is true yoga: effortless presence in action. We cannot change the nature of change, but we can choose the way we relate to it. Discernment and Surrender in appropriate portions are the substrate of Grace. Dharma Dance invites conscious play with the interconnected fabric of the alive world. Deepening skillfulness and availability to change, we explore the technologies of being human in nature. To dance the dharma is to widen the bridge of Grace. The practice invites integration between how we experience being-ness, stillness, spirit and how we meet, experience and respond to life in every moment.