Dream Work and Exercise/Sport
When you fall asleep at night, your body and mind go through a series of cycles intended to give you rest and recovery for the next day. At the same time, your spirit or your true self, goes off on various types of journeys when you are in your deepest periods of sleep to further your evolution as a human being. The dream journey is connected to your body and mind, but also detached from it. You remember the dream in your mind and feel emotions from it your body, but the purpose of the experience is always to help you grow as a human being by acquiring new capacities.
All of us as human beings are in a constant relationship with our bodies to get stronger, faster, more flexible, last longer, and be more coordinated. We just want to be at our peak and not have to face sore muscles and incapacitating injuries and illnesses. We miss it so much when our bodies are not able to act to our fullest potential. But since we are human beings, we all have weaknesses. Without them we would never know where we need to grow.
Dreamwork is about using the messages you get in your dreams at night so that you develop your inner self and your physical capacities. What is a useful way to think about your dreams, is that they originate in your body. When you first start the work, your dreams will begin in the weakest part of your body. For instance, your dreams may be in your knees or in your neck. They may be in your lungs or your achilles or your shoulders. Wherever you are weak, they will be there.
How does it work? If you have knee problems, which are the most common for people, you may have issues around flexibility usually because of trying to control things too much. The dreams will show you in a metaphoric manner where the issue is, like where your fear is. Then you can overcome the weakness and develop the body part as well as the virtue such as being more flexible in your life. When people start this process, they usually have long standing recurring injury problems. They are almost always related to the family they grew up in and how that family interacted in its cultural surroundings. For instance, if you have had an absent father, you probably will face some kind of back problems because of the lack of support. When you do the work to give yourself more emotional support and then do the corresponding physical work to strengthen your back, then you get amazing growth in every way in your life.
Most of the work begins with negative emotions, usually fear, because most of us do not have methods for working through our difficult problems especially handling complicated emotions. However, there are also dreams that are strictly positive such as flying dreams. Flying dreams are related mainly to your lungs because they are about being in the air. When you get a positive dream and know where it is related in your body, then it means that that type of exercise movement is open and ready to really develop.
You can start the work fairly simply and easily. If you are doing an exercise program, you can notice which movements are the most difficult for you. This is where your dream will be. You can write me, tell me what kind of program you are doing, where your difficulties are along with a current dream, and then I can point out some solutions for doing the developmental work. If you can’t remember a dream, which is also common, that is great information for me related to the difficulties.
dreamsforpeace@gmail.com
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a 
Dreams For Peace 
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your recent post about how dreamwork connects to the body and fitness or sports.
Your post refers to when a person first starts out doing dreamwork that where their issue is will show up in their dreams.
When I first started doing dreamwork with you six years ago, the issue showing up in my re-occurring dreams was around sex and sexuality – and the feeling of powerlessness I had back then because of some negative experiences around this issue.
I probably would have liked to avoid this topic because it is not something a lot of people in our culture speak openly about but in the past week not only have several people asked me directly about this topic, saying they want to read what I’ve written, or saying they wanted to explore the topic in greater detail with me, but also a young person just told me yesterday about a friend of hers who was sexually assaulted a couple months ago and the aggressor was a family member and she was asking my advice about how to support them both with tact and wisdom.
One thing I have learned about by applying your dreamwork method is that when something keeps showing up in day-to-day life that it is there for a reason and can be used as an opportunity for growth.
I know for certain that the issue I started out with when we were working together, of allowing powerful men to do as they wished with me or with my life because I was afraid to stand up to them and say No, I know that in some areas I have gotten a whole lot better and have stronger physical boundaries now and generally seem to know how to protect myself from compromising situations. I suppose that is why a young friend asked my advice on the issue.
It’s been your interpretations which have taught me so much about this – mainly that when sex shows up in a dream it is not about sex literally but is a metaphor for integration of qualities or virtues. I can realize that because sex was such a big issue for me in waking life years ago that when it showed up in a dream I couldn’t really receive the positive messages the dream had to convey because I had so many fears and negative memories associated with the images or feelings that those dreams brought up.
Anyway, that is in the past now in many regards and I am going forward with new sports and fitness activities and getting others involved too. I even won an award for implementing a physical activity program for a child with special needs and the idea had come from you, the dream I shared with you, and your interpretation. So I’m just building on that now in work I do with children.
I’m also learning to apply what I have learned about not allowing myself to be over-powered by men physically to the business realms and money. In the past, the business world was a male-dominated world and there was not a lot of room for authentic female participation or involvement. I like going forward now in positive and cooperative ways with amazing and positive men to generate and implement great business ideas which help a lot of people. It’s new and innovative and it’s really exciting.
So I guess I just wanted to share a testimonial of sorts as a comment on your post to say that absolutely what you are saying here is true and when I applied this method and stuck with it over several years it changed everything about my physical health and well-being in all aspects. I still have a lot of work to do because limitations in my life circumstances still prevent me from being as active as I’d like but that is changing now little by little and as it changes I am sharing with others what works and we are all learning from one another.
My long-term sports/fitness goals include things like going on week-long hiking trips, and biking for days, doing a bit of mountain climbing, and camping in extreme weather. I’d love to run a marathon of one sort or another and I’d like to be training in things like Taekwondo and playing soccer often. These are the things I’d like to do if I had more choice and more freedom to choose.
As I learn about integrating more of what I want to do and release more of what I don’t want to do I am sharing what works with others. It is great to see positive change all around me in every area. I am really grateful for your dreamwork.
I am also writing this here to encourage the others you are working with because I see a lot of the same themes are showing up in your Free Dream Interpretation page and I think it is so great that so many people are going through positive change by sharing their dreams with you!
I wanted to let you know.
Rachel