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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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. …
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 …
Anger is one of the less understood virtues, especially in places like America where the culture is run on how fast you can get to a goal or get something done or delivered. It is even worse in cultures like the Middle East where men think they own their families and have the innate right …
I have stated this theme many times in the past, but it is worth repeating again because the culture gives such a different message. Negative emotions, even though they feel negative, are actually only doorways to higher levels of positive energy. The culture wages war against negative emotions so that they will go away. It …
Nightmares by definition evoke fear. This means that when you are facing that big snake or being bitten by one, the negative emotion you are feeling is FEAR. It is not anxiety or shame or guilt or grief or any other one. It is fear. To be good at changing a nightmare into an asset …
When you wake up in the middle of the night because you have just had a terrible nightmare like a poisonous snake ready to sink its fangs in you or you are about to fall off a huge cliff, your heart is usually racing and your mind may feel some relief that the dream was …
It is 5:00 PM the day before the last day of school, the day of anticipation of the long awaited and deserved rest period. I have just arrived in my apartment and am about to lie down on the living room couch to get a few moments of rest. The phone rings. It is the …
I am walking down Commercial Drive in East Van (Vancouver) on another cool and rainy day. Every step I take tells me to get out of my discomfort and into temporary relief. I could get some nice pastry, maybe some pizza, or a double macchiato latte topped with whipped cream. Don’t get me wrong here. …
Have you ever dreamed of an animal? Animals are great as symbols because they are fairly easy to interpret. Here is what you do. Say you are dreaming about a dog, and the dog bites you. This is a negative dream so you have to start with how you feel. When you get bitten, the …
This is where I spent the first three years of my university education. It is called the Air Force Academy. Its purpose is to train young men and women to become officers in the U.S. Air Force. When I was a young person and they started recruiting me because I was a good student and …
In part one of dealing with worry I was trying to show that when you are confident with your internal gifts and act out of them, then positive things begin to show up all around. What happens when worry gets the better of you? Human beings have two aspects to themselves, an ego, which is …
Healing or Development Change is always basically the same process of changing negative energy to positive energy, but where you start from to do the change process depends upon how dysfunctional you are in your overall life. You will have to find where you are coming in last place, where you are kicked out of …
“Act in accordance with the counsels of the Lord: that is, rise up in such wise, and with such qualities, as to endow the body of this world with a living soul, and to bring this young child, humanity, to the stage of adulthood. So far as ye are able, ignite a candle of love …
Secret #1: Everyone of us has darkness, that is, we all have weaknesses and fears and vulnerabilities that make us do things that are not so positive. You cannot expect perfection from others, because it does not exist. As obvious as this is most of us get angry at others when they act badly. You …
If you are feeling hopeless or in despair or know someone who he is, this post may give you some guidance about how to proceed. It is not by any means complete, but a place to start. Taking an honest look at the hell you are in including being able to talk about it openly …
The medical model in the Western world, of a necessity, developed itself into something of a subtraction equation. It says that if you have something like cholera or the plague and you get rid of it (subtract it), then everything will be peachy. If you were living with cholera in a town and then suddenly …
In the previous post about what kind of physical activity you can do when dealing with trauma I introduced the concepts of low intensity and high intensity exercise emphasizing the importance of low intensity work when you are in first working with your trauma. In this post I am going to show how to use …
In the work I do with DreamsforPeace hardly a day passes when I don’t receive a message that goes something like this. “Dear Richard, Last night I had the most disturbing nightmare…” The first impulse when we have intense feelings of fear whether they are in dreams or real life is to do whatever is …
I have a lot of natural calmness. I think it was just one of those gifts that was placed in me when at the moment of my conception. I don’t think it has a lot to do with genetics or environment. It is what helps me do a lot of the inner dream work with …
Almost every week I receive a dream on the “free dream interpretation” page of this blog where someone is sleeping with their ex and then wondering what that is all about since they don’t have a relationship with that person anymore. It can be very disconcerting to get sexually stimulated with someone you thought you …
Most of the dreams that people send me have a lot to do with fear. When you get to the core of someone’s inner work, there is always a fear that that has to be faced. It is part of the human condition. I think that for most of us we just want the fear …
It seems to me, without actually having done the calculation, that most of our dream life (about 95%) deals with troubles with our relational lives. I am sure that that is because 95% of our troubles in life are relational ones. How to have a successful relationship seems to be one of the great mysteries …
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a Baha'i and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. Read more...
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