Grief is the Doorway to Empowerment

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: How to Change a Big Fear into a Huge Asset

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 …

Dreamwork: Nightmares are Your Best Friends

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 …

The Secret Code of Transformation 3: Grief/Sadness

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 …

Why We Need to Stay in Our Discomfort

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. …

Animal Dreams 1: Dogs

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 …

How to Use Negative Emotions to Your Advantage: Part 1 Fear

The purpose of the next few posts is help people understand how you can use negative emotions as powerful vehicles for change.   The idea of a negative emotion is not to run away from it but to use it as a way to get to the really positive energy that wants to develop in you.   …

My Recurring Dream of the Air Force Academy and Why People Think the Current President is Correct

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 …

Dealing with Worry Part 2: How to Not Allow Worry to Take You Over the Edge to the Dark Side

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: Finding Out What Stage You are in Makes a Huge Difference on How to Act

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 …

Giving Out Honey When You Receive Poison

“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 …

The 5 Secrets of Dealing with Dark Energy

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 …

Turning Around Hopeless Situations

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 Mathematics of Developing Your True Self/Getting Over the Subtraction Model with a Little Addition

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 …

Using Your Dreams to Monitor the Intensity of Your Physical Activity

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 …

Fear is Your Best Friend When It Comes to Transformation

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 …

Releasing Enthusiasm Part 2: Getting Over the Fear of Other People’s Anger

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 …

Dreams about your Ex

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 …

Dreams of Vampires, Walking Dead: Why We Need Them in Our Dreams

When a dream is frightening like a nightmare, it isn’t as bad as you may think.    We need vampires and zombies and monsters.  They give us valuable insight into our own process and help to head is in the right direction in our lives.    You are not a bad person or really messed up because …

Embracing Fear

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 …

Relationships are Tricky Things in Dreams: Be Careful

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 …

Lions and Boundaries in Dreams

I recently had these two dreams sent to me and thought about how important they are for so many people. I had a very vivid dream.  I had no option but to pass through a path to get to the other side. There was a caged lioness and lion cant remember but the lioness I …

Bear Dreams: Getting to Your Empowerment

I dreamed I was in a house which was being invaded by bears the size of Sasquatch. Someone told me to not worry they know what they are doing, and they had some sort of trick to get them out, but it seemed to me the bears were going to attack. I felt so small. …

Finally Getting Out of Blame and Into Responsibility

The big difficulty with getting out of blame and taking responsibility for moving your life forward is that there are a lot of people out there that are truly worthy of an immense amount of blame.   When you have been a victim of injustice, the condition that most of the world lives in,  then it …

Dreamwork in the Body

Every year when I go to Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, my son-in-laws and I do some kind of boys day out where we hike or mountain bike.   This year we climbed the Chief in Squamish which is just north of Vancouver.  Shane runs a company called Dare to Evolve  He asked me if I …

Dream Work 8: What You Are in a Dream is NOT the Same as What You Are in the World

Hi… last night I had an odd dream. I am a male, but in this dream I had big breasts and a vagina. I was naked and i started to play with my self and it felt really good… what could this mean? I’m certain I’m not gay, or in any way curious. So what …

Dream Work 7: Living Life As If It Were Already the Future Your True Self Wants

“Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday.” Baha’u’llah The question of inner work is always singular.  How do I get out of the stuck state that I am currently in?  There is large body of literature and work about the importance of being present in yourself,  but …

Dream Work 6: Using Self-Discipline in Dream Analysis

Many times I receive dreams from people that appear as though they could happen in real life just as they happen in the dream world.    For instance, what do you do if your happily married, but you are having sex with someone else than your spouse in a dream?   How do you get your head …

Dream Work 5: Making Your Enemies into Friends

“Let them at all times concern themselves with doing a kindly thing for one of their fellows, offering to someone love, consideration, thoughtful help. Let them see no one as their enemy, or as wishing them ill, but think of all humankind as their friends; regarding the alien as an intimate, the stranger as a …

Dreamwork 5: Podcast

Recently I did a podcast on Dream Work that you can hear by clicking the link below.  It is also on the blogroll on this blog. http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/living-on-purpose/2013/04/202-dreams-peace