How to clarify your intentions
A public service announcement from my higher self.
Hold each intention up to the sun – see what drives you.
Message from a dream, September 20, 2022
Your intentions propel you through life.
If they are cloudy or driven by ego or fear then where you end up could be somewhere you don’t want to be.
If you want to see your future hold your intentions up to the Sun, one by one.
See what is really driving you.
Anything short of divine will is only cheating yourself.
An alchemical dream about Calcinatio
Calcinatio is the first process in Alchemy. It is the burning of prime matter into ash. This is from where the mythical phoenix rises. This is how you turn lead into gold. This is how you become something new.
Baptism in fire, by Midjourney
Dream, Saturday, April 9, 2022
It was supposed to be a baptism, only my head was set on fire. This is how you purify yourself, they said. Burn all your scripts and schemas, and then start all over again. How many times can I transform before I die? I wonder. My head a funeral pyre. My potential reborn.
The Last Reunion
Midjourney
Sometimes we feel like disconnected segments of ourselves. Periods of our lives are cut off from each other. Our brain rewires and restructures itself, and we forget who we were in the past and what we felt and what we wanted. We forget this is not the only life we have lived. Someday you will call all the various versions of yourself home. Row after row of multiple you(s). Together you will walk toward the Sun. It will be your final pilgrimage, and it will feel like resting.
The Moon Tarot Card: A Meditation
In The Moon Tarot Card:
In the land of dreams — when your intellect is illumined by intuition — two dogs bark and howl — these are your natures. One of them is tamed and one of them is not. Which is the one that you feed?
In the distance the two towers symbolize Intelligence and Instinct. One is man-made, the other divine. Most people live in one tower and not the other. Very few live in both.
The Moon is eclipsed and the face in the moon is a projection of your face. The droplets raining down are what cause waves in your subconscious. Sometimes they feel like a disturbance, but they are meant to stir you awake.
In the foreground there is a pond, where a crayfish lives. The crayfish is YOU — boxed in by your own five senses. The pond is rigid and stagnant and nothing new is ever born there.
But you can crawl out, and walk the path past your dogs — your submissive self and the one who revolts. And past the towers that paralyze you with paradox. Because you know there is something beyond what you are told. And you know there are more lands than just this one land.
Because you are primordial, made of angels and stars. You are not just a crayfish. This is a shell and you have choice: Retreat into the stagnant pond or leap beyond everything you know.
Inspiration: Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
Illustration & Animation by Olga Goriacheva
Grow another face
You’re aching to give voice to this other side of you. It’s beating like a new heart just below your skin. We have no language for this and we don’t talk about it and no one, but you, will give you the grace to change.
You must grow another face.
This is an all-out grab for more and more consciousness. You want to swim in multiple waves of depth and you deserve that. You deserve to be fed more than just algorithms. You are the one pulling rabbits out of the cosmic hat.
You clawed your way out of the abyss to be here now. So be here now.
You must grow another face.
There is a mythical land called Shambhala where some say Jesus and Buddha might reside, and others say it’s not really a spiritual kingdom but more of a diamond, where every ascended master is a facet or a separate side.
You are also multi-faceted. You are allowed to be multiple you(s). This is what true depth is. You can be different now. Grow another face.
We are afraid to be complicated. We mute ourselves. We stay on the surface of things. Flatten our desires. We think growing new faces means mental illness, but you’re already living with multiple voices and none of them are yours. They belong to your parents and your friends and children — and they are all outdated and uninformed.
Reformat yourself. Auto-update. Delete. Do what you have to do to grow another face.
You are allowed to be all things, then some things, and not other things, and no things — all at once.
All of my self-questions from 2022 so far
I copied and pasted all of my diary and dream entries into Clive Thompson’s only the questions online tool. Questions propel and expand your consciousness. Master the art of asking yourself questions.
What are the next god/guide posts? What did I learn in that lifetime and how can I bring that here? How to merge dimensions? What portal am I creating? What form are you holding now? Where is the rest of me? What is my soul reaching out toward? Am I still a stranger to myself? Why does love do this? Was that unkind? What are the consequences of love? Can my heart be boundless? Why does it hurt? Will there be love? Who is guiding me? Am I pure? What is this wilderness inside of me? What does a new beginning mean to me? What is true freedom? Who should I confess my sins to? Or can I have sovereignty over my heart, mind, body and spirit? Can I be absolved or is the freedom from needing to be absolved more than enough? Whose rules am I living by? What is worth fighting for? Is this a mistake? When is the next moon phase? He is still on the first rung of the ladder and where am I? Why do I have to get my footing again and again and again? Why can’t I start from where I was last time? Are you a comet or are you a planet? Is there anything you've been working on for many centuries? Do I have a stupid heart? What is the one thing I can control? What have we unearthed here? What kind of worship is this? What was the whale I threw out the window? How many times can I transform before I die? What is the difference between human love and divine love? How do you pray to a dead God?
Living Libraries
In my continuing journey to connect with “whale” consciousness, I began a correspondence with June Sananjaleen Hughes, who wrote Whale Wisdom Dolphin Joy: Ascension Teachings from the Cetaceans (mentioned here). Through her I learned of the term: living libraries — anchor points for truths.
Whales are living libraries. So are master crystals, she says, and flight patterns of migratory birds.
I want to be a living library. I carry memories in my finger tips. Each day I go out into the world and I expand my library of sensory experiences, emotions, ideas.
Someday I will be a living library of nostalgia, dreams, potentials and love.
Related: Choosing your form and Whale wisdom
Updated: Dreaming as a technology
Dream imagery: Mental Clouds
Dreaming is a technology. Every night I become more adept at translating the language (symbols) of dreams.
On March 8, I dreamed someone who loved me hired a skywriter to write my name in the night sky in neon light, but there was so much cloud coverage that I could barely see it.
When I woke up, I had a knowing that the clouds were my thoughts getting in the way. My mental body was building a wall between love and me. Suddenly, so many other dreams from before made sense!
From Symbolic and the Real by Ira Progoff:
If the dream goes unheeded, or if it is not understood, and if its subject matter remains important, the dream will usually be repeated, either with the same or with equivalent symbols. It seems that if an important part of the process taking place in the depths of the psyche is not recognized on the conscious level so that the person cannot cooperate with it and draw it forward in the acts of his life, the process of growth is stymied. The individual then remains in a condition of self-stalemate until he learns to recognize the tendency of his inner life and manages to bring his outer life into accord with it.
I thought about the other coded symbols I had unlocked (specific to me or universal):
Water/Waves/Ocean — subconscious, different levels of consciousness or what is repressed.
Landscapes/Cities — usually depicts the state/shape/territory of my heart.
Movement/Transportation/Airplanes/Buses — journeys, mental/subconscious/emotional or otherwise.
Spaces/Rooms/Furniture — usually calls for rearranging of mental structures. perspective shifting. mental baggage.
Clouds — my thoughts, a system of intelligence that differs from my intuition or emotional body.
Dream imagery does what self-help books cannot do.
How dream imagery works for me: First it is the image, then the understanding or knowing of what the image represents, followed by the emotion that’s anchored to the dream which makes it so meaningful and has the power to transform something inside of me.
UPDATE:
El Candado (the Spanish word for padlock) is a provoker-symbol in dreams. It show me doors I’ve neglected to lock or unlock. Sometimes there is an intruder, other times I’ve locked someone out when they needed to be let in.
Dream language will never be entirely translatable — but the energy from dreams is what we need to carry with us in our waking lives.
When I dream of El Candado and wake up, I ask myself throughout the day: who I am locking out or what I am letting in?
Every dream has a request, and when I dream of El Candado, it is asking me to pay attention to my emotional boundaries and physical space. So I do exactly that.
Claudia, The Growler
Three nights ago (02-08-2022), I felt embarrassed in a dream. The polar opposite of this dream experience:
Another version of me resurfaced from The Wild. She was on the news, and word had gotten around that she was me, and she was called Claudia, The Growler.
A Growler is someone who one day leaves behind their life and recedes into the wild to go crazy in peace. My mother had wanted to be a Growler too. (This is what I knew to be true in the dream).
Apparently, she had been in exile. I was embarrassed because now everyone knew that this Claudia existed, without ethos or etiquette. And that whoever I had become in the past 37 years would be replaced by this wild woman. Then I woke up.
I immediately thought of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the mother figure to all wild women. I went back into the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” and searched for solace and clarity. What I found was a manifesto and a newfound responsibility for my life and self:
The things that have been lost to women for centuries can be found again by following the shadows they cast. And make a candle to Guadalupe, for these lost and stolen treasures still cast shadows across our nightdreams and in our imaginal daydreams and in old, old stories, in poetry, and in any inspired moment. Women across the world—your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met—we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.
Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knowing. It is the land of our Self.
And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.
It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to sit before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, homelife, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
The imagery of spreading the soil of my psyche in larger and larger circles until it becomes a continuous land, resurrected from the dead, is the same imagery as last week’s resurfaced audio. The Universe confirms your journey over and over and over again until you pay it attention.
I can’t be embarrassed or ignore Claudia, The Growler. I know the answer is to not feel embarrassed, and to instead wear her like my soul. She’s returned from exile. She wants to live beside me. I breathe her wild and it infuses everything I do.
A case for growing angel wings
From Meditations on the Tarot by Robert Powell
The organs of action are simply crystallised will. I walk not because I have legs but rather, on the contrary, I have legs because I have the will to move about. I touch, I take and I give not because I have arms, but I have arms because I have the will to touch, to take and to give.
Action plan: Crystallize the will to fly closer to the Mystery of the Universe. You might just sprout spiritual wings.
Note: This post is an excerpt from my weekly mind dump newsletter, sent out each Friday.
Unraveling the Scarcity Mindset & The Soul of Money
Unraveling the “scarcity mindset” installed in me as a child was something I decided to tackle a couple months ago when I was mistakenly billed for a medical procedure. For a moment I thought I had to pay a thousand dollars, and even though I have the money, and more importantly, the ability to earn that money, I had a small anxiety attack that teleported me back to life before my 30s, when I had no money. I knew that if I didn’t deal with my “insufficiency” wiring that no matter how secure or stable I am in life I would never be as free and happy as I deserve to be. As we all deserve to be.
Below is a short poem I wrote — a glimpse into my childhood. After that are excerpts from a book that helped me complete this “soul work” of unraveling the scarcity mindset. Before this book has been a lot of other work: talk therapy, journaling, cutting cords, prayer and stillness. I learned to create a world of abundance and sufficiency. I am more mindful of the flow of money. I am grateful every day for food, a home and a warm bed. If you ever need someone to talk about this, you can email me at claudia@claudiadawson.blog.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”
At one point, a womb was enough. Then came birth and all my parents’ fears and failings and flails became mine. I was drowning too. Underneath poorness and not enough. Money came and went like a river in drought. Roofs came and went. Shelter lines came and went. A free loaf of bread and a peanut butter jar could last us all week. Saltines for dinner sometimes. A cup of noodles in tap water warming on a window sill. This had to be enough sometimes. At one point, a womb was enough. Another new school, another first day, I’m 10 and wearing an XL men’s t-shirt down to my knees. I try to make friends, try to be bigger than my circumstances. I carve out a safe space inside of me, follow my intuition. Keep my head above water. At one point, a womb was enough. Then I’m born and scarcity began to build a grave for me.
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Once we define our world as deficient, the total of our life energy, everything we think, everything we say, and everything we do—particularly with money—becomes an expression of an effort to overcome this sense of lack and the fear of losing to others or being left out.
The toxic myth is that “more is better”. More of anything is better than what we have. It’s the logical response if you fear there’s not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.
More is better misguides us in a deeper way. It leads us to define ourselves by financial success and external achievements. We judge others based on what they have and how much they have, and miss the immeasurable inner gifts they bring to life. All the great spiritual teachings tell us to look inside to find the wholeness we crave, but the scarcity chase allows no time or psychic space for that kind of introspection.
When we believe that more is better, and equate having more with being more—more smart or more able—then people on the short end of that resource stick are assumed to be less smart, less able, even less valuable, as human beings. We feel we have permission to discount them.
This mind-set of scarcity is not something we intentionally created or have any conscious intention to bring into our life. It was here before us and it will likely persist beyond us, perpetuated in the myths and language of our money culture. We do, however, have a choice about whether or not to buy into it and whether or not to let it rule our lives.
By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.
Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.
So often we think of “abundance” as the point at which we’ll know we’ve really arrived, but abundance continues to be elusive if we think we’ll find it in some excessive amount of something. True abundance does exist; it flows from sufficiency, in an experience of the beauty and wholeness of what is. Abundance is a fact of nature. It is a fundamental law of nature, that there is enough and it is finite. Its finiteness is no threat; it creates a more accurate relationship that commands respect, reverence, and managing those resources with the knowledge that they are precious and in ways that do the most good for the most people.
Money is a current, a carrier, a conduit for our intentions. Money carries the imprimatur of our soul.
If your attention is on the problems and breakdowns with money, or scarcity thinking that says there isn’t enough, more is better or that’s just the way it is, then that is where your consciousness resides. Those thoughts and fears grow from the attention you give them and can take over your life. No matter how much money you have, it won’t be enough. No amount of money will buy you genuine peace of mind. You expand the presence and the power of scarcity and tighten its grip on your world.
When we let go of trying to get more of what we don’t really need, we free up an enormous amount of energy that has been tied up in the chase. We can refocus and reallocate that energy and attention toward appreciating what we already have, what’s already there, and making a difference with that. Not just noticing it, but making a difference with what we already have. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands.
We think we live in the world. We think we live in a set of circumstances, but we don’t. We live in our conversation about the world and our conversation about the circumstances. When we’re in a conversation about fear and terror, about revenge and anger and retribution, jealousy and envy and comparison, then that is the world we inhabit. If we’re in a conversation about possibility, a conversation about gratitude and appreciation for the things in front of us, then that’s the world we inhabit.
Scarcity speaks in terms of never enough, emptiness, fear, mistrust, envy, greed, hoarding, competition, fragmentation, separateness, judgment, striving, entitlement, control, busy, survival, outer riches. In the conversation for scarcity we judge, compare, and criticize; we label winners and losers. We celebrate increasing quantity and excess. We center ourselves in yearning, expectation, and dissatisfaction. We define ourselves as better-than or worse-than. We let money define us, rather than defining ourselves in a deeper way and expressing that quality through our money.
Sufficiency speaks in terms of gratitude, fulfillment, love, trust, respect, contributing, faith, compassion, integration, wholeness, commitment, acceptance, partnership, responsibility, resilience, and inner riches. In the conversation for sufficiency we acknowledge what is, appreciate its value, and envision how to make a difference with it. We recognize, affirm, and embrace. We celebrate quality over quantity. We center ourselves in integrity, possibility, and resourcefulness. We define our money with our energy and intention.
If you look back on the experience of freedom in your life chances are that it wasn’t when you were measuring the options against one another, or making sure you weren’t getting stuck with a decision. It was when you were fully expressed, playing full out. It was when you chose fully and completely, when you knew you were in the place you were meant to be in, when perhaps you even felt a sense of destiny. That’s when we’re free and self-expressed, and joyful or at peace with circumstances—when we choose them. We bring that freedom to our relationship with money when we center ourselves in sufficiency, choose to appreciate the resources that are there, feel their flow through our life, and use them to make a difference.
Additional Reading:
How to feel like you have enough by Christine Garvey