The Dreaming
I was in Egypt for two weeks in November, anchoring myself in temples and tombs along the Nile River. My dreams in Egypt were potent and bold and alien, but I have yet to translate them into a language or imagery I can share.
Dreams tend to screen themselves as something mundane to avoid breaking our brains. My husband says he only dreams of boring things like emptying dishwashers and riding passenger side in cars — but those dreams are also potent, and they have messages too.
I had several dreams of Susan Sarandon gifting me things and taking me under her wing before I realized who she symbolized. She was my Goddess archetype and once the goddess broke through me (read about it here), I stopped dreaming of Susan Sarandon and I started dreaming of the Goddess herself. Sometimes the goddess appears as Isis, or she is a beautiful warrior woman with wings or sometimes she is me. A screen is no longer needed in that case.
In Egypt there were no screens over my dreams. The veil was lifted and I was shot out to other planets, rapid-fire slipping into other consciousnesses — most of them not even human.
I remind myself that these visions are not fixed realities inviting me to come and live within them. They are tools to help dismantle the mental frameworks that were never mine to begin with. The ways of thinking that were handed down to me externally.
When you decide to spiral inward instead of out toward the world, you'll quickly discover there is a deep, deep abyss within you — and it is roaring.
In dreams I fly, I stretch across time, I create new realities, I shape-shift, I teleport, I talk to angels, animals, aliens and ghosts.
Dreams act as floodgates for the imaginal and the imagination. They create new ways of seeing that will defy everything you knew before.
With that said, in waking life I will never levitate. I will never manifest billions of dollars. I will never wake up one morning in a different timeline or reality.
I have limitations because I am anchored here on Earth, and before I was born I made a promise to play this thing out as human and to play by the rules or laws of nature.
And all of that is OK with me, because I have my dreams. And when I leave my body at night and I travel through the worlds, it's not an act of escapism. It is a radical act of humanism.
I only have this short blip of life and I hope I'm doing it right, and some people stay in school forever or go to church for guidance or fill their brains with books, but I just go to The Dreaming.
Every night is like reaching into a grab bag of universal consciousness and pulling out other-worldly views of time and space and love and humanness.
Here is an unedited stream of consciousness after one of those dreams in Egypt:
Monday, November 14, 2022, 11:49pm. Dream notes. They are showing me my home planet. I can’t confirm if it is Mars, but Mars-like, red rocks. Someday they’ll find the tombs there. Maybe my body is there or maybe I only had a light body, not a physical body. The creature life there glowed in the dark or was bioluminescent in psychedelic colors. Maybe I was a creature or maybe I was ALL the creatures. One entity … the entire planet breathing in my bioluminescent veins. I danced like an aboriginal with neon colored ink on my body. And when I danced new realities materialized before me. Dreams were my bloodline, like now. This is just one lifespan. Non-human. Not of this Earth. I have transcended before on another planet. This is why I feel like a gypsy, why I have no roots, why stability can sometimes feel like a prison. All these facets of life we chose for ourselves are man-made obstacle courses for us to “remember” and grow past our temporary circumstances. I have to extend my soul spirit out past this planet, make it reach back in to the future where the past begins and connect all my lives on the wheel of time. All that wisdom from other lives, other planets. The fruits of my experience. The wheel must become that. When I say I have to “get off the wheel,” I mean I need to be in the hub driving it, fully remembering all my alien lives. All the aspects can come home now.
Deep Continuity: the spiral web your soul weaves
A goddess of spiderwebs of alternate timelines and dimensions (Midjourney)
I dream of spiders and spiders can dream.
For several nights, I dreamed of stumbling upon spider webs. One night, I found a rainbow-colored web in the back of my closet. It was woven tightly like a sweater. The strongest material on earth made by the most fragile bodies. If you drop a tarantula from a small distance it will break and die.
In another dream, I was between the walls of Space and Time when I saw a book about the future trapped in a spider web. An old-timey radio broadcast came on and alerted the public that this book was being changed from the past. The words in printed copies were being altered as they were read.
The dream messengers said I could do this too. Write my own life across timelines — backwards and forwards. Change the past to create new futures.
Still the message is just a metaphor. Symbols are flat. And animal totems are shapeshifters. Dreams weave themselves outside of time — the meaning of them is revealed only after patience and reverence. So I carried the dreams with me for days, trying to fit them into my reality like puzzle pieces. Then one morning, I woke up to find a spider had spun part of its web on the lawn. It gleamed in the sun. I meditated on it quietly, until a meaning arose in the form of a question — what is the deepest desire that drives you?
I think of my parents, because I am a continuation of them. Their desires are encoded into my DNA and my whole life I've tried to disentangle my identity from theirs. My father, who never wanted to be poor, would spend hours shining his shoes only to hide his holey bottoms. My mother, even as a child, could never escape the male gaze, and it splintered her into a hundred pieces.
Fears often disguise themselves as desires and sit behind the wheel of all our decisions — these are things that need to be rewritten.
Your true desires are separate from any external influence. You sense them in the trajectory of your life. Every decision I have ever made has been driven by the desire to feel freedom and connect with God on my own terms.
So this is what I do. This is how I time travel. I connect with my deepest desires — not my parents, not anyone else's. I go back and sit with younger versions of myself. I consult and console. And each time I return to the now, I come back with another piece of my puzzle. This is how you establish Deep Continuity.
Sometimes I meditate and sit with my 60-year-old self. A woman I am getting to know little by little. She is graceful and wise and boundlessly loving, and I always ask her — how do I get from me to you? The path is not clear. One time I asked her in a dream "What is the difference between me and you?" and she responded, "Pull the universe toward you."
Deep Continuity is the spiral web that your soul weaves. You can travel it, back and forth across your life. You can quantum leap into paths not taken. You can extrapolate into futures not yet created. You can pull the universe toward you.
You can do this, because you now know what drives you in every direction.
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.
Subtle-body sermonette
What my body truly wants is the freedom to expand and contract without any outside judgement. Without my own judgement. Every month, I shrink and bloat with the moon. My body is alive and mutating and aging and no, I will never punish my body. This is my spaceship. It carries me forth. I climb mountains with it. I align it with my other bodies – subtle or otherwise. My head, heart and gut are all priests in the same temple. I breathe into my spine, set boundaries, widen the stillness within me, stand barefoot on the grass, soak up the sun, leap past man-made intelligences. One body feeds the others. We set off to other worlds.
How to Transform Consciousness
HOW THE GODDESS BROKE THROUGH ME
I had a psychedelic journey on April 1 that knocked me inward for a couple of months.
Every vision — whether it's a dream or a subtle image that bubbles to the surface — deserves to be honored with patience, attention and action. In my case, a Warrior Goddess broke through my wooden, embroidered heart.
In the journey, I was being chased for my heart. They said it was beautiful and impressive and they wanted to mount it in a museum.
I held my wooden heart in my hands and I ran and I hid. "It's not ready yet," I told them. "I'm still working on it."
Every embroidered groove and engraving was a love or a lesson or a heartbreak — and this is what made it a work of art.
The hide-and-seek game continued until I found myself cornered, but before it could be stolen, my heart cracked open and gave birth to a beautiful, Warrior Goddess with wings.
A new energy had entered my body and I knew immediately I had to make room for her, and that's what I've been doing.
HOW TO MAKE ROOM FOR A NEW ENERGY
You must quiet all the outdated, uninformed voices that live in your head and who are always eager to speak up first. You breathe into your spine. You take a step back from your body — pretend you are sleep walking. There is a new driver behind the wheel. Relinquish control.
Trust the energy — it is sourced from your heart. Your heart feels on fire — but it is not wild, it is a controlled fire — and this is the new energy that will give birth to your true voice.
Since the journey, the Goddess has been making cameos in my dreams. In dreams, she gifts me wings. She brings me cats and jewelry, and she baptizes me in fire.
She wakes me up mid-night with sticky thoughts. She tells me that I am not trusting enough. She tells me to let go. She tells me to believe. To be fearless.
But these are only words and dream images and a human needs more than words and images to transform.
HOW TO TRANSFORM CONSCIOUSNESS
On Tuesday, April 26, I woke up with a sticky thought from the Goddess. She said:
It's not just the symbols or the message — it's the flow of consciousness that breaks through you at night. It is multiple flows and it is the energy from these flows that you must feel.
During the day, when we are awake, we repress so much. At night, when our defenses are down, our true nature tries to break through us. It cracks us open with images and words and these images and words are, in actuality, flows of energy — multidimensional and encoded with so much potential for transformation.
I carry the energy from dreams with me throughout the day. I walk the world with one eye outward and one eye inward and I pay attention to synchronicities and symbols and I gravitate to whatever resonates with the energy I am carrying — and I let that be my guide posts.
This is how you transform consciousness. This is how you learn the language of your subconscious. This is how you become a co-creator with Life.
Life doesn't want to happen at you or throw itself at you. Life wants to break through you from the inside out.
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?
Make yourself holy and loud again
I’ve been living in my heart chakra for the past month. I grew a new chamber in my heart. I didn’t know I could do that without becoming a mother — which I consciously chose to not be this lifetime.
It’s painful to have more space in my heart. It feels empty at times, unfurnished. There is a lonely echo.
I thought I needed someone — a God, a Master, a King — some sort of ruler to move in and reign over this new territory. But I was wrong. The pain I feel is the original sin — separation from the divine.
I think about Adam and Eve after God withdrew from the garden — how we forgot we were made from each other. How we continued living as if we were separate beings, at times enemies.
Misunderstanding, suffering, repressing. None of that belongs in the heart.
The full moon in Virgo is all about purification. Putting your life in order for the purpose of purifying your heart.
In my meditation this morning, I saw myself windexing a two-way mirror. On the other side was also me — but at multiple points of existence. I was a two-year-old hiding in tall grass and I looked scared. I was 8 and whispering to old oak trees, begging them to open up their portals. I was 11 and I was crying in bed and wishing I could die. I was 17 and I was burning all my old diaries so I could become someone new. And these versions of myself continued on like that — some were sad, some were in love, and some were shameful.
I kept windexing the mirror glass — wiping and cleaning this supernatural view I had of myself. I saw myself as energy with imperfections and impurities woven in since birth. I saw what some people would call sins and I made them beautiful and holy again.
A confession: When I was young, I went through a short phase of stealing perfume bottles. Two. I stole two bottles. One from a store and one from my best friend’s older sister (and I gave that one back). I couldn’t afford them myself and the scents were so intoxicating and they made me feel feminine and magical, and the bottles were made of colored glass, like potion bottles, and my senses were enraptured by the feel, the smell, and the sight of these perfumes. I had to possess them. This is godly too.
We desire with our senses, I salivate, I ache to touch, I stare, I can’t keep my eyes off of all the divine, beautiful things I want. I forget that all that beauty is inside of me already.
I hope you can heal yourself the same way. Windex your own two-way mirror. See clearly the incessant flowering of your soul since birth. You came in as a pure and holy force and have been muted along the way. Unmute yourself.
Healing your inner child is time travel
When I was in Sedona, Arizona last year for my 37th birthday, I met with four different healers. A shaman, dream weaver, reiki therapist and someone whose business card said multidimensional intuitive. Each one talked about the importance of healing your inner child.
During one of the sessions, I was given a visualization exercise that had profound effects on my psyche and was definitely a form of time travel.
The exercise:
I was told to go back in my mind to my first moment of shame. I was told to see myself as a child and let myself feel every painful thing Little Claudia was feeling. To induce tears. To let that moment in time break through me and cry. I did. Then I was told to swoop in — as myself from this current point of existence — knowing everything I know now, with all the love I have now, and to pick up that little version of me and heal her with my compassion and wisdom and tell her all the things she needed to hear back then.
My first moment of shame:
I was 4 years old and I was in an upstairs bedroom listening to the radio. There was a Spanish love song playing and I was singing along with it. I had a pen and a piece of paper and I was writing a love letter. I don’t know to who, but I suspect it was to God. My mother came into the room and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a love letter. She laughed at me and I felt embarrassed for the first time in my life. I didn’t want to finish my letter. I didn’t want to sing along to the love song. I thought I had done something wrong — and I was ashamed of being so in love.
How I healed Little Claudia:
In Sedona I was 37 years old when I went back in time and picked up my 4-year-old self and I hugged her, and I kissed her and I told her she had done nothing wrong. I told her she came into this world in love and that’s how she was supposed to remain. I told her to write more and more love letters, and to sing along to all the Spanish love songs and to never — for one moment — feel embarrassed about it. I told her that her heart was pure and that was her super power and to let herself be guided by that for the rest of her life.
We walked out of that bedroom together, Little Claudia and I, and she’s been with me ever since.
My Kingdom of Heaven
My mother was a cult. Spiritually liberal and Bipolar. I was dragged from dogma to dogma, church to church. I’ve been baptized at least 10 times that I can remember. If you ask her, by the time I was two I had bible verses memorized. We walked door to door as Jehovah Witnesses on the hunt to convert. I remember the books and pamphlets we would hand out — the depictions of Heaven — I would get lost in those images.
I remember asking if there would be sharks and if I would have to swim with them, and being told Yes. I tried to wrap my baby brain around this ecological paradox. I truly felt this would be my heaven, but I was terrified of it at the same time. Now I understand the importance of accepting these polarities — pure love.
From Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming: Awakening the Visionary Life by Catherine Shainberg:
…sink into the body of the experience, the domain of the subconscious mind, where two seemingly opposite tendencies can co-exist. It is in this cauldron of paradox that "something other" can emerge…
… Having brought all the elements together we can only "let go and let God!” In the experimental alembic that is the womb or the mind is formed the new creation, a mixing of two seemingly incompatible parts…. The mix confuses the eye, amuses, astounds, disjoints, and unbalances our preconceived notions. Our hearts leap at the surprising freedom of the creative force to break inflexible boundaries, to mix incompatible forms. The shift, so shocking, so exciting, liberates our "True Imagination."
Imagination purified, pure love.
ISAIAH 11:6-9
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard lie down with the kid;
The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together
With a little boy to herd them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
Their young shall lie down together;
And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.
A babe shall play
Over a viper's hole,
And an infant pass his hand
Over an adder's den.
In all of My sacred mount
Nothing evil or vile shall be done;
For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord
As water covers the sea.
How to draw closer to your mystery
The above audio is a reading from a transcript. It is a thirdhand creation story. They are not my words, but the story was told to me orally by someone I loved, and for almost twenty years has lived on a microcassette unplayed. It is an unearthed treasure and I wanted to share it with you.
The Grounding Stakes or a Resolution for Trauma
You can feel free and blow in the wind and be grounded.
The psychic language of images is intimate. There is no universal visual dictionary to help you decipher your visions or dreams. Why would you want one anyway?
You are a Psyche Archeologist and this is a solo expedition. Your mission is to discover new aspects of your self, interpret your personal images, and then merge this new meaning into your soul. This is a long journey we are on.
On the inside of my left wrist is the word heal tattooed in white ink. It is fourteen years old and fading and it is a monument to my suffering.
After years of therapy and talking about the trauma and then not talking about the trauma, I wondered what the end game would be. What does a healed person look like?
What do I feel like? Someone who has sovereignty over her mind, body and spirit. Someone who can pause and reflect in the face of strong emotions. Someone who is grounded and open-minded, and most of all, open-hearted.
Still, the question persisted. What does a healed person look like? The answer came in the form of an image — an image infused with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love and freedom.
I saw myself as an expansive tent — if not tied down — I would blow away. I saw the traumatic event in my life as a stake grounding me to the Earth. I felt grateful for my grounding stake.
I recognize and accept the event as a part of my history. It is not the suffering I appreciate, but the journey to heal and how it has widened my capacity to love.
Not all of my stakes are made of trauma. One of them is my loving husband. The others I am still getting to know, but each day I am grateful for them.
How beautiful that I can be a sprawling tent with the wind blowing in my face, and how it feels like I am flying, all because of my grounding stakes.
Diary excerpts from 2021
A year in review. Here are fragments of my life in 2021. I pulled them from diary entries.
JANUARY
Have I been circling the same shallow depths for so long?
After a call with my journey guide:
She asked me to share about myself, specifically what has brought me to this moment — what has made me want to do a journey. What came out of my mouth was a word jumble of bad things that had happened to me. No, not happened to me — the bad circumstances of my life. I was born to two teenagers… we moved around a lot … my mother left us … she is bipolar … I never had stability … I had suicidal ideation since I was 11 … and 14 … and 22 … and 24 … and 26.
All this changed when I turned 30 and went on a vision quest, spent more time in nature and committed to therapy. I described how my entire childhood I bounced from one dogma to another, and how at 30, I finally cut the cord with my mother and created myself as an adult. How my career, my husband and choosing to be childfree are the best choices I ever made. But also, how I feel like I have no creative voice.
Later I realized, my voice is lost because I cut the cord with the narrator. The narrator who wrote all those poems in the past is gone. She’s no longer depressed or dark and as much as I miss that voice, it’s not coming back. I can’t summon her. I think it’s time I get to know my new narrator. This woman that I am.
FEBRUARY
I try to break free from the expected everyday.
An oracle card reading:
I pulled The Cauldron card, which says, “We become integrated and mature by watching, waiting, and trusting that all these insights and impressions will be added to the cauldron and will, one day, be fully cooked.”
This year is about creating the space. About following what ignites my heart and trusting it will guide me somewhere better. It is a waiting game, but I am the cauldron. I am the witch brewing my dreams.
A dream I had in February:
Last night I dreamed that they kept showing me an ultrasound of my womb and why I could never get pregnant. The energy that was supposed to latch on just kept “floating away,” like the smoke that comes out of my oil diffuser. The souls just kept diffusing. But I was OK with it. I don’t want to birth children. I can be a mother in other ways.
The back and forth of integrating trauma:
This day is displaced from other timelines. It feels new. Or maybe I am new. The years are piling on like dust on top of dust. I am being buried under patterns, synchronicities and routines. New goals. New Year. Resolutions. Old habits break through. I lose myself in other people and the ticking of the time hand. And like the trees lose their leaves and then return, I think that the same thing is happening to me, but no, it’s not. The opposite thing is happening to me. The leaves only fall and don’t regrow, and every new day is different and I am on a path I can see and sense, but ignore anyway. I see other people have one foot in reality and the other god knows where, and they uproot their minds and fly away so easily, yet I keep treading this darkness one step at a time. Only now I can see the form. I know I can.
….. I lean into the darkness again, this time more protected. There are no shadows. All the unknowns are outlined. Nothing scurries or brushes past in pitch blackness. Nothing groans or howls. Except for me. Darkness, I am enveloping you. It is a momentary eclipse. We’ll become the same, but I'll still keep my shape.
MARCH
I will no longer dull my edges.
On being the older sister:
My therapist told me something last week that stuck with me. My sister came into this life with a different purpose and journey, and her journey to evolve is different from mine. I am her friend and her sister, but I am not here to save her. Her journey does not have to look like mine.
On my dead brother’s birthday:
My brother Steven would have been 36 years old today. He only lived one month. Why do they come and go and where is his life force today? What happens to these short spirits?
SHORT SPIRITS
A light cuts through briefly
flowers limbs and bones
sprouts from nothing
gathers dust, disappears
again, leaving my mother
holding the bag,
a palmful of ash is enough
to spread grief for lightyears
APRIL
Anyone who goes digging into their subconscious is a witch, attempting to make sense of everything in her cauldron.
Life came to me in pieces. Slowly I could see that I had long been trying to make sense of it. Since birth. Since crawling. Since hiding. Since discovering dark rooms and hidden agendas and bad people and secret dreams and imagination and in the safety and sacredness of solitude.
A description of how I feel:
Myself — loosened
spread all over
in another time
unanchored from now
A lesson in a dream:
I found myself hanging from a high cliff because I had climbed up the wrong way. I was about to blame the dream people for leading me astray, but they didn’t know any better. In the end, it turned out that the easier climb was just inches away from where I started. If I would have just taken a few steps back before climbing, the other option would have come into view. This is a reminder to trust myself, stand back and consider my options.
Automatic writing on Easter: How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)
MAY
I dust off my aura, I protect my aura.
Spiritual Border Control or How to Share Space with a Stranger:
I build a wall around my aura. This is my space. This is allowed. This is not discriminatory. We are all part of the source, but your energy is yours, don’t siphon mine. I am allowed to say mine, because this is my journey. This is my consciousness.
When I was younger I would go out to bars and bump up against others, and kiss strangers, and bond drunkenly in bathrooms, and then wake up feeling empty. It was so exciting until it wasn’t. Then you learn to conserve, that there is a balance in connecting and sharing space. You are allowed to be selective.
On revisiting old diaries:
I forget there is treasure in there. My subconscious bleeds out of me on to those pages. There are 15 years of confessions, dreams, wishes, changes, mistakes. I find it’s easy to get lost in that space, that time. What was I so desperately wanting? Not men — Life. I was desperate for life, it seemed.
A note about my grandfather’s ghost:
Somewhere embedded in the fabric of my reality is my dead grandfather. He comes as white butterflies, and in dreams. The weight of his consciousness I could not tell you, it is heavy, maybe tons. Like a whale, but he is just one dead person.
A freewrite about the moon/life/process:
I try to stay connected to the moon, whatever that means. I cut myself in slits. I am waning, I am waxing, I am growing myself whole. I am becoming bigger than I am. I follow the folklore, nothing should be planted on the full moon, only cut your hair on the new moon, banishing spells when the moon is large, any love spells should grow with the crescent moon. I watch myself expand and shrink in the matter of weeks, like the ocean, my body bloated with salt. I hide away when the sky is dark. I am brewing something magical inside. When the moon is bloated like my body, I bleed, and the process begins again. This constant shrinking and expanding wears on me, but I realize every 28 days I become something new, something bigger than I was before. I head toward the sun and the end of my life with hair as white as the moon and sun spots from the universe. I am spinning with the earth toward death, growing closer to my body, to the mother earth, blossoming and withering at the same exact time. This is the process destined by the heavenly bodies that govern us. So yes, of course we are connected to the moon.
JUNE
There is no completion to life. It just continues.
How hard it is to be human sometimes, to not neglect any part of my being — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. … I can only be on one side of the dodecahedron die at a time.
Birthday trip to Sedona:
On the road headed toward Arizona, trusting we will meet our life somewhere along the way.
Fragments from a psychedelic journey:
It began with doors opening to the sacred chapel of mirrors. Climbing the stairs of my grandmother’s apartment building in Morelia, it transformed into a temple. … They kept telling me the imagery does not matter. The universe expanded into a bismuth stone. So many dimensions, so much work that is unseen. They kept repeating “The imagery doesn’t matter.” They kept telling me I was focusing too much on form, and my form kept shapeshifting into something else. I became gooey and shapeless and I called out, “I don’t want to be gooey and shapeless, I want form!” I want this body, and yes I will honor it. They were showing me: this is what clairvoyance is. You see the lineage and archetypes and the chakras people get stuck in. Astrology, tarot cards, breath work, these are just tools, they say. They showed me the dimension where play takes place and said all art comes from this place. Play here. Pull from here.
JULY
I am trying to exist below the surface of everything.
A dream question:
In another part of the dream, I was in an old neighborhood from my childhood. Through the window blinds, I peeked out on a group of women walking. I recognized them as children I had met and played with briefly, before moving again to somewhere new. The possibility of life-long friendships was never in the cards for me. I woke up with a question on my mind: How do I root myself in a past I never had?
On Reality Tunnels:
I wake up with the message: they’re only going to show me what I can handle. In a dream, I see myself seated on an alien tapestry, like a magic carpet. On a wall of the universe, I see messages reflected in Space meant only for me. I see others seated on their own magic carpets, tuning into their own private screenings, I take a peek. They tell me those messages are not meant for me. Stick to your own reality tunnel, they say.
AUGUST
You’re never going to lose touch with the world because you are the world.
On boredom and loneliness:
For a moment, I’ve abandoned myself. I can feel the negative space that it leaves and I think this is what you call loneliness. Ten degrees to the right and it would be solitude and it would be sacred, and I think of all the ways I can veer off course to my true north. Since birth this has been a solo voyage, so why am I aching for something other than myself? Turn your compass inward. The needle vibrates and spins out of control. You’ll need to figure this out on foot with no equipment/tools/compass. You do not want someone else, you do not need another voice to speak for you, to guide you, to hug you, to love you, to accept you. You only need yourself. Turn the compass inward. What are you feeling? The words that come up are uninspired, bored, aimless. You feel like you need a spark. What could it be? Inside yourself there is no light on, if only you turned on the light you would see a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration and love and epiphanies and revelations — so many that you would never want to come out. Investigate. Be curious of yourself. Close your eyes. See an image that has been haunting you.
A moon poem:
I am the crescent light of the moon
cradling my own shadow
each day I look inward
brighten the darkness
inching my way toward wholeness
SEPTEMBER
I dress myself in dream imagery.
On my ancestral mothers, and the start of what would become A New Temple:
To build a new temple means to create a new language for my bloody, muddy mothers. I have been pieces of them throughout my life. In the beginning they felt like shards of glass piercing through my skin, manipulating my body like a grotesque Pinocchio. Breaking me into pieces with their suffering - but now I see what they made me — a mosaic of mirrors to see all of my soul.
Something my journey guide said:
There is no rush. Just be aware, honor what you are shown. Celebrate yourself.
A reminder:
Reminder: I get to participate in life today. Work. Create. Write. Make something out of nothing. Connect with the world.
OCTOBER
The great mystery of life is a gift.
Dreams symbolizing mental constructs:
The balcony fell down. We sat all of our friends in rocking chairs we made and then it crashed down. The children were playing in the room and pushed the bunkbeds off which created a tremor and the balcony crashed down and I thought all the older people were injured but they were not. This was the second dream about balconies falling off. I know these symbolize shedding mental constructs. In the last dream, I was sharing war stories with a stranger about living in Oakland. He said the terrace on his apartment was so poorly built that it had broken off, but it was OK because he still sees it from time to time. I asked “how?” He said a homeless man must have picked it up, because every once in a while he’ll see it in a shopping cart rolling on by.
A dream about past perspectives:
I am in an empty parking lot in Mexico. I intentionally sit facing a cliff and look out upon a vast and unknown territory that is my home. A rear view mirror appears to be growing out of the cracked concrete. I gaze into it and see the magical blue sky behind me, the clouds marching. I see a mariachi band walking past. A walking celebration of life. I can’t stop gazing into the rearview mirror.
A case against compartmentalizing:
All last week I pulled the death card. An aspect or construct of me died. The construct is the idea that I can compartmentalize these aspects of myself. If you lob off a side to a prism it becomes less luminous. We are all multi-sided, messy and beautiful humans. I sit here spiraling in my thoughts, a multitude of voices chiming in, wanting to say things, ask questions. This morning I meditated and I met an angel in my sacred space, and she held me and I asked her how can I be more myself and yet be pure. She said the answer is desire itself. I am allowed to be complicated and dark and scared and guarded and hesitant and still be pure in that sense. Yes, I am a spirit having a human experience, but I have been so, so, so, deeply human in my errors and ways and it is the intention of my desires that pull me closer to my pure self.
NOVEMBER
What is this individuation process? I thought I was supposed to be getting clearer and now it feels like I’m getting more complicated.
A dream about shadow work:
In a rented room that I share I try to put together my dilapidated furniture. I broke a mirror trying to move it. My furniture is old, chipped and from my childhood. I see other rented rooms designed so extravagantly. I wish my room was swanky and stylish. I keep rearranging furniture, trying to design something beautiful and minimize the space my shadow furniture takes up.
On controlling the expansion of consciousness:
My gray hair was growing in. At first I was happy, this was the mark of living. It said to the world, I am still here and I am sticking it out and I love every minute of it. On a closer look in the mirror I saw that my grays were growing in the opposite way, from end to root. I felt a desire to control it or cover it up. I didn’t want to be vain. I woke up with the message that we cannot control where awakenings and wisdom choose to appear.
How to get closer to heaven:
My hope is that by the time I leave this life I am closer to heaven, by the way that I love, by the way that I walk the earth, and by the grace that I gift myself.
DECEMBER
For the first half of December, I do not journal. There is no excavating of my psyche or logging of my dreams. I put all my energy into completing this small book of visions, poems, dreams and animal spirits that I call A New Temple. It is dedicated to my ancestral mothers who appeared to me last August during a psychedelic journey. It is an artifact of my subconsciousness and it is available here.
It’s been a long year of inner work. I set off in the beginning of the year to get to know my new narrator — the woman that I am now — and I did exactly that. I am ending this year closer to myself than I’ve ever been.
The Wisdom Index
I took the Jeste-Thomas Wisdom Index, a short survey created by researchers at UC San Diego that can determine your level of wisdom. Here are my scores:
I was surprised that I scored the highest in Spirituality. My first thought was, “Is there something wrong with that?” I answered myself with a gentle “no” and realized that I’m still holding on to an outdated concept of Spirituality.
My mother indoctrinated me to be “spiritually liberal” and I grew up in and out of churches. As an adult I have an aversion to group think and anything that requires my weekly attendance to evolve or grow in any way. But that is more Community than Spirituality.
I actively try not to lead with Spirituality, but I think I’m only kidding myself. Because underneath every nature outing, or meet-up with a friend, my heart beats with communion. When I’m alone, I’m never alone. There is a cathedral inside me and the church bells ring hourly.
On sacred loneliness
This is not a how-to. There are no steps for shifting loneliness into solitude. Loneliness is an intrusion that makes my bones cold. Loneliness feels like a void and Solitude is a sanctuary. Some days I just feel separate from the universe.
I think of the Rupi Kaur quote “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself,” but what I am missing is not myself, but my connection with the Divine. And Yes, I know the Divine is also me, but knowing this doesn’t make the loneliness go away.
The gaping hole in my heart grows wider and I ache for a sign, or a signal of love, or for someone to seek me out. When I was in my twenties this is when I would go out to bars, get drunk, sleep around — anything to escape myself. What I do now is different.
I seek out nothing. I acknowledge that I am in pain and I sit with it. I imagine other humans feeling this same profound sadness with no source point and I breathe into that feeling. This is how I create an equilibrium. I remind myself this is a condition of being human. I find connection in the separateness and that is what brings me comfort.
This mystifying grief called loneliness belongs to you and it belongs to me and everyone else, and that is what makes it sacred.
The Labyrinth Theory
What I love about walking labyrinths is that the closer you get to the center the farther you are in distance. Life has often felt that way too.
A brief summary of the past 37 years: I am born to two teenage immigrants who speak no English. As they grow, I grow too. Their mistakes are my mistakes. I am uprooted and left behind. In my earliest memories, I am always alone. I write love letters to God and search for portals in trees. I will be the new girl in school 15 times. Being called “weird” or “poor” will never faze me. By age 10, I am irrevocably damaged and weighed down with worry. Poetry saves me. I write it all down — the dark parts and the dreams. I never stop searching for meaning. At age 17, I move across the country to survive on my own. Besides books and my own intuition — and the occasional Divine interference — there is no guidance. A decade is spent destroying when all I want is to create. After one near-death experience and three suicide attempts — at age 30 — I decide to get off Zoloft and heal through nature and talk therapy. I give up poetry for a brief time. I ground myself in the Earth. I meet my husband — my anchor. I grow beautiful friendships. I find my center. It feels a lot like the wonder and magic of my short childhood. All those years spent in the outer circles, I never knew how close I was to myself.
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
How am I not myself? T-shirt
I designed a t-shirt dreamed out of a favorite movie of mine, I Heart Huckabees, and put it up on Society6.
I drew the chalkboard art depicting how everything is the same even if it’s different. See: The Blanket Truth — “We’re all connected.”
“How am I not myself?” is from the scene where Jude Law is confronted about the “mayo” story. A reminder that the repetitive stories you tell about yourself are propaganda.
The Black Tapestry
I found myself in a dark void, surrounded by a primordial and formless space. At first, I thought I had lost all my senses. Everything was deep black and soundless and there was no gravity. I was a floating consciousness with no home. This is limbo, I thought — or maybe I just knew and didn’t think any thoughts. I seemed to understand things without processing them. This is intuition. This is clairvoyance. This is my third eye. Out of the void, a bolt of fabric came into view. It was also black and began to slowly unroll itself before me. A velvety, onyx-colored cloth expanding to the edges of my perception, until it became what I knew as my sole existence. All at once, an invisible hand started embroidering symbols and archetypes and allegories. I read the fabric from left to right — stitch by stitch — I was witnessing my life from birth to now. An orphrey of multi-dimensional imagery. Each symbolic stitching embodying a multitude of history and emotion and language. And the colors — such vivid hues of violet, orange, crimson and pink. It looked like something my long-lost ancestral aunts in Mexico might have sewn. But even though the colors were bright and festive, I was quickly overtaken by grief and discouragement. By now, the invisible hand had finished its work midway through the fabric, leaving almost exactly half of it blank. What lay before me was an unfinished tapestry so deeply embedded with neglect and loss and scarcity — all of which were at this moment so foreign to me. I wanted out of this vision, and hurtful reminder of where I had come from. My shapeless consciousness grew hot with shame, and pulsated with anxiety that spread outward into nothing. This must be how stars die, I thought. No, This is how stars die. I knew. Then came a gentle cooling. I was reminded — telepathically — that what I was seeing was my past. The other half of the tapestry still remained to be embroidered. They said it would be stitched by my own hand and with only the values and experiences that I wanted for this life. Symbols of love and animals and friendship and nature and art and freedom and magic, and these simple words do no justice to the rich power that lies behind them, because just like the embroidery they are a prism. Multi-faceted and pure light. An energy of such high vibration that it could only belong to the Gods. And as I began to accept this as truth — in the core of my being — my sadness gracefully morphed into rapture and gratitude and passion. This was an invitation to stand at the helm of my life. And I took it. And my own black velvet tapestry is just one of infinite tapestries eternally unfolding across the universe — a divine display of all the soul journeys that embark onto unknown space and create something beautiful.
Tiger heart — a visual poem
Sometimes I dream of a tiger clawing at my chest. In the most recent dream, I discovered him locked in a cage in an abandoned apartment. He was so malnourished he was almost dead. I was also destitute and squatting in what shape-shifted into my old apartment in Oakland. I wanted to feed him, but I was afraid he would get bigger and bigger. I debated setting him free, but I knew he would die. Before I could decide, he broke out of the cage and came after me.
I realize now the tiger is my heart and I have to feed it every day. So every morning I ask my tiger heart what he wants and he says he wants my whole damn life to chomp and chew.
What has carried me (an ever-expanding list)
What has carried me from birth until now has been this: love, the openness of the world, wild overgrown yards, imagining I am a princess warrior, digging for dinosaur bones, calling out for god in the dark, what prayer is, wishes, the sky at night, that one star brighter than the rest, my grandfather communicating from the dead, love, the dimensions of dreams, coincidences — no — synchronicities, magic spells that work, love, being alone but not feeling alone, love that grows claws, my mother in my throat chakra, art as a choice, stretching past my shame, a wide open sky, walking in nature, aliens, the believers, love, a murmuration of birds, love, falling down on my knees, getting back up, a warm bed, nostalgia, oh my god, so much nostalgia, animals as familiars, freedom, every beautiful thing, this incessant flowering of time and life — each day, I open my heart up for the looting.