You have plans, goals, hopes and desires. In addition, you have fears, doubts, obligations, and comfortable addictions that keep you stuck. The more you focus on what you want and ignore what you fear, the more you fuel your fears. The result is that your chances of sabotaging your goals are excellent. Doesn’t it make more sense to look squarely at both and listen to your nightmares? Won’t that increase the chances that you will set realistic goals, ones that are not merely compensatory for your fears or merely fulfill your life script? Won’t it make it more likely that you will defuse the power of your fears to destroy your chances for happiness and fulfillment? Integral Deep Listening (IDL) is a powerful tool for transforming your fears and nightmares into fuel for transformation, awakening, lucidity and enlightenment. Here is one example of how IDL does so followed by some suggestions about how you can use the same process.
01/30/10
The Dream of My Life
Claudia and I are able to go to the sun and ocean anytime she wants. I am teaching IDL to thousands of therapists, educators, parents, and children all over the world by internet and in person seminars. I not only catch myself when I fall into the drama triangle while awake, but do so in my thoughts and while dreaming as well. I interview characters in my dreams while I am dreaming. I become characters in my dreams while I am dreaming. I get stronger in the six core qualities and experience more and more abundance, joyful absurdity, and luminosity. Claudia’s health is strong; she is healthy and happy. I get along with everyone and am able to find and enjoy a balance among body, mind, emotions, transpersonal clarity and multiperspectivalism, and relationships. I constantly experience the good luck and magic of being in the right place at the right time to say and do that which awakens the highest in myself and others. My weight is normal and I don’t overeat sugary stuff. I get all my books written and set a clear intention of continuing to build this work through others, in others. My relationship with my daughter Kira deepens and broadens in areas we enjoy sharing and have in common.
The Nightmare of My Life
Claudia becomes sicker and dies a slow and painful death. My world is all about taking care of her, which is what I want to do, but which creates imbalances and takes me away from my work. When she dies I am pretty much unable to carry on my work because of a lack of translator and work partner. I stay in Germany but my world shrinks. Or, I move back to the US, where I no longer have a strong network or context for work and face the formidable challenge of building one. My relationship with my daughter remains remote.
This nightmare brings up feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and not being appreciated. A cloudy, muddy deep blue color becomes a blue, fire-breathing dragon, that is isolated in his cave, sad, alone, and pissed. Here is what the dragon had to say:
“I am a blue, fire-breathing dragon that is isolated, sad, alone, and pissed. I can breathe fire. Can you do that? I’m a magnificent blue. I can fly. Pretty impressive! I’m stuck here in this cave, I feel weak and helpless. I personify your unused strengths and potentials. If I could change I would be out flying around. I would go wherever I wanted: land, sea, lakes, air! I score ten in everything except compassion and wisdom. Those I don’t know about. If I scored ten in everything I would be a bodhisattva dragon! There aren’t too many of them… If Joseph scored like I do, he would have attitude. That means he would be free, joyous, giving, and kicking ass. He would be able to find ways around almost any obstacle. The rest of them he would just go through! If I were him I would choose to live his life with strength, power, confidence, and courage! When he becomes aware of a fear, it would be good for him to become me! I recommend he concentrate on staying focused and doing those things that are important to him. Don’t take any crap! I am in his life to get him past his fears! It would be good for him to become me whenever he worries about the nightmare coming to pass!”
What I heard myself say is that I can access an emerging potential that has attitude and is not afraid of anything. Freed, it provides my life focus, energy, and assertiveness. It wants me to become it when I am afraid – the fire-breathing flying bodhisattva dragon perspective!
If you were to become your own version of such an emerging potential, what do you think its effects would be on your own personal life nightmare? What effect might it have on your ability to make your own dreams come true? Why not do such an interview for yourself and follow the recommendations that make sense to you? Most of us are too stuck in our waking priorities, habits and self-definition to make such changes. That is why IDL recommends that you work with a fellow student or IDL coach, teacher or practitioner to help you be accountable for setting realistic goals for yourself based on your interviews and sticking with the process instead of allowing your emerging potentials to become lost under the ongoing avalanche of the responsibilities of your daily life.
