Robert Moss, born in Melbourne (Victoria) in 1946, is an Australian historian, journalist and author and the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism.
Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.
When we travel with a sense of mission, we attract events, people and opportunities toward us.
Suppose you have a parallel self who has made different choices, who is following a different event track since you made certain choices in your life. Maybe you can reach to that self and borrow gifts and lessons from that self and maybe even help them on their road.
What I'm talking about is fun. It's every day, it's high energy, and it gives you guidance and healing for your life. It puts a fizz of magic into the air.
Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.
In many traditions, crows are messengers and close attention is paid to their actions.
On a psychic level, we could be carrying energies and entities and cravings and habits and confusion and patterns of behavior from generation to generation that we don't want. We could also have picked up loose energies or entities from places we visit or live, and this could be very confusing. It could reinforce or even produce addictions and cravings that don't really belong to us.
When bad things happen, part of us might go away. It's a survival technique. You can't stand to be around when there's so much grief or pain in your life so part of you goes away. Shamans call this soul loss.
We can ask for a dream of guidance on any issue that is facing us, and when we're lucky the dream can take us out of the boxes of the everyday mind's approach to that theme.
There are chemical and other explanations for addictions, but speaking from my own observations (and I am a shamanic type), there is always some sort of disembodied spirit causing some of the addiction, riding your energy field, trying to impose their needs and addictions onto you.
When we wake up to the fact that our thoughts touch the people we are thinking about, we are again asked to choose which thoughts we send out. If we send out the thoughts of the heart, we can heal, even if the person who needs healing is far away.
The struggle inside the cocoon between the defenders of the worm state and the agents of winged possibility is one that I was still living, one that many of us surely experience in times of spiritual emergence. We may find ourselves pounded into mush, hanging upside down from whatever we can cling to — and yet have the possibility and destiny of becoming much, much more.
People can glum onto all sorts of things. And some might use this in that way instead of taking personal responsibility for their lives. But if you discover the addiction is not all your own, you can ask, "Do I want to drink or smoke on behalf of Uncle Fred? Or do I realize I need to get rid of Uncle Fred and live my own life. "
The important things usually prove to be very simple. They are also open secrets in the sense that no one is hiding the knowledge from us except ourselves.
Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is also about retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.
I have never met anyone who is addicted to alcohol who isn't drinking for a lot of dead spirits!
It is difficult to wrap your mind around this intellectually and until you've had the experience, it can be difficult to understand. I tell people to give it a shot; you have nothing to lose.
The first thing to understand about working with children's dreams is that adults need to listen up.
Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.
The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through.