Dream Journeys With the Inner Child - Opening the Gateway to the Creative Spirit - You are the Living Embodied Blueprint of Your Dharma

Revisiting some of my favorite themes from my creative process this year

Hello all my lovelies,

Keeping with my end of the year summary and celebration of some of my favorite themes from my creations here this year, I’ve compiled a few different posts and sort of integrated them together for you today. I hope you enjoy, and leave me a comment if you feel genuinely moved or called! MUAH!

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Your Body-Mind is Your Work of Art - You are the Living Embodied Blueprint of Your Dharma

Many of us came here carrying intrinsic blueprints for our creative purpose - For our service in the world.

This blueprint is often made conscious to us within the moments when we are digging the deepest to navigate a painful inner corridor. These are the moments when the many secret codes to the unique architecture of our Dharma make themselves known to us.

Often our traumas are a fruition of Karma, necessary for our blueprint to blossom into its greatest expression. Our blueprint is written into the infrastructure of the Soul, throughout many lifetimes, throughout all experiences that have imprinted upon us the wisdom to integrate those experiences toward our Soul’s self actualization.

By working with Karma artfully we evolve into self mastery over our Dharma.

But we have to make the choice.

The choice between letting our experiences further define and condition us more deeply into illusion, or the choice to use every karmic arising, both internal and external, to attune more deeply to who we truly are and why we are truly here.

We have the free will to direct our attention to the deeper purpose that is calling us forth from within our karmic experiences or not…

Dharma is an unfoldment from within the Soul.

The seeds of Destiny, of self actualization, liberation, awakening, are contained deep within the nit and grit of our karmic challenges, deep within the darkness of our ‘dark night’.

Dharma is the integration of everything that we are, the good-the bad-the ugly, toward one singular unifying expression.

An expression that can’t help but give itself over entirely to the service of humanity.

When we fulfill our Dharma, we craft our unique blueprint into tangible form, and then offer it to humanity so that they may use it for their highest good.

This can only happen by facing ourselves wholeheartedly and integrating the wisdom we acquire in the process toward our unique expression in the world. What happened to us and how we found our way through it, becomes a map that can be passed down to others who find themselves in similar struggles.

In deep devotion, we become a living embodiment of our Dharma blueprint.

Our Karma - Becomes our Dharma - Becomes our Destiny.

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Dream Journeys With the Inner Child - Opening the Gateway to the Creative Spirit

During my second dark night of the Soul, I made a conscious choice to take my creative impulse seriously and began allowing it to lead me through life. There was a very clear turning point onto this path, when I started having a recurring dream of a child. This recurring dream of this symbolic child has evolved quite a bit over the years, as a clear representation of the creative transformational and birthing process I have embarked upon and how I am moving through it.

I’ve often been able to follow its themes as guidance for my waking creative life, in the sense that this symbolic dream child represents my inner child. More than that though, it represents the inner child’s essence fully liberate and developed into creative expression, as one’s unique message in the world.

It represents the integrative process, of the infusion of one’s inner child essence, into one’s creations.

Essentially, the inner child as symbolized in my recurring dream, represents the gateway to the creative spirit itself and the healing process necessary to fully open and traverse this gateway.

In my dream, the child and the scenarios we found ourselves navigating together have evolved with the evolution of my creative process, which is deeply tied into my personal transformational process as well. Often this child is leading me into deeper and deeper corridors within the dream, as much as I am leading him or her to safety.

In the beginning, sometime late winter 2018, when I was traversing the deepest darkest depression of my life. When I had reached an almost forced turning point, in which my outer circumstance was descending into chaos, and I was beginning to search for a higher purpose within myself in the midst of this chaos. When everything seemed to be crashing down around me, the pressure within my psyche became so oppressive, I felt like I was being squeezed by this immense invisible force at risk of imploding under the crippling weight of it.

I went to sleep one day having descended deep into this depression and darkness. During this time I often slept in an attempt to escape the excruciating, psychic pain I was experiencing.

Within this depressive slumber, I dreamt I was pregnant by self insemination.

Later in the dream I gave birth, catching the baby face up in my hands, as it entered into the world from my own birth canal. The dream was incredibly vivid, as the baby looked up at me with pure joy emanating from its face. Not just a regular every day joy though, the kind of joy that can only be accessed through a state of absolute innocence. I recognized this baby’s spirit. She WAS the incarnation of the essence of joy and I felt pure joy permeate my entire being as I rested my gaze upon her face.

We laughed together and basked in this joy for a long while…

…Until I woke back up into the deadening depression I had fallen asleep within.

When I woke I had a very clear sense of reassurance though, that while I was in a deeply painful death and dying process, that had a viscerally palpable, heavy psychic darkness to it, I was headed for the joyous birth of some new part of myself I had never known before.

Life itself was squeezing me, forcing me into some sort of spiritual birth canal.

And even though within that intense squeezing sensation I could not access any semblance of joy, I would someday soon, after bravely traversing the birthing pains of this creative transformative process, arrive at joy’s doorstep.

I was clear that this was probably not going to be a fluffy process. I think my Soul knew that we were in for some deep underworld adventures. But the profound joy I felt within that dream gave me the courage to move ahead into unknown territory anyway.

I immediately began writing, focusing intently on creating everyday.

Over that next few years this baby grew up in my dreams. It often showed up as an adolescent child. One that I had to rescue from all kinds of predators.

In ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about the predator archetype and its manifestations in the psyche of women attempting to step into their creative power. The predator in my dream, I came to identify as an expression of my inner critic, or the wounded version of my inner animus.

I had become aware of this inner critic and how it had been on an incessant loop my entire life. How it had been an aspect of my body-mind that was often in the driver’s seat without me realizing it.

I have rescued the child from this predator in my dreams many times over, and in my waking life I had to embark on the very challenging journey of facing and shrinking the inner critic. Of unraveling the felt experience of its incessant abuse from within my nervous system. Of accessing - channeling - releasing the frozen energies in my body, underneath its psychological manifestations.

When the symbolic child dream started, I often had in my waking experience a subtle inner-felt-sense vision of her standing within a cage clinging to the chain link so hard that her hands were raw and bloody, screaming in tortured agony, wanting so badly to be freed.

Yet throughout that time, I had often felt totally helpless - powerless in being able to free her.

I would have oscillating expansions, in which I attempted to ignore this inner critic for some time. Momentum would pick up and I would finally feel free, but this was often short lived, as these expansions had been a sort of alternating current with extreme contraction phases, where I had to withdraw from the world and go into hiding again to feel safe.

I used to beat myself up for this, which would only drive the child into this withdrawn state even further.

Of course this was all subconscious enough that I didn’t know it was happening most of time, until my nervous system would become deeply overwhelmed.

I eventually figured out that my body-mind needed the down time, the contractions, to be healthy in the face of integrating the trauma responses that were being triggered by my stepping out creatively.

Over time I learned to nurture myself through these contraction points. To allow my nervous system to rest deeply. I embraced the little depressions even as necessity. I learned to love myself, even through those moments when I felt locked into the freeze state and paralyzed in fear. Even when I needed to hide and rest away from the world.

In this process, I harnessed the rhythm and balance between expansion and contraction. I learned not to fight the contractions or push the expansions, but to flow through both with more fluidity and flexibility.

I’m getting to that place where self expression doesn’t always have to feel like a violent assault on my psyche. I’m getting more used to the intense vulnerability, to the rawness of exposure that expressing my creative self invokes.

In turn the child is growing up in my dreams.

We are finding ourselves less having to rescue and be rescued, and more successfully navigating scenarios where we have to take huge risks, trust ourselves and each other, and demonstrate competence within high stress situations.

In these scenarios I am no longer rescuing him/her from a predator, but am fully responsible for this vulnerable child. For keeping him/her protected and safe until we reach our destination.

During one of my last long withdraw-shut down-contraction phases, I dreamt of the baby again:

This time it had been forgotten - locked away in a dark closet. Looking as though it had been dead for quite some time, its skin was blue all over and I had the feeling that I had miscarried it. I cried and grieved deeply over this baby. I placed my hands gently over it. As my tears washed over its lifeless body, it started to breath again and with each breath became more alive right before my eyes. I kept saying - “this is some kind of miracle”. How could this forgotten, neglected, lifeless baby come back to life all this time later.

When I woke I recognized this as a sign - that it was time to start creating again. And the daily process of breathing life back into those places where I had needed to contract so tightly for so long, the act of breathing life back into my creative pursuits endeavoring to pick up where I left off, was painfully awkward and slow.

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I’ve learned to be gentle with myself - To soften into this inner process. I learned that even within the contractions there is growth.

I know now that traversing this underworld IS the path to healing my inner child. It Is the path to birthing my creative power. In knowing that my inner child is the gateway into my creative spirit, I take this inner process, however messy and chaotic, very seriously…

The wounded inner child is my muse. Her journey of healing has been my greatest adventure - My most worthy endeavor. Her wounding is no longer what “holds me back”, it IS the path and I embrace it wholeheartedly.

Nowadays these dreams occur less and less, but when they do there is less chaos and more maturity within the child's experience. For example, in my last dream the child is now playing in the ocean, with the father and I standing on the beach. I am concerned for her safety but the father reassures me that it will be fine and he will protect her.

This is indicative of how my creative pursuits have matured and evolved as I start to share them with the world more boldly. It’s still a little shaky at times and I have my contractions and expansions, but I flow with the process much more gracefully. No longer in the throws of the inner critic for the most part, no longer swept away by every current that threatens to overwhelm me in the process, as my inner animus evolves in an integrative healing process with my inner child.

My inner critic has been largely transformed into the masculine archetype represented in the dream. He is protective, but reassures me through uncomfortable growth points as he did in the dream. This inner father archetype encourages me to step out past my comfort zone, while reassuring me that I am capable of handling myself if things get to be too much.

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My little toddler self