Lisa Colón DeLay | Spiritual Formation and the Way of the Desert Elders
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This link is a beautiful and thought-provoking musical and visual presentation on dreams. Song and art work display lasts 4.36 min. (The artwork was not made for the song, but both portray the world of the unconscious.)
For more on dreams, do a search for my other posts.
(Excerpts/edits, and reflections from my reading, “Dreams: A Way to Listen to God” by Morton Kelsey, Paulist Press, 1978. ISBN: 0-80911-2046-1)
• 99% of the time when you dream about others, you are really dreaming about some part of yourself (whether positive or negative).
• Dreaming about war or fighting nearly always has to do with inner conflict.
• Certain universal themes/plots like being chased by a shadowy figure, or finding a new area in a house, have to do with reconciling issues of the inner person, or self-discovery.
• Dreams abide in the realm of symbols. Watch for repetition, patterns, and the associations you have to the symbols in waking life to start to better understand them.
• Dreams can carry both personal and universal symbols, and point out places for personal growth, increased harmony, and prosperity (on all levels).
• If you feel your dreams are important, and take care to begin logging them, you will harvest much personal growth, (including interpersonally) and can experience added spiritual awareness.
• Whether we remember them or not, we dream 5-7 times per night. In studies, animals and humans deprived of dreams develop mental health issues.
If you would like to share comments on dreams or share a powerful dream here, go right ahead.
To discuss your dreams and their potential meanings privately, you may contact me through my website.
What if in a given day, even a difficult day, we thought of our struggles not as problems but as invitations?
For what you may ask? To reveal something about ourselves we haven’t considered. To sharpen our growing edge. To incite growth. To realize that problems and struggles are character revealing and building. To see where God is within it–wanting the best for us.
Until today, I never considered jealousy as positive for the reason that desire lies behind it. Desire (behind jealousy) that is not negative, but helpful, creative, productive, and beneficial to others– can be rightly directed. I have squelched all jealousy, tried to kill it dead, and even denied it, but it exists in all of us. (Or I have let it ferment so it hurt me.) Jealousy crops up with/beside love too. If we appreciate the desire behind it as good, and accept who we really are, and what we really feel, perhaps we can channel all we are for the best. (For ourselves and others)
The Dark Night of the Soul, says Dr. Gerald May, sounds different in his patients when they speak. There may be (felt) discouragement, and silence from God. There may be a confusion, and a lack of spiritual “experience” or lack of sensation of the spiritual as there had been before. But, compared to his patients who have symptoms of depression, these folks do not have despair like those who are depressed do. They do not have the same cynicism, even though they may feel alone.
In the dark night times one knows transformation is underway. During times of depression, one hopes to return to normal.
Because God is not a “thing” but rather Spirit-all places at once-as we progress spiritually, invitations come to rebirth and journey closer to union with him as Spirit. What I speak of here is not a journey to a physical spot, but to an awareness of God, in a deeper, richer way. One that involves faith, not sight, or even the crutch of sensation, which may confused for God, but also cannot be God, in actuality.
We can leave behind the old methods of tapping into the spiritual that are like outgrown child’s clothing–too small for us. Ultimately, we move toward union with God in this way.
Some dark nights take years to move through. We must not fear them because they involve a greater revelation of God’s amazing grace and love. The end always results in greater insights of God’s love, and greater union with the Divine, in a brighter day.
In Part III, I will talk about the “Dawn” from the Dark Night.
Some information taken from my reading: Gerald G. May, M.D. The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. Harper San Francisco, 2004.