Power Up Your Brain (28 page)

Sit down comfortably and take a few deep, relaxing breaths. Call to your mind the image of a loved one, and feel the feelings of caring and affection. Hold this image for a count of three breaths. Now call to your mind the image of someone you feel has wronged you—a former lover or business partner, or someone who abused you physically or emotionally. For one long breath, feel the anger or resentment you have toward this person swelling up inside you. Now, for five long breaths, superimpose the image of your loved one over this person, and imagine how they blend and merge until only the image of your loved one remains, and only the feelings of love and caring endure.

This exercise must be repeated frequently for it to clear the toxic emotions and erase the neural networks in the limbic brain. You will notice that the intensity of your feelings of anger or resentment will gradually diminish, until one day you discover that they are extinguished. Then you will be able to draw the lesson that you still have to learn from that relationship and not have to waste time and energy on toxic emotions. Once we learn the lessons that our enemies have to teach us, we don’t need to continue learning that way any longer.

DRAWING LIFE FROM YOUR DREAMS

Shamans believe that an enlightened person is one who not only recognizes truth but is able to bring forth truth in every situation he encounters. The enlightened person not only speaks truth but recognizes and understands the true nature of reality both when awake and when asleep.

Shamans believe that our waking reality is very similar to the world we experience during our sleeping dreams. This does not mean that the world is not real, that those are not real birds singing outside your window or real children playing at your feet or real neighbors bickering next door. The world is real, but our perception of that world is flawed. Our mind only ruffles the surface of the reality it observes, and thus perceives only its own distorted reflection. It therefore obscures the truth of a greater Reality.

Amazon sages speak of learning to dream with open eyes. They feel it is unfortunate that people in the West have stuffed dreaming time into the domain of sleep, where clouded consciousness inhibits recollections and blurs the images and insights that dreams are meant to reveal. Even when we recall dreams, the waking mind cannot grasp the few images that linger after many long hours of adventuring while asleep. The sages point out that the enlightened person is fully awake even while asleep, while the unenlightened human is fully asleep even while awake.

These sages believe that if we become lucid in our dreams, we can begin to change their tone and direction. Once we learn to change our sleeping dreams, we can begin to change our waking dreams. Then we begin to dream—awake and asleep—of our world with greater originality and lucidity. We guide our dreams to extraordinary domains where we learn from great teachers, visit distant lands, communicate (without electronic devices) with friends across the world, and meet with deceased ancestors.

Dreams are a part of our life, coming to us nightly, whether we are aware of them or not. They also come to us in the form of daydreams, a pastime for which many of us have been criticized for squandering time. But shamans respect their dreams—both of the nighttime and the daytime—because they contain messages from the spirit and the biosphere.

To draw life from your dreams, we recommend two exercises: Dream Yoga and Lucid Dreaming.

Through this Dream Yoga exercise, you will be able to better recall your dreams and will prepare yourself for the next exercise, Lucid Dreaming.

Exercise: Dream Yoga

Set your clock to awaken you five or ten minutes earlier than usual, ideally with gentle music rather than a radio talk show host or an alarming buzzer.

If you do not recall your dreams easily, try the following technique. Drink one half a glass of water before you go to bed and tell yourself, “When I wake up, I will drink the other half glass and remember my dreams.”

Keep a notebook by the side of your bed, and when you wake up in the morning take a few moments to jot down keywords that will remind you of your dreams.

When you awaken, come out of your sleep slowly and luxuriously, basking in the afterglow of your dreams, relishing the flavors, scents, and images that linger in the early morning from your dreamtime adventures.

With your eyes closed, recall your dreams, and notice the urgency with which the waking mind wants to get on with the day’s work, whether checking your e-mail, listening to the morning news, or getting ready for work. When you do open your eyes, do so gently.

Write what you recall in your dream journal, always using the present tense, as if you were still dreaming as you write, even if your dreams seem fuzzy or blurry at first. As you do this exercise, you might be amazed at how much more you recall as you write.

As soon as you wake up in the morning, drink the rest of the water and lie in bed with your eyes closed, allowing your dream images to flow back into awareness.

If you are likely to get up during the night to go to the bathroom, keep a recorder next to your bed and dictate the essentials of any interrupted dream.

Lucid dreaming is important because it helps us bring consciousness and awareness into our dreams. Once we learn lucid dreaming, dreams no longer just “happen” to us. As we realize we are dreaming, we are able to guide and direct our dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the first of three steps in the shaman’s dream practices. The second is to bring awareness into your dreamless sleep, when you have no dream images in your awareness. The third is to bring your dreaming practice (not your dreams but the skill of dreaming) into your waking state, to understand that you are dreaming the world into being at all times.

Through lucid dreaming, shamans can agree to convene on a certain night at a place of power in nature. They may use a crystal or some other beautiful stone to facilitate their dream meeting. When they compare notes in the following days or weeks, they recognize that they had indeed shared the same
psychic space
and were able to recall what the others had said or done.

Exercise: Lucid Dreaming

Select a stone—perhaps a beautiful crystal—with no sharp edges and that fits nicely in the palm of your hands so that you can rub your hands together while holding it.

When you go to bed, set your intention to dream lucidly. For example, you might decide to dream about being in a mountain in the Himalayas, or perhaps a home you lived in during your childhood, or about visiting with relatives who are no longer living. You can also determine to visit a “university” where you will go to receive teaching and training.

As you concentrate, blow into your stone with a soft breath and ask your subconscious mind to bring the image of the stone into your dreams.

Hold the stone in your hand while you go to sleep.

During the night, the stone will fall out of your hand and end up somewhere in the bed. If you turn over and lie on it, you will likely surface from your deep sleep momentarily. Take the stone into your hands. Imagine that you are bringing it with you into your dreams, and reassert your intention to dream lucidly.

After a few tries, you will find that the stone will begin to appear in your dreams. You will realize that you are dreaming while you are in the dream. And, with time, you will become able to steer your dreams in your intended direction.

To succeed, you must practice this exercise daily.

WE ARE OUR STORIES

Shamans come from cultures where the written word has not yet replaced the storytelling tradition and where “facts” have not yet overthrown the myths and legends that express the soul of a people.

As nations and as individuals, we are the product of the stories we tell ourselves about our origins, our childhood, our life, and our close brushes with death. For example, for a long time, Christians believed that the story of Creation as told in the Bible was the only available explanation of how humans came to appear on the Earth. Then scientists discovered that there was another perspective, another story, and Darwinian evolution began to influence our culture’s worldview. When we do not generate original stories of our own, we can easily adopt iterations of the generally accepted version of reality or the pop psychology themes of the time.

In our personal stories, we might feel hurt by rejection, for example when our first love was not reciprocated, or when we were told by our elementary school teacher that our drawing was “not worth saving” as she crumpled it up. Then, we have all experienced the loss of a loved one and feelings of being left alone to fend for ourselves in the world. When we see ourselves as victims in those tragic tales, we might turn that hurt or that loss into an apology for not being creative, or into an excuse for not “showing up” in our marriages and families. But when we are able to survive loss, defeat, abandonment, rejection, and failure and, instead, draw important lessons from those intense encounters with fate, then our stories become epics of great heroism in which we are the protagonist.

Everyone likes to think their tale is unlike anyone else’s. We tend to invest hugely in the drama of our story, absolutely convinced not only that it is true but also that we ourselves are the product of our circumstances, but this is not the case.

Alberto:
I Am

My patients’ stories are true. I know this because they have told me. They have invested their tale with sound and fury in an attempt to better understand their past. And each time, they recast the events of their past in a more convenient light, imposing 20/20 hindsight. The long-held story of being abused as a child, for example, explained timid and withdrawn adult behavior. The replayed story of a struggle with addiction explained not living up to full potential. These stories often served as an apology to life for what a person had become.

And I learned this lesson again as an anthropologist working with Amazon sages. The shamans believed that everything a person recalls about their past is a projection of an internal map held in their psyche.

“Amanda” was convinced she had been abandoned emotionally by her mother and father when she was very young. After many years in therapy, struggling with her abandonment issues, she went to a hypnotherapist who performed a hypnotic regression during which she saw vividly how her parents had abandoned her when she was 18 months old. After her session, Amanda confronted her mother—her father had already passed away by then. The mother explained that Amanda had been very colicky as a baby and, at that early age, both parents had gone on a weeklong holiday, leaving Amanda with her grandmother, who held her and cuddled her. The brain of the child, of course, did not recognize the parents’ need for a little sleep but only realized that Mommy and Daddy had gone, perhaps never to come back.

Amanda taught me what the Amazon sages knew: namely, that trauma is not what actually happens but the way it is remembered—how it continues to live as a personal myth in the psyche. “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare said.