Trust The Universe, But Set The Alarm As Well.

Whooooo.
It's been one of those days that started off on the wrong foot and got no better. Like I somehow got knocked out of phase.

Sometimes being out of phase sparks neat, innovative ideas and creative solutions.

Sometimes it's simply tiring, chasing after what needs to get done in less time than usual - and it's a wonder I didn't lose my keys, my wallet, my gloves, my mind.

My social psych self keeps trying to come up with an explanation for this, and I'm sure there is one, or several ... but the rest of me simply wants a big juicy nap.

The Greek Chorus Plays In The Drama Too

The Active Inner Critic reminds me of a Greek Chorus of Can'ts, Shouldn'ts, Shoulds, and Oughts.

A quick consult of Wikipedia revealed an curious little statement: In many ancient Greek plays, the chorus expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as their fears or secrets.

That's something to think about, no?

Hm. What to do with all of this.

1. shush, banish, scold, or mock (a.k.a. give the Censor Chorus a good taste of what it's dishing out)

2. let the Chorus say its piece, name it for what it is, and move on to attend to the main players in the scene.

Spring spring springity spring

flowers with dew, originally uploaded by jk10976.

I'm working very hard on manifesting spring right now in accord with the Law Of Attraction ... aligning my thoughts, feelings, and, here, my posting actions on the warmth, dewiness, and gorgeous openfloweredness of spring.

"it's
spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful"

E. E. Cummings
"in Just-"

The Inner Voice Of Truth That Channelled James Earl Jones

There are two times in my life that I've heard a voice come from within that had the intonation and authority of James Earl Jones.

The first time was I was in college, then, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the in-town school.

I was crabby and defiant because, although all the admissions ducks were in a row and letter of intent signed, the tuition funding didn't work out, and I didn't get to matriculate at my institution of choice.

wah wah. poor you.

Hey. It rocked my world at the time.

Anyhow, the voice-of-God-aka-James-Earl-Jones said: "You're not living up to your potential."

It scared the pants off me, one, because it was this voice-of-God voice in my head and two, because it was dead right.


Needless to say, I changed my ways and buckled down and made the most out of a perfectly serviceable freshman year.

The second time was last week.

I woke up to hear "It's not about the money."

This time I had the chutzpah to argue with the voice-of-God-aka-James-Earl-Jones like a ruffle-feathered hen: whaddya mean it's not about the money of course it's about the money it's always about the money it's always BEEN about the money.


And now I get it, but in the gut this time: It's not about the money.

But what IS it about?

How Statistics Can Help You Manage Your Inner Critic ... Seriously!

Say whut?

Yup. Now stay with me for a sec. Statistics does not always boil down to numbers and charts and flogging same into submission.

Statistics might even have an empowering function.

*gasp*

Maybe even with an Inner Critic.

*No!*

Several recommend outright banishment or exorcism of can'ts shoulds oughts and the like. And I do try to do that. And if I don't banish or exorcise successfully, I mock: wah wah wah ... shouldacouldawoulda ... wah wah wah.

BUT I've also noticed that sometimes both my Inner Knowing and my Inner Censor (Critic) meet in my throat and get stuck there.

Worse, sometimes I try to wrestle my Inner Censor (Critic) out of my way or to the ground or whatever, and she gets more powerful while the rest of me runs out of gas and somehow acquires a roaring headache.

That becomes a problem when I'm actually trying to work on a task. Especially when it's a taxing task with much unfamiliar, much complexity, and many steps.

So. In circumstances like these, when my Inner Critic (Censor) gets particularly intrusive and vehement, I break out this statistical technique I learned in social psychology school.

It's called "covarying out" and what this technique does is account for and remove the effect of a nuisance, but predictive, variable from an outcome variable.

For example, if we were interested in looking at the effect of goal orientation on a certain performance measure (e.g., GPA), we might want to covary out a measure of prior ability (like IQ).

How on earth does this apply here?

Happy to enlighten!

I let the Inner Critic say her piece full-frontal for a finite but intense amount of time. She proceeds to spew the 'I can't's and 'There's no way's and 'Who are you kidding's and 'Who do you think you are's.

Then, after a time, almost miraculously, my Inner Critic runs out of steam, and then the rest of me can step nimbly aside all that negative but honestly-felt debris -- covarying out its effects, as it were -- and proceed with doing what my real true self thinks is right.

I'm not saying the covarying thing works all the time and for all people. But it sure beats trying to wrestle down a Critic in a particularly ornery mood.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Seven Icky Things That Show Up In Dreams - And What They Might Mean.

1. Forbidden intimacy/intimacy with unexpected partners.

2. Extreme negative reactions to waking-life loved ones.

3. Characters or places with toxically stereotypical characteristics.

4. Filth

5. Decay

6. Disease

7. Enslavement

Any of these elements present in a dream could mean shadow stuff is afoot.

What's the shadow deal, again?

Rejected or disowned parts of the dreamer - seriously rejected part ... so rejected they are in the "that couldn't possibly be me" category (a.k.a. the "Not me").

I used to think the shadow would be sadly pretty, even classy -- black velvet with purple accents, a whiff of extinquished candles, perhaps a lily and chaise longue.

Pfft.

And I used to think, of course I won't suppress the shadow parts of me ... I want to grow, be healthy, be whole. Who doesn't?

But then I saw some dreams with the real deal:

• Emily* had terrifying dreams of swarthy sweaty "foreign" men with dark mustaches trying to muscle their way through her childhood home's flimsy front screen door while she struggled to keep the door closed (it won't lock).
  
• Collette dreamed of a Nazi man in an overcoat hissing sinister things into her ear about "the ghetto people" (in the dream she was a child, which made it worse for her somehow). She was horrified that her dreaming mind conjured up this hateful character.

Both of these dreamers are people just like you and me. And although the dreams were upsetting, they did have value.

Remember the phrase "dreams come in the service of health and wholeness?"

It still holds true.

In this case, dreams signal that all is not whole, that there is still disowned, "not me" stuff to be dealt with.

The dream brings all of it into full view so it CAN be dealt with.

________
*pseudonyms - further, any identifying characteristics in dream content are masked to protect the dreamer.

Resistance Is Fertile

A neat article dropped into my inbox yesterday: Sally Kempton's Finding Freedom from Resistance, front and center in the Yoga Journal newsletter.

Of course I saw myself in it.

*sigh*

The dogged one, the "good" one. The one who relaxes AFTER the concluding bell has rung, signalling that I can stop trying.

Kempton offers some good antidotes for several different kinds of resistance - not just the striving kind. One antidote really isn't "anti" at all - it's more of an "attending to."

In a highlighted section, "What Are You Resisting?," she identifies that resistance manifests in a sense of constriction, stagnation, or stuckness.

Believe it or not, there are lots of opportunities in being clenchy or stuck:

1. You can tune into that felt sensation in the body at that moment ("where am I feeling this in my body right now?") and how that felt sensation changes moment-to-moment ("has the feeling moved or changed in any way?") ... The change could be a relocating in the body, an intensifying, an easing, a softening, or something else. Truly, anything is valid.

2. You can adopt an attitude of gentle questioning and address the sense directly ("hello there, resistance, what are you here to tell me")*

3. You can tune in, then, to what floats up, sidles in, or pops as an "answer" ... it could be a word, phrase, image, an exhalation, a sigh, a choked up feeling, a welling up of tears, or change in the felt sensation.

And that's that. Sometimes all the resistance needs is to be attended to. Sometimes it offers guidance to what you need to attend to.

For further reading, see the full article: http://www.yogajournal.com/wisdomnews/wis93.html.
_____

*I'm guessing that you've noticed by now that I like to invite direct questioning of internal states and the incorporeal (e.g., "dream source," "higher self"). It's true - sometimes it takes such measures to break set and get a moment outside of a tail-chasing intellect.

(*whispering, with cupped hand to ear:* you can do this too, if you want. nobody has to know ... )

The Intellect Has Withdrawn Its Watchers From The Gates

You know who wrote the title sentence? Our man Freud.

Or at least he quoted it.

In "The Watcher at the Gate," Gail Godwin makes a suggestion that I myself am still struggling to accomplish: "Get to know your Watcher. He's yours."

Do I feel a slight twinge of recognition?

No I do not.
No.

Further ... "Let your Watcher feel needed."

Ha! Not with her constant harping.

And " ... watchers are excellent critics after inspiration has been captured; they are dependable, sharp-eyed readers of things already set down."

***Sigh.***

That's true.

Maybe I feel my heart softening a little bit. Maybe there's a tiny crack of an opening here.

The card shown above came out while my Watcher was at Dunkin Donuts. I love it, it keeps giving me the yuckity-yuks. It's called "Overly Sensitive" and it's coppery like "cents" and the chimps have this air of "nonsense" about them.

Could the chimps be who the Watchers really are? Or maybe what they aspire to be. LOL.

How to Get Some Relief From Your Inner Critic and Get You Some More A-Has at the Same Time

It's really interesting to see so much interest in Vision Boards, Goal Boards, Dream Boards, Treasure maps, and such. At their heart is the collecting of attractive pictures and grouping the pictures on a display background. The more mundane name for the collecting and grouping process is "making collages" or "collaging."

Making collages is AWESOME.

The whole process of leafing through magazines, pulling out pictures, collecting pictures, sorting and re-sorting through pictures, grouping pictures, cutting, trimming, and pasting does a lot of good for someone with a fierce and dominating Inner Critic. To me it's got to do with using the hands instead of the head. The head can come in once the pasting is done.

There are a couple methods of collaging that I really love - that are focused more on developing creativity and working through creative blocks than on manifesting abundance.

Seena Frost's SoulCollage and Sheila Asato's Healing Collage have both influenced the way I put collages together. I started out with the SoulCollage method - and still use the SoulCollage sized matboard cards (5 x 8 in.). Something about that size of card is much less "threatening" than a whole poster-sized paper.

The stuff of the collages I make tends to emerge from the unexpressed or supressed STUFF I can't make heads or tails of on my own. This part of the process is more like Sheila Asato's Healing Collage, but not exactly, as her process is more dream focused, offering "a non-verbal means of bringing dream material into waking life through the language of form and feeling."

Asato quotes Jung on her site that I just adore: “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”

This is SO TRUE.

The image above, with the bird, shadow birds, and the woman in whiteface came about today because I was frustrated and stymied with several behind-the-scenes aspects of the www.dreamcurrent.com website.

When I look at the card now, it's a pretty good representation of an Inner Critic actually- from the foreground bird's yellow appraising eye to the shadow bird's beak menacing the woman's vulnerable back-of-neck. The woman's white face makes me think of a "persona" or "a face put on to show the world." I'm not quite sure what to make of that - but it feels right that it's there.

Building the collage gave relief. Looking at it now gives relief. Describing the pictures now also gives relief - and helps bring the unsaid into words.

Now ... how to get you some more a-has? The answer: keep making collages - and do so with the hands and the heart rather than the head.

Here's an example of what can happen: I've been building collage cards, with hands and heart, since 2004. The other collage card, with the snow and the woman with her arms crossed, and Pope John Paul II in the background, visible at the back of her neck, was built early in 2007. I found it today after finishing the other one.

When I saw the two cards juxtaposed, I got a charge and a little gasp (hallmarks of the a-ha) - and several connections came to me:

-both women are facing the same direction,
-neither has a particularly content or happy expression (the one on the left is pretty sulky), and -both have something associated with judgement (the Catholic Church pontiff, a Shadowy Beaked Inner Critic), at the back of their neck.

There's something in these two cards - something in all these images together - that's bubbling up and I gotta work on. The inchoate is coming into coherence (apologies to T.S. Eliot), and that is very, very good.

*The collages displayed here are for self-exploration and self-acceptance. They're made from art published in magazines, calendars, books, cards, etc. and personal materials (e.g., photos) and therefore are not to be sold, traded, or bartered and are to be reproduced only for the personal use of the maker of the card.

Song For My Father: "C Is For Cookie"

On Feb 10, I caught NPR's In Character, where I expected to learn about the standard literary venerables like Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, Holden Caulfield or Willy Loman. This segment, to my surprise and great joy, featured Cookie Monster.

Having grown up with Sesame Street (those seasons now on DVD with disclaimers and "dangerously whole milk"*), of course I was sucked in instantly.

According to interviewer Elizabeth Blair, a predecessor of Cookie devoured a machine in an IBM training film in 1967. At this, my ears perked up: wow, my father was a die-hard IBMer, having retired with a closetful of dark suits, white shirts, and wingtips. I wonder if he got to enjoy this film?

Funny enough, not more than a year later, in 1968, I turned up - all-devouring little bugger that I was.

The interview continued ... Frank Oz, credited most often with Cookie's development, was described as having two parts - the square, worrier part and the id. It's pretty easy to tell which part Cookie comes from.

The part of my father I knew best represented Big Blue and the squares far better than Cookie Monster Blue.

But I think I saw little bits of Cookie blue emerge at times. Or at least some of the "subversive sense of humor" Cheryl Henson, Jim Henson's daughter, says her father and Frank Oz shared.

For example, due to lots of health issues, for years my father wasn't allowed to have fat, sugar, salt, eggs, or anything else that tasted halfway decent, but if some forbidden food landed on his plate by accident, it would vanish at the same time a mischievous smile would appear on my father's face.

Or he would mess with his Aptiva desktop in different ways - I guess engineers can't leave well enough alone - he'd break stuff, figure out how to repair it, and then call customer service to explain what happened and how he fixed the problem. I'm not sure how the agent on the other end of his calls received my father's instructions and I didn't really understand why he bothered with the feedback in the first place. But I'm also reminded of the stories he told me of being on a ship in WWII with a gyroscope and orders to take care of it. Maybe he made a vow then to help others not to have to fly by the seat of their pants.

Or maybe he was just doing what he thought was right and proper. He was a very right and proper fellow, my father.

There were times a few years before he passed away that I wished really hard that he could break loose of whatever box he'd put himself in. Maybe he preferred to stick with the familiar and the safe in his retirement years.

Still, I wish he could have treated himself with more than just one short glass of non-diet Pepsi, or that he would have permitted himself even guarded exploration on the Internet, to keep up with IBM, the Kiwanis, the government, or to look up all the symptoms he was having or medications he was taking.

But I am speaking here as a daughter, and although there are elements of my father within me, I can't imagine his perspective, his motivations for creating his box, or staying within his box when it looked so confining from the outside. I can just love him for who he was - the parts I knew and the parts I never saw.

"C"is for Cookie and that's good enough for me.

"C" is for Carter too. Hank Carter. My father. He was good enough for me too.


*"Sweeping the Clouds Away: Not the Same Street", Virginia Heffernan, New York Times, published November 19, 2007

What happens when a good luck charm goes like this ...

February 11, 2008, according to George Osgood at the Star-Gazette, one of the Oscar Mayer wienermobiles spun out from a Pennsylvania highway.

This is a hy-uuge chuckle to me, but it's also a little bit scary; see, the wienermobile, to me (so long as it's merrily tooling along) is a harbinger of good.

Exhibit 1. I'm in my advisor's office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discussing analyses for my dissertation. We came to agree that a finding finally emerged that was worth writing up. At that moment, I SWEAR, I saw out her window the wienermobile come into view and start trundling down the hill from the Sociology Building. I remember her facing me - and, I guess I shifted my attention pretty obviously from what she was saying, because she said something like, what the h*ll are you looking at? All I could do was gape and point.

It was at that point, I knew I could actually graduate.
... I did graduate.

Exhibit 2. Upon coming to Boston with a freshly deposited dissertation, all my belongings, a tolerant, kind boyfriend, NO job prospects and little money, a string of events occurred linking me with a woman working for a firm looking to hire a social scientist-type like myself. As I was practicing the driving route to the firm's location, just in case the hiring manager would be willing to see me the next day, the wienermobile sped by on Rte 128.

It was at that point, I knew I might get to interview and give a good one.
...I did get that job. It was the start of a great career in fact.

Truth be told, the wienermobile has been spotted on other occasions. Living in Madison in the 1990s meant I saw their "docking station" near the Dane County Airport every trip out and back. A couple of times I even gave chase to the wienermobile as fervently as people chase storms in Tornado Alley. In the two exhibits above, though, the link between a big life changing event and the sighting of the wienermobile was so perfect, I couldn't help but think: it's all good.

So. What to make of the spun-out wiener?
(my husband just IMed with his answer: "the horror!") LOL

Hm. Maybe I've "fallen off track?" ... maybe I need to take a pause? wait out the storm? make some repairs?

What's coming to me most, though, is relief. The Hotdoggers inside were A-OK, and that's really all that matters.

... The news report is located here
http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080211/NEWS01/802110323

Do read it, it's laced with godawful (but cute) hot-dog-related groaners.

Self-Understanding Comes from Lots of Different Places

"If thou canst bear
Strong meat of simple truth ..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Gnothi Seauton."

Dena DeCastro did an evolutionary astrology birth chart reading for me last week and I just got the CD. I've never really had a *thing* for astrology, horoscopes, or the like - but I heard a podcast featuring Dena and she sounded so friendly and down-to-earth, I was inspired to give it a try.

You know, this calls to mind a belief I hold about chefs and restaurants - if a chef can prepare a food I am unfamiliar with, ambivalent about, or even dislike, in a way that makes me rave about it - that chef is one heckuvan impressive chef. Barbara Lynch of a suite of restaurants in Boston is that kind of chef. She worked her magic for me on brussels sprouts and prunes.

So - back to Dena DeCastro. In listening to the CD, the following descriptors came to me about her "mode of conveyance": calming, engaging, knows her stuff backwards and forwards, balances receptivity and guidance, bright light, friendly, consultative (in a good way), identifies gifts - and challenges that can be worked into gifts - a good ambassador for her field.

For those who are interested in knowing such things about a person - here's a bit of what was revealed.

I learned that the Sun sign is the essence of one's being. The core. The energizer. The fuel.
Apparently my chart reeks of Gemini. The Sun is in Gemini in the 3rd (Gemini's) house. There's a conjunct of Mars and Venus in Gemini, and Mercury, who rules Gemini, is in Gemini.

In explaining all of this to me, she used a lot of terms that resonated and that I scribed into a "this accurately describes me" list (useful to come back to when one is called upon to write a self-description ... at the very least to stimulate thought!). Gemini is fueled by the mind and the mouth ... LOL ... intellect, the life of the mind, as well as communicating, using one's "voice."

The moon sign represents emotional expression and what comforts. My moon is in Aries, which was a sign I never paid much attention to. Apparently Aries has firey energy, and seeks new challenges.

She highlighted a conjunction of the Moon and Saturn, which represents a tempering of the Aries fire with discipline and a long view. Hee hee - another coupla nice descriptors for the list. Yes, hard work is emotionally fulfilling for me ... I attributed it to my midwestern upbringing, but apparently it's charted in the heavens as well. LOL. Inescapable, that work ethic.

Adding to the story is a rising sign, described as the face one puts to the world (or, contrariwise, how the world sees one). My Aquarius rising says that I approach the world as a truth-sayer. (YES!!!) But also someone who's seen as "different" (sigh), ahead of the curve (writing that one down), inventive (writing that down too), and quirky (aggggh, I am so sick of people calling me quirky).

It occurs to me now that, later in the discussion, I said I'd actually gotten feedback on trying to "be less wacky." Dena chimed in with this great, affirming: Tell em you can't! ... don't give up the wacky, just know the times to get serious. And you know what? That was just what I needed to hear ... from somone who only knows me from a few email exchanges and a natal chart reading. I've heard the same kind of feedback from friends of mine, from people who joined us at the wedding, and even though I listened to these folks, and honestly took in the words, I faintly discounted what they said - heck, they are biased, they are used to me, they are gluttons for punishment. For some reason, Dena's less biased perspective got me to stop short and think. Huh. Maybe I don't have to banish the wacky, maybe it's even worth crowing about -- okay, says the tempering part of me, maybe not so much crow -- but that wacky/quirky part is certainly worth holding close as a true part of me rather than trying to expel, smother, or shove it into an overstuffed drawer.

Where Your Eyes Don't Go

"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders
What the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"

"Where Eyes Don't Go"
They Might Be Giants
Lincoln album
1988 November

So I was listening to This American Life in the truck this past weekend and heard a segment on this MIT mystery contest, a puzzle-solving fest that sounded really difficult yet really fun and involving at the same time ... but wa-a-a-y above my skill level.

There was a competitor featured, Dr. Awkward member David Dickerson, who said things that captivated me enough to cause me to try to scribble them down as I was driving. (don't try this at home.)

First he manipulated the letters in "A dream within a dream" into "What am I, a mind reader?" Given my interest in dreams, synchronicities, and the like, my immediate reaction was OMG, that is SO COOL! and so PERTINENT!

And then I heard TAL producer, Lisa Pollack, say: "... puzzles have an a-ha moment that unlocks them" - yes, yes, I thought, like dreams too!

Ms. Pollack continued: "On a puzzle team, Dave Dickerson can be himself, only better ... " yes, yes, I thought, the "be himself, only better" reverberating in my head - this is authentic-self, true-calling, heart-singing stuff!

And then I heard Mr. Dickerson start a (funny) story with: "I inform people against their will" ...

At that moment, in my head, I heard that nasty heart-stopping "needle scratching across an LP record" noise.

wha?

Informing people against their will?

In his book, The Making of a Therapist: A Practical Guide for the Inner Journey, Louis Cozolino writes of how a schizophrenic audience member congratulated him on his talk, calling him "a suppository of information."

Hmm, maybe it's time for me to take a pause here and think - really think hard - about what I want to convey here and in dreamcurrent.

Yes, I want to be credible.

Yes, I want to be taken seriously.

Yes, I want very much to give unto others the benefits of tuning into dreams.

But methinks I've been playing in the smarty-pants sandbox a little too much lately. Seriously: NPR? MIT? HBR? Ph.D.?

As I write this, all the letters and layers of hip references are taking up residence at the base of my throat right now, such that I can't get a real word in edgewise.

But you know what? Yesterday I was asked what I most wanted to do in life -- I pictured myself answering questions with my hands, and at that instant my hands tingled and buzzed.

That seems worth paying attention to.