The Dream of the Soul: Speak It. Keep It Safe.

I wake with fragments of a dream. I am in a crowd, fearful. Yet a stronger need pushes me toward a platform. I have something to say but the words dissolve before reaching my tongue. I stand before the Senate, before power players. I look out to a grey fog rolling in. The dream breaks with my pleading words, "I ask you to reconsider." As daytime awareness arrives, that terrible body blow of dread, disbelief, then anger.

Sit up. Bring feet to the floor. Make tea, move to the meditation mat, light a candle, breathe—feel—breathe. Mindfulness of breath within embodied experience. Hold soft awareness to what is felt beneath thoughts that ricochet around the halls of our descent. Mix breath-infused awareness into feeling tones. Keep going, patiently, until pain dissolves into light. Envelop everyone in prayerful light waves. Meet them with your diamond conscious knowing. The putrid patriarchs who grab and crush, who push us back into dungeons of white fear cages. Know them; shadow kings who plunder through sadistic prostitution, who sell nature's Eros in fetid marketplaces.

The abusive tweet storm, rants of idiocy, and the hateful ripping apart of community that is projected daily onto our collective body, services only this. The displacement of inordinate pain held within a shattered soul. No amount of destruction will ever soothe such a rabid appetite for revenge. Instead, we are pulled into a vortex of trans-marginal stress as psychological safety nets are continually breached. The abandoned unformed agony held in the body spins into a harming fest of paranoia and rage. The self-structure, losing ground, spirals into a disorienting fog. This daily ritual of cruelty ignites our shared wounds over and over. So, be mindful, be steady. Hold your ground.

We are not receptacles for the pain of shadow kings. We, the resistance, are awakening to the power of our collective soul. Speak her truth, even at vulnerable platforms where we cry out our dissent. As I grew up, I had no voice. I hardly knew I existed. As a teenager, I once painted myself as a wisp behind an ill-fitting mask. I was someone who hid, until her voice started to rise. Ironically, the catalyst was the excruciation of misogynistic monastic Buddhism within which I had encapsulated myself. There, the resistance to patriarchal repression began its ascent.

She, Pachamama, the immune system of the planet, is about ready to roll over us. But, for a few more geological seconds, she begs us to come to our senses, literally. Feel her pounding heart within you. In the midst of swirling shadows, we must reclaim her sacred way. I believe, I suppose, we have brought ourselves to this terrible mirror so we can study fully the reflection of our ego madness: like the handsome portrait of Dorian Gray hidden in the attic, only to be unmasked as the twisted sadist, there, underneath all along. But let's not finish here, scrambling around in the swamp of nightmarish trolls.

Last summer, in the gentle pastures of England, I met Anne Baring. Five o'clock cake and Darjeeling poured from a proper teapot into china cups in a hobbit land of cricket lawns, cottages, and pubs along the Chaucer pilgrimage route. Anne, a wise elder, produced a vital guide in her magnum opus The Dream of the Cosmos. Speaking with me, Anne expressed dismay that a Trump presidency would shatter the higher dream of the world. That stark reality has come to pass, and her worst fear is our daily nightmare. I wonder, though, about this shattering. Perhaps it will finally take down the last stand of this colonizing, racist, misogynist mindset. Perhaps it will set our dream free.

But we must quicken the nightmare's demise by midwifing the new world struggling to be born. We must make sure the dream of our soul is not stillborn, that the emerging child is not crushed under the feet of a degenerate and jealous patriarchy. We must herald the child's arrival with joyous voices loud and clear. It's a challenge, no doubt, but we...