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January 2 through January 8, 2023

Happy New Year! The week starts off with vibrant Venus heading into Aquarius on Monday, filling us with new hope, vibrancy, and innovative ideas. The sky is not even the limit as Venus opens our hearts and minds to endless possibilities. With the Moon cruising through Gemini the first three days of the week, brainstorming, internet research, and shared ideas will be a theme, amplifying the new energy that’s filling the air. We can also charm our way in or out of situations, making our words and intent more powerful and effective. Insights abound when the Moon moves into Cancer on Thursday, intellectual as well as spiritual. Hidden things can come to light during this phase of the Moon, especially when the Moon waxes full in Cancer on Friday. Promise yourself you’ll take it easy this weekend, relaxing and regrouping under Saturday’s Cancer Moon and focusing on love and self-care when it moves into Leo on Sunday. All in all a great start to the new year, filled with potential and hope as the months unfol

How to Use Shamanic Practices for Dreamwork, by Mark Nelson

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

There is extensive literature on dreamwork, psychotherapeutic applications of dreaming, and, more recently, shamanic dreaming. In this article I explain what shamanic dreaming is and what you can use it for, such as your own development, for purposes such as creativity, or to help others. In this context dreams can include waking dreams or other visionary states, as well as dreams while asleep, all of which you can work with in the same way. Anybody can learn shamanic dreaming, although you still need to learn shamanic practices used in dreams (teaching of these may of course occur in dreams).

A prerequisite for shamanic dreaming (or any other active dreamwork) is to be lucid and to take control of events in a dream. Lucid dreams occur in the final two hours or so of normal sleep, so there are 730 hours each year (30 days) of lucid dreaming potentially available. If you live to be 70 years old, then that equates to 6 years. If you learn to dream lucidly in your late teens, your lucid dreaming may only cover 50 years, so total is 4 years. Let us further assume that you only dream lucidly 25% of the time; that still equates to a full year of lucid dreaming that is available for dreamwork. What could you achieve in that time?

The other consideration relevant here is that your experience of time is different in dream, so an extended period in the dream may occur in a shorter time in physical reality, increasing the "actual" time available for lucid dreaming.

Two particularly useful approaches that authors often mention to help lucid dreaming are prospective memory and reality checks.

Prospective memory is remembering to do something in the future. A usual way of using this is via a trigger question. When you notice an object, person, or event that you are likely to see routinely (but that is unusual encouraging you to notice it), you then ask a question such as, "Am I dreaming?" While awake the answer to this is obviously no, but the act of asking the question encourages you to also ask it while dreaming if you notice the same trigger, which may prompt the realization that you are in a dream and lead to a lucid state. Examples of such triggers may be seeing something of a particular color, noticing a specific animal or animal behavior, seeing the Full Moon, or hearing a particular phrase. Knowing that you are using this technique may also encourage spirit to put the trigger into your dream.

You can also perform reality checks to confirm that you are dreaming. A good example of this is being able to do something that you cannot usually do in physical reality, such as passing your hand through or into a solid object or jumping in the air and seeing if you float rather than fall again.

There are common signs that you are in a dream, such as devices or vehicles not working as they normally would, a location that you know being different to your knowledge of the location in physical reality, or your appearance being unusual (people often notice the appearance or reflection of their hands, feet, or facial appearance being different). These may also trigger lucidity.

In addition, you can also set a specific intention before going to sleep that you will be lucid in the dream, such as, "I intend to be lucid in my dream," and can also use an affirmation such as, "I am able to dream lucidly" in combination with your intention.

Like anything else, lucid dreaming becomes easier and more frequent with practice. The other problem for beginners is preserving the lucid state within a dream once you achieve it. This requires focus on the dream and again becomes easier with practice.

You can direct events in a lucid dream or allow your unconscious or higher self to be in control, or to guide you, so that you are more of a witness to events. This opens new possibilities that your conscious mind may not consider. You may also of course receive guidance from spirit in a dream.

A key to dreamwork is dream interpretation. People often do this with reference to a dream dictionary, but it is important recognize that symbols and metaphors that you see in dreams have specific meaning to you, which may be different from general interpretations. It is also important to ask yourself how a symbol or dream event makes you feel, noting your emotional as well as mental reaction. If you do not understand the meaning of a particular symbol, you can take a shamanic journey while awake with the intention of meeting a spirit to ask them to explain this to you.

Important symbols include archetypal and personal symbols. Archetypal symbols are cross-cultural and span time, such as certain spirits that have an accepted meaning. Birds are archetypal messengers and certain animals (such as rabbits, spiders, foxes, and coyotes) are tricksters. If you see a frog wearing a crown, you might consider kissing it. Personal symbols are ones you already recognize and associate a meaning to. Spirit will tend to communicate with you in dreams using these archetypes and/or teach you the interpretation to use for a symbol or allowing you to infer it from dream events.

You should write dream intentions in a dream journal, as well as the experiences of a dream and your interpretation of it, together with any follow-up work that you perform. Using a dream journal also helps you recollect dreams and in learning to interpret symbols in future dreams. If writing dream contents is not that practical, or will interrupt your sleep too much, you might consider using a phone or other device to record a memo in which you describe the dream content, which might be a more effective method.

Having learned lucid dreaming, dream recollection, and dream interpretation, you are able to do shamanic dreamwork. So, what is shamanic dreaming and how is this different from normal dreaming? The following are differences that help distinguish "shamanic" dreams from "normal" dreams:

• Recognizing that dreaming is not something that happens in your mind, but that dreams occur in spiritual reality, the same three level cosmology of lower world, middle world, and upper world that shamanic journeying occur in. Dreams occurring in the middle world aspect of spiritual reality is one reason they often appear to be confusing and strange.
• Realizing that spirits can be present in dreams, including power animals, other helping spirits or teaching spirits, or ancestral spirits, as well as the spirits of live or dead people who may need your help. Such spirits may provide you with teaching and healing (or even initiation) in the dream.
• Understanding that you can do shamanic work in a dream, including where you intend to change physical reality, in the same way you can use such an intention in a shamanic journey.

In shamanic cultures, people believe that dreams as sacred and real, and that people can dream physical reality into existence, with the dreamworld being the true reality.

As well as normal dreams there may be significant dreams, what Michael Harner and others call "big dreams," which may recur and that may hold guidance that has potential to change your life. Advanced dreamwork aims to try to incubate such dreams.

The following are the sorts of activities that you can do in shamanic dreamwork, which can form the basis for intentions set before you go to sleep:

• Explore the dreamworld.
• Experience activities such as flying or shapeshifting into an animal.
• Do things that you may not usually do as a way of experimenting, or to rehearse future activities that you will perform in physical reality, such as public speaking.
• Fulfill fantasies.
• Take more direct control of your dreams.
• Face fears, phobias, anxieties, grief, or past trauma that you have not fully resolved.
• Resolve issues with past relationships amicably if you meet a former partner in a dream.
• Receive empowerment or recover energy that you have lost.
• Release or return energy or power that you have taken from others.
• Face nightmares, transform them and release their energy.
• Get creative inspiration or input from people or events in a dream. If you are working on creative fiction people in the dream may be characters, and events part of a plot outline.
• Receive or give teaching, or gain or impart knowledge or wisdom, in a dream.
• Learn divination of potential future events, what you can do to avoid them, or how to co-create a desired future with spirit.
• Receive or give healing in a dream or learn healing techniques.
• Learn healing techniques in dreams to use in physical reality.
• Meet the spirits of dead ancestors to engage in ancestral healing or other ancestral work.
• Gain information about, work with, or heal, past (or future) lives.
• Have spiritual, mystical, and ecstatic experiences. This can include experiencing union with the cosmos, the divine, or an equivalent based on your belief system.
• Make changes in the dream with an intention that this leads to changes in physical reality. You can learn rituals to affect this from teaching spirits and will eventually be able to design your own.
• Receive initiation from spirit.

Dream initiation is an advanced topic but can occur spontaneously, even in people new to shamanic work. During a shamanic dream initiation, a person usually experiences symbolic (not actual) suffering and death within a dream including the following motifs:

• Experiencing illness, animal bites, or near-death experiences that change the person and provide them with knowledge or enhanced abilities.
• Descent to the underworld or your being swallowed by an animal and their return with gifts, or ascent to the upperworld to receive divine guidance.
• Symbolic dismemberment such as having your body cut up, boiled in a cauldron, or reduced to ash in a fire) followed by rememberment and your resurrection or rebirth as a new person. Rebirth is an initiation element in all traditions.

As always, we need to consider the ethics of work that we do. Any entity that you meet in a dream may be a suffering being who needs help. You should treat people that you meet in dreams the same way that you would treat a person in real life.

You should also adopt a serious attitude to dreamwork, so it is not just an opportunity to engage in frivolous pursuits, which misses opportunities to undertake work of benefit to yourself and others.

By changing your approach to how you experience and work with dreams, and learning your true potential, you can produce beneficial changes in physical reality, for yourself, for others, and for the world. May you be empowered and guided to do so.

Further Reading:
Moss, Robert. Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom (New World Library, April 2011).
Sumegi, Angela. Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place (SUNY Press, May 2008).
Tuccillo, Dylam et al. A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming (New York: Workman, September 2013).
Villoldo, Alberto. Courageous Dreaming: How Shamans Dream the World into Being (Hay House, March 2008).

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2022. All rights reserved.

Around five years ago, my husband gave me a lovely pair of diamond earrings. Last morning morning, I lost one of them. I was in my bathroom at my sink and I took the earring off to clean it. I always close the drain so it doesn't drop down it. As I dried it with a Kleenex, I had other things on my mind. I don't remember if I placed it back on my sink. I couldn't find it anywhere. I checked the Kleenex but my earring wasn't there. My husband and I have searched several times for the earring with no luck. This is not the first time I've lost one of them. My husband gave me the earrings around five years ago. Some time after that, in the middle of the night, I suddenly sat up in bed and grabbed my ear lobes. One of the earrings was gone! I searched where I'd been in the house and went back to bed. For some unknown reason, I told myself to get up and look in front of my dresser, and there it was. The second time I lost my earring, I had been at the doctor's office that day, so I called but they hadn't seen the earring. A few months went by. One morning my husband woke me up, and in his hand was my earring. He had found it in front of my dresser, just like the last earring. My bedroom is vacuumed regularly, so I have no explanation for how it turned up months later in front of my dresser. Can you help me find my earring this time, and perhaps explain to me what happened the other times my missing treasures turned up?

Carol

Susyn:

There is a higher purpose behind the way your runaway earring frequently disappears and then returns. In fact, once you recover it, you may want to mark it in some subtle way, for I sense that it is always the exact same earring that tends to vanish and then inexplicably return weeks or months later.

Like all natural gemstones, diamonds carry a certain energy. Diamonds represent clarity, truth, passion and inspiration; this is why this stone is so often chosen to represent true love. In addition, diamonds tend to have a mind of their own, so when you get an independent one, they can go missing at a moment's notice. They are also often recovered in the most interesting places.

I myself have earrings that tend to separate themselves from each other; I often locate one in the place I left them but not the other. I usually have to go on a hunt before I discover the missing one in a place I wouldn't normally leave it. I have a theory about these wayward diamonds; I think their main purpose is to grab our attention, heighten our awareness, and refocus our priorities.

It's a common metaphysical experience to encounter renegade jewelry. When these items disappear, they may lead us on an interesting search that often reveals other things we've been missing or reminds us of how important these items are to us. Because these earrings were a gift from your husband, they hold greater value to you than if you had bought them yourself. You would never want to lose your husband, so when you lose something that represents his love for you, you feel compelled to find it in order to restore your sense of emotional well-being.

I feel this particular earring of yours likes to hide in your clothing. If you can recall what you were wearing the day it disappeared, you may find it there. Whether or not you dress and undress in front of your dresser, when your attention needs to be grabbed, the earring may choose to let go in that spot, for it knows that you will find it there. I'm sure that your precious earring isn't lost forever, and will return when you least expect it.

Each time this earring goes missing, it is trying to tell you something. Whether it is reminding you to keep your relationship with your husband safe and secure, showing off to call your attention to some important insight or issue, or simply trying to jolt your awareness, it is sending you an important message. Once you get the message, it will reappear either in front of your dresser or in some other unusual place.

*****

Oceania:

Though I've experienced the strange disappearance and reappearance of physical objects many times, I'm not sure how to explain it. Sometimes there are mundane explanations. (Pierced earrings have been known to fall into pockets, drop into turned-up pant legs, or even get stuck in the gap of a ridged shoe sole and stow away unnoticed.) Other times, it's a mystery! Either way, I like to focus on the spiritual lesson behind the lost object.

I play music with a group that recently got together to rehearse. As the guitar player was sitting down, he dropped a brand new, specialized guitar pick. It had not fallen into his guitar - it had utterly vanished! We all began crawling around on hands and knees to look for it, even laying our heads on the ground so our eyes were at floor level in case the pick was blending in with the pattern of the Persian rug underfoot. After a noble but unsuccessful search, we gave up and returned to our seats to begin playing. Just then, a latecomer walked in, casually bent over to pick up the elusive object, and said, Anybody lose a pick?

I marveled at how this baffling incident brought us all closer, bonding us through laughter and a common goal. In your case, the lesson may involve the truth that the connection you share with your husband is more steadfast, real and valuable than any object.

Diamonds symbolize our greatest potential. Tons of dirt must be cleared away to uncover a single carat. Diamonds are the hardest naturally-occurring substance. When cut and polished, their pure, colorless facets disperse white light into sparkles. Given all of this, a diamond is a great symbol of our own strength, beauty, potential and connection to Spirit.

Your matched set symbolizes your marriage. There may be times when one or the other of you goes missing (becomes distant or preoccupied), but you're still a pair! The lost earring episodes could be exercises in trust. It's a circular, cyclical universe: things and people have a way of oming back around.

There's a sweet scene in the movie Harold and Maude where the two main characters sit by a pond, watching fireworks. He presents her with a metal token with the message Harold Loves Maude stamped on it. She smiles and admires it, then tosses it into the water. In response to the shocked look on his face, she explains: So I'll always know where it is! Whether the earrings are in your ears or out of sight, the love they represent is always present in your heart.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.