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Awakening the Visionary Life
Inner Traditions 2005 ISBN #159477047-6 Catherine Shainberg is a psychologist, healer, teacher, and founder of the "School of Images", a school dedicated to teaching the dream and kavanah (intent) techniques of the ancient Sephardic Kabbalah tradition. She spent ten years studying the Kabbalah of Light in Jerusalem with kabbalist Colette Aboulker-Muscat, and an additional twenty years in collaboration with her. The resulting work, of which this book is an excellent example, opens the world of dreaming so that it becomes a tool for spiritual growth and right living. This is a book to not only be read, but to be experienced. It is interactive, through the exercises provided within every chapter. Each chapter takes us to a higher level of understanding, and one step farther on our personal path of transformation. The book begins in a very unique and stunning manner: Shainberg presents her acknowledgment page as a lotus-like flower, with "Thank You" at the center, and individual names written on each individual petal. How gracious is this! In her introduction, Shainberg presents Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming as being about the "act" of dreaming, rather than being "about" dreams. She points out that nighttime dreaming is only one form of dreaming, that we also dream during waking our hours. There are two basic paths of learning: the path of liberation through the verbal mind, and the path of liberation through the imaginal mind. The ultimate goal: enlightenment by detachment from all forms. To access the imaginal process, we need to access our subconscious minds. Shainberg talks about the juncture between our outer and our inner worlds as being our body. We need to earn to trust our bodies, as our sensations (sight, hearing, taste, feel, smell) are the pathways to the concrete world in one direction, and the dream world in the other direction. The bottom line here - true dreaming requires determination and dedication. Be prepared to do the work! The work begins with the recognition that how we perceive life is through patterns and forms. If we don't see them immediately, we search for them. This is how we make sense of life. The patterns in our life ground us. The first exercise that we work with is to identify that which we are attracted to (termed "strange attractors"). We then move on to identifying and clearing out the disruptions in our environment. From here we start working on recognizing our daydreams and fantasies, and begin the exploration of our inner dream world. Shainberg then moves the reader into the creation of a Life Plan. This starts with learning to recognize our emotions and our instincts, and see how they interconnect. An integral part of this procedure is identifying the qualities that we wish to develop within ourselves. Most of us are taught from childhood to ignore our dreams. This energy then stays with us, with the possibility of manifesting as "dis-ease". Part of the work here has to do with identifying repetitive patterns within our lives, and looking beneath the surface to see what is motivating this behavior. At this stage of work is also where we are encouraged to start a dream journal, with the intent of remembering our dreams. Once we remember our dreams, we can begin to interact with them. One of the exercises in this chapter has to do with arming ourselves to deal with our dream images. We are given a visualization that takes us within ourselves to gather whatever we feel that we need for protection. I got an interesting response here, and I think that you will too. One of the exercises that helps us understand and work with our dreams is called "Reversing". You consciously go backwards through your day, and when you come to a point in time where there was a difficult encounter, you see yourself through the other persons eyes - you step forward and become them for a moment. How very empowering! Now we are moving into some very deep areas - sensing the pain in ourselves, be it physical, mental, or emotional. Giving it qualities such as wet or dry, hot or cold. In this manner we can decide how to deal with the pain - what will make it better, what will make it worse. Then we are given a very easy exercise where we literally mop up our pain - releasing it from our lives. Now we come to the quickening in our lives. We address how we feel once we leave our "safe place", the direction that we want our inner journey to take, how we feel about whatever we encounter on that journey, and how to safely return. We begin to work with mirroring, and with the concept of opposites. The next issue that Shainberg addresses is intent. She makes the point that we can only reach the gold at the end of the rainbow - the meat of our dreams - if we learn to discard our "busy" dreams. The first step here is to journey into the colors of the rainbow and see what our reaction to them is. We learn to journey back to our earliest happy memories, and see how they have placed intent in the "great dream" of our life. We learn to go into waking dreaming, to see what is standing in our way, what our fears and obstacles are. We learn to "attend", or pay attention to our dreams. We are shown how to work with our fears and anxieties, and how to reverse them, not by avoiding them, but by going into them! There is enough "work" in this book to last a lifetime. The "how" of taking control of our dreams is developed in small but significant steps. If you follow the template developed here, you cannot help but grow as a person. Each moment will be lived in the now, and your future will be what it should be. Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming> is an excellent work book, and an excellent reference book. Be prepared to make some life changes when picking this book up to read!
Bonnie Cehovet
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