Larger Life & Deeper Dream

Healing Conversations - Reflections series

As winter solstice approaches, I am taking a short break from our interview conversations to introduce a new series for this blog, Reflections. Below, you’ll also find a blessing prayer I recorded for the turning of the year. I hope it will nourish you. In these times of so much violence, suffering, and grief, we must dream into — and live into — our vision for a world of love and justice. Each of us can be part of the healing that births new possibilities.

I have been thinking about hosting periodic zoom gatherings for us to come together in sacred connection, to vision and find strength, to send our prayerful breath out as an offering to the world. If this is of interest to you, please contact me.

There is a larger life that leads us
There is a bigger breath that breathes us
There is a deeper dream that dreams us
Its subtle boundaries whisper
the most significant matter of all:
how we live this life
ever flowing through us. [1]

This poem by Beandrea July, a writer in my extended community, speaks to what is troubling me. “Troubling” in the best sense — the way angel-troubled waters can lead to the alchemy of healing. Given our intimate relationship with larger Life, bigger breath, deeper dream (as Beandrea puts it), what is our charge? 

My friend and colleague Dr. Barbara Holmes asks it this way: “How do we honor, with our lives, the millions of ancestors whose names we do not know?” Those who came before us in the ongoing cause of liberation. Those who cleared the ground upon which we stand, and are looking to us to take up our portion, to be faithful in whatever large or small ways we are called. Ancestors who trouble our complacency, our resignation to “the way things are,” daring us to risk more, stretch more, be more, dream more. To be attentive to the larger Life that is always whispering.

The delusion that we are separate from one another, from Earth, from ancestors and future generations, is at the root of so much of our present turmoil and dysfunction. We cling to our flawed but familiar securities, even as we long for change. The same amnesia, with the same devastating consequences, is at work in the psyche of individuals and of nations… How, then, shall we live? Of course this is not a new question, but now, in the face of apocalyptic upheaval, the stakes feel higher and the years seem increasingly shorter.

We shape our response through every choice and act and encounter. Can we moment-by-moment close the gap between the values of our truest heart and our impact on Earth and on our relatives of every form and species — here, past, and yet to come? It can be a difficult and painful awakening, but in those developing patches of integrity with bigger breath and deeper dream, something opens inside. Through this alignment we can tap the resources of the larger Life. Or perhaps they tap us, and we step up — for an interval at least — into our best selves. This is the essence of spiritual practice: to spend more time awake and less in amnesia. More in love and less in fear. More in availability to that which breathes us all.

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[1] Poem included with permission from the author.

Photo above by Mindaugas Vitkus on UnSplash

Prayer by Dr. Liza, originally shared via OneLife Institute.