Help Me Grow A Spiritual Life Program at St. Mary of Mo’ili’ili

Grow Spiritual Seeds

If you like the blogs I have posted giving concrete and practical information on how dreams and intuition can be used to improve health and grow spiritually, please help me grow a Spiritual Life Program at St. Mary of Mo’ili’ili in Honolulu, Hawaii.  We are just now launching a fundraising campaign to support classes on spirituality, dreamwork, meditation and mindful exercise as well as to offer a guest speaker program and other activities-all of which serve to honor the body, mind and spirit, holistically.  Under the supervision of St. Mary’s rector, the Rev. Greg Johnson, I will manage the program and teach many of the classes as money becomes available. Perhaps there will be something of interest to you. Certainly your financial help will help us grow seeds planted by the late Rev. Nancy Conley at St. Mary’s.

To go to our GoFundMe page and find out more, please click on the link below:

https://www.gofundme.com/StMary-SpiritualLife

You may also fund the conventional way by making out a check to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, for Spiritual Life Program/Ministries on the memo line.  Checks can be mailed to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 2062 South King St., Honolulu, HI  96826.

Dreamwork Helps Build Authenticity

These days, there is much said about lying, fake news and hypocrisy both at the personal level and in organizations such as the media, government and churches.  It seems almost as if there is a national dialogue going on to determine who or what is true.  I hope this debate not only causes people to reflect on what constitutes the basis of truth, but also encourages them to look beneath the glitzy surface to the hard reality that forms the substance of truth.

Dreamwork:  Getting to Know One’s Own Driving Forces

One of the many benefits of dreamwork is that it gets us acquainted with the driving forces of our own behavior—forces which remain largely hidden, and thus unknown, to people who have done little self-reflection concerning what goes on beneath the surface of their daily thinking.  Dreamwork thus helps us know who we really are, with the amazing combinations of light and shadow that make up our individual souls.  When applied with a loving, open heart, it helps us own all these energies by recognizing, accepting and integrating what we thought was lost or what we thought was unlovable.  This coming together results in a brilliant transformation that speaks truth out of its own experience.   This kind of depth awareness becomes the basis of knowing and judging what is true and not true.

Self-Ignorance Leads to Fake Behavior

For people who have not undergone this transformation, truth is only true because somebody else said it was true or because society or the church says it is true.  As a result, many people constantly look to others to define the truth.  Peer pressure is an example.  Teens and others who often have little reflected life experience of their own to draw personal conclusions about what is true are subject to the power of others’ opinions and behaviors.  As a result, phony behavior flourishes, people ape their peers, lie to hide their shallowness or to please others, or blindly give lip service to the dictates of a church while compulsively acting out destructive actions.  In government, people with no spiritual depth or inner compass easily succumb to the compelling charms of dictators.  Given the current state of affairs, one has to imagine that this is what happened, big-time.

In our national and personal quest for truth, let us hope it brings us to a deeper part of ourselves, collectively and individually.  Dreamwork can help for those with the courage and imagination to go within.

Dreamwork: An Art of Interacting with and Learning from Inner Wisdom

Image via Pinterest.

Dreamwork is the practice of working with dreams to learn from and interact with them.  This can include keeping a dream journal of important dreams, reflections on the content and feeling of dreams, use of various methods to better understand them, and applying the information obtained from them to enrich our lives.  When done over a period of time, the practice can be life changing and transformative as one comes to see before one’s very eyes the insights and eventual healing taking place within the dreamer.

For a person new to dreamwork, some claims made by dream experts can seem unreal, such as asking for a dream that will help with a specific issue.  Most people don’t know that you can ask for a dream and expect to get a response which can be creative, insightful and healing.  For most people, inspiring dreams, like intuitive insights, are seen as flashes in the pan—a great fortune when you get them but not the type of thing you could ask for or intend.

One of the things that gives me great satisfaction as a dream minister and mentor is to have a person I am working with report that they asked for a dream and actually got an answer!  Usually they tell me this with awe, wonder and the joy of discovery in their voice.  It is so empowering to the dreamer, and that person can readily see the long-range value in a practice that could help them for a lifetime.