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On Dreamshaping: Letting Go Is Not Defeat
Mark McNease
Oftentimes the hardest part of letting go is simply not knowing what will take the place of the thing, person or situation we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish. We may think the difficulty is in living without it, but upon closer inspection we discover that the real problem, and the impulse it creates to hang on, is being unaware what could possibly replace it. Comfort comes in many forms, including the illusion of certainty. Our routines, habits, assumptions, and repetitive thoughts all provide comfort—despite how uncomfortable we tell ourselves they make us! They offer reassurance that today will be as predictable as yesterday, and tomorrow will bring more of the same. Sameness is mistaken for safety. It allows us to be less fearful of what comes next.
Knowing that I have kept my life cluttered with the same things I want to be free from requires introspection that makes changing hard. I don’t want to admit these things bring order to my days. I may claim to be unhappy or displeased with my weight, or my behaviors, or my worldview, or my addictions, but they have provided me with continuity. I’ve trusted myself to wake up in the same dream since I was a child being told that dreams were beyond me, that I was limited and destined to achieve little in this world. Whose definition of achievement was another matter, and my resistance to that judgement, that taking measure of me, is among the reasons I survived. I wanted to see what could become of me, what experiences awaited in a new day, and I wanted to prove the assumptions wrong. Ultimately, the voices that tell us we are limited, and that play a part in our refusal to let go of the ordinary, become our own voices, the unwelcome narrator in our minds.
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On Dreamshaping: Fear Itself
Mark McNease
The realization that many of the decisions we make throughout our lives are made from fear can be startling. Fear often determines the choices that shape our dreams and create our personal environments. When we’re children, we fear displeasing the adults in our lives, especially our parents. We watch them for signs of disapproval, and we become conditioned to pleasing them. Many times we succeed, and sometimes we fail. And it is the fear of failure, of not getting their approval or, worse, incurring their judgement, that sets a tone for our reactions to others, sometimes for the rest of our lives. I still recognize this impulse in myself in relationships, from the most intimate to the most casual. I tell a joke and watch to see if the person I’d told it to thought it was funny. Or I disparage someone who’d annoyed me, and I wait to see if my criticism is shared or if I should soften it with some kind of praise. Watching for the reactions of others is a lifelong human trait, and one of the things we watch for most is any reason to fear. Do they like me? Did they enjoy my book? Do they think I’m good at what I do? Or—and here comes the fear—do they think I’m a fakir, do they mock me when I’ve left the room, can they see the real me, for surely they won’t like it.
Fear wears many masks and offers many faces: the face of anger, insisting we have been wronged somehow or that we’ve lost the upper hand; the face of sorrow, immersed in the fear that we will never feel pleasure again; the face of gloom, our expressions set by the conclusion that the world we believed we lived in—our personal world, the world of our community and nation, even the planet—is changing for the worse. Fear undergirds it all. Fear is there beneath the surface, and if we’re willing to patiently scrape away those layers of anger, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, judgement, indignation, warpaint, we will find fear, the flame that provides the heat for it all.
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On Dreamshaping: Enough Is Enough
Mark McNease
It’s not hard to observe the world around us and see how easy it is to live in a state of lack and fear: lack because we think that what we have is not enough, and fear of losing what we already possess! I’ve done it myself for an entire lifetime, starting as a child who needed validation and wanted more of whatever it was I had, on into adulthood where satisfaction and contentment have been fleeting and conditioned on believing, just for a few moments, that I was fulfilled. It’s the kind of completion I’ve felt after writing the last few lines of a novel, or winning some accolade that proved to me I was accepted. Those feelings of wholeness never last long, because they are not about who I truly am and want to be, but about markers of success, reassurances that I am not the failure I suspected I was.
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On Dreamshaping: When Staying the Course Means Hitting the Iceberg
Mark McNease
How many times have we kept doing something because we were convinced it would have the result we wanted if we just kept doing it? We stayed the course despite possible detours or course corrections because it felt safer and more familiar to trudge ahead, even though the ground we walked on got softer and muddier and harder to free ourselves from.
Jobs are a good example of this. Relationships, too. We plow ahead, ignoring warnings and our own deep understanding that this work or this person is not helping us live the life we want. It doesn’t have to be a partner, either. It can be a friend or family member whose world view is so at odds with ours that we’re better off wishing them well in our hearts and putting them out of our lives.
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On Dreamshaping: The Project Worksheet
Mark McNease
Whether you call it a Dreamshaping Worksheet or a Project Worksheet, it’s one of the most valuable items in the Dreamshaper’s toolbox. I started keeping mine a year ago in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. It’s remarkably simple, and deceptively powerful. Why? Because it helps me see, right there in front of me, what I’ve accomplished in the previous weeks and months.
It’s so easy to become discouraged and think we’re not getting anywhere, or that we’re somehow stuck in the same small box we felt confined in yesterday and the day before. But by keeping an easy list or spreadsheet that we can add to every week, what we actually get done becomes clear – excitingly, irrefutably, invigoratingly clear! Each week, month by month, I record what I completed or started. ‘Sent out email to subscribers,’ or, ‘recorded interview with guest artist,’ or, ‘designed cover for new eBook.’ I may think I didn’t get anything done last week, but if I just take a look at the steps I took, the chapters I wrote, the podcasts I recorded and published – suddenly I know I’ve accomplished a lot. When we do this for an extended period of time, we may be the ones asking ourselves, ‘How do you manage to get so much done!’
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On Dreamshaping: An Inside Job
Mark McNease
It’s not the thing the emotion attaches to, it’s the emotion.
It’s not the person or event the anger attaches to, it’s the anger.
It’s not the thoughts around which the confusion swirls, it’s the confusion itself.When I’m consumed by an emotion, even something as simple as anger aimed at another driver on the road, it’s the emotion that generates my state of mind, not the other driver. So many people have a need be angry, or even enraged, without ever comprehending that the object of their rage is not the issue: it is the rage, and the need for it, that lies at the heart of the experience.
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On Dreamshaping: Get Messy
Mark McNease
For many years now people have been led to believe that decluttering is the answer, that narrowing our focus is the way to finally accomplishing what we want to: finish that project, write that last draft of a novel, plant a better garden this year. But what if that’s the wrong approach? Or at least not the approach that works for everyone.
As part of my personal dreamshaping, I’ve decided to embrace the mess. I’ve spent a lot of time in an unnecessary loop of narrowing, expanding, narrowing, expanding, narrowing … on and on, until whatever psychological fix I get from doing this becomes the reason for doing it. The novel does not get completed. The garden does not get planted. Yet the motions continue, the repetitive behavior of trying to make it all fit in the artificial space I’ve imposed on myself.
Rather than spend my life in this endless behavioral loop, and having discovered that less is not more – it is less! – I’ve accepted the messiness. I’ve accepted that I have a half dozen projects to work on, and that’s okay. The messiness is actually what energizes me in the morning! Having options on what to create today works for me. And while I do think decluttering the home, as well as the mind, has tremendous benefits, it’s not always the solution to indecision and an inability to focus. The mind, after all, and despite what we think, can only focus on one thing at time, one thought at a time. Chaos is an illusion: or, it’s everything, all the time. The universe is incredibly messy, and we are tiny reflections of it, we are the microcosms to its macrocosm. So wade in, swirl it all around you. Enjoy this incredibly messy thing called life.
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On Dreamshaping: Today I (Insert Behavior Here)
Mark McNease
One of the tools I’ve used in shaping my own dreams is the ‘TODAY I’ list. It’s very simple: a regular, running list of things I’ve either stopped doing or begun to do. While putting things in the positive (‘Today I started ….’) is important, it’s also fine to say I stopped doing things that have been corrosive to my heath, mind, spirit, and dream.
It helps me stay observant of myself. I’ll notice myself engaging in some behavior, such as talking badly about someone at work, or gossiping, or being gratuitously negative, and I’ll add stopping it to my list. There’s a beginning to it the first time I write something down, but there is not set end: I may add to the list for the rest of my life, or, preferably, until I’m shaped my dream to the best of my liking and can confidently say ‘TODAY I stopped adding to my TODAY I list!’
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On Dreamshaping: Write In Front of Us – The Dreamshaping Journal
Mark McNease
I have never kept a journal until recently. I’d read for years that any ‘serious’ writer keeps a journal, and I rightly dismissed it. Journaling is a personal choice, and until the last few months it was not one I thought would serve a purpose for me. The novels, short stories, and plays I’d written over the last 50 years (yes, it’s been that long), did not come from ideas in a journal. I knew plenty of people who kept journals or diaries and swore by them, but It was never something I saw myself doing or did.
Then came Dreamshaping and my hunch that writing most days could help me peel away the layers and obstructions that have impeded the creation of my life. I don’t write in it every day and would not fault anyone for that: we write when we have something to say, or we need to explore the dream we live and the part we play as its architect. I also don’t find any benefit in repetition, which has been the biggest trap of it for me – repeating the same things over and over, grievances and worries and doubts, as if the monkey mind has been given a keyboard and allowed to ramble. It happens, but it’s the opposite of what a journal is about for me.
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On Dreamshaping: Exit Signs
Mark McNease
There was something different about that morning. It could have been just another morning when I woke up feeling stagnant, overweight and overwhelmed. But when I opened my eyes, and my mind worked its way sluggishly back to the ‘real’ dream, the one I call my life, I had an unusually clear sense that the time had come: the time to change things, the time to rearrange the interior of my personal world, the time to shape what I experience as reality and my place in it.
I’d been on the same figurative road for years. I’d allowed myself to settle into a sort of perpetual frustration, and to think that if only I did some thing, or some things, differently, I would find the elusive happiness I’d always wanted but had cynically dismissed as a marketing tool for the self-empowerment crowd. I’d told myself contentment was much more important that happiness – and what is happiness, anyway? A puppy? An ideal job? Or, most probably, an illusion.
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On Dreamshaping: Straws and Camels
Mark McNease
I can’t name a specific date and time, but at some point the past few months I stopped paying attention to the news beyond what I need to stay informed. Is there a significant natural disaster nearby I need to know about? Has a foreign invader breached our northern shores? Have scientists discovered that drinking eight cups of coffee a day leads to a long life or that it causes permanent memory loss? There’s the local political stuff I want to know about, like who the next governor of New Jersey might be, and which dismal choice I’ll have to make next year for health insurance. But the overall big picture, the cloud of dread and anxiety that is our current 24/7 news cycle? I just can’t indulge in it anymore. Very little of it uplifts me and much of it depresses me. It’s as if, given the possibility we are not living in the end times, we’ve collectively decided to make it appear as if we are, like that Buck Owens and Roy Clark song I remember from Hee Haw, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me …”
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On Dreamshaping: Name Your Poison
Mark McNease
Observing the current cultural and political climate, I’m reminded of a scene from the westerns once so popular with American moviegoers. A bartender in a grimy, dusty saloon, says to a weary customer, “Name your poison.” The customer asks for whisky—they all drank whisky in the movies, with names like Rot Gut and Dead Eye—and the bartender serves him from a bottle on the shelf. The customer throws back a mouthful from a greasy shot glass, grimaces as it burns its way down his throat, then smiles, slaps the glass on the counter and orders another one. That sure felt good.
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On Dreamshaping: Nowhere to Hide
Mark McNease
Wherever I go, there I am!
It’s an old adage, meant to be humorous but with a grain of truth to it. The one thing I cannot escape is also the one thing I spend so much time attempting to flee: myself. My repetitive thoughts, my obsessions, my fixations, all playing out in loops that sometimes remind me of spools of yarn that have become entangled. Do I do this today? Do I do that? If I don’t to this, will I feel freer? What will bring me the simple relief I crave?
Another common analogy is that nearly all of us possess – or are possessed by – a monkey mind. This one is self-explanatory: what is something monkeys are known for? Jumping! Limb to limb, restless, never ceasing to move. That is a good description of our minds. It certainly captures what I experience almost every day. And the more I attempt to stop jumping, to settle on one fragile limb and stay there, the more another limb grabs my attention and within an instant I’ve jumped to that one. On and on, hour after hour, day after day.