Monday Love to your Stream of Dreams plus Golden Bridge Inspirations with Melissa Michaels

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.“

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Do your sleeping dreams inform your waking life? Are your daydreams aligned with your intentions? What sort of value can you find between the two?

A funny thing happened on the path through the pandemic, a lot of us started getting a lot more sleep! Setting an alarm used to be a daily Monday through Friday ritual, now it’s been just for special occasions.

I’m often asked “What day is it?” If it wasn’t for this Monday newsletter and my Friday night DJ stream, I would probably lose track too. But as far as hours of the day go, it’s gotten pretty squishy. About the only constant is the fact that our dog starts begging for his walk about an hour before sunset every day.

For me, sleeping in means more dreams. It’s amazing how much the dreams you have at night can set the tone for your day. Sometimes my sleep will be a bit more restless and fitful, on those nights I might be having a serious of disjointed snippets that never seem to reach a conclusion.

Other nights I might be sleeping like a rock, and have some long-drawn-out story that seems to carry a narrative from bedtime till dawn. You’ve probably had those nights where you woke up feeling pleasant with a rosy glow based on your dreams from the night before.

And then there are the nights that are a complete blank. If there were any dreams, I don’t remember them at all. But more often I do, and the recurring themes can be a fascinating mirror of my waking life.

No surprise, there are often turntables and records involved. “I’m set up for the party, but where are the wires?!?” Workshops, welding, and work-related activities are frequent subjects. I’m often re-creating versions of the retail shop I used to run. Everyone has a different interpretation of their imagination, and your dreams are yours alone.

Some dreams are so strong that the impressions are long-lasting. There are a number of scenes and scenarios that I can bring to mind immediately if I so desire. This is actually a handy trick to use for falling asleep, if your mind is too wrapped up in the events of the day see if you can recall a particularly pleasant or remarkable dream and chances are you’ll drift off right away.

It’s somewhat akin to the relationship between books and movies. I don’t know about you, but if I see a movie before I read the book, then reading it later is always going to be colored by the director’s interpretation of the story. The characters can’t help but have the voices, images, and personalities of the actors in the cast.

When you read the book first, your mind fills in the details so that when you see the movie later you’re comparing it with the ‘real’ version which is what the author and your imagination put together in your mind. Sometimes a movie lives up to the book, sometimes not so much.

Reflections of your life in your sleeping dreams and parallels of storylines in Hollywood adaptations are both examples of non-linear imagination informing reality. Taking it one step further and you can posit the effect of your intentional daydreams and unconscious beliefs and the results you manifest in your physical world.

Beliefs are like muscles in a way – if you allow yourself to be lazy and let negative ones persist, they’ll set you up for failure every time. If you focus your imagination on bolstering your positive beliefs, you’ll see those bear fruit just as reliably.

In other words, if you believe that everyone is out to get you, they probably are. If you believe that most people are good at heart, then you’ll likely make friends wherever you go. So it’s worth the effort to make a habit out of questioning and evaluating your beliefs in order to weed out the less-than-loving ones by putting intention and imagination into your beneficial ones.

The interesting thing about beliefs is that with the help of your imagination and intention, you can ‘try them on for size’ much like a pair of shoes or a new coat. Your subconscious has the unique ability to shift your world in the direction of your beliefs regardless of how you come about them.

These are crazy times that are sure to be a turning point. Use some of your dream time to dance with your intention and put your imagination into action dreaming up a world where all your ducks are in a row…

Much love and happy quacking till next week!

M+

Mark Metz

Director of the Dance First Association

Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine

Dance First Member Insight – Creativity in the Time Of Covid with Melissa Michaels and Golden Bridge

This week’s Dance First Member Insight is brought to you by Melissa Michaels, founder of Golden Bridge and SomaSource. Dance First members are sharing their insights and inspirations during this troubled time, as well as how they are coping. Plus links to live streams and online offerings for you.

Dear Dancers

This time out of time has brought some great challenges to our global Golden Bridge community. It has also provided us with a powerful opportunity to engage in collective revelation and unprecedented collaboration. Although our SomaSource training has focused on the frontier of somatics, social justice, and initiatory processes for decades, this pandemic has given us a clearer focus on the fissures in the social, environmental, and economic fabric of our global community.

We received reports of the impact COVID has had on our students in the early days of the pandemic. Many of our beloved dance mates found themselves in very different and all too often, highly compromised situations. The first wave came from our students in China. They offered stories of hope and resilience from their positions in quarantine, using their time at home for self-study and growth. On their heels came reports from resettled refugees, here in the United States, being forced into compromised work conditions. They had to quit immediately, redirecting their creativity towards developing sustainable means for survival outside of the systems that had abandoned them.

Our community members in the townships of South Africa, in the favelas outside of Rio de Janeiro, in the schoolyards of the Congo and Zimbabwe, and in villages of South India also reached out and revealed their need for basic necessities. Things such as soap, water, beans, rice, and internet access had become scarce, adding to the pandemic’s impact. The stories we received of individual isolation, family fragmentation, and young people living in risky situations were beyond unsettling.

Within Golden Bridge, we rapidly mobilized, making decisions about how we wanted to show up during this worldwide threshold experience.

We chose to begin with only one public online offering, Movement Mass , channelling all proceeds to our community members in need. You can read a few of the Stories of Impact and Resilience that demonstrate how those funds have been used to support SomaSource leaders and their communities around the world. The needs are many and ongoing.

We also chose to focus our energy on the emergent. We have been meeting as a global community online to create support structures that will endure long past this pandemic. From organizational restructuring to day-to-day programming, we have used this time to focus on what is ready to birth through this mighty collective of souls.

Above all, we continue to lean into our foundation, the endless pathways for resourcing in the face of rapid and disorienting change. Dance opens the door to access all of our tools for staying present. Prayer. Service. Artistic expression. Listening. Nature. Tending to others. Tracking sensations. Showing up. Sharing. Study. Ceremony. Creating beauty. Community. The list of resources for centering and seeing amidst the chaos is boundless.

We are vast. We can find our way through this epic descent, coming out stronger on the other side. We aim for going the Golden way, devoted to dancing our way towards our collective return. Join us.

Movement Mass – Every Sunday Online

11am MT

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Monday Love is the weekly inspirational newsletter written by Mark Metz, publisher of Conscious Dancer and director of the Dance First Association. Join our mailing list and learn about membership at www.consciousdancer.com