Stuck
Stuck.
When I was a little kid I was terrified of getting stuck – in a too-tight jacket when the zipper jams, my finger in the crack between the car seat and the console, squeezing through a tunnel and not getting out. I once got stuck in a little crawl-space in our house and it seemed a century before I was rescued. For two hours all I could imagine was that each breath was my last and I was going to die. When my father found me I couldn’t even hear his instructions on how to get out – all I heard was my own panicked voice in my head screaming that my world had come to an end!
Stuck is the restriction of movement, it is a narrowed perspective. The opposite of stuck is freedom. Stuck and the world becomes one panicked voice. Unstuck and all expansive possibilities are able to be viewed.
As adults we still get stuck. And it’s still terrifying. Dusty crawl-spaces of childhood are replaced by old patterns that continue to hold us in their snare in our maturity. Maybe we find we once again are dating the same old person, with the same old patterns; or, we find we’re repeating a situation at our job. It’s all vaguely familiar, but hard to see because our body is screaming at us: “We’ve Got to Get Out!” In these moments the screaming is so loud we don’t see our exit. But there is, always, an exit.
We just finished Passover. Passover is the official holiday celebrating getting unstuck. It is the time when Jews fled from the bondage of being slaves in Egypt into the desert. The word for Egypt happens to translate directly into Hebrew as The Narrows, or The Narrow Place. In this way it’s any place where movement is restricted, perspectives are narrowed, and we are held tight by it. And where do we go in the story? The desert. What is a desert but limitless expanse? It is boundary-less freedom. This movement of getting unstuck is celebrated every single year not because it happened once a few thousand years ago, but because it happens to all of us living right now. We’ve all been stuck. And the promise that we can become unstuck is certainly worth celebrating.
So how do we get unstuck without some bearded guy making miracles and leading the way? We can start by working with our dreams.
My last blog post included a video of me opening a dream of my friend Angela. Opening a dream means looking at a night dream for its patterns and deeper messages. Our dreams tell us where we are right now, where we’re stuck, they show us our exit and give us a taste of what our desert-of-freedom can be. Dream opening is part of the practice that I teach, and it’s a great first step in getting unstuck. There’s also a second step, and that is doing a Waking Dream.
A waking dream is going back into a night dream while we’re awake in order to address the dream’s necessity. Since dreams show us where we’re stuck, going back into them as a waking exercise can move us towards getting unstuck. This works for patterns we keep repeating, and even repetitive nightmares we keep dreaming. I’ve worked with people who have had a repetitive nightmare for years, and after doing a waking dream never have it again.
This video clip is of Angela talking about just that – a repetitive dream she had had for years until she worked with it as a waking dream. Take a look and hear how she does it. In my next blog I’ll post instructions of how you can work with your own dreams as Angela has done.
Happy dreaming!
