Every morning I meditate with two cups of tea, letting my mind relax and release its constant stream of inspirations, anxieties, emotions, impressions half-formed and forgotten. I let the mind sink into the heart, and it’s a recognizable transformational moment I couldn’t imagine living without – or, “without which I could not imagine living” – an experience of love.
In those times when I am sitting more formally, I invoke the process by saying: I offer the World to my Consciousness, so that I can offer my Consciousness to the World.
The Achuar people of the Amazon Rainforest are a dream culture: Every morning at 4 AM, they sit together in a circle and drink tea. They drink their tea until they vomit. Then, after purging like this – letting go of the past – they tell their dreams, and with what is shared, they plan their day and the life of the community.
Into this dream culture, came news of the approaching industrial world, a warning, and the inspiration to approach that modern world, itself, for help. And from that call for help, not just from the rainforest but from life itself, the Pachamama Alliance was created “to preserve the rainforest in the care of the indigenous people who are its natural guardians.”
Last year, Ecuador was the first country to give rights to the natural world, and to rewrite their constitution to include these protections.
The second part of the work is to “change the dream of the north,” the consumer culture of the modern world. And for that, “Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream” was designed as a story and a process. I attended the Symposium with friends; my awareness of these issues was transformed – “awakened” - and I knew that I had connected with the work I longed to be involved in after reading Tom Hartmann’s Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.
Awakening the Dreamer, first given to 50 people in March 2005, is now being offered by over 2,000 facilitators all around the word – at Findhorn, in Calgary, San Miguel de Allende, New Zealand, Australia, to 6,000 sufis in Algeria, all over Europe and the United States.
I will host my first symposium on Sunday, March 21st, in the Bay Area, celebrating the beginning of Spring.
