Dream: I am a slave

So I was a slave in last night's dream. The guide I use for dream interpretations suggests the following:

Slave:
To dream that you are a slave, suggests that you are not taking charge of your own life.

Slavery:
To dream about slavery, indicates that you re not utilizing your power. You are putting power in another's hand and allowing them to make choices and decide for you. Alternatively, you are experiencing a lack of autonomy and independence.

Other interprations?

Perception: How to change the negative to positive?

You see it everyday. It is inevitable. It is close to a cliche, but everything could be.

My roommates, generally with the exception of one, wake up too busy to say good morning to each other unless spoken to first. You see the lack of contentment from the moment we awake from deep sleep.

On the commute to work, school, etc. Angry drivers (and must admit to being a sometimes impatient driver myself). People not letting others in, no friendly waves, tailgaiting someone because they're only driving 10mph over the limit. People on cell phones, lighting a smoke, and leaning over seaching for a CD. Rarely do you glance over and see a happy face - and god forbid if eye contact is made that you should acknowledge one another with a smile - instead it's a quick glance back to the road or dashboard.

You hear it during your day. Complaints, meaningless conversation about the weather, dissatisfaction with most things in general, we gossip about the person next to us, in front of us, behind us. Repeat commute home. Throw unhealthy food into our stomach because we think there's no time to prepare anything healthy. Then spend a few hours in front of a box that showings strangers marrying for money, eating bugs and slime for money, meanwhile intermittently being bombarded with advertisements for things we don't need.

Time for bed...stand and repeat.

How is that the norm?

Everything begins with choice, and a person is generally smart - so why is it diffuclt to find someone walking down a sidewalk happy and smiling? Why can't we find people who use "please's and thank you's" more often?

What's the matter? Are we just too immature as a species?

Compassion & Vision: We are one, collectively

Was depressed for a while til I started reading up on Joseph Campbell. Lots of his stuff inspired me. Anyone else read his stuff?

Here's one antidote: In an interview, Joseph Campbell talked about an essay in which the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asks, in Campbell's phrasing, "how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he or she sacrifices his or her own life to the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved?"

Campbell cites a story where a police officer in Hawaii grabs hold of a man just as the man jumps from a cliff and the two nearly go over the edge together. A second police officer grabs the first and all three are saved. Campbell goes on Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off -- his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life -- all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.

Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, "Why didn't you let go? You would have been killed." And his reported answer was, "I couldn't let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn't have lived another day of my life."

How come? Schopenhauer's answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a … realization … that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life. [Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. 1988. Doubleday, Page110.]

The truth of our lives is that we are not separate from each other. In wars and floods and power blackouts and when buildings collapse we come together, we help each other, and we find ourselves there.

Peace & Love

Yoga Basics

My very first blog on my very own Blog Spot!

Well, it's not my own - it's for all.

Had a very intense yoga session last night. I've done it a few other times in the past, but I am commited to go regularly this time around. Outside of working up a great sweat ten minutes into the session, it was an incredible workout for my mind and body. On the walk home I felt more "open" - as if blockages had been removed and my mind was much clearer.

Why can this be accomplished through nothing but stretching?