Love Notes from a Dreamer

If you are gaining energy, you are living. If you are losing energy, you are dying.

What are you feeding your Dreamer? How are you feeding your dreams?

Life-force is the fuel of our dreams. Most of us can get by on a moderate or even low level of energy and still manage our day-to-day life, doing what we can—pushing through.

We are meeting the challenges of life and at the end of our day we fall into bed, grateful that we can stop the world and rest. Sure, we are tired, but isn’t everyone?

Before you answer that, consider this. In more than two decades working with people who are exhausted, I have heard them say more times than I can count… “well, that’s life.”

That is, indeed, the design of life most of us have been born and socialized into, as worker bees. But is that really living?

Take a moment to re-member a time when you engaged in something that left you feeling so energized, you wanted that moment to last. You may have replayed it in your visceral memory for days, and maybe even snuck it into bed at night in hopes of keeping that fire lit.

What was really happening there?

The first thing to notice is the novelty of it. An unexpected pleasure.

Our doing life is full of the known—our routines or a perhaps a familiar feeling of chaos. We are accustomed to our morning cup of coffee or tea, our exercise routine (or the absence of it), and the hamster wheel of dialogue about our worth, our rehearsals of the day, or our to-do list.

We were never built for constant doing but that is what most of us know. Big hugs and little sticks. We are not intentionally choosing it. It is just how and why we are wired.

The novel experiences that our Dreamer brings into our day are unintentional moments of light that break up our routine and wake us up out of our habitual GPS to see the pieces of life that smear by at the speed of life–like brushstrokes that lack the detail.

Those are moments when our Dreamer is saying – “Pay attention! You are still alive!” And we don’t dial that down.

What if we stopped trying to control the destination? What might life be like if we made that relationship with our Dreamer intentional, moved out of the driver’s seat, and let our Dreamer drive? She is, after all, the one with the Eagle-eye view.

The second thing to notice is the desire to linger. We are never in a hurry to get on with it when we meet a moment of full-on pleasure–unless we have been trained to ignore it.

Some of us never really take in the gains of life. We just move right on to the next step in the program.

Our desire to linger is there because our Dreamer has been hungry for this moment. That is its carton of double chocolate ice-cream after a day, a week, or a year of putting everything else first–only instead of it numbing our emotions, we are lit up!

Creating pockets of time to check in with our Dreamer in a sea of doing is like saying to the tiny human that is hiding inside of us, “Hey kiddo, how are you doing? Let’s take a moment to enjoy something sweet, just so you don’t forget what it tastes like.”

The third thing to notice is the fuel gauge.

A dream requires life-force to be born and sustained.

Where are you leaking energy? We are living inside a design where we are a human resource–rewarded for not noticing when the fuel is low. This is our programming.

Pushing through is not victory if the reward for meeting the goal is leaving us depleted.

Remember that hamster wheel? The one that keeps telling you what you should be doing? It is the Ferris wheel spinning out of control, and we are the monkey in the middle.

It is the voice that says, “ya—you should feel guilty. Who do you think you are to put yourself first? Don’t be so selfish. Do for others, and then you can rest… and–if you spend your life doing what they want you to do, you will be rewarded in the end with time for yourself.”

Gabor Mate did a study of obituaries for people who died from cancer, and this is what he found. Every single one had something in common.

Everyone described them as selfless, driven-someone who pushed through so they would never let anyone down. It was themselves they let down in the end.

Pause and take that in.

Living life backwards is to recognize the futility of meaningless endeavor before you take that next step. Doings that are not life-sustaining are meaningless endeavors.

If you are too tired to dream, you are too tired to heal. Dreaming happens during REM sleep, when we leave our body to do the work of healing and regeneration.

If we are disconnecting with our Dreamer, we are also disconnecting from our awareness of the doings that steal the life-force needed to be well.

Now before you begin to think this is a prescription to disregard the needs and sensitivities of others – it is far from that. There is a reason they tell you on the airplane to put the mask on first.

No, not the mask we all wear when we are pushing through while driving on a leaky tire to preserve an identity–it is the mask that lets us breathe.

I’m not at all sure if we can call that authenticity– or being ourselves.

Perhaps, being ourselves is just about giving ourselves permission to inhale life, and exhale whatever does not sustain it.

So, I said all that–to ask you this…

What if you could have more energy at the end of most days than when you started?

What might feel different at the end of your days if you found those 5–10-minute pockets of presence that you truly do deserve, and shared them with your Dreamer and the tiny human that has always lived inside of you–not as a goal to self-improvement, but an act of profound grace?