Big Dreams Part V: The Great Turning
“It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up —release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. ” ― Joanna Macy
On New Year’s Day 2023, I awoke with a dream:
There are three dead canaries on the bottom of a cage; a fourth canary is dying in my hand.
Miners understand that canaries are the alarm system in the mine pit. If canaries begin to die, the miners know that there is toxic air in the mine. As a big dreamer, I am a canary in the mine. For many years now, I have felt like Cassandra, who was gifted by the Gods with foresight, but cursed that nobody would believe her. Since 2012, I have witnessed my dreams unfold on a grand scale on the world stage. But now, as existential anxiety is happening in epidemic proportions, people everywhere are like the canaries in the mine—we all feel the toxicity, in the form of fear and hatred, in the environment.
I threw the I Ching to ask about the canary dream and got the hexagram for “Shock.” The I Ching offered essential guidance on how to handle shock: When there is shock, your responsibility is not to drop the sacred vessel. In other words, whatever has been tasked to you as sacred, whether this is your family, your vocation, your pets, or your faith, you have to protect it and not drop what you value. For me, it is Dreamwork, Tarotpy, and the I Ching. Maintaining and deepening these practices is how I can hold sacred space for myself and others with whatever is happening personally and collectively. These sacred practices are not only about forewarning us. They are about grounding us in the eternal core of our being and connecting us to a higher consciousness to navigate upheaval and transition.
Recent dreams have shifted to indicate the coming of new life: an image of my beloved bending to kiss my heart, repetitive dreams of kittens, and being the midwife to help my best friend birth a baby boy. The dreams felt more personal than collective. Instead of being the vessel for Big Dreams these past months, I have turned to our public spaces to find what dreams and visions may come.
Like many of us who have suffered from PTSD after the 2016 elections, I was hesitant to be optimistic about the remarkable turn of events in the democratic party. However, after listening to one inspired speech after another at the DNC for four days, I felt a quickening in my belly, as if I had become impregnated. I, among others, am witness to these greater archetypal forces playing out on the public stage as a Black/East Indian woman prosecutor arrives like a warrior to meet this moment in history. Hope, democracy, equality, and inclusivity are numinous sparks of imagination that can be embodied to reshape a nation. I feel a duty to hold sacred the reignited optimism in my belly just as a mother protects the growing life in her womb.
There is a Great Turning: the archetypal feminine is rising in response to the death grip of a toxic patriarchy to bring joy and compassion to a war-weary world.
Old dreams can take on new meaning as the dreamer and collective psyche evolve. Instead of fearing the nightmarish tsunami, I see that a “blue wave” can topple old edifices of empire and patriarchy. We can see a Great Turning in every field: In medicine, traditional allopathic approaches have had to incorporate the huge expansion of alternative treatments. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has exploded in the field of mental health. Tarot and psychology are trending. There is a collective hunger, especially among the younger generation, to integrate divination tools into psychotherapy and their daily lives to find inner resilience and navigate times of uncertainty and upheaval.
I see the divine feminine – intuitive and ancient wisdom -- rising in the therapists who come for training and consultations in Tarotpy and Dreamwork. They express a deep yearning to leave institutionalized models of psychotherapy that are killing their souls. This is not in any way a prejudicial view of women over men or mysticism over science. It is about an integrated whole, a unified field of consciousness that dissolves all dualities, including gender bias.
This brings me full circle to the wisdom of the teacher in the Empire State Building who said: “The Self doesn’t develop fully until one immerses oneself in the Collective.” We all need to rise like particles, each in our way, to become the collective wave, and knock down the old emblems of dominance and the outdated Newtonian belief system that only matter matters.