Chapter 1: Is Ignorance Really Bliss? Using the metaphor of this life being a dream, you will learn in this book that when you resist any part of your dream character, it only means that you believe you are him or her. However, when you learn to just allow the experience of the dream character to be there, you can wake up from the dream and realize you are not him or her, and transformation happens quite naturally by itself. Waking up from the dream can be the kindest thing you can do for yourself. This book will show you how to allow and be present with what shows up in the dream without being identified with it or becoming lost in it (i.e., being in the world but not of it).

When I look around the world, it looks like a lot of what is “natural” is either disappearing or already gone. I am not a pessimist at all, so what I am writing here does not come from a bleak or pessimistic point of view. However, there is something inside me that is screaming: “STOP! Where is everybody going?”

Are we not aware that we are going in the wrong direction? Can’t we read the signs when we have turned the wrong way into a one-way street and are going against the natural flow? Are so few people even questioning what is going on because we have lost touch inside with what is natural – and therefore cannot see the outer signs that are telling us to turn around?

A few years ago I heard it described this way: Stress is the distance between who and where you are naturally and who and where you are trying to be in order to be part of what is normal. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Stress relief should then be simple if all it takes is paying attention to what is natural for you, right?

I like to call this natural feeling inside of me my Deepest Intent or my Heart’s wisdom. It is my best friend. It is in you too, and as you come into ever more intimate connection with it you will find your own name for it. It seems to me that the disappearance of what is natural in the world is merely a reflection of our own disconnection from what is natural inside of us. I have an image of a rose bud that naturally unfolds and becomes a fully blooming rose. At first the petals are tightly folded, but as the natural movement evolves from within, the folded petals unfold. We are no different. We are flowers waiting to come into full bloom....

Every second spent on becoming more conscious and less unconscious is a second well spent!

Why? Because whatever remains unconscious has the potential to keep us suffering. If we don’t sense what it is in our bodies that make us “click” with something or someone, say “Yes” or “No”, or do what we do, then we live as unconscious puppets at the mercy of any thoughts, feelings and suggestions floating around in the air or in the nebulous spaces and places inside of us. Likewise, we are also at the mercy of our own conditioning and beliefs, which we assume to be “the truth” when left unquestioned.

Unless and until we have learned to experience and listen to our body’s language, we will be moved through life by unconscious feelings that may not serve us. Feelings that are intolerable, scary or painful will force us out of our Felt Sense in our body and into our mind. And when we live in our mind, it makes perfect sense to believe that our actions or decisions are made from a logical and true standpoint. And they are . . . from that limited level of awareness.

However, when we muster up enough courage to enter into our bodies and experience the Felt Sense of rejected and unwanted feelings, we discover a wealth of information.

Feelings are complicated when they are suppressed. Feelings are intelligent and insightful when we pay attention to them and listen to what they have to say.

When our feelings are repeatedly not attended to they become a buildup of demanding emotions that we have dammed up. At that point there is a reservoir of unfelt, unexpressed material being held back.

Most of us get swept away by old wounds and pain without even knowing it. We think we are in charge of our lives, but just can’t seem to get it right. What we are not aware of is that we are run by an unconscious inner committee that keeps us from unfolding the way we would like to – and the way we are able to. I like to use the term committee, because it consists of many of the different parts inside of us that have influenced most of our decisions in life. You may recognize them as the voices of a condemning judge, a task master, a scared child, a shaming authority, or a critical parent. These are the voices of our unquestioned thoughts, beliefs, strategies and feelings that we have blindly accepted.

I imagine you are wondering as I did, why you would commit to something that you consciously don’t want. Inner exploration gives us the answer. We commit to something that we consciously don’t want because our unconscious feelings and beliefs make themselves more important than our Heart’s longing. But they can stay that way only if we leave them unexamined!

What are our unexamined feelings and beliefs concerned with? Survival, safety and security are high on that list.

Inner peace begins with you. And the whole world is waiting for you to take that first step.

Since you are not separate from your Core Essence as the Divine, how can it make sense to ask the Divine to do something for you that you are not doing for yourself?

Nobody can do it foryou. True. But that does not mean that you have to figure out how to do it all by yourself.

It’s not a problem if you don’t know how and where to begin, didn’t have good role models to show you how to be kind to yourself, and feel at a loss. Remember, you are not alone. If you knew how to do it, you would have corrected this imbalance long ago.

If you had been treated with love and kindness when you were growing up and if your role models had been your allies, they would have installed the right software for those skills by their example and this chapter would be redundant. But it didn’t happen that way for most of us and this chapter is necessary.

It all connects back to being able to feel your Inner Movement of what a Yes and what a No feel like, and what is natural in your unfolding.

Inside many of us there is a new dream that wants to be dreamed. The old dream we have been dreaming has turned into a nightmare. Part of that dream was that we are victims of life, disconnected from our Creator, stranded on a God-forsaken planet with no way out.This dream came from the mind thinking it was separate from the whole. It’s one heck of a scary dream!

The new dream that more and more people are embracing includes the certainty that we canchange the rules. We are not victims in this new dream. We are conscious expressions of the divine. This time around we are conscious that we created the old dream, and now we know that we can create a new dream that resonates with our Hearts.

This new dream is coming from our Core Essence with our Heart as its mouth piece and our Felt Sense as its voice.

Because we have been so accustomed to listening to our mind, we cannot quite believe what our Heart wants to dream. It seems so opposite to what we have been trained to believe, and yet … if you are being called, there is something inside of you that keeps knocking and knocking and knocking.

Can you hear the knocking?