Book Group: Emotional Freedom Chapter 3

Dreams and Sleep:  Accessing Revolutionary States of Consciousness

This is one of those chapters that some people might have problems with.  Some scientific studies suggest that dreaming is nothing more than random firing of neurons while we sleep.  While scripture is filled with stories of people that had significant dreams, some religious people are uncomfortable with the idea that anyone can have dreams that are prophetic or offer guidance. Also, I'll be the first to admit that some of the dream interpretation books/websites are just a little too "out there".  

My personal take is this:  Some dreams are total randomness and carry little if any meaning.  Other dreams are your brains way of continuing processing events and ideas that are part of your conscious thought when you are awake.  And yes, sometimes dreams give you important information.  I also believe that while other people can offer suggestions for what dreams might mean, ultimately any dream interpretation has to be determined by the dreamer, taking into account his or her own personal history, desires, and fears.  

Now that that is all out of the way, let's move on to this chapter.  

Orloff starts the chapter with the known physical and psychological benefits of sleep itself.  She then moves into information about the stages of sleep and how to overcome insomnia.  Many of the things she talks about for improving the quality of your sleep were things that I was already familiar with.  One new thing that I loved, but haven't tried yet is visualizing delta brain waves.  Just mentally seeing the picture of the wave can help you relax.  I love that.  

The rest of the chapter covers how to remember your dreams and 3 different kinds of dreams.  Although it wasn't new to me, I appreciate the reminder about keeping a dream journal.  Even if I don't go through the process of analyzing each dream, having that record is kind of fun.  Plus, some of my best story ideas have come from fragments of dreams.  I often have very vivid dreams.  

Orloff first covers psychological dreams, which she says can be both cries for help from something inside you that can't carry a burden any more, and "advocates for your finest qualities."  She has a helpful guide to some of the common psychological dreams and their meanings.  She also lists 5 steps for interpreting your psychological dreams.  

As she covers predictive and guidance dreams, she gives helpful signs for identifying them, as well as ways to learn from them and apply that knowledge.  One of the things that I found fascinating about predictive dreams is that there is a neutrality, detachment, and even calm to the dreams.  She talks of witnessing, rather than experiencing the emotions during the dream. A woman who has distressing dreams about a relationship is most likely having a psychological dream and not a predictive one.  

I love this quote about applying guidance dreams.

Never do anything that feels harmful to yourself or others.  Authentic guidance is always compassionate and will make you emotionally freer, even if it involves tough love.  (page 96)

Questions for discussion or personal reflection:

1.  How much importance do you give to your dreams?  Are they merely random thoughts linked together while you sleep, or do they carrying meaning for your life?

2.  Do you believe that the average person can receive prophetic and guidance dreams?  

3.  In what ways has looking at your dreams and their meanings helped you to process life events and/or find more emotional freedom?

4.  How is the quality of your sleep?  What things have you found that help you sleep better?  

Book Group: Emotional Freedom Chapter 1

This chapter is still pretty much introductory material.  The author present a little more detail about why we should want to find emotional freedom.  And once again, she emphasizes that it is about helping our love to evolve.  It's also about connecting to who we really are inside.

She shares stories, including one about her own experiences as a patient in a mental hospital.  In another story, she tells us of learning to trust her intuition.  She had been in a session with a patient and had a feeling that the women would attempt suicide.  Because there were no other indications beyond her own feelings that this was the case, she ignored it, and the woman did try to take her own life.  From this, Orloff learned that she had to trust her intuition, even if it seemed contrary to everything else.

Orloff tells of her experiences of finding a spiritual teacher, and finding her own voice and power.

The chapter wraps up with an emotional freedom test that allows you to assess how you are doing right now, and a short and very careful discussion of how men and women generally respond differently.  Any discussion of differences between men and women has the potential to blow up in your face, but I felt like she did a great job here of explaining general tendencies and the fact that these tendencies occur with "many (but not all) women" and "many (but not all) men".

I liked the emotional freedom test.  It consists of "20 questions for reflection." (I love that focus on reflection).  You respond to each question by checking Not true 0, Sometimes True 1, or Mostly True 2, and then adding them up to get your score.  It was interesting for me to see how much different my answers are now than they would have been 10 or 15 years ago.  I'm moving in the right direction.

Questions for discussion or reflection:

1.  Would you be more or less likely to trust a former mental patient as a dispenser of wisdom about emotions?   Why?

2.  How do you feel about intuition?  What does intuition mean to you?  Is intuition different from promptings from the Holy Ghost?  If so, how?  

3.  Who have been the spiritual teachers in your life?  Is there someone that you go to for guidance and instruction that is not part of your Sunday worship experience?  

4.  Are there areas in your life where you think you have found emotional freedom or are moving towards it?  Are there times that you still feel trapped by your emotions?  

Books about Writing

My favorite books on writing are not necessarily the ones that tell you how to be a good writer.  My favorites are the ones that inspire me.  My favorites are the ones that say things about writing that also apply to other areas of my life.  My favorites are the ones that give me a glimpse of the real life of the author.

If You Want to Write:  A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit

When I first started grad school, my voice teacher recommended a book that has become my favorite book on writing.  In her instructions, my teacher said, "Just substitute sing every time she uses the word write."  It worked.  Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write changed the way I look at singing and at life.  A few years later, when I decided to really jump into writing, it was one of my guideposts.  My copy now shows the markings of several different highlighters and colored pencils indicating the places that spoke to me each time I read it.  Here is one of my favorite quotes:

I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time, --no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.  With every sentence you write, you have learned something.  It has done you good.  It has stretched your understanding.  I know that.  Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.
 (pages 15-16)

I love this.  It's been so long now, that I can't remember if I felt it before, or if I learned it from her.  It is part of me now, though, and gives me a lot of peace.  All my blogging and all of the writing I do each year during NaNoWriMo helps me grow.  I want to do it--I need to do it--even if no one ever reads it.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott's book Bird By Bird came to me in a similar manner.  A woman who was speaking at a major voice convention read passages from it and recommended the book, again stating that you just needed to substitute singing for writing and it all applied.  This book is wonderful, but the most important thing I took from this book was a love of Anne Lamott.  I have since read several of her other non-fiction books and they have changed how I view writing, spirituality, and life.  I love this quote about perfectionism:

Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.  Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground--you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.  Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get.  Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.
(pages 28-29)

As I've participated in NaNoWriMo, this has been particularly helpful.  If you are trying to be perfect, you are never going to get those 50,000 words in one month.  It's just not possible.  You dump everything you can think of into the novel, and sort the mess later.  The beautiful thing is that when you let yourself just write, sometimes when you go back and re-read, you discover that it wasn't as awful as you thought, that there really are gems sprinkled through the mud.

No Plot? No Problem!

And since NaNoWriMo keeps coming up, maybe it's time to introduce Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem?, written specifically for participants in NaNoWriMo.  The first section of the book gives general hints and tips for getting through, I mean succeeding and having a great time with NaNoWriMo.  My favorite quote from this sections is:

The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.
(page 32).

The second sections gives week by week advice on how to keep going with your novel.
He perfectly describes my NaNo experience with this paragraph from the introduction.

The biggest success stories of Nation Novel Writing Month, though, are rarely the published ones.  These are the stories of everyday people who, over the course of one frantic month, discover that literature is not merely a spectator sport.  Who discover that fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.
(page 20)

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I loved this glimpse into the mind and history of Stephen King.  The man is brilliant.  I love many things about his writing, but I haven't read much of his fiction in several years, mostly because it is so real, and I just need more positive stuff in my life right now instead of things filled with darkness and swearing.  (I looked for the place that he talks about why there is so much swearing.  I couldn't find it, but the idea was that you write what you know, and in real life, people swear. On the positive side, I don't think he just throws it in for no reason.  It fits.  It creates the characters and the situations.) I haven't read this book in a long time, and it's clearly time to pull it out again.  The first time I read On Writing, I checked it out from the library.  Bad idea.  There is so much wonderful stuff in here that it really needs to be read with a highlighter in hand.  

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot.
(page 139)

Zen and the Art of Writing:  Essays on Creativity 

This is another book that I really need to re-read.  (I love how this post just keeps adding things to that list!)  Ray Bradbury writes in ways that make me listen.  He teaches me to trust the process and to trust myself as a writer.  I think that this paragraph is quite insightful, even out of the original context.  

I went back to collecting Buck Rogers.  My life has been happy ever since.  For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction.  Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas.  When this occurs I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
(page 52)

This quote is one that I actually had posted by my writing area for quite awhile.  I'm not sure what happened to it.  Maybe it's time to make a new sign.  

So again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion, or my Ouija subconscious again.
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can.  But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.
We never sit anything out.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
(page 111-112)

Letters to a Young Poet

This small book containing the letters of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet who had asked his advice, was also recommended by my voice teacher.  I read this translation.  Choosing a favorite quote from these letters is not easy, but here is one that speaks to my heart today.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the begin of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses?  Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just one, with beauty and courage.  Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
(page 92)

The Right to Write

I picked up this book because it was about writing AND it was by Julia Cameron.  I have a couple of other books by her that I really like.  In the introduction, she explains that this book isn't really a book explaining how to write, but it is a book explaining why we should write.  

We should write because it is human nature to write.   Writing claims our world.  It makes it directly and specifically our own.  We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.   

We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living.  Writing is sensual, experimental, grounding.  We should write because writing is good for the soul.  We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.

We should write, above all, because we are writers whether we call ourselves writers or not.  The Right to Write is a birthright, a spiritual dowry that gives us the keys to the kingdom.  Higher forces speak to us through writing.  Call them inspiration, the Muses, Angels, God, Hunches, Intuition, Guidance, or simply a good story--whatever you call them, they connect us to something larger than ourselves that allows us to live with greater vigor and optimism.
(page xvi)

The Rest of the Library (in no particular order)

 How to be a Bestselling Novelist:  Secrets from the inside  by Richard Joseph

How I Write:  Secrets of a Bestselling Author by Janet Evanovich with Ina Yalof

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

Writing Fiction by Gotham Writers' Workshop

Fingerpainting on the Moon:  Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom by Peter Levitt

The Midnight Disease:  The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W.
Flaherty

Writing Down the Bones:  Freeing the Writer Within & Wild Mind:  Living the Writer's Life by Natalie Goldberg

What are your favorite books on writing?