Dear Dream Tending Community,
Welcome to this week’s Tending Tuesdays offering! Tending Tuesdays was inspired by a pull to sustain the value of what happens when we come together as a community. Each Tuesday, an email will come to you with a link to a new video on a Dream Tending or depth psychological topic in the form of current writing and research, interviews, discussions with colleagues, and clips of tending dreams.
Throughout human experience, landscapes have been integral to well-being. Your need for grounding, your yearning for deep belonging, and your desire for home originate, in large part, in the soul of place. When attuned to place, you prosper. When separated, you struggle. Being placed exists both outside in a physical landscape and inside in the realms of dream.
In dreamwork, the setting is the most forgotten of all elements. Often, we quickly bypass the place in which the dream is situated. Instead, we turn our attention to the dramatic presentation of dream characters, actions, and emotions.
Anchoring first in the settings of dreams and listening into the voice of place opens your perception and engages your senses. Feeling the river flowing through the landscape or listening to the winds blowing through the trees offers another way of tending dreams. Dream Tending with an open heart and an attuned body connects you to the ensouled ground under your feet. It starts with opening your relationship to the landscapes of the soul.
Tending Tuesdays is about supporting one another in listening to dream and imagination in a different way. Together, let’s discover what is being asked of us now. Let’s listen to the stories embedded in the living images of dream and imagination and offer back to the world their generative sparks. Until next Tuesday…
In the dreamtime,
Steve

Dream Tending Exercise:

1)   Identify the setting that appears in your dream.

2)   Gather detail about the landscape—natural or urban.

3)   Explore this territory for a while before getting involved with the “story line.”

4)   Become a naturalist of this place. See with both soft and focused eyes.

5)   Use your bodily senses. Experience the smells, colors, temperatures, and winds/tides of this place.

6)   Now with a quiet mind, feel the rhythms, the pulse, of the dream landscape in your body.

7)   From this new mode of experience and perception, journey through the dream scene by scene.

8)   Notice how your grounding allows the images to come forward, become animated, and deepen your sense of belonging . . . experience the “wind at the door.”

Inside The Curious Mind

A quote that resonated with me this week…

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the
wind.”

— Bob Dylan,

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Stephen Aizenstat

Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., is the founder of Dream Tending, Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the Academy of Imaginal Arts and Sciences. He is a world-renowned professor of depth psychology, an imagination specialist, and an innovator. He has served as an organizational consultant to major companies and institutions, and as a depth psychological content advisor to Hollywood film makers. He has lectured extensively in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is affiliated with the Earth Charter International project through the United Nations, where he has spoken. Professor Aizenstat is the Chancellor Emeritus and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has collaborated with many notable masters in the field including Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, and Robert Johnson.