SACRED ART-PLAY

The Dream Box

Sit comfortably in the room of your choice. Imagine you have a beautifully made box painted with your favorite colors next to you. You have the ability to go anywhere in the Universe and reach for anything that you desire. Allow your feelings of joy and child-like enthusiasm to come to the surface, allowing the secret law of attraction to work its magic.

Reach for the beautiful home by the lake, and pick out a specific room that you see yourself working from. Put those in your box. Go to your bank, picture the teller counting $100,000 in crisp one hundred dollar bills, and put that in your box. Imagine yourself sitting out on a beautiful beach on Fiji - take that whole wonderful scene and slip it in your box.

Use all of your senses. Smell the water and seaweed on the beach, hear the snap of the hundred dollar bill and the teller's voice. Feel the breeze on your skin as you open the window in your lake house.

It is very important to get in touch with the emotions. FEEL gratitude, joy, delight as you imagine your dreams truly happening. By giving some time to this everyday you are watering seeds in the dark that will in time become plants with flowers. You are honoring a part of your deepest self.

Dran from Ask and it is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires, by Esther and Jerry Hicks:

(www.abraham-hicks.com)

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." 

    Alice in Wonderland.

Dream Box

The Legend of the Dreambox

Another exercise you can do is to write down a dream, a desire, or a wish on a small piece of paper. Put the paper in a Dreambox--you can create it or you can buy a box that you designate for this purpose. Place the box beside your bed. Every evening as you retire and every morning as you rise, hold your Dreambox and think of your dreams, believing (and feeling) with all your heart that it is so. Legend has it that if done faithfully, your dream will come true.

It is not wishing which causes illness but lack of wishing.

Rollo May

Every genuine wish is a creative act.   Rollo May

Wishes, dreams, and desires are like seeds in the ground. They need warmth, safety, and nourishment. The more care they are given, the more they thrive and grow. Creating a Dream Box shrine is a way of caring for those seeds inside us that want to blossom. You can begin this project by doing the imagination exercises below. If you give a little time each day to doing this you are watering and nourishing your dreams. You can also create a Dream Box of your own and fill it with images and objects that symbolize your deepest hopes and desires.

"We want you to feel the fun and joy of the process. Often, when you get something that you have been wanting, your feeling of elation is short-lived, but this game will give you the opportunity to savor the things that you desire longer. And then, the thrill of the manifestation, even though short, will be all the sweeter."

Ask and it is Given

We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.

Thich Nhat Hanh

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

Maya Angelou

Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.

Jonathon Swift

Calling the Rain

"The ground is too thirsty to drink," David said softly from behind me.

"Have you ever seen it this dry before?" I asked.

"The old ones say that it has been over one hundred years since the rains have left us for so long." David replied. "That is why we have come to this place, to call to the rain."

This was the third year of drought in the American desert Southwest. Ski areas had not opened that year, and the Rio Grande slowed to a trickle before merging with the Red River near Questa. I had met David years earlier, before I actually moved into the high desert north of Santa Fe. We had each been on a sacred journey away from our homes, families, and loved ones. His people called such a journey a "vision quest." For me, it was an opportunity to escape my corporate commitments and live close to the land, a periodic evaluation of my purpose and direction in life. 

After a long, warm drink from my bottle, I stood up and began walking toward David. Already he was a good twenty steps ahead of me.

"Over there," David said. I looked where he was pointing. It looked remarkably similar to the other hundred thousand or so acres of sage, juniper, and pine that surrounded us in the valley.

"Over where?" I asked.

"There, where the earth changes," David replied.

I looked closer, studying the land. Scanning the tops of the vegetation, my eyes searched for irregularities in spacing and color. Suddenly it leaped out at me, like a hidden image in one of those three-dimensional charts with a picture disguised among the dots. I looked closer and saw that the tips of the sage bushes were spaced differently. Walking toward the apparent anomaly, I could make out a series of stones, each stone was situated perfectly, betraying the precision with which ancient hands placed it hundreds of years before.

"What is this place?" I asked David. "WHy is it here, in the middle of nowhere?"

"This is the reason we have come," he laughed. "IT is because of what you call 'nowhere' that we are here. Today there is only you, me, earth, sky, and our Creator. That is all. There is nothing here. Today we will touch the unseen forces of this world, speaking to Mother Earth, Father Sky, and the messengers of the in-between.

"Today," David said, "we pray rain."

Nothing in my memory prepared me for what I was about to witness.

"The stone circle is a medicine wheel," David explained. "It has been here for as long as my people can remember. THe wheel itself has no power. It serves as a place of focus for the one invoking the prayer. You could think of it as a road map."

I must have had a puzzled look on my face.

"A map between humans and the forces of this world," he replied to the questiohn I had not yet asked. "The map was created here, in this place, because here the skins between the worlds are very thin. From the time I was a young boy, I was taught the language of this map. Today I will travel an ancient path that leads to the other worlds. From those worlds, I will speak with the forces of this earth, to do what we came here to do: to invite the rain."

I watched as David removed his shoes. Even the way that he untied the laces of his tattered work boots was a prayer--methodical, intentional, and sacred. With his feet bare to the earth, he turned his back and walked away from me toward the circle. Without a sound he navigated his way around the wheel, taking great care to honor the placement of each stone. Each stone remained precisely where the hands of another had placed it, from a generation long departed. As he rounded the farthest rim of the circle, David turned, allowing me to see his face. To my amazement, his eyes were closed. They had been closed the entire time. One by one, he was honoring the placement of each round, white stone by feeling the position of his feet! As David returned to the position closest to me, he stopped, straightened his posture, and moved his hands into a praying position in front of his face. After a few brief moments in this position, he took a deep breath, relaxed his posture, and turned to me.

"Let's go, our work is finished here," he said, looking directly at me.

"Already?" I asked, a little surprised. It seemed as though we had just arrived. "I thought you were going to pray for rain."

David sat on the ground to put his shoes back on. Looking up, he smiled.

"No, I said that I would 'pray rain,'" he replied. "If I had prayed for rain it could never happen.

That afternoon the weather changed. The rain began suddenly, with a few splats on the deck facing the mountains ot the east. Within a few moments the droplets grew larger and more frequent, until a full-fledged thunderstorm was under way.

Later in the evening, I watched the weather reports on the local stations. Though not surprised, I remember feeling a sense of awe as the colored climate maps flashed across the screen. Animated arrows indicated a typical pattern of cool, moist air angling down from the Pacific Northwest, across Utah, and into Colorado, as it often did for the summer months. Then, unexplainedly, the jet stream changed its course and did something unusual. I watched, amazed, as the air mass dipped with precision into southern Colorado and northern New Mexico before loping tightly back to the north, resuming its path across the Midwest. With the dip came low pressure and cool air to mix with the warm, moist air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico, the perfect recipe for rain. 

"What a mess!" I exclaimed. "Roads are washed out. Homes and fields are flooded everywhere. What has happened? How do you account for all of this rain?" THe voice on the other end of the phone was silent for a few seconds.

"That is the problem," David said. "That is the part of the prayer that I have not figured out yet!"

David's story beautifully illustrates the inner workings of the mode of prayer forgotten by our culture nearly two thousand years ago. The rest of the story is perhaps best shared in David's own words.

"When I was young," he had said, "our elders passed on to me the secret of prayer. The secret is that when we ask for something, we acknowledge what we do not have. Continuing to ask only gives power to what has never come to pass.

"The path between man and the forces of this world begins in our hearts. It is here that our feeling world is married to our thinking world. In my prayer, I began with the feeling of gratitude for all that is and all that has come to pass. I gave thanks for the desert wind, the heat, and the drought, for that is the way of it, until now. It is not good. It is not bad. It has been our medicine.

"Then I chose new medicine. I began to have the feeling of what rain feels like. I felt the feeling of rain upon my body. Standing in the stone circle, I imagined that I was in the plaza of our village, barefoot in the rain. I felt the feeling of wet earth oozing between my naked toes. I smelled the smell of rain on the straw-and-mud walls of our village after the storms. I felt what it feels like to walk through fields of corn growing up to my chest because the rains have been so plentiful. The old ones remind us that this is how we choose our path in this world. We must first have the feelings of what we wish to experience. This is how we plant the seeds of a new way. From that point forward, "David continued, "our prayer becomes a prayer of thanks.

"Thanks? Do you mean thanks for what we have created?"

"No, not for what we may have created," David replied. "Creation is already complete. Our prayer becomes a prayer of thanks for the opportunity to choose which creation we experience. Through our thanks, we honor all possibilities and bring the ones we choose into this world."

Excerpt taken from The Isaiah Effect: Decoding the Lost Science of Prayer and Prophecy, by Gregg Braden. pp. 160-166.