Concepts
Dream Co Creators was inspired by many different schools of thought, being and experience. The concepts we use come from all over the world, and I am delighted to introduce them here.
Sacred Space
Your Sacred Space is a landscape your soul knows: a world within you, filled with enchanting visuals of your inner nature – the nurturer within.
It is referred to in Shamanism, describing a safe space set up and held by a facilitator for others to enter and be present within.
In religious circles, a Sacred Space is a place where people worship, or connect with the Divine of whatever form they believe it to take.
Here at Dream Co Creators, we refer to this as a place your Highest Self creates and uses as a medium to share your own Inner Wisdom with your conscious mind. Entering in a meditative state, you can connect with and experience your Inner Wisdom directly – unimpeded by the constraints of the outside world or past experience. When you return to this world, you know exactly what you want to do.
Highest Self
This one has many different meanings in many different cultures. It has been linked to the subconscious mind, superconscious mind, spirit, the Divine, universal consciousness, and many more.
Here at Dream Co Creators, we simply mean a power higher than your conscious self: the part of you that tries to deliver messages through experiences in reality. For example, how many times have you found a beautiful gift in what seemed like a challenging situation? We believe that was your Highest Self communicating to you through events in the real world. The difficulty is, the real world has constraints – which often obscure the message from our conscious understanding and leads to our Highest Self trying again. This is one probable cause of finding ourselves in very similar situations over and over again – that we’re simply not getting the lesson, or gift, our Highest Self is trying to teach us.
Inner Wisdom
This is the Wisdom which is stored up within us, that Dream Co Creators sessions are designed to unlock. You’ve probably heard the maxim ‘you have everything you need within you’. We take this very seriously here at Dream Co Creators, understanding that only YOUR Inner Wisdom is right for YOU. We do not attempt to influence your thoughts or feelings about your journey, but rather to ecourage you to explore deeper until you feel you have understood the meaning your Highest Self wants to communicate.
We also believe we are all part of one whole. Thus, this maxim extends to ‘you have everything you need all around you’ as well! This inspired our name, ‘Dream Co Creators’ meaning we all cocreate together as part of one whole.
Yi Dao Chi Dao – Where your mind goes, your energy flows.
This concept comes from Qigong, which is the 5,000 year old origin of the more commonly known Tai Chi. Qigong is a system of ‘intelligent movements created to access all areas of the body … and cultivate or enhance the inherent functional essence of the human being’ (Move Life Better, Deniz Paradot, 2020).
In terms of our work at Dream Co Creators, its meaning operates at many levels, but for most of our clients this is the important:
- When we live without knowing our dreams, or our purpose in life, there is no overarching focus – and so our energy can be moved by external forces.
- This is known as being ‘externally referenced’
- When we live holding our dreams in our minds, our energy is directed by our own will
- This is known as being ‘internally referenced’
Positive Dictionary for the Subconscious Mind
It has long been known by hypnotherapists and NLP Masters that our subconscious mind acts as a garden of fertile soil: the ideas we plant there are nurtured and grow. If we link this into Yi Dao Chi Dao, the ideas which receive the most energy grow fastest. With this concept, we introduce the understanding that our subconscious mind only understands where the emotional energy is, or ‘where we place our power’ (The Magician’s Way, William Whitecloud, 2009).
So, the Positive Dictionary, as we call it here, is a system of reframing all of our goals into Approach Goals. This means our emotional focus is toward a positive outcome: when we read our goals out, it is clear exactly what we DO want, and everything else is absent. In this way, our best-case scenarios are much improved and our amygdala can remain calm: there are no threats in our goals.
To help us understand this it is useful to run through an example, remembering Tony Robbins’ work showing us the sequence of events that determine outcomes: thoughts create emotions, emotions create behaviours, behaviours create outcomes.
We often hear people talking about what they want to bring into their lives in a negative way. For example:
- “I don’t want to be poor anymore.”
When thinking about this goal, the emotional energy is focused on being poor. Using this avoidance goal type, the best-case scenario is the person might do something (a behaviour) to become less poor, which could mean an extra £10 a week – unlikely to match up to their desired outcome.
Here, the worst case is they actually get poorer, because every time they think of their goal they are driving their emotional state towards the outcome of being financially poor!
The sensation of being poor also links in with the stress response, pumping cortisol (the stress hormone) through their body and drastically reducing their chances of accessing the resources all around them.
Avoidance goals often result in the perpetuation of exactly the thing the person does NOT want, because that is where they have placed their focus. It is true that pain is a “tremendous inhibitor” (Principles of Psychology, William James, 1890), but using a pain-avoidance type goal drives someone’s emotional state towards pain – and makes it most likely they will receive more of that pain (The Hierarchical Model of Approach-Avoidance Motivation, Andrew Elliot, 2006).
Now we can flip this over to an approach goal:
- “I want to have £20,000 or more in my bank account in 6 months, and be able to effortlessly pay all my bills without touching that money.”
When thinking about this goal, your focus is on having £20,000 (or more), so your emotional focus is on what that money will mean to you – how you will feel when you have that in the bank. Things like living an easy life, where money brings up images of holidays and meals out. These are stress-free emotions, allowing you to think outside the box and create new solutions beyond what you thought were possible. You tune into the frequency of it, just like when you decide to buy a yellow car you suddenly notice all the yellow cars around. You begin accessing resources you didn’t notice before because you weren’t tuned into their frequency.
Here, the worst-case scenario is a more positive outlook around money. Using this approach goal type, your best-case scenario is you actually end up with more than £20k in your bank account and effortlessly pay your bills through some new income stream you created.
Physiology Influences State
If you’ve attended one of my sessions, you’ll have heard me affectionately refer to the “First Commandment of Meditation”: to sit nice and tall. This concept extends to all physiology, as I’m sure any Tony Robbins fans reading this will know. My favourite illustration of this is to follow this step by step guide:
- Stand up
- Imagine a string is pulling the crown of your head up towards the sky
- Roll your shoulders back
- Lift up your head
- Smile at the ceiling / sky
- Keep the smile, keep your shoulders back and your head up high – and be as MISERABLE as you can be!
This is a wonderful proof that although thoughts create emotions and emotions create behaviours… If our thought is to straighten our posture, our posture influences our emotions in return. This just goes to show that everything is in some way linked to polarity: both poles of positive and negative emotions are within us all, and what we do can influence where we sit along that spectrum.
Gratitude
Giving thanks has been a ritual undertaken by people across all ages of human existence. From sacrifices to innumerable Gods, to blessing the food at the table, right through to mindful noticing of the lesson available in each mistake or seemingly less desirable situation.
The reason for its continuation as a practice is this: it is the key to accessing your ‘resourceful state’ (Tony Robbins). Why do we need to be resourceful? Because when we tap into all of the resources we have available to us, we can achieve things far greater than we ever imagined – including living our Dream Life. Gratitude for whatever is in front of you opens the door to fully appreciating what is (Eckhart Tolle). For example, when you need help, the scary phone call or fear of asking simply melts away and you effortlessly move forward with your life. All of the story that’s built up around those fears becomes irrelevant because right now, you are two people: one asking for help from another. The phone is a simple device that can make that connection, so you pick it up and dial the number. Life moves forward very quickly when you fully embrace gratitude!