In last night’s dream a man kept shaking me. Or was it the other way around? I told him I was sorry for all his pain and that I hadn’t realised because I was a little girl. Someone else told me that I was the focus of his wrath now because I was getting the attention. Prior to the shaking, he was following me, hunting me down, even going into female toilets and pushing his way into a cubicle where my mum was sitting (not using, thankfully).

Who is this man? He represents masculine energy within my being; my mental or logical side which is concerned with thinking, action, assertiveness, dominance and the material world. In contrast, the little girl represents innocence, the pure heart, receptivity, the spiritual. In the dream she responds with love because she is in tune with her natural state of being and knows no fear or pain. The man, caught in conditioned thoughts and beliefs, only knows to attack what he doesn’t understand. His goal is survival at any cost and the little girl is a threat at some basic level because she is now the focus. Love, rather than fear.

What I have taken from this is that my old conditioned thought patterns are fighting for survival against my increasing focus on the light within my self and the knowledge of the innocence of my true being. Conditioned thoughts are rooted in fear because they are born of woundedness and pain. They attack because they do not feel worthy of love – my love. They cannot see or feel the light. They do not want to because they may disappear and then what? There can be a lot of comfort tied up in old negative thought patterns and wounds. We do not always want to let go of them. It can be more frightening to surrender to the light of truth.

The pivotal message of the dream is this: despite the threat, I responded in love rather than fear. Despite the fear of letting go, symbolised by the toilet cubicle, I am facing those wounds. As I reflect on this, I am remembering a prayer I sent recently which consisted of the genuine intention to be happy for those with whom I sometimes have a tendency to lose myself in sadness; to rise above self-centredness and enter into the realm of pure unconditional love where everyone and everything is accepted and welcomed with love, even my deepest wounds.

My challenge is to remember my natural state of being even when those thoughts and patterns take over and attack myself or lament others for having what I desire or lost. In the light, there is no pain, no loss, no separation: there is only love.