Lucidity and Self-Realization through

Emotional Surrender

by

Beverly (Kedzierski Heart) D’Urso, Ph.D.

Proposal for the 2012 Association for the Study of Dreaming Conference,  Berkeley, CA, June 2012

Copyright 2011

Summary

 

When we fail to internally experience our emotions completely, dramas involving similar emotions appear in our life and in our dreams. I will give personal examples of dealing with such recurring emotional dramas, breakdown the steps involved, and compare my lucidity work to a contemporary psycho-spiritual teaching of self-realization.

 

 

Abstract

When we fail to truly experience a strong emotion in our bodies completely, life seems to give us more opportunities to do so in both our waking life and in our sleeping dreams. We experience new dramas or dreams, often with different characters and environments, but similar emotions. If we pay attention, we can notice patterns of such recurring emotional dramas or dreams.

 

As a child, I learned to become aware of such patterns in the form of recurring dream nightmares. When I found myself in a similar dream drama, I recognized it as part of the pattern. I fully faced my fear, my dream nightmares ceased, and I became ‘lucid’ in a dream for the first time. As my dream-self expanded into the dreamer, I gained powerful abilities and positive qualities, such as will, joy, and peace. I now understand that my recurring nightmare evolved from an accident I had in the waking state at eighteen months old. At that time, I could not deal with the strong emotions that arose during the drama of the accident.


As an adult, I experience lucidity in my waking life, as well as in my sleeping dreams. I call this ‘lucid living.’ Currently, I am studying a psycho-spiritual teaching that describes a similar process called ‘the theory of holes’. This ‘theory of holes’ explains how earlier in life, when we could not completely experience an emotion, we would develop a related psychological ‘hole.’ We try to fill the hole with external obsessions, such as taking drugs, overeating, or having superficial relationships. We don’t allow room for ‘aspects of our true essence,’ such as love, strength, or joy. We get many chances to face up to the emotion in new recurring dramas in our waking life. When we finally do so, and completely experience our empty hole, aspects of essence finally arise to fill it. I will show how we can use this process in our sleeping dreams as well.

 

As an analogy, imagine our ‘Creator,’ which I call the ‘Dreamer of life,’ as the sea and people as the waves. During lucidity, a wave expands DOWN into the sea knowing unlimited possibilities and self-realization. In the ‘theory of holes,’ the deep water of the sea, our ‘true nature,’ can represent aspects of essence. The waves represent people with holes. When we fully experience our emotions and face our empty holes, the deep-sea water rises UP to fill them. The waves finally realize themselves as the sea. When the water overfills the holes of all the people in the world, or we all become lucid, only a peaceful sea will exist as the potential of God.

 

All audiences can relate to this presentation, which should increase self-awareness and emotional growth.

 

REFERENCES:

‘Emotions in Dreams Lead to Self-Realization,’D’Urso, Beverly (Kedzierski Heart), Workshop Presented at
The Association for the Study of Dreaming: PsiberDreaming Conference, September, 2010.

http://durso.org/beverly/emotions_in_dreams/emotions_in_dreams.html

 

 

‘Essence With the Elixir of Enlightenment: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization,’ Almaas, A.H., Weiser Books, York Beach, Maine, March 1, 1998.

http://ahalmaas.com/

 

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