Dreamwork as community weaving
Dear dreaming ones,
I have been thinking a lot lately about the power of dreamwork as a community weaving practice, and the way sharing our dreams weaves us together.
Of course, it is community dreamwork because we share dreams in community, but in sharing our dreams together, we weave our bonds closer - sometimes bonds that didn’t even exist before the dreamwork gathering. We make community as we share in community. We weave together as we dream together.
Sharing a dream in community takes courage and vulnerability. We might not even realize on the surface of the dream, but once shared, it can bring to light our innermost workings, questions about our most intimate relationships, and deep patterns. The beauty and mystery of sharing dreams together is that we never know where it will take us - individually or collectively. I am struck by how dreams are a pathway for dropping us into conversations about our deepest aches and our deepest longings, for such deep sharing from the heart.
I recently taught a class on community weaving at the University for Peace, where I am faculty. In the class we explored this Community Weaving Framework developed by Erin Dixon, Fabian Pfortmüller, Michel Bachmann & Sita Magnuson. They identify 5 elements that strengthen the health of a community:
The Fire - The possibility that brings us together.
The Web - The relationships that hold us together.
The Rhythm - The rituals that connect us.
The Circles - The roles we can play.
The Spiral - Our individual and collective journeys.
When I think about community dreamwork within this framework, it is a fire that brings us together. Through the sharing of dreams, it strengthens the relational web, and the practice itself is a ritual. The dreams weave together our individual and collective journeys, as once a dream is shared, it becomes ours, held together. In the process of holding dreams together, we are held closer to each other. As Minna wrote earlier this year, community dreamwork centers relationships at many levels, and in the process, strengthens and deepens them. Dreamwork is a potent community weaving tool, and in the context of hospicing modernity, is a powerful practice for disrupting individualism and remembering our interbeing.
This post was in part inspired by our recent session at the Practicing for the Pluriverse Symposium with Courage of Care. We invite you to watch the session here:
Wishing you sweet dreams,
Stephanie
Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, professor, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.