Political Dream Yoga; Sooner or later, the oppressive forces of today will fade into history.  Sooner or later, the vastness of the human heart will triumph.

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Politics sometimes seems like a bad dream and we want nothing more than to wake up.  Or, perhaps more often, we want THEM to wake up, whomever the opposition force of the moment happens to be.  In this article, I suggest we take this feeling a step further and actually approach our political activities with the tools of dream yoga.  I use the term yoga here because it derives from the word for "yoke" and is sometimes translated as "union."  In yoking things together, we multiply our capacity for positive effort through linking.  Physical yoga links body, mind, and soul.  Dream yoga links the many parts of our identity. Political yoga, if we extrapolate this concept, would link political factions together and enable them to work towards shared societal goals.
 
Before we go further, let's look at the basics of dream yoga.  One approach suggests looking at our dreams through the lens that every character represents an aspect of our full Self.  Terrifying tigers, mad scientists, or pillaging marauders are, in some larger sense, faces that our conscious self doesn't want to admit to having.  To keep a pristine self-image, we split them off into "bad characters" and create mini-dramas each night that rival anything on TV.  
 
This is the psyche's way of teaching us.  Because we tend to be slow learners, we often need to repeat the lessons on a different night, perhaps with a new set of characters. Repeating dream themes are a signal that we haven't quite gotten the message.  And the message isn't that we need to run faster or slaughter more quickly.  The message usually has something to do with acceptance.  
 
When we can accept the extremes in our dreams and befriend what we resist or fear, we expand our conscious self.  No longer are we quite as rigid, naïve, or lopsided.  We begin to accept our wanton destructiveness, ravenous lust, or callous indifference.  We see them as part of our humanness, side by side with our nobility, grace, and generosity.
 
More advanced forms of dream yoga take this process to higher levels of lucidity.  The dreamer literally wakes up within the dream.  The scene continues but the dreamer is no longer under the illusion that the dream is fundamentally "real."  He has woken up within the dreamscape.  It's like pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz and seeing how the illusion is orchestrated.  Advanced practitioners can even begin to sculpt the dream-field to suit their whims - they become architects of their dream life.  
 
These principles can be applied to the political sphere.  There are challenges, of course.  The political landscape packs considerably more punch than a dreamscape - the cries of oppression are louder, dead soldiers are not resurrected, and debts must eventually be paid.  A dreamscape allows experimentation.  A political landscape results in serious, sometimes lethal consequences.
 
Nonetheless, approaching the political process as a dream yoga does offer benefits.  At the remedial level, we can begin to recognize that all of the warring factions represent an aspect of our Self. Even the power-mad sociopath exists in each of us in kernel form.  Part of us is liberal, another part conservative, still another anarchic. Most of us, though, settle into a comfortable groove of only identifying our conscious self with one facet. As a result, when we engage the players of the political landscape there is an escalation of fear, resistance, and aggression as we square off against the "other," each vying for power and control.  Politics becomes a re-enactment of our own internal splits and we end up with dissociation and exhaustion rather than integration and harmony.
 
By contrast, approaching politics as a yoga brings a "meta" level of awareness to the drama - a recognition that there is more to the story than "We're right and they are wrong." Winning - in the sense of domination - becomes less central than aligning - yoking together what were competing factions in the service of some higher goal.  The deeper truth is that "us" and "them" are not fundamentally separate and thus one side I rarely entirely right while the other is entirely wrong.  Recognizing this truth doesn't negate the fact that certain political factions carry greater evolutionary power - King and the civil rights activists versus the Ku Klux Klan, for instance. But it does move us from thinking positive value resides entirely in one camp to seeing that as a society, we may need the very qualities, values, and characteristics we disdain in the opposition.
 
Political yoga cannot occur without a certain measure of personal growth.  Until there is some level of personal integration, we cannot enact it in the political sphere.  However, if leaders do enough of the work of personal integration, we can begin to create political activities that result in positive feedback to supporters.  When leaders reconcile, it makes it ten times easier for their followers to do so as well.  For instance, when South Africa engaged its truth and reconciliation process, leadership actions empowered healing throughout the country.  What could have been an inferno instead led to transformation. Political healing at the upper levels, then, can trigger personal healing on a massive scale.
 
People often confuse integration with indulgence or tolerance.  Accepting murderers doesn't mean letting them kill.  We can strongly protect the public interest and prevent people from killing.  However, while our actions protect public standards of behavior, we can accept and even love the destructive person, which tends to help them grow in a positive way to a point where they do not need to be contained.  
 
So, when I talk about political yoga, it's not about washing out all distinctions of quality, depth, or virtue and simply indulging every oppressive idea around.  It's about re-connecting with the place of innate divinity where we are all here working together on a larger project and seeing that we all have gifts in this process.  Linking those gifts together with consciousness rather than fighting about whose gifts are right is what liberates the transformational power.
 
Shifting back to the personal level, our dream yoga task is to align with what is best in us while we fully accept all the less "desirable" faces as well.  That allows internal union, which frees our outer attention for our highest calling.  In this process, it's important to remember that the "unwanted" parts of us contain energy, wisdom, and power.  Even the part that wants to be an oppressive dictator.  Or a dirty tricks operative.  Or a jaded slacker.  
 
Politically, the same process applies.  How can we align with the best, most noble goals, and then bring together the gifts of everyone to serve the advancement of that goal?  If we can successfully yoke together everyone's talents, the political process stops wasting much of its power on oppositional power struggles and re-focuses on shared mission. When we are polarized, there is little attention left for the forward-looking, collaborative work of building a better world.   To de-polarize, we need to see beyond surface stories to a deeper level.  If we are completely convinced that Republicans are selfish exploiters or that Democrats are wimps or that activists are ungrateful reprobates or that police officers are agents of oppression, most of our life force will be trapped in the oppositional struggle. And it's likely that we'll need to repeat the same heated scenario with a new set of characters in future years or decades.
 
By engaging the actors on the political stage like the characters in a dreamscape, we can open to the possibility that each has been placed there to teach certain lessons and bring certain gifts.  We can listen and discover their wisdom and worth.  We can accept them - even if they make different choices than we do. Thus doesn't negate us standing in our own truth - we can still boldly champion reform and positive change.  We can hold those who abuse power accountable for their actions, sometimes with fierce love, lawsuits, and marches.  But we are not trying to eradicate them.  We are attempting to join with them in a way that leads both parties to be drawn forward towards greater integrity, virtue, and good.
 
If enough of us engage the political drama in this fashion, we may grow collectively such that we no longer need to repeat the same political dramas with new actors. We may, like a dreamer who wakes up into full awareness, begin to create a political landscape that operates with another level of lucidity.
 
So I encourage you to engage the political process with all the passion, intensity, and power that you can muster while resting in a place of acceptance as well, seeing the perfection in the role of each player and trusting that we are destined for nobler days.  Sooner or later, we will move beyond the latest injustices.  Sooner or later, the oppressive forces of today will fade into history.  Sooner or later, the vastness of the human heart will triumph.  It all begins when we let our own heart triumph.
 
Stephen Dinan stephen@radicalspirit.org is author of Radical Spirit (New World Library, 2002), and founder of TCN, Inc. Stephen directed and helped to create the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory & Research, a think tank for leading scholars, researchers, and teachers to explore human potential frontiers. Currently, he is a marketing consultant for a number of startups, political action groups, and non-profits and runs workshops through the Radical Spirit Community.  For a full archive of his articles, visit www.stephendinan.com