Shamanic Journeying

LIZARD – KEEPER OF DREAMS

‪ It is said that Lizard dwells in the Dreamtime. Lizard sees very clearly in The Dreaming that which lays ahead as can we and well … to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Lizard lives in the Shadow where our dreams occur prior to them manifesting. Our Shadow is part of us and can include our hopes, our fears, our limitations, our past and our future all of which essentially follow us around, just as our own physical shadows do.

Whenever Lizard appears it is prudent to have a look at what may be following you around within you and it most certainly is, for me, always a sign to pay closer attention to any dreams I experience or any symbols that come my way in what we call dreaming or when I am not in that conscious space and am instead in what we call being awake in this logical, rational, physical space.

I cannot EVER over emphasise the importance of paying attention to our dreams, they are crucial to our growth and understanding not only of ourselves but of life itself. When we work with our dreams, with symbols that appear to us in either state of consciousness, which life provides freely to all, an enormous wealth of wisdom, truth, peace, love and simplicity opens up to us.

Lizard can also be sending us a message that we may need to sleep, dream, imagine more than we have been. If you are experiencing nightmares either in the physical or non-physical states of awareness these are usually signs of inner conflict.

Another message from Lizard is that we could be lacking “dreams” for our future. It speaks of finding and embracing new experiences and can also be a warning that we are dreaming too much and not acting on the internal guidance we are all freely given by manifesting our “dreams” for our lives in the physical reality.

So Lizard very generally speaking, whenever it appears, is for me, all about our internal state and is a warning sign to pay close attention to what is going on inside us by way of our dreams, waking scenarios, thoughts, feelings and creations we would like to manifest in our lives.

As with ALL symbols what something means to each is based on their own experiences and gut feelings.
 Copyright – C. O’Connor 2014.

•*´☾☆☽`*•

#Cheryl O’Connor.
#Holistic #Counsellor, Author & Writer.

* Cognitive & Body Based Counselling.
* Creative & Artistic Therapies.
* Specialising in #Dream #Analysis/#Conscious #Dreaming & #Shamanic Journeying.
* #Reiki/#Seichim Treatments & Attunements.
* #Isis #Meditation.

* Proud member of The Wellness Universe – www.TheWellnessUniverse.com
#‎WUVIP

Newsletter Subscription @ bit.ly/CheocoNews – All subscribers will receive a 10% discount on their first initial consultation for any of my services along with 33 awesome tips and tricks to help you start deciphering the language of your Soul, your dreams, as well as the symbolism of what appears to you daily.Website @ www.cheocoenterprises.com
My book The Promise, Skype & Email Consultations Available – bit.ly/Cheocoshop

Re-Membering the Self: Healing What Was Forgotten

Have you ever felt like pieces of you are missing—like you walk through life with invisible gaps you can’t explain?

This is the quiet legacy of trauma. Our cultural conditioning, childhood wounds, and the unspoken energies of fear and abuse cause us to shut parts of ourselves away in order to survive. When the pain feels too much to bear, fragments of our being retreat into the subconscious, creating protective walls that shield us from further harm. These fragments remain hidden, but they continue to shape our lives—surfacing as re-actions instead of conscious responses.¹

We may find ourselves repeating patterns we do not want, pushing people away when we long for closeness, or filling inner holes with addictions, distractions, or relationships that never quite heal the emptiness. This is not because we are broken. It is because parts of us are waiting to come home.

The Body Remembers

Trauma is not just stored in memory—it is stored in the body.² ³ Muscles tighten, breathing shortens, the nervous system learns to expect danger. What could not be felt at the time becomes lodged in the cells of our being. Over the years, these unprocessed fragments may create illness or dis-ease—literally, a body not at ease with itself.

To become whole, we must re-member. This is more than recalling with the mind. It is bringing lost parts back into the membrane of our being, allowing ourselves to feel what was once too terrifying or overwhelming to feel. Only then can the energy move through the body and transform.

The Dreaming as Gateway

The Dreaming is one of the most powerful gateways for this re-membering. Some call it dreaming, astral travel, shamanic journeying, meditation, past life regression, or even moments of drift between sleep and waking.⁴ ⁵ All are expressions of the same expanded field of consciousness, where the boundaries of time dissolve and all is now.

Indigenous wisdom teaches that Dreaming is not confined to the past but is a living reality in which ancestors, land, and spirit continually speak.⁶ ⁷ Western depth psychology echoes this, recognising the dreamworld as the symbolic landscape of the psyche where hidden parts of the self may return.⁸ ⁹

Through The Dreaming, we gain access to the fragments of self split off by trauma. These encounters may appear as dream figures, symbolic landscapes, or re-enactments of old wounds. By engaging with them—through dream journaling, reflection, or guided processes—we can shift the patterns not only of this lifetime but also those carried across generations.¹⁰

Healing Across Time

We cannot change what happened in the past. But we can change how the past lives within us. When we meet a reactive trigger in daily life as if it were a dream symbol, we open the door to healing. Instead of repeating the same re-action, we can respond differently—re-writing the imprint, releasing the body’s grip, and restoring flow to the soul.

Transgenerational trauma research shows that unhealed wounds ripple down through families, shaping the lives of children and grandchildren.¹¹ Yet the reverse is also true: when one person chooses to re-member and transform their pain, the healing radiates outward, offering release to both ancestors and descendants. In this way, personal re-membering becomes collective re-membering.

Returning to Wholeness

As we call these parts home, the walls we built for protection soften. Instead of holes we try to fill, we discover fullness already within us. Instead of patterns that sabotage, we find space for conscious choice.

This is not easy work. It asks us to feel what we once ran from, to sit with grief, pain, fear, and sadness. But on the other side of the feeling lies integration. And with integration comes freedom—the freedom of being wholly ourselves.

We were never truly broken. We were only waiting to be whole again.

Reflection for You

Is there a dream, memory, or reactive moment that has been returning to you? Sit with it gently. Treat it as you would a dream symbol. Ask: What part of me is calling to come home? Then listen—not with the mind alone, but with the body and the heart.

Each fragment re-membered is life-force returned.

© Cheryl O’Connor, 2014 and 2025. All rights reserved.
Please do not reproduce without permission. Sharing with credit and a link is welcome.

References

  1. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books.

  2. Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.

  3. Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy: Interventions for trauma and attachment. New York: W. W. Norton.

  4. Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.

  5. Jung, C. G. (1960). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (Collected Works Vol. 8). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  6. Rose, D. B. (1996). Nourishing terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.

  7. Atkinson, J. (2002). Trauma trails, recreating song lines: The transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press.

  8. Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Melbourne: Text Publishing.

  9. Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

  10. Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  11. Danieli, Y. (Ed.). (1998). International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma. New York: Springer.

TRUST

It’s a biggy isn’t it?

No doubt we’ve all believed what someone has told us with everything in us and then wham we learn the hard way that person is NOT to be trusted. So… where do you go from there once trust is gone? I haven’t yet experienced that you can re-build it totally with the person who broke it. At the very least you are indeed wary of believing much anymore that comes out of that person’s mouth.

Yet we innately trust when we are children. We trust we will be fed, bathed, clothed and we don’t concern ourselves too much at all really with the adult world of money, distrust, blame, judgment or gossip.  Young children have no awareness of there being a me and them and they are full of trust and love.

As women, when we are pregnant we trust that the life we have growing inside us knows exactly what it’s doing. We all trust that we can breathe, we trust that our blood flows through our veins 24/7 and that our bodies know, somehow, how to work properly without us having to think too much about any of it. We trust the sun will come up each day and we trust that the seasons will come and go as they have done for eons.

Many trust that there is a higher power that is guiding them in their lives. They can’t see it but most trust that it exists in the form of God or whatever other label we use to describe something that we believe is outside of us that we think has power over us and our lives. When good things happen we thank “God” or the Universe or whatever our belief is. When bad things happen, generally speaking, we play the blame game.  Many have horrible, shocking, terrible things happen to them and then say how could “God” let that happen?  Some people come into this world and then are gone again rather quickly and again many of us say “they were too young to die” because our expectation, generally speaking, is that folk once born will live to ripe old ages.

Personally I figure we are all here only for as long as we need to be, to do whatever it is we came to do and once we have accomplished that, we go.  It’s almost like being contracted for a certain period of time to do a job, only thing is we often don’t know when our or another person’s contract will end.

So much in our lives often happens for reasons that many of us don’t get to even see until much further down the track and it can be difficult at times to remain trusting of that process.  It is like we live in a shadow world here. A world that has had for many a long time a blanket of fear, greed and ignorance, separation, power and control thrown over it with many only starting in recent times to lift that blanket off themselves and consequently the world.

It occurs to me that it is rather odd that we put our faith and trust in something that cannot be seen, which we think is external to us, like what we refer to as “God” and yet we cannot trust that the folk who come into our lives who we can see, do so to show us something about ourselves we haven’t yet seen.

It seems to me that a bit of a battle also occurs within when our logic and our conditioning tells us one thing yet our gut tells us another. Our logic can come up with any reasonable justification for anything we like to tell ourselves and at the end of the day it’s all just a story but how many folk actually stop the head chatter long enough to essentially feel, listen to and trust our own gut feelings regardless of what anyone tells us?  How many of us rush into situations due to feeling needy, pressured or even guilty then once we’ve dived in wonder how the hell can I now get out of this?

Experience tells me gut feelings are our warning alarm bells that come from what we refer to as “God”, “Goddess” etc.  The more we pay attention to them, like building a muscle, the stronger they get, the more frequently they are felt.  They, along with synchronicity and looking at all symbolically as an aspect of self rather than literally, are things we can use to guide us as we do our Earth Walks.

Generally speaking our whole western cultured education system is learning about data and rules and then being tested on our ability to remember them.  It’s all mostly head work so many of us have been conditioned to be very busy in our heads not even pay attention to what I call gut nav.  Much of what we learn in school becomes rather useless when we leave that environment for we are not taught life skills, just facts, figures and numbers and we are conditioned to learn what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour within the societies we live in.  Our western conditioning is also geared around do well at school, i.e. follow the rules and pass all their tests, then perhaps go on to further study, get a good paying job, buy lots of things, perhaps travel for a bit, find a mate, “settle down”, have children, get yourself into a bucket load of debt and then live happily ever after – hmmm doesn’t really quite work like that does it?

Perhaps it doesn’t work that way for ever so many because that is what exists in our heads, what has been drummed into many of us from an early age, it is not what exists in our hearts and how would many of us even know what exists in our hearts when we have been told from a very young age, generally speaking, absolutely zip shit about listening to them and trusting our own gut nav to help us navigate our paths in life?

We constantly, mostly, seek outside ourselves for answers, opinions from others when we are needing advice and validation of our own self-worth, never having really being taught how to listen to and trust our own inner workings and gut nav in daily situations we find ourselves in.  We most definitely, a lot of the time, put our trust into others and not ourselves.  Then we get our noses all out of whack when someone lets us down due to our own expectations which live in our heads.

Many speak of unconditional love – i.e. meaning loving folk without conditions/expectations attached.  Love is just love and it is not something that we have been conditioned to feel and live for conditioning lives in our heads, not our hearts.  So for me the term unconditional love takes on a whole new meaning i.e. Love is not that which we have been conditioned to believe it is.  Our expectations more than anything are what truly let us down when we trust them and others more than we do our own hearts and gut nav.

So very often we get angry with and blame others for whatever we feel as if it is their fault they have let us down.  Really we are just angry with ourselves for allowing that to occur due to our expectations.  Rarely are we honest enough with ourselves to say to ourselves I participated in that situation for whatever reason and start to dig deeper into ourselves to find the gold nugget of learning or even healing the experience has given us.

At the end of the day trust in our own Self and in life is what is learned, usually the hard way, and when we can trust ourselves way more than we can by putting our blind faith and trust into others, we have freedom from blame, expectations and we have peace.

Cheers, Cheryl.

© C. O’Connor.

Grab your free copy of my Dreamwork Booklet at http://bit.ly/CheocoNews when you sign up for my monthly Newsletter.

*´☾☆☽`*•

#Cheryl O’Connor.
#Holistic #Counsellor, Author & Writer.

* Cognitive & Body Based Counselling.
* Creative & Artistic Therapies.
* Specialising in #Dream #Analysis/#Conscious #Dreaming & #Shamanic Journeying.
* #Reiki/#Seichim Treatments & Attunements.
* Isis #Meditation.

Website @ http://www.cheocoenterprises.com

My book The Promise, Skype & Email Consultations Available – bit.ly/Cheocoshop

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Image credit: Pixabay.

DRUMMING UP A DREAM

Drum

“Sacred Drum aligns me with the heart beat of the Earth expanding and taking me deep inside to experience my true worth. Connecting my awareness consciously with the Source of all Creation, creates a feeling within and without of peace, bliss and jubilation.”

My Workshops are based on Native American/Shamanic practices.  The Drum and the Didgeridoo are the oldest instruments known to humanity which assist you to enter Dreaming consciously, quickly and safely.  In Aboriginal Culture the playing of the Didgeridoo is “men’s business” and out of my respect for that culture I never have or will put one to my lips, I do however use the Drum.

After the first session of drumming which usually lasts about 20 minutes, participants draw one image and formulate one question regarding what they have experienced.  They then pair up (if numbers allow and if they wish to) and both hold one person’s image and question in their minds whilst I drum again.  This is where “magic” truly occurs for both enter the same/similar dream and experience whatever is needed.  After that drumming session we share what has occurred and participants then enter dreaming again holding the other person’s image and question in their minds.  We then again share what has occurred.

To enter Dreaming consciously is a truly amazing experience and each participant receives whatever it is they need for them at that particular moment in their lives, whether that be re-connection to a part of Self that needs to be re-membered, realising their full connection to the natural world and all that exists, meeting with their Ancestors or Guides, or discovering and journeying with their totem or power animal/s.  Like life, the possibilities of what can occur in this space are only limited to your own perception and beliefs.

After this part of the workshop is completed we then break for some healthy sustenance and re-group for the second part of the workshop which is where questions are asked, dreams are worked with, techniques taught for working with your dreams and a general sharing occurs.

Cost per person is $50 and in order to secure your place a non-refundable deposit of $10 is required at the time of booking.  The balance is to be paid on the day, before we start.

It is suggested you do not consume alcohol or recreational drugs 24 hours prior and you only have a very light breakfast.  Anyone who appears to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs will not be permitted to participate.

You will need to bring writing and drawing materials but the other things listed here are optional, if you require a bit of comfort whilst you are dreaming, and if you have any queries please contact me:-

  • something to lay on, like a yoga mat.
  • something to cover your eyes with, if you need it.
  • a light blanket.
  • warm socks.

If you would like to participate in my next Workshop or would like me to come to you to conduct one please email me at Cheoco99@gmail.com or private message me at Facebook – Cheoco Enterprises.

© Cheryl O’Connor 2014.

•*´☾☆☽`*•…

‪#‎Cheryl‬ O’Connor.
‪#‎Holistic‬ ‪#‎Counsellor‬, Author & Writer.

* Cognitive & Body Based Counselling.
* Creative & Artistic Therapies.
* Specialising in ‪#‎Dream‬ ‪#‎Analysis‬/‪#‎Conscious‬ ‪#‎Dreaming‬ & ‪#‎Shamanic‬ Journeying.
* ‪#‎Reiki‬/‪#‎Seichim‬ Treatments & Attunements.
* Isis ‪#‎Meditation‬.

Newsletter Subscription @ bit.ly/CheocoNews – All subscribers will receive a 10% discount on their first initial consultation for any of my services along with 10 pages of awesome tips and tricks to help you start deciphering the language of your Soul, your dreams, as well as the symbolism of what appears to you daily.

Website @ www.cheocoenterprises.com
My book The Promise, Skype & Email Consultations Available – bit.ly/Cheocoshop

FB: https://www.facebook.com/cheocoenterprises
Skype: cheryloconnor333

Twitter: Cheryl O’Connor@Cheoco99
Email: cheoco99@yahoo.com.au