We’re On A Highway to Yeah, Not The Highway to Yeah

Another full day at the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) annual conference in Ashland, OR happened yesterday, and I took away a few insights and ideas, some of which I want to share in today’s article.

A very powerful presentation was given in the morning by Dr. Loma Flowers, a founding member of the IASD, one of its first presidents, and a psychiatrist who earned her M.D. and later served as a professor at Case Western University, as well as a voluntary professor for medical students at the University of California, San Francisco.

This is an incredible woman who has a healthy and amazing perspective on what this “good life” stuff is all about.

Her presentation was about dream interviewing as a method for working with dreams, and its connection to the work she did building emotional competence with a group of academically challenged adolescents.

In a nutshell, Dr. Flowers has created a method for helping people live better lives.

In her approach, thinking, feeling, and judgment need to happen before action. Typically, our feelings alone can lead us toward the wrong actions.

There is so much more I could say about her presentation and life story, but she made a comment that really landed for me.

She said her emotional competence-building approach was not “the highway to emotional competence,” it was “a highway to emotional competence.”

First, I love this perspective and have tried to live it in what is published in this blog.

Second, it felt like a personal message because of her choice of the word highway.

That seemed like a very important synchronicity.

When referring to developing the freedom to live your truth so you can get out on the Highway to Yeah, I try to be very clear that this is not the Highway to Yeah, but your version of the Highway to Yeah.

This blog is simply fodder for your consideration on how you might do this for yourself.

You may have noticed the blog is simply labeled Highway to Yeah, and that is intentional.

Another powerful presentation was given by Dr. Ed Kellogg.

He began with a quote by Charles Tart about the idea that, in most of our waking life, we exist in a consensus trance.

Normal waking consciousness is typically a trance-like state, produced by a kind of hypnosis created by the culture in which we are embedded.

Our reality is not the reality, but a reality.

And for most of us, we are stuck in this consensus trance and don’t even know it.

You see, the other day when I was discussing a stack of amplifiers that can boost the freedom to live your truth so that you can better live out your Yeahs, that is part of the process.

Getting on a Highway to Yeah is largely about breaking free from the standard, conventional way of being that most of us have been embedded in our whole lives.

Take the idea of Time Freedom.

Most people are at a loss as to how to achieve it.

I recently watched a YouTube video by a young man, perhaps in early middle age, who was lamenting that a job is not a life.

But that is his life.

That is his reality.

He said he wakes up at 4:15 a.m., takes his dog for a walk, comes back, packs his lunch, gets ready, and is out the door by 6:00 a.m.

He gets home around 7:00 p.m., has dinner, and finds himself asking, “Where is my life in all of this?”

He is struggling with what to do about it.

Interestingly, he works in civil engineering construction, building and repairing roads.

I guess we could say he’s on a Highway to Nah.

Except for the dog part, that sounded a lot like the life I lived for well over 20 years.

But that is what one does.

We follow a script.

We follow Someone else’s plan.

And the next thing we know, ten years are gone in the blink of an eye.

And are we were we want to be?

In another session on alien abductions, shamanic rituals, and the dream-life path, we were asked to do an active imagination exercise.

Earlier in her presentation, the speaker had shared the idea that human beings possess twelve senses, not just the five that are emphasized in our culture.

As I was doing the exercise, I found myself in Rivendell from The Lord of the Rings.

And it occurred to me that I was experiencing some form of these other senses, but I had never thought about a basic question:

What is the smell of Rivendell?

Let’s see if we can wake up and smell the message Dr. Flowers was laying down.