Announcer (00:00:04) - This is Dream Power Radio, the place where your dreams turn into reality. Here is your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:00:13) - Hello, hello. Hello and welcome to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Certified Dream-Life Coach Debbie Spector Weisman. This is a place where we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. As regular listeners to this show know, I spent a good deal of my life, as I like to say, sleepwalking. And by that, I mean that I let life lead me around instead of taking life into my own hands and determining my own fate. It took me many years to discover and understand the role that consciousness play takes into living a full and enriching life. I often wonder what turns my life would have taken if I'd had that knowledge years earlier. Would I have made the same choice? Would I be in the same place I am now speaking with you here today.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:10) - Speculation is but we’ll put that aside for the time being. But I bring up the thought now because these insights came late in life to me. They actually were the concepts that my guest today has known about since birth. Catherine Llewellyn grew up surrounded by conscious thought leaders, and it put her on a path to lifelong learning and transformation. She realized very early on, that consciousness lies at the very root of everything we do. And when our when our consciousness shifts, everything else follows. And that enables us to live the most fulfilling lives possible. What else do we need to know about our consciousness? How do we make a shift if we want to and don't know how? Let’s let Catherine tell us. Welcome to Dream Power Radio, Catherine.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:01:56) - Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here. I think dreams are just such an extraordinary thing, aren't they? I've always just found dreams to be a sort of a window, a magical window for me. So I was just thrilled to be invited onto the show.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:02:12) - Tell me, how do you use dreams to either access your consciousness or help your consciousness along?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:02:19) - Well, a variety of ways. Years and years ago, I came across the concept of dream programming. I don't know if that's a term people still use. And at the time, what it meant was if I had a problem or a creative challenge, whatever it might be, where in my sort of conscious, everyday mode of being, it seemed to be a bit beyond me. I felt like I needed help with it, and I would think, well, maybe my subconscious can help me, but I have a feeling that if it is going to help me, it's not going to do it while conscious. It's going to do it behind the curtain, as it were. And so I developed this practice of just before going to sleep, dropping a request into the subconscious. The request might be, I'd really love the answer to this conundrum I'm dealing with, or I'd really like to feel some healing around this particular issue.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:03:16) - I'd actually send a request in, and it always felt like I was giving the request to this incredible kind of team of experts that were sort of inside me. And then during the night, I might have a dream in which things would be working on and resolved and played out, or I might have a dream but not remember it, and therefore I didn't know whether or not I'd had a dream. But I'd wake up in the morning and the thing had shifted during the night. So it was sort of a combination of my conscious intention, my respectful request. So I wasn't demanding it. I was respectfully requesting it, and then I was surrendering to that inner process. So for me, the dream life is a part of that particular thing. So that's one. But now nowadays, something I've experienced a lot and I've got lots and lots of examples. So I'm not going to give all of them, but I'll just give two more. Something that happens for me a lot is if I've got a really interesting thing coming up that's going to stretch me-- I might be running a workshop or meeting somebody or something where I know it's going to stretch me.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:04:28) - Sometimes I have a dream where in the dream every possible thing that could go wrong goes wrong. And it gets worse and worse and worse and worse in the dream. And when I first had these, I thought, well, this is telling me I shouldn't be doing this thing. But I soon learned that what it was actually doing was it was putting me through all of my fears, all of my doubts, all of my negative self-beliefs, so that when I woke up in the morning, I thought, right, there's no way it's going to be anything as bad as that, whatever happens, right? And I survived that, so I'm going to be fine. And so that turned out to actually now be part of my process. I know that I'm really connecting with the thing I'm going to do if I have one of those dreams, which won't sound weird. And then the third one is where I literally wake up. I can remember a dream, and there's a really potent feeling of significance about the dream.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:05:28) - And there's some message from the dream. Which I then I don't tend to be very analytical about that. I tend to just ask myself, what might that mean to me? What might it be? What might it be? And I allow the message to emerge. So those are the three kind of things that immediately came through in response to your question.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:05:50) - I tell you, Catherine, you just very succinctly put together the whole concept of dream work. So much of what I do revolves around all three of those concepts. Dream programming. Some people call it dream programming. A lot of people call it dream incubation. And there are different methods of doing it like what you did, but it's all about the same thing -- asking your subconscious to help you figure out something like that. And it just shows dreams can be used in so many different ways, from figuring out problems to just sorting through what's going on. So even just having this wonderful image in your sleep and being able to dance in the juice of it and just make you feel wonderful, wonderful about living.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:06:40) - So yes, there's so many things you can do about that, but I brought you here to talk about consciousness itself. So to get that part started, I’d like your definition of what exactly you mean by consciousness.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:06:56) - Well, it's interesting because someone asked me that question in a workshop the other day. What's your definition of consciousness? And you can't define consciousness because consciousness is everywhere all the time. It's not. It's not a finite thing. It's an infinite thing. So the minute we try and define it, we've lost it. And in fact, what I said to the lady in the workshop, I said, do you have a consciousness? She said, yes, I absolutely do. And I said, do you believe other people have a consciousness? Yes, I do, and I said, that's actually all you really need to know, because this desire to define what consciousness is comes from a particular aspect of our consciousness, which is the rational mind. It's the rational analytical mind, which is only a very limited part of our entire consciousness.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:07:48) - So that limited part cannot understand the whole thing. By definition, it's too small and we can't. It's like saying, understand God, you know, understand the cosmos. We can't do it. So that's my answer, really. And consciousness, consciousness is infinite. It's everywhere. It's in all of us all of the time. And as you said, when you read out something earlier, it's behind everything else. And it's something we are. We're not always aware of our own state of consciousness because we're so often focused on things outside of ourselves. So we're focused on who's doing what. Do we agree with it or not? Samuel's done this to me. Was that wrong, or right? How do I feel about it? What am I going to do about it? And all of those questions and all of those perceptions that we have are guided by our state of consciousness, but we don't necessarily realize that. We believe that all these perceptions we're having in judgments and thoughts and questions are about the outside world.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:08:53) - They're not they're about our consciousness, which is therefore then filtering the information that's coming into us and dictating how we respond to it and how we then perceive it going forward. So I think the most interesting question is what is my state of consciousness at the moment? What is my state of consciousness at the moment? And that's one of those meditation questions we can ask over and over. And it never actually gets old. And if it feels like an annoying question to ask ourselves, that gives us a clue as to our state of consciousness right now.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:09:31) – Right. That's because our consciousness is always changing.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:09:36) - Yeah, it's always changing and it's infinite. It has no end to it of what it's capable of how it's capable of being. And I think that's one of the reasons dreams are so powerful, important for us, because in dreams we're not limited by the physical world, and we're not limited by our mental process. In dreams, all aspects of ourselves come into play without our rational consciousness having any ability to control it or limit it.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:10:08) - So this limitless stuff can happen in our dream world, which can, of course, be carried into our daytime world if we open to it. If we come into our daytime world and we go, I accept this limitless perception in my daytime world, I'm open to that. Even though I'm terrified of feeling like I'm losing control or terrified of not knowing what's going on, or nothing was right. But I'm open to that. And when we sound open to that, suddenly the whole thing expands, and we get this extraordinary, almost magical sense of possibility in the way we're experiencing our lives.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:10:45) - And that's the magical word you use is possibility, is it? I think one of the troubling aspects of society at large is that most people aren't aware that they have these possibilities. They're so limited in what they're seeing, in that rational part of the consciousness that has them in this limited tiny area, believing that that's all there is and there's nothing else there. Do these people or the people who live like this in this sort of limited way? Is there a way to help them see that there is more out there?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:11:26) - Well, I think the first thing to say is we all live like that some of the time.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:11:31) - And I think that's really important to keep in mind, that there's no such thing as the really conscious, open people and the really unconscious closed people. It's not like that. That's another rational mind concept which I have fallen into in the past, but luckily at the moment I'm not in that place. So for each of us, it's our own path, of course. And I think for me, the thing I've found most useful is to try to understand my own power in terms of the awakening that's occurred for me at different times and understand how that seems to have occurred to us. We will understand that that's obviously my path, but to also understand that some of that could be relevant from people. So I'm talking about things like the relationship with the body. Let's talk about that. So a lot of our baggage and woundedness and so on is held in the body. And when we are not freeing that up, what that does is that cramps us in terms of our consciousness, because a lot of our energy is going into maintaining that holding and containment of all of that material that's being held in the body, and that takes energy to do.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:12:48) - So what that does is there's less energy than for us to be open and receptive. So something that can be very, very helpful to people is anything to do with the body. That helps to free up the energies in the body, free up the emotional baggage and free up the joy, and the sensuality and all of those other wonderful things in in the body. Because what that does, because we are in a physical body currently, bizarrely, that's one of the weirdest things I think about being humans. We're in these individual physical bodies and yet we've got this infinite consciousness. What is that about? I love conscious dance, for example, walking in the hills, anything. Tai Chi is fantastic. People do like water therapy where they move in the water with someone guiding them. I've never done it. So there are all sorts of things we can do with the body that help to free things up, which then helps us to become more aware, more conscious, and more in touch.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:13:50) - You said our consciousness is always changing. You know more in touch with that conscious, constant changing ness that occurs as opposed to being stuck in this kind of hanging on trying to survive. So that's one example. Yeah, there are many others I can give you as many as you like.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:09) - We are going to go into that, but we are going to have to take a short break now. We are speaking all about consciousness with Catherine Llewellyn and we'll be right back.
Announcer (00:14:51) - Welcome back to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:58) - Yes, welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. And we're speaking about consciousness with Catherine Llewellyn. Well, Catherine, you're talking about how working with our body helps us elevate our consciousness or makes us more aware of things. Why is it that the movement can do this or how does the movement affect this?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:15:23) - Well, because we're all one thing. We're not just, a leg and arm a head and a brain, you know, where everything's connected to everything else and so on a very, very basic level, when the energy in the body is moving in the way that it should be, that also affects the brain, which affects our thinking capacity, which affects our awareness, and our ability to connect with what's going on with us is in a very, very basic way. I mean, anyone who knows the difference between waking up after a really good night's sleep as compared to waking up after really not enough sleep after ten nights of not sleep.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:16:00) - The difference to our state of awareness and a kind of plasticity of connection with ourselves and with the world is really noticeable. And that's the simplest example. And the thing about our bodies as well. Our bodies are capable of such joy and love and ecstasy, all those wonderful experiences and of course, capable of having all of that shut down as well. So when we allow everything to flow naturally, that allows all of these other wonderful things to come through, which connects with our sense of oneness, our sense of universal love, our sense of God or whatever we think God is. All of that becomes more available to us when we actually take care of the physical body. Which might seem counterintuitive, but I think anyone listening to this will have an inkling that that's actually true. I think we know this, but we don't always necessarily really take care of ourselves in that regard or have fun with it.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:03) - Well, I think we could all say that we are not our bodies, but what about the person who unfortunately may have physical limitations through illness or injury or something like that. How do they get that sense of joy and get that sense when, when their body is putting these limitations on them?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:17:27) - Yeah. So I mean, I can only speak from my own experience, and I'm fortunate enough not to have physical limitations like that. But I do have a few friends who have physical limitations, and they've told me that they can get in touch with that same experience if they pace themselves and if they treat themselves with love. So depending on what the limitations are, there are ways that people can treat themselves with love and pace themselves and not try and do what everyone else is doing who doesn't have the limitation--you know, doing enough, but not too much. I think the danger is for us to categorize ourselves and say, I've got that limitation, so therefore I can't do any of it.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:18:18) - I was running a conscious dance event the other day, and a woman came along, and she's got mobility issues quite significantly. So she had a chair some of the time. She was on a chair, and some of the time she wasn't on the chair. And she followed her own intuition as to what was best for her with that. And when she was on the chair, she was dancing. And the joy coming off. This woman was beautiful and other people were moving a lot, lot more. So she was following her own thing, you know? And if it's more of a metabolic issue like chronic fatigue syndrome or some other metabolic issue or nervous neurological issue. People can always find ways of helping to give themselves the nourishment that they need, that they require, which then we can only do the best we can. I'm always very hesitant about going into too much detail in regard to this sort of question because I've got great respect for each person's situation. So in a way, for each person, it's for them to find out what really serves them but is also for them to find people who are kind of expert in that condition, who can support them in that specific condition.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:19:34) - I've got people who work with people with dementia, let's say, and they have specialized in working with people with dementia, and they can give them really, really good expert help. Now, I could be helpful to someone with dementia, but I'd be kind of winging it. I wouldn't really be giving them the right kind of focused attention that they'd probably benefit from more.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:19:58) - What about our feelings? How do our feelings play? Into our consciousness?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:20:06) - This is interesting because I was actually working with something the other day and really working on the connection between our feelings and emotions and our imagination. Because to me, our imagination is the window into open it opening to the unknown and to the miraculous. And something I've discovered over the years is that our imagination is actually fed by our feelings and emotions. And I actually learned this from a chap called John Herron who's very amazing, humanistic psychologist, the father of humanistic psychology in many people's eyes. And he said, no, it's the feelings and emotions and then the imagination and then the thinking and then the action.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:20:56) - But if you just spend your whole life in thinking and action and then someone says, okay, brainstorm on this. Use your imagination. You can't access it. You don't have to access it because you need to get into the feelings of the emotions to access and actually give life to the imagination. So and sometimes people don't want to do that. They want just to want the great ideas, you know? I just want the brilliant ideas. I don't want to have a feeling first because feelings can be scary. But actually when we open to our feelings and emotions, which of course are in the body. So again, another thing, when the body is loose and the energy is flowing, we have better access to our feelings and emotions, which can then give rise to the most colorful and wonderful imagination.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:21:41) - Yeah, that's the problem with our brains, because our brains create so many layers of negative thought and stories that we tell ourselves that. And keep us from getting to that imagination because we'll say, no, no, no, we can't do it for this reason, for that reason.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:21:58) - And you talk yourself out of it. So anytime you're ready to do something, there's nothing there. But one of the things I think is so important for everybody is self-acceptance and self-love, which our consciousness helps us with so much. How do we do learn to accept and love ourselves? is there anything left to learn about ourselves?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:22:26) - Oh, yeah. Infinite amount. I mean, I'm working with a practice at the moment and modality called Pelota. Have you heard of Pellowah?
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:22:34) - I was going to ask you about that because I see that you practice it, and I never actually heard of it before. So tell me.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:22:41) - It's quite new. It's only been around for 20 years. It was channeled and downloaded by a spiritual teacher in Australia, and I was one of the first people to train in it as a practitioner in the UK, and I'm now a teacher. Now Pellowah is like--It's like a shortcut to shifting our consciousness. It's a consciousness modality.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:23:03) - So it actually engages with our consciousness and facilitates a shift. But it has a conversation with our consciousness first to go write what you need. So it doesn't just come and go wham. You know, I'm going to shift you from A to B. It kind of negotiates with our consciousness below or below our consciousness level. If you follow me. So we don't see it happening, but it happens. Personally I really like Pellowah. It works really well for me and for my students and my clients. There are growing number of things that are available in the world at the moment that that can help us really shift our consciousness much more quickly than if we just sort of thought about it or talked to our friends about it. So if people want to shift their consciousness, I highly recommend that they seek out Pellowah. Pellowah treatments can be given distant, so wherever somebody is in the world, they can have a treatment. It works just as well as in person. Or if you're in Australia or the UK and some parts of the US and some parts of Europe, you can go to the two-day workshop.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:24:12) - And that generates an extraordinary shift in consciousness, which kind of connects us. Have you heard of 12 strand DNA?
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:24:22) - No. Tell me that.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:24:24) - So, you know, we've got the allegedly two strands of DNA. Well, if you consider the possibility that we've got another five pairs. Right. So 12 strands and it's a bit like you have a house and one room, you're two strands of DNA is equivalent to one room in the house. And you live in that room, and you've got all the electricity and the plumbing and everything all works. So when you do the workshop, the other five rooms in the house all get switched on, each with a pair of DNA thingies. And what that does is it opens up your capacity to receive wisdom from the universe and to receive wisdom from yourself and to continuously and ongoing keep shifting your consciousness, which is the most extraordinary experience, I got to say. It's wonderful to do it.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:25:18) - But what it also does is you're probably familiar with this idea of us being in this current incarnation on the planet right now for a reason, and that that reason is something that our higher self-came up with originally. But some of us had kind of forgotten what that reason is, or that mission is. And in the everyday life, we don't necessarily feel connected with our higher self or time or some of the time. Even so, on the workshop we get a very strong really connection with the higher self. So a much stronger connection with our original individual specific mission to being here right now. So you've actually expanded consciousness.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:04) - So they have the connection with our past lives.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:26:06) - Then it doesn't actually take us through the past lives. It's more a question of imagine if you imagined the higher self was there at the beginning. And then we went to however many lives we needed to get to where we are now. Then you turn around and go, okay, higher self, hi, can we just reconnect right now? We don't need to talk about all those past lives.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:26:28) - That's history, right? I'm here now. Here we are. Let's just reconnect so I can be more closely and powerfully connected to myself and my current mission, which actually we just, you know, we decided on all that time ago. And now I want to be much more closely connected to it. So it's like a double whammy. Your consciousness is shifted and significantly opened. And there's that greater connection to the mission for being here. Now I'm obviously a fan of Pellowah. I think it's amazing and I'd love people to look into it. But if you when you heard me saying that listener, if it resonated for you, follow that. If it didn't resonate for you, then my invitation is to find something that does on the energetic level that helps you to do that, because that's almost like a battery powered boost to your own subconscious. It's like an external assistance to what your subconscious is already working to do.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:32) - Say like another way to access it would be through Reiki, for example?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:27:37) - Well, Reiki is not primarily for the consciousness. It's primarily for the body and the aura. Some people find when they do Reiki a bit like with the body work. It's not directly consciousness work, but through Reiki, people experience enormous amount of healing, and as a result of that, they may then be more open and available to shifting consciousness. So it's like a side effect.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:59) - All good.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:28:06) - And there are all good ways of helping us discover ourselves and H=heal and heal and grow and expand.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:28:09) - Absolutely. Well, Catherine, there's so much I'd like to ask you, but I just have time for this one final question, which is how can people find out more about you and your work?
Catherine Llewellyn (00:28:18) - Thank you. I would love people to listen to my podcast, which is called Truth & Transcendence and the and is an ampersand, the squiggly ampersand. And that is everywhere, all the usual places. And the other place people could find me is my website, which is beingspace. world. So you're very welcome to listen to the podcast or check in on the website. There it looks, there's all sorts of free stuff on there and more information.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:28:49) - Catherine, thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio today.
Catherine Llewellyn (00:28:52) - My pleasure. Thank you.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:28:54) - Okay. We've been speaking about elevating our consciousness with Catherine Llewellyn. I hope you enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman saying sweet dreams everybody!
Announcer (00:29:11) - You've been listening to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. For more information on Debbie or to sign up for her newsletter, go to DreamPowerRadio. com. This has been Dream Power Radio.