If you’re anything like me, you may feel tired, weary, or even afraid to dream. Disappointments and broken promises — from ourselves or from others — can leave parts of us that would rather not try. That reluctance is understandable.
The good news is we can meet those parts with curiosity. We can give them space. And we can still dream.
Even better, the body has an intelligence that can bring the dreamer in us alive.
The mind, though, doesn’t always trust the body to do the dreaming. The mind wants to stay in control.
The body knows no control.
Ram Dass used to say, “Relax. Nothing is in your control.”
On first hearing, that can sound less like wisdom and more like a nightmare.
Nothing?
Of course there is a voice inside that protests. That can’t be true.
But let’s step into that perspective for a moment.
What if it were true that nothing is in your control?
Would you just throw in the towel and call it a day?
Of course not. No one would. Because it’s actually impossible to do nothing.
Try it for any length of time and you’ll feel it — the itch, the restlessness, the pull toward movement.
So “relax, nothing is in your control” doesn’t mean give up.
It doesn’t mean disengage from life or abandon the wish to be better, kinder, more alive.
Hell no. If that impulse lives in you, it’s a miracle — something worth safeguarding at all costs.
But if goodness, or the will to be better, already lives in you, control won’t get you there.
It’s already happening.
You didn’t decide to have that longing.
You didn’t manufacture it.
All you can really do is follow it.
And somehow, the body knows how.
The intelligence of the body is animal, instinctual, visceral, clear.
It speaks in sensation, energy, intuition.
The body tells you before the mind when you’re in the company of the wrong people — the sinking in the chest, the knot in the stomach, the uneasy flutter you can’t explain away.
And it tells you just as clearly when something is right.
Think of a time you were about to see a close friend, or someone you love.
The chest opens. There’s space. Warmth. A subtle excitement.
That’s not thinking — that’s energy. That’s sensation.
That’s the body speaking to you all the time, quietly pointing out where you’re moving toward life and where you’re moving away from it.
Which is why, if we’re going to do any dreaming at the start of a new year, it has to involve the body more than the mind.
The mind has endless ideas — and let’s give credit where it’s due. There’s a great deal of intelligence there, and not something we want to throw away.
But it’s the body that sifts through what’s actually mine to do.
The body gives you that felt sense of this is right.
The mind, on the other hand, can deceive us.
Thoughts can arrive that sound convincing — even noble — and still be completely untrue.
Sometimes they’re just fear dressed up as reason.
Sometimes they’re desire pretending to be destiny.
The body helps us feel the validity of an idea.
It moves us out of fantasy and into imagination, where the dreamer in us can take flight, but we still have access to the roots of the tree.
Feet on the ground, even as we reach into the branches and the deep blue sky.
Imagination is where real dreaming happens — beyond fear, beyond compulsion, beyond what I’ll loosely call the lower mind.
Not to shame it, but to acknowledge it. Those lower currents — our grasping, our tightening — can keep the dreaming body bound if we don’t see them clearly.
So what is embodied dreaming, if we take seriously the idea that nothing is in our control?
It’s not passivity.
It’s not doing nothing.
It’s allowing the dreamer to play in the world of imagination.
What do you care most about?
How do you want to feel?
If there were no time pressure at all, what would still feel urgent?
Where does your energy want to go?
If dreaming is in you — and I suspect it’s one of the most universal qualities of being human — then relaxing may actually be synonymous with dreaming.
The grip of the lower mind loosens.
The imagination comes online.
The view widens.
So relax. And dream.
Relax, and follow your breath.
Follow your dreaming body.
Because if it’s true that nothing is in your control, then it’s not the mind you trust to figure out your life.
It’s the intelligence in the body — what some of my teachers call the unbroken self — that knows the movements your life is quietly asking you to make.