Dancing with your Dragon

Why do people spend years in therapy and never really resolve their problems? Why do people fall in love and three months later find themselves angry, disappointed and upset with the very same person they thought was their ultimate soul mate? How can we move toward a more loving, peaceful world, when so many people can’t find love in their own homes, or even in their own hearts? Often, life’s emotional challenges have to do with the unconscious needs and fears, which belong to the realm that author Shaeri Richards calls “the dragon.” Shaeri’s new book "Dancing with your Dragon: The Art of Loving your Unlovable Self" is about opening the darkest regions of our inner being to the healing power of Divine unconditional love.This magical, transformative power is always accessible deep inside no matter what might be happening in the world around us. Divine unconditional love is tricky to understand. We’ve been trained that love has to be earned, that we have to “do” things and “be” a certain way in order to deserve love. But Divine love is quite literally “unconditional”; it rejects nothing. Divine unconditional love allows us to be as we are. It includes the things that we find frightening, shameful, or bad about ourselves. Divine unconditional love includes everything, even those things that we’ve hidden in the dragon’s den. Based on a workshop Ms. Richards presented at the 2006 International Conference on Conflict Resolution in St. Petersburg, Russia, this book is designed to help people begin to access the disowned, denied and repressed energy of “the dragon” and to transform it into useable, productive life force or power. The power of the dragon typically hides deep in the subterranean regions of our psyches, deep within our unconscious minds. Often the energy of the dragon is experienced as being angry, fearful, or threatening. Spiritually minded people, particularly women, tend to condemn this energy, which keeps it vibrating beneath the level of our conscious awareness. It also keeps the power of the dragon out of our reach. In fact, the myths and fairy tales of the Western world teach us that we are supposed to kill dragons. We learn through societal and religious conditioning that certain types of energies are ‘bad’ and that we should get rid of them. Those of us who desire to be “good” tend to polarize against what we believe to be “bad.” We tend to deny, repress or project this energy, because how can we be “spiritual” and have so-called “negative” energy too? At the same time, this repressed energy contains a big chunk of our life force; it holds our power. Without power, it’s difficult to discover our life purpose and fulfill our Soul’s calling. We need energy to do our work and the dragon has a lot of it. "Dancing with your Dragon" offers a spiritual practice designed to help us reclaim and reintegrate this denied power so that we can actually use it in our daily lives. This process of reintegration happens through allowing our self to become conscious of what’s really happening deep inside our being without any judgment against what we find there. The word dragon actually comes from the Greek word “derkesthai” which means to see. Without judgment, we can begin to honestly see ourselves while having compassion for the dragon that we all have deep inside. The Divine qualities of compassion and forgiveness allow us to reclaim the energy of our “inner dragon” and put that energy to good use in our lives. "Dancing with your Dragon" explores ancient esoteric principles that demonstrate how to work directly with the energy and power that lives deep within our inner world, yet it’s written with a light touch and with the beginner in mind. The mastery of these principles comes through practice, and the book makes that easy too. Although the fastest access to one’s inner world happens through meditation (actually sitting down, quieting the mind and going in), many people don’t know how to meditate or don’t want to take the time. “Dancing with your Dragon” is a moving meditation, meaning we can practice becoming aware and awake while moving through our daily lives. The main tool introduced to help people with their daily practice is called the “Dragon-ometer.” It’s a form of conscious awareness, a device designed to help people remember to wake up, notice what’s going on inside of them, and let it be okay without any judgment or need to change it. The act of allowing the energies inside of us to be “as they are” can also be called unconditional love. Once we relax and give ourselves permission to “be,” we allow the divine essence of our own Soul to move through us. When our Soul touches our “Inner Dragon” this lower vibrational energy begins to synch up and harmonize with the higher vibration of the Divine. With acceptance, presence and love, our “inner dragon” actually begins to transmute and transform; the dragon begins to dance. A dancing dragon symbolizes freedom of expression--freedom that leads us toward the life we are meant to live, filled with laughter, love, harmony, and oodles of fun.