The Dorothy’s Dream workshop explores practical applications of your non conscious resources to put you into a resourceful states (e.g. feeling good) and to generate creative and “out of the box” practical solutions to real life personal and professional issues.
The exercises are woven around Dorothy’s dream in the Wizard of Oz tale and how Dorothy utilized myth, metaphor and magick to help her find and develop her skills (brains), passion and courage. This workshop is based on exercises found in Jonathan’s soon to be published *Dorothy's Oz Dream: A Guide to Enchantment and Empowerment. (possible title)
About the Book
Once upon a time, many of us—and perhaps you yourself—were curled up in front of the family television, enraptured with delight as we joined Dorothy crossing her threshold to an enchanted and empowering dreamscape.
Since then, for all of us, years have passed. We might notice that many of our earlier enthusiasms have lost their energy and that we have less control over our lives than we might wish. So we consume personal growth/self-help books; but most of them disappoint.
Readers of a certain maturity and self-reliance may seek inspiration and guidance from personal growth books, but they do not want a simplistic, paint-by-number approach. Nor, for many, is there much appeal in approaches that are formulaic (“The 6 steps to..”). These one-size-fits-all approaches simply don’t appeal to many readers.
Books written to the lowest common denominator are not the only problem. At the other extreme are jargon-laden treatises so inapplicable to day-to-day life that they might be better characterized as one-size-fits-none.
Finally, many excellent books offer solutions that follow a particular religious and/or spiritual path. But these appeal mostly to those who already follow those specific approaches.
So there is an appeal for personal growth books that are both practical and enchanting; adaptable to each reader’s specific concerns, offering just the right dose of spiritual and intellectual stimulation, but not so much that readers are turned off by heavy lifting after a day at the office. Even better would be to tie this into a story that brings back feelings of childlike wonder while resonating with significance.
Dorothy’s Oz Dream: A Guide to Enchantment and Empowerment accomplishes this by weaving itself into the now mythic Oz tale. Why Oz? On its surface, The Wizard of Oz is a familiar fable about Dorothy on a dreamed up “hero’s quest” to seek what she needed—to find her way to her passion, smarts and courage. This seemingly simple story has embedded itself into the American consciousness.
Yet the story is also a delightful and magical allegory of self-empowerment, self-determinism and self-responsibility. This is especially so for tens of millions of American women who were imprinted for the first time by a movie that reversed traditional gender roles.
In a complete turnaround from fables like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and all the alpha male and powerful princes elsewhere in the movies, Oz men were incomplete and unreliable. They were only half men since they were half animal (cowed monkeys and a cowardly lion), half vegetable (straw), half mineral (tin) or half pints (munchkins). The only completely human man, the wizard, a blustering charlatan, a bunch of hot air.
Oz showcased strong women who had all they needed to walk their own paths (in ruby slippers, no less), control their own destinies, and enjoy some magic along the way.
Dorothy’s Dream tells and shows how Oz is more than just a coming-of-age story about how one girl found her way to develop and trust in her passion, her smarts and her courage. It reveals lessons in the Oz story about how to dream up life-enhancing metaphors, and other tools for personal growth and transformation—tools that are so simple they can be used by anyone, even a simple farm girl.
As a practical handbook, Dorothy’s Oz Dream gently guides readers toward their inner resources, illustrating and using many tools such as indirect and open-ended questions; counterintuitive notions (such as a cowardly lion), dream language such as symbols and puns (Almira Gulch--something cut down by water) and allegories. It explains and explores these and other powerful tools in a respectful, open and inviting way that will encourage readers to apply these tools to their own lives.
The book adapts itself to the individual reader’s needs. For example, with respect to courage—an issue for Dorothy—while it may occasionally be felt lacking by many of us, it may not be the issue of the moment for all readers. And even for those who would not decline an extra dash of courage, there may be more apt metaphors than that of a cowardly lion. So the book includes other classic and contemporary transformational metaphors, in addition to those used in the Oz story. Further, Dorothy’s Dream shows readers how to generate and apply their own metaphors (or other appropriate tools), tailored to their own particular needs to better evoke their own responses.
Such metaphors, allegories and open-ended questions allow a wide range of readers with a tremendous variety of life experiences to respond in their own way to find their own solutions that they can apply to their own lives. This approach offers personal benefits of enduring value, since readers automatically incorporate into their psyche appropriate stories and metaphors in a manner they find best.
The book empowers readers since, much like Dorothy, their health, relationships, careers and lives in general are impacted by persons and events outside their control. Dorothy’s coming-of-age story is a tale of response to change.
As for enchantment, even grown-ups seek a little magic. Many aspects of our lives may have become too much dreary Kansas and too little colorful Oz.
If you've gotten this far you might be interested in a draft of chapter 1.
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* Dorothy's Dream is the title of a children's book by Kady MacDonald Denton, an award winning author and illustrator of many children's books that are translated into many languages and are read by children around the world.http://www.kadymacdonalddenton.ca/.
Dorothy's Dream is also the title of a 1903 movie.
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