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Catherine Shainberg, Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming
Inner Traditions, April 2005.

Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming is a magnificent guide to putting soul back in the body and walking a path with heart. Catherine Shainberg is a profound spiritual teacher who reminds us that dreaming is not only about what we do when we sleep but about waking up to a deeper life, remembering and navigating from our sacred purpose, tapping into Source energy - including the images that speak to the body and can make it well - and being present at the place of creation. Her book contains a panoply of practical exercises for transforming fear and anger into heart-centered energy, liberating ourselves from the rule of habit and healing the wound between Earth and Sky.

Extemporizing on a common dream image, she incites us to stop being “passengers” on the train of life and instead become “switchmen” – which means catching ourselves every time we start giving our energy to a pattern or emotion, monitoring where the train is going, throwing the switch to take ourselves off the track of repetitive behavior or a negative emotion, and steering consciously toward a desirable destination.

She knows that dreaming is a discipline, one of the most vital and powerful that our kind possess. “True dreaming calls for rigorous training”, to take us beyond the snares of illusion and protection. When we grasp that “imagination affects the physical, and vice-versa” and that “the mind exteriorizes itself” and turn these insights into daily practice, we can consciously dream and re-vision the reality that takes form around us. This the heart of real magic, and these are core understandings of our Dream School.

Catherine Shainberg was drawn to Kabbalah by a chain of dreams and synchronicities that led her to study for many years in Jerusalem with Colette Albouker-Muscat, an extraordinary personality who was a leader of the French Resistance in Algiers in World War II and a lineal descendant of both Isaac the Blind (a medieval kabbalist in Provence) and Dona Gracia Mendoza (one of the leading Jewish women of the Renaissance). Though people sometimes think of Kabbalah as a bookish approach, heavy on numerology and difficult texts, Colette Albouker’s fundamental teaching was that the Book of Books is within us, and is to be accessed through images, after we have cleansed the windows of perception, and anchored in the wisdom of the body. Her first demand of her students was, “Tell me what it is you see.”

We feel the presence of the teacher’s teacher in the book, perhaps because of a reality noted in one of the great texts of Kabbalah:

The Tzaddikim [sages] who have died are present in this world to a greater extent than when they were alive.

                                          - Zohar III, 70b

The play of synchronicity attended my reading of this book Just before the publishers sent me advance pages of Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming for review, I had a vision in which I encountered ancient wise women of the Dordogne in France. Reading Catherine’s account of her formative experiences, I learned that she comes from a noble family of the Dordogne. Her Gallic inheritance comes through beautifully in stories from medieval romance and the Arthurian cycle and French sayings like Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop!(“Reject what is natural, and it returns at a gallop!”)
  
Another, quite stunning, synchronicity revealed itself as I entered the world of Catherine’s book. The title of Catherine's introduction - "Wake Up and Dream" - is also the literal bumper sticker (a home-made one) that I put on my elderly Jeep Cherokee (a brand mentioned in a teaching story in her book) many years ago. When synchronicity flowers, again and again, we know that the powers of the deeper world are at play in our physical world.