The Big Dream PodCast

In this episode Dayle tells the story of how she came to knowing that it was time for her to leave acting, after realising it was a colonial system meant to erase her. She discussing the inspiration behind her first feature film, a documentary called 'Coloured' that would follow her on an epic ancestral led journey across three continents to uncover and reclaim her shamanic roots.

Contribute to the Crowd Funding Campaign Here: https://www.daylemcleod.com/coloured-documentary  

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In this episodes of 'The Big Dream Podcast' Dayle discusses her thoughts on the cancellation of her favourite show 'Trickster', the sexual assault she has experienced on set as a result of white supremacy, and the indigenous revolution that will take sacred story telling out of the hands of white colonialists. Get a copy of Dayle's book 'The Big Dream; My Terrifyingly Beautiful Shamanic Initiation into the Arts' at www.daylemcleod.com/the-big-dream-book  To join her online tribe reclaiming their indigenous spiritual practices visit www.patreon.com/daylemcleod  Follow Dayle on Instagram @dayle.mcleod Twitter @realdaylemcleod

In this episode, Dayle discusses the power of an artistic/creative practice, its relationship to spirituality and its benefits for mental health. 

Last week I spoke on a panel for World Mental Health day and one of the big topics was about ‘the Shadow’ that exists in the human psyche. Carl Jung defined ‘the Shadow’ self as the parts of us that we have banished, or deemed unacceptable.

As human beings, we are subject to the full spectrum of emotions and experiences, however, certain feelings and experiences in our culture are judged as being ‘wrong’ or ‘negative’, for instance, anger.

As a young girl growing up I wasn’t allowed to feel angry because it was ugly and unladylike, and no one liked an angry young girl. I learned to cast my anger into the shadow area of my psyche, where I thought it would cease to exist, but shadow parts of ourselves are still very much alive even when we banish them from our conscious.

Its sort of like our plastic garbage problem these days- you might think that just because you took the garbage out to be collected that it is gone forever, but the fact is that it continues to live long after you’ve thrown it away, and because you aren’t bringing it into the light of your consciousness, it becomes a huge problem in other ways.

Feelings and emotions are part of our holistic intelligence and serve a major purpose in our lives. For instance, anger is something that happens when a boundary has been crossed- we get a wave of anger which is the energy needed to reinstate your necessary boundary and communicate our limits. If we are not allowed to feel certain things, we are crippling ourselves from having emotional intelligence.

There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ feelings. Think about a young child, how they feel everything to the fullest extent, and can move on so quickly from feeling to feeling, not getting stuck in the past, or holding on to the emotion. The feelings are flowing. That is a healthy state of being.

When we have cast certain feelings into the shadow to not be felt, they become emotions that exist as ‘states’ or ‘moods’. When we deny our feelings, they start to fester and get stuck in ‘mood’ states.

Feelings are gentle flowing sensations that tell us how we are doing at the moment. We are supposed to move with them like a child. Each feeling has a unique energy to it and when we can learn to be with these energies, then we are in direct communication with our intuition. Our intuition is our deepest form of knowledge and insight!.

With that, I would like to go through a list of the major feeling categories and what each emotion is trying to tell us in the hopes that it empowers you to feel your feelings and know yourself better.

In this episode, Dayle discusses 5 major shamanic practices that increase vitality and mental health, and details how a shaman is called to the vocation.

In this episode I speak with my mother about what it was like for her to witness me go through a psychosis/shamanic awakening, which I write about in my book 'The Big Dream; My Terrifyingly Beautiful Shamanic Initiation into the Arts'. Get your copy at www.TheBigDreamBook.com

In this episode Dayle talks about how belief in conspiracy theories brought her to the psyche ward, and how she gained her sanity back.

Read the article on Medium Here: https://link.medium.com/IXh0HL4P77

Join my Patreon Here: https://www.patreon.com/TheBigDreamBookClub

In this first episode of 'The Big Dream' Podcast, Dayle tells her origin story of being the only mixed-race family in an all-white rural Canadian town in Northern Ontario, and addresses how she internalized the racism around her and tried to bleach her skin to become white and therefore, accepted. It wasn't until an Ayahuasca ceremony went wrong, and sent her to the psych ward after a 40 day psychotic episode that she realized she had been living a lie for 25 years. The experience connected her with her African ancestors and their ancestral shamanic spirituality which now inspires the work she does today.