Customer Reviews

She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing through Dreamwork

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

She Who Dreams: A Journey into Healing Through Dreamwork by Wanda Easter Burch is a deeply inspiring story of a woman's brave battle with breast cancer, an illness first revealed in dreams and later healed through dreams. She sets the stage early on with rich imagery of her experiences as a southern child whose beloved grandmother is a locally famous healer and dream appreciator. Later in life, Wanda Burch draws on the strength and wisdom of this childhood training as she journeys far and wide in her waking world and her dreamtime. Mystical experiences on an African sojourn precede her passage through the difficult medical treatments she faces, a journey in which four men play important roles as fellow travelers and guides--her dream appreciating husband and son, her deceased father, and her mentor and dream-sharing partner and friend, the well-known author and teacher Robert Moss.

We accompany Wanda Burch on a treacherous healing path, and we empathize as she honestly discloses her fears and feelings--her dread of impending death that a recurring dream portends, her anger at delayed medical interventions and her bouts of deep depression. Yet these stormy seasons of her soul are tempered with an indomitable will to be healed at all levels of her being. Experiencing surgery and then chemotherapy with its dreadful side-effects never stops her from turning to her dreams for help and healing, and she recounts dreams, her ways of sharing and working with them, and using the wisdom she reaps from them. Tested to her depths, she emerges as a beacon to others, a Wounded Healer whose example offers the greatest hope of all to those of us who face life challenges. Her illness may have stolen her breast, but it didn't harm the caring heart beating beneath it, nor her sharp mind, nor her glowing spirit all of which are put to use as she rewrites her life contract and now walks on a new path as a Dream Guide and Dream Bringer to others.

I highly recommend this book and its practical and purposeful exercises and advice, as well as the forward and appendix by Robert Moss, reminding us that we can heal ourselves and reach out to help others and our world if we follow the wisdom and guidance our dreams bring each and every night. ...

Dreaming is healing. Our bodies speak to us in dreams, giving us early warning of symptoms we might develop, showing us what they need to stay well. Dreams give us fresh and powerful images for self-healing. Dreams are also the language of the soul; they put us in touch with wells of memory and sources of creativity and energy far beyond the clutter and confusion of the little everyday mind. Beyond this, dreams are experiences of the soul, and can take us - sleeping or hyper-awake - into realms where we can have direct access to sacred healers and teachers.

These themes and possibilities come vividly alive in Wanda Burch's brave and beautiful book She Who Dreams, which is both the narrative of a personal journey into healing through dreaming and an incitement to bring the gifts of active dreaming into our everyday lives.

I have been sharing dreams with Wanda since early in 1987, and I know the depth of experience and the deeps of dreaming from which this book flows. Her dreams diagnosed a life-threatening illness (breast cancer) a year before the doctors found symptoms. Her dreams guided her choice of treatment, gave her powerful imagery for self-healing and recovery, enabled her to grow a creative relationship with her physicians and awakened her to a deeper life and a vital engagement with the world as a dreambringer - one of those who creates a safe space for others to open to the gifts of dreaming, and can bring a dream to someone in need of a dream.

Her personal story is quite fascinating. Her first dream mentor was her Irish-American grandmother, a "wise woman" of the Alabama hill country. Later she met the dreamers of the Iroquois, one of whom appeared at her back door in the form of a white wolf.

But it is the story of everyday trials, more than the extraordinary elements in this book, that will touch the hearts of many readers and bring them practical guidance that is urgently needed. Wanda shows how dreams can get us through. One of her most valuable contributions to the literature of healing and recovery is to show us how we can use the self-healing tools that flow from dreamwork to support conventional medical treatments, smoothing the process and reducing adverse side-effects. For this alone, She Who Dreams is an invaluable resource for healthcare professionals, therapists, healers and caregivers.

I'm one of the lucky ones - no breast cancer in my immediate family - yet. So this is not a book I would have expected to be on my "Must Read" list but it is. I do dream and found compelling Burch's unsentimental and honest account of how in her dreams she was given clear images of her cancer, where it resided, and what she needed to do to get rid of it before doctors were willing to make the diagnosis. As her treatment progressed, the dream images changed to fit her need and she found ways, described in the book for others to follow, to create "prescriptions" based on them that she took many times a day. Her oncologist was amazed at her rate of healing and told her: "It was you who brought yourself to this amazing state. The rest is still up to you; it always has been." This is an inspirational story and a great read.

I truly enjoyed reading Wanda Easter Burch's excellent new book, She Who Dreams. This is a book you definitely want to read if you or someone you love is trying to heal from cancer or any serious illness. It's also one you want to read even if you're not in that position because it's an amazing chronicle of the healing power of dreams. With genuine Southern charm and deep spiritual insight, Wanda takes us through the experiences, in waking and sleeping, that presaged her disease, helped her get a correct diagnosis and proper medical treatment and supported her through the intense physical, emotional and mental roller coaster of treatment to recovery. I found myself buoyed by her honesty and humor in the face of such an immense personal challenge. I especially loved reading it at bedtime, just before I entered the dream world myself. I'd go to sleep full of wonder at the possibilities for healing and guidance available in dreams because Wanda's experiences are sparkling examples. With help from her long-time friend and mentor, shamanic dream counselor, Robert Moss, Wanda has developed a healing path for others to follow into the dreaming. I highly recommend this book for anyone from teens on up.

SHE WHO DREAMS is a powerful book. Wanda Easter Burch gives us a beautiful portrait of a life lived on many levels - as we all live - and, by offering the harrowing and hopeful details of her life, inspires us to look at our own lives with the same degree of curiosity and compassion.

With the quality of pacing and skillful foreshadowing that a seasoned novelist would offer, the author lays out her personal story. On one level it follows her roots in the American South to travels in Africa, important interactions with the Mohawk tribe and her home in a rural New York hamlet. We follow her struggle with cancer including her mastectomy, the emotional despair her chemotherapy induces and, ultimately, her path as one who heals. On another level it follows the story of her dreams. Her childhood is guided by a grandmother who understood the power of dreams to foretell and bring healing. Her adult life is blessed with the incomparable friendship of well-known author and dream explorer, Robert Moss - whom she first met in a childhood dream. The author's dreams insistently foretell of a cancer her doctors repeatedly ignore. As insistently, her dreams predict her death at age 43.

By actively following guidance her dreams provide, the author is led - and leads us - through a healing process that proves, beyond a shadow of doubt, the power of the spirit and the mind. And, even more profound, it leads to a rewriting of a life contract that, in its extension, offers us a writer whose unfolding talents provide unique inspiration that inside each of us lies the ability for our dreams to reveal our own infinite wisdom. Reading SHE WHO DREAMS may well change your life.

Wanda Burch has created and lived a wonderful story of her own powerful creative dreaming and healing which goes way beyond autobiography. She describes her childhood, growing up in the South, being descended from a long line of healers. Her dreaming talents became apparent early in life, and were further developed and expressed through her association and friendship with Robert Moss, a true dream-brother. The author describes a series of dreams which predicted and described in amazing detail the onset and extent of her breast cancer, and the treatments which would be necessary for its healing. She also relates a recurrent dream which had evolved over time since her teens, and predicted her death at age 43. This would have been about a year after her diagnosis with the breast cancer. How she uses her dreams as "medicine" to guide her choices, amplify the effects of the standard breast cancer treatments, and ultimately, in the dreamtime, re-negotiate her life contract makes a gripping and inspiring story. As an added bonus, The author includes many practical and powerful techniques and exercises that everyone can use to tap the power of dreams for guidance and healing. This is further augmented by Robert Moss' Appendix containing clear descriptions of "Lightning Dream Work" and other powerful methods for working with dreams. I believe that this book is a major breakthrough in the fields of dreamwork and healing.

This is an excellent book! It is very poignant story. Her amazing journeys from childhood dream sharing with her grandmother, her visits from her father in her dreams to her journey to Africa, where the villagers also knew of her dreams, is an amazing story. She has proven that there is merit to our dreams. Had she not listened to her dreams, she would not be alive today.

Everyone who has ever had a dream of "premonition" should read this book!

I just finished reading "She Who Dreams" and enjoyed it thoroughly. In this honest and sensitive book of personal dreams, illness, challenges, and recovery, the author shows us how she honored and utilized her dreams to battle a lethal breast cancer. Through her openness, I felt like I had known her for ages and am sure I wasn't the only one who felt that way. With the combination of modern surgery and chemotherapy, topped with her fascinating dreams, the trinity of the healing medicine reversed her path to death. As the small triumphs and wondrous healings took places, doubts about her unknown future also persisted. The life affirmation came from an amazing BIG dream, in which she was allowed to re-negotiate her soul contract. I can't imagine anyone's life be the same again after such an eye-opening dream: it actually gave me chills! Whether facing a serious life challenge or leading a mundane life, reading this book encourages one to pay more attention to personal dream messages and integrate them into waking life. I highly recommend this inspirational book to anyone who needs to dream which includes us all.

"She Who Dreams" is an insightful overview of a life that brings us to a solid realization of the power of choice in our own lives. This is especially true when life threatening illness knocks us out of complacent routines and makes those choices actual life or death decisions.
Wanda Burch has put a spotlight on how necessary--indeed essential--it is that we participate in our own healing.
Furthermore, she has sketched out ways in which we may participate in our own healing by using dream imagery to bring the energy and healing power of deeper levels of our being to bear on our everyday choices.
Burch's techniques may appear deceptively simple, but --as the author proves again and again from her own experience--the potential of dreamwork to heal even the most chronic conditions--whether physical or emotional--is vast.
This book is a "must read" for anyone battling serious illness. The dream imagery guidance it offers on how to be a prime participant in one's own healing could make a life or death difference.
For all of us, this book is a valuable guide to living more fully, to healing the wounds which living inevitably brings, to avoiding many pitfalls before we become enmeshed in them, and to finding certainty that the enrgy and power to see us through is there--and spelled out on the "neon sign" of our dreams.
Paying attention to dreams, actively working with dreams, is part of a successful formula for living, through good times or bad. Applause for this brave author in baring her rough road through illness to health, and for showing us all how to do it using our own dreams as our best "consultant."

Wanda Burch has done a great service for anyone who has ever gone to a doctor and been sent home because "it's nothing to worry about". Well, yes, sometimes that's so - sometimes it's difficult to distinguish what's Real from what's neurosis. And yet sometimes we get very clear messages about things, and we MUST learn to listen to those feelings. By doing so, Wanda saved her own life. As she says in this beautiful book, Wanda is alive because she dreams. I would amend that to say that she is alive because she Listens to her dreams, and Does something about them.
It really comes down to self-respect, self-worth, and self-knowledge. Whether one's belief system sees dreams as coming from a higher place, or from subliminal intuition, or from daily "brain-drain", the fact remains that if we look at dreams analytically, there's a chance that we'll find something important. If we don't, we certainly won't. And what a shame.
I thank Wanda Burch for writing such an inspiring book. Just since reading it, I have made some observations on my own dreams that I might not have thought of before, and have looked back on times when I had "gut feelings" about situations that later turned out to be dead-on accurate. This is remarkable work, and more people should avail themselves of the healing that comes so naturally with the Dreaming!
Readers may also like to know that Wanda can be seen in a wonderful new series of videos with Robert Moss, called "The Way of the Dreamer" and available from Psyche Productions in Milford CT. Open yourself to the experience of your own dreams!