You know how a good dream makes you feel great? And a bad dream does the exact opposite? So what do dreams mean, and how can they help you kick negative thoughts to the curb and improve your life?

Sometimes they are seemingly random. Other times they are obviously about a life event or struggle. Have you considered what your dreams are telling you?

Some psychologists put a lot of stock in dreams, considering them higher forms of contemplation. Makes sense if you think of dreams as distraction free thought that is much more intuitive than our ordinary daily thoughts.

Not only are dreams interesting, but may be tools to a better life. By paying attention to what your mind is mulling over while you catch your Zs, you can unveil what’s troubling you, working for you, and even gain help in making decisions.

Carl Jung may have been one of the original believers, but dream symbolism is becoming increasingly popular. While dreams are as individual as the dreamer, there are certain themes that seem to run true. Jung disciple and psychotherapist, Carder Stout, recently did a fascinating interview with GOOP that went further into the dream/reality connection.

Stout says not only do our dreams connect with our subconscious, but with universal archetypes. For instance, those naked in public dreams that crop up from time to time? You may be feeling vulnerable or unprotected in some way. Dreaming of a scary woman, maybe even someone you know? This isn’t so much about them as you, representing a part of our own personality that we aren’t so crazy about. And every mother out there is likely familiar with the misplaced child nightmare. Guess what, that one is not a premonition of bad parenting, but a signal that you may be denying the childlike qualities in yourself and need to have more fun. What a relief!

Ready to delve deeper into your own psyche? Start by making notes on dreams in the morning and see if you can come up with real life connections that speak to you. Or type your dream character or symbol into DreamsCloud, a free app that shares insights and scenarios on dreams. Read up on dream interpretation with “Your Mind at Night: Dream Interpretation Guide for Beginners” by Frances Long and “Beginner’s Guide to Dream Interpretation: Uncover the Hidden Riches of Your Dreams with Jungian Analyst“.

Think of dreams as meditation while you sleep, opening up greater insight into the true you. What do you think? Interested in dream analysis?

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Always trust your gut. It knows what your head hasn’t figured out yet. ~Unknown

We are programmed, here in the West, to run to our physician whenever we aren’t feeling well. Of course, there are times this is warranted. But many times our gut is trying to tell us something.

By gut I mean our intuition. You’ve heard the term trust your gut? Listening to our bodies and inner wisdom can go a long way toward maintaining balance and good health.

What is Intuition?

So how do we tap into this inner wisdom? What if ours isn’t speaking very loudly? What if we can’t hear it at all?

You know how you just knew that your aunt was going to call, or were thinking about an acquaintance only to run into them later the same day? That’s not a coincidence, it’s your intuition. Sure, some are more open to their inner wisdom than others. But the good news is we all have to ability to get in touch with our intuition.

How to Tap Into Your Intuition

You likely won’t be surprised to learn that meditation is one very effective way to get in touch with your inner wisdom. Remember, this does not have to be a rigorous practice. There are many ways to meditate. The idea is to get quiet and listen to your inner voice.

Another way to get in touch with your body and intuition is by balancing your chakras. Intuitive, Jill Willard, offers a great chakra balancing breakdown on GOOP. Read it to find out how to open your third eye.

And finally, just do it. Stop writing it off as a coincidence or imagination. If you feel strongly about something it is likely for good reason. That stomach keep nagging you or just feeling off? Pay attention, dig into it, see if you can put your finger on what’s happening in your body or if your aches and pains are physical signs of stress.

Change Your Mind, Change Your Health

Did you know that our emotions can play out in physical ways? Louise Hay’s book “You Can Heal Your Life” has a super useful and comprehensive list of physical ailments and their emotional counterparts, along with healing mantras for each. I refer to this list regularly and it is amazing how often it is spot on. For instance, say you have lower back pain. The probable emotional cause is fear of money or lack of security. Have an earache? This represents anger and not wanting to hear what is going on around you.

Our emotions are ruled not so much by what is actually going in our lives as our perception of what’s going on. Our thoughts. This quote by my favorite Ayurvedic, Monica Bloom, tells the whole story — If you want to change your body, you must first change your mind.

Whoa! That’s deep. But what, exactly, does it mean?

Monica explains that our health is largely due to the decisions we make. What we eat, how much we exercise, our stress patterns, are all governed by our thoughts. Which, though it sometimes seems otherwise, we have control over.

Reigning in our thoughts and making good choices leads to better health. Sure, none of us are perfect and we all go overboard in one area or another. That’s where balance comes in. Have a margarita and three cupcakes on Saturday? Clean up your act on Sunday. This is life after all, and if cupcakes make you happy, then have one once in a while. Just remember, cupcakes everyday won’t make you so happy.

Go deep, get in touch with your intuition and what it is telling you, stop ignoring your own inner voice. What it has to say is important to your health, wellbeing, and happiness.

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No, I’m not referring to the razor (though they do save oodles of time, don’t they?) – I’m talking about the other women’s intuition: The internal compass that helps you make important life decisions. We all have one, but do we remember how to use it?

There are many women who aren’t going after what they want – they’re going after what they think they want. I used to be one of them. I’ve spent most of my life perpetually confused, as I’m sure many of you have. As young girls, we were taught the all-important mantra:

Be yourself.

Yet as adults, when we actually started living this mantra and dedicating ourselves to a life of coloring outside the lines, everywhere we turned someone was looking at us like this:

Clearly, we missed the little asterisk after our mantra that indicated the following footnote:

*Just like everybody else.

The incessant, contradictory tug-of-war between what others expect of us and what we want for ourselves has left us lost, quashing the most important voice in the room: Our own.

More specifically, our women’s intuition.

“As women, we’ve spent so much time and effort living up to the standards of a patriarchal society that we’ve almost completely disconnected from our own deepest, authentic truth,” says Leela Francis, author of “Woman’s Way Home: Navigating Your Path to Embodied Power.” In her book, she discusses the importance of telling the difference between ego-driven and intuitive decisions.

Ego vs. Women’s Intuition

Let’s say you’re offered a job that pays double what you make now. Your ego tells you to snap up the opportunity – you even start browsing for the new wardrobe you’re going to buy with your new salary. However, once the initial adrenaline wears off, you start to feel panicked and queasy. That’s your women’s intuition telling you it needs a consult.

This is where our ego and women’s intuition battle it out like a couple on the verge of divorce: When the line blurs between what we really want and what we feel obligated to want, we lose touch with our instincts and end up making decisions that conflict with our personal integrity.

It’s most helpful if you can recall times in your life when the outcome of a situation didn’t meet your deepest needs. Can you look back and recall an intuitive nudge that you didn’t pay attention to or an inner stirring that was tugging at your awareness but which you didn’t heed?

“Woman’s Way Home: Navigating Your Path to Embodied Power”

Yep. Every decision I made in my twenties. So how do we stop letting ego run the show and give our women’s intuition more of a say?

Take Women’s Intuition for a Test Drive

Francis suggests using the following exercise to help you recognize when your women’s intuition is sending up a flare:

1. Pick a decision, any decision, that you’ve been struggling to make.

2. Write down all of the options you have to choose from.

3. Label each option as “ego-driven” or “intuition-driven.”

4. Think about each option one at a time: How do you feel about them? Define the quality of each based on the sensation.

Go back and forth between your ego-driven and intuition-driven options so you can feel the difference between the two. Once you’re able to do so fluently, you’ll finally be able to live your life on your own terms – and you know, not like this:

How often do you listen to your women’s intuition?

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ColumnSometimes it is worth ditching the guidebook.

Barcelona, the land of tapas and Tempranillo.

I was there for a few days exploring the food scene, pretending I knew how to speak some odd combination of Spanish and Catalan while on an ongoing mission to eat pimientos padrón.

“That place looks perfect. Let’s come back here.”

We were on a small street just off of popular pedestrian route Passeig del Born. There was a corner bar, filled with locals, simple interior and a few stragglers outside smoking a cigarette with a glass of beer in hand. What about that place screamed, ‘get your next round of tapas’? I have no idea, but there was something about it that made it pop from all of the others.

And so we returned, ordered a round of patates bravas, pimientos padrón, a Spanish tortilla and a few glasses of vino tinto. It was the best meal of the entire trip. Simple. Delicious. Relaxed. Unpretentious.

I looked around the bar. There were mostly locals, of all ages. The decor was modern but relaxed, the drink selection written above the bar on a black chalkboard in all caps. This wasn’t a trendy spot. It was just a good spot. The kind of place you go for good food and good conversation.

There is a sense of pleasure derived from finding a good food spot all on my own. Following intuition until it takes you somewhere you never would have expected or would have planned. The serendipity of searching for food.

In the information age, there are a multitude of ways of finding a place to eat, and even if you skimped on buying a guidebook, there’s always Google. While this keeps us on our toes, and with a laundry list of culinary hotspots we should visit while we are in a new place, does it detract from the magic of finding something spontaneously? We’re so glued to our smartphones, reading reviews of what other people thought of a place that we have a preconceived notion before we ever even walk in and order.

There is something to be said for doing your research beforehand. If you love craft roast coffee then it can be hard to blindly wander the streets of a new place in search of a cafe. And if you want to taste local artisan beers, you might want to track down an address or two before heading out. But there is something to be said for not knowing, not having a plan and simply following your intuition, wandering until something strikes your fancy, trying something without knowing what it is, or asking a local where to go. You know, all those things we used to do.

I have a long list of places in Barcelona that were the result of lots of reading and Googling. But my two absolute favorite spots in the city? Two places that I randomly happened across. Maybe because I found them myself, maybe because they were the kind of places that I like to frequent – simple settings with good ingredients – but also maybe because they were both a reminder of the essence of travel: exploration. And when it comes to food, we could all explore a little more.

***

My two favorite spots? Really I should let you find them on your own, but if you are in Barcelona don’t miss Bormuth for simple, cheap and fantastic tapas and Granja Petitbo for coffee and baked goods.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Images: Anna Brones

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Take off the blind fold will you. I mean, will I, can I?

Tunnel vision, oh god, I have had such a serious case!

After hours spent alone in the house, after sewing non stop for days (insert Project Runway flashbacks) and after vision skewed physically and mentally, the arduous process of inner struggle took hold. And I found myself wondering – is the role of a designer to tell you what to wear now, or what to wear next?

First and foremost I am a woman. And on a personal level, creation is about asking the question, “What is it that I want to wear, can’t find or what speaks to me personally?” The benefit of being a designer is getting to translate desires into design. I want to make clothes, not costumes. I myself play dress up daily, to self express. Designing the items that lack in a wardrobe, my wardrobe is the approach I take.

What makes a good designer great is their ability to listen to their own creative voice and intuition, rather than the public or mainstream. Translating to you, technically speaking, what it is we want to wear. And for you that means what we want you to be wearing next.

After a mildly terrifying review (to be honest the most “positive-bad” critique of my life), during the midpoint in this season’s sampling, my intuition was confirmed. What I had created and presented throughout past seasons and the viewing of PR, had lost its relevancy within my creative hand. And did not and does not work within the context of the direction my work (and self) is taking. Which begs the question – are designers dictators or fortune tellers?

Perhaps a little bit of both.

If you liked what it is that I have created, if you want what I was feeding you a year ago, even six weeks ago, why wouldn’t that be my focus, the next idea? The beauty of this industry is that it works with the way I create. The second I am finished with a concept, I move on. Not holding onto what it is that I have created, but what it is I will create next. Fashion design enables constant dialogue. Communicating in a manner that translates the context or chapter last lived and exposed to, while looking onto the next horizon. Anna Wintour once said “Fashion is not about looking back, it’s about looking forward.”

Agreed.

As I left my critique this past week, with three out of nine designs safe, two in critical care and a few left for the morgue, I thought to myself – what is it that I wasn’t listening to or seeing? My intuition, that’s what.

I am where I am today because I stay convicted. I trust in the direction I am taking because I must. The best part about fashion is that it is objective. If the direction doesn’t suit you, if it doesn’t look like the road you were on with me last season, you can hop off. Or you can trust that your future may just come in a different shade of Gretchen.

For now, eight days left, eight garments remaining.

This is the fourth piece in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

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