Borrowing Clothes from 3 Sisters

DREAM that I was with a group of young people and we were staying in a house or building for a week. It was the last day or night and I was upstairs looking for my clothes to get dressed for a meal downstairs. But I couldn’t find anything of mine. Eventually I gave up and put on some clothes I found that fit me. I told an older woman who was some kind of authority figure. She listened attentively then called over 3 sisters and said I should explain to them. I assumed the clothes I put on belonged to them. The youngest was only a small child, about 6 y.o. I told them that someone must have taken my clothes, clean ones that I’ve laundered, and dirty ones too, that I looked everywhere and in other people’s stuff, wearing only my underwear. I only had those because I always had them on. Finally I chose a sweater, jersey-knit and light grey, with a cowl neck and pouch pocket in the front, and a pair of calf-length pants. They were short of course but I thought it would be okay with my boots.

The sisters listened to me but didn’t appear to pay much attention, as if the clothes weren’t theirs, or they don’t care. They were distracted by what else was happening in the vicinity. I remember looking at the contents of one bag I searched through. Instead of clothes it had loose sheets of pictures of women models, like fashion shots, post-card sized but on magazine paper. All the rooms were full of clutter, things everywhere. Typical young people chaos.

DREAMWORK:

Clothes… my personas… both are of paramount importance when we’re young and/or immature. In our appearance driven culture, you could say it’s a group dilemma or collective affliction. In the dream I am one of those young people, and bound by my conditioning which said that I had to look acceptable (get dressed, upstairs) before I could get the nourishment I need (meals, downstairs) from the collective (society). But I had lost all of my personas (outer garments), all the resolved and unresolved issues that they carry (cleaned and dirty laundry), yet my ego is still wanting to belong, to be accepted by the standards of contemporary society (still looking for clothes to wear). I still want to be somebody, do something ‘useful’ in the eyes of my peers, earn recognition and rewards. My ego wants validation, inflation.

I found a quick fix with ‘borrowed’ stuff, so I could appear in public. The top was really stylized monkish wear, with a modified cowl and flared sleeves, the pouch was a touch of the peasant incorporated, and it was a colourless light grey. It was comfortable and fit me well. The capris were also comfortable though a bit funny looking when seen above socks, but only because I was indoors. It would be okay when I put boots on to go out (into the world). Capris suggest youthful freedom and optimism to me, like holiday adventure wear. These are what I chose, based on my priorities for what I want in life: vitality, freedom, optimism, adventure, joy, as well as spiritual contemplation and solitude, connection with the divine as well as my own humanness, and with the world. So if it takes borrowing a temporary persona to connect all these dots, so be it. I can face up to it and humble myself to ask the Goddess (woman authority figure) for guidance. What then, is this ‘borrowed’ outfit that I need? The top is a contemporized novice monk/mystic shirt, the bottom is the freedom to explore, dance, leap, and move with vigor and flow. Does this make a picture of someone who is spiritually centred in the midst of humanity? Well that’s who I want to be.

The 3 sisters, I feel, are the immature representations of the 3 stages of the feminine: maiden, mother, and crone. They are as yet underdeveloped in me, the maiden is only a small child, and I haven’t connected to them, so they are not paying me full attention. They are still attracted to and distracted by the drama and sensory stimulations pervasive around them. So with each of these stages of life I have work to do, as I well know. What to do, I do not know. I guess I give them (and myself) time, and keep watching for opportunities to further my maturity.

The ‘fashion plates’ I found in that bag, which looked substantial from the outside at first, puffed up and full, was disappointingly insubstantial. No actual clothes in it, only slick pictures. This, and all the details in this dream were almost painstakingly delineated and vivid, as if of great significance, as if this dream wants me to really get all the nuances of the ‘reality’ of my situation. I have been disappointed by the refinements of the world, but this is showing me that even the refinements aren’t real. They are mere images, constructs of appearances that we are led to aspire to. We make mannikins out of ourselves to put on these outer appearances, and tell each other and ourselves how great we look, how we’ve come up in the world, that this is what we want in life, and inwardly miserable because we constantly measure ourselves and others by it…

I’ve lost count how many dreams I’ve had that carried this same message, that I am still a captive of the mothership society I grew up in, still the slavering dog after the pats and treats from my master, still measuring myself against the gold standard of patriarchy. Why can’t I make the shift? Because I have now labelled them ‘them’, and they and I are of divided loyalty, purpose, meaning, and everything else that matters. I have drawn a deep dark line between ‘them’ and me, so as to show that I am not them, I am not like them, and more subversively, I am good and they are bad. So the split in me is one inch ahead and two inches back… In fact, I am still one of ‘them’, and I know now that I am meant to be one of them in this life, as mine is not the path of the renunciate or hermit.

So am I to embrace and accept status quo?!? I feel though, that that is not the question nor the point. The point is not to judge, not to create sides so I could take one and declare the other the antithesis. The point is that I stay grounded in stillness and walk the middle way, observe what goes on around me, and be open to receive what the present is telling me, not be distracted by these essentially illusory and egoic tactcs and hoops I put myself through. I don’t have to cut myself off from involvement of the worldly, just pass through it and let it pass through me. Don’t get caught up in the politics of spiritual pursuit. Don’t make politics.

Quartet of Dreams

DREAMS & BITS:

1) I am looking down from our 2nd or 3rd floor home out of the front window and seeing some people walk their dogs on the ground below. One dog I noticed was wearing a very fashionable and tailored outfit. I point this out to my mother who is in the room but she is dismissive.

2) I have just pulled my car into the parking pad outside our house when another car drives by between my car and our front door, deftly turned in front of my car and pulled into a space in the parking pad next to ours, literally a hair away from an identical car already parked there and lines up to it perfectly. A young woman with long black wavy hair gets out and I compliment her on her parking skill. She makes a vague noise or gesture and leaves. I head to our door and notice the dash of my ex-husband’s car is crammed full of garbage like candy wrappers and old pieces of paper. Somehow my car is parked inside his like a car on a ferry boat. I took out some of the garbage to get rid of it.

3) I see a woman stripping herself naked swiftly and pulls a long dress over herself. The dress is of natural fibre like sackcloth and sewn like a wide loop, with a hole at one end for the head and 2 holes at the other for the feet to go through. The sides are of course, completely open.

4) I walk into the house and see my dad’s blueprints on the table (he was an engineer), I wonder to myself whether he got bored with retirement or did the company ask him to work. There was the word ‘Queen’ or ‘Queensway’ on it.

DREAMWORK:

1) I am up in my head looking down again, keeping my safe distance from the general unwashed world out there, down there. Dogs are for me the sociable, eager-to-please faces we put on in public, but a drive for survival nonetheless. I see other people as overdressing their public personas, for acceptance, for ambition, for power, but do I still have that need in myself, even though I’ve distanced myself from that world? My own assessment is that I am less so than I used to be, but how firmly grounded am I? I am not so detached that I have stopped noticing what goes on in the world of achievement and acquisition and vertical growth. I am still comparing myself to them everyday, telling myself that I’m not like them, that I’m following a higher calling, etc. But underneath all that peptalk is fear. I am still shaky in my faith, and my mother in the dream, my shadow and my critic, is less than impressed.

2) The woman in this dream is not unlike my mother in the first dream. They are both dismissive of me, not bothering to look at me nor talk to me. As shadow figures, they are a bit hostile. Perhaps because I am not receptive to them?

I made it home in my car, my personal vehicle and drive, and parked – I have arrived. Everything was just ever so slightly smaller than normal, kind of hobbit-sized, and the parking pad was really just dug out of dirt and crude, a bit primitive and ‘organic’ looking. Everything was also compactly spaced, although it felt more cozy than claustrophobic. The woman, my neighbour, my shadow, drove right around me, coming up from my right and across to my left, expertly. There was just enough space for her car to get by, and she managed the 90˚ corner as only a dream can accommodate. But she went straight to the spot, didn’t waste any time or energy. The car beside hers was a twin, and like 2 front teeth they were so close together. So my shadow is driven by several things? An identical pair, plus a different one off to one side (there was another car already parked there off to one side). Hmmm… I’ve the feeling the 2 identical cars are 2 halves of a whole, a split. She is driven by a split, plus another that has been there longer.

Then to my surprise I discovered that I was actually parked ‘inside’ my ex-husband’s car, his drive, a part of my masculine I had rejected and thought I was done with long ago. What part of me, or my drive, does he represent? Worldly, immature, primitive, crude, an echo of the parking space, and apparently unkempt with old garbage. At the same time grounded in the physical, and relies mostly on survival instincts. Being in the physical and instinctive is not usually my forté, therefore what I need. I need more brawn to go with my brain, but I have old issues with it, which is really just garbage I can let go of now.

The dream is showing me what’s going on with my feminine, what my shadow wants me to know, as well as what needs to be done for my masculine. These are personal level, close-to-home stuff that I can take care of, although I am at a loss to say what the split is in my feminine. And why isn’t she living with me, but next door? Is she a part I’ve rejected? The long black wavy hair suggests a romantic freedom, perhaps an ideal I’ve disconnected from? She was wearing a dark thick winter coat, so maybe to do with depression and a cold indifference? I certainly got that feeling from her. I am reminded suddenly that that’s how I was when I was married to my ex – young and idealistic to begin with, later hardened into bitterness and indifference. I have never brought her back into my embrace, even as I healed those old wounds, never loved her back into life. She is stuck in that image I have of myself then, all I’ve done for her is admit that she is a part of my nature. I know her, but I do not love her. I call her The Bitch, as in Bitch-on-Wheels, which she definitely was in this dream, ha ha…! The unconscious can be so subtle and blunt at the same time… The Bitch is impatient, brusque, cold, and immune to flattery because she is so jaded and toughened by her bitterness. Most of all, she hates men, and my ex was definitely the prime target for all of my venom.

So there’s old garbage I need to clean up, old beliefs like stereotyping the kind of man my ex was, and stereotyping men in general – the insensitive, inconsiderate, tunnel-visioned, infantile meatheads that they are – as my rantings went yesterday on my way to the grocery store. I know very well that biologically men are women are made for different functions but ALL serve Life, so why do I still cling to the old conditioning that ‘women and men are equal’ means we can all do and excel at the same thing? We don’t, just as one person does not necessarily excel in the same thing as the next person. I need to see through that unforgiving way of looking at gender equality through the militant feminist lens, which is often extreme and just as biased as what it tries to balance against. This is what lurks in my shadow, and that’s the split in my feminine. In my heart I have learned the truth, though my head is still crammed with old garbage.

3) Woman in a simply and ingeniously designed sack dress… hmmm… Is she a monk? A penitant? I can see how I’ve wanted to become someone like that, detach from the ties that bind, and trade it all in for the drastically simpler and more single-minded way of life of the retreatant. The loop form of the dress is significant, because it suggests a circle, endlessness. The retreat does not end with time, it is a state of mind, a way of life that continues even when I move on to do something else in life, even when I go back out into the world, even when I am busy doing something else besides contemplation. I don’t have to renounce the world in order to live in sacred contemplation. But why the open sides? It leaves me vulnerable from the sides, because I need that vulnerability, that openness, as I’ve only lately discovered.

4) My dad, my masculine authority, has chosen to come out of ‘retirement’ and accept work in his old trade (engineering). But the prominence of the word ‘Queen’ tells me that this time the authority is also feminine. I am coming back out of my retirement from the world and returning to my old work. Healing? Design? No… Creativity. I am coming back as my creative best.

Gift of Vulnerability

1) I was in the kitchen feeding the cat, an orange cat, and discovered that a bag of cat food had been infested by mice. Chewed right through the top of the bag, and there were clumps of white fluffy things puffing out of it when I was just about to reach in, like cotton stuffing from a futon. I freaked and ran downstairs into the basement where a couple of groups of young people were gathered. I went to the first group in one room but they were too busy to give me attention. I went to the second group and said to the girl closest to the entrance, softly but urgently, “I have an emergency!” But she just turned back to the group and ignored me. I became angry because this was my house they were in, how dare they ignore me!

Then I saw on the floor a mouse running by, which I announced to a girl beside me, but the mouse was not running but lying on its back and propelling itself with its long tail spinning fast, like a windmill, or the propeller of a boat. There was a fraction of an inch of water on the floor.

2) I was in a drugstore shopping. The final item I was looking for was natural toothpaste. I couldn’t find any so I asked a store clerk for help. She was a young East Indian with long black hair parted in the middle. She pointed to the display in front of the checkout, but there were people in the line-up obscuring it. I got in there and looked, but there was nothing left. I went to checkout but there was no one at the station, so I sat down in front of the cash register and tried to do it myself. I scanned the items from my bag, but not thoroughly, some may have been missed. I intended it that way, as a way of compensating myself for not getting what I wanted. I hit ‘subtotal’ at the end and saw that the screen said ‘small circle’ and ‘large circle’ in Chinese (the same character can also mean ‘coin’), as if they were options. I didn’t understand but continued to slide my credit card in the slot. Then the cashier came and asked if I was finished, I told her I was just paying. She said “Oh no, you don’t have to pay because we have inconvenienced you. You are to go to the back. We have something for you.”

My sister, who was also there, came and escorted me to the back room where it was full of small stalls, like a public washroom but without the toilets. More like change rooms but without doors. The small space was full of people, women I think, chatting, hanging out. It was like a lounge but crowded and shabby because the décor was outdated. But everyone seemed content and relaxed, happily engaged in conversation. In the centre was a grouping of chairs, and those were mostly occupied too, but on one chair I saw a nicely wrapped package, like a gift. I thought that was what I was getting, but my sister led me to a stall nearby, and it was decorated with party ware. Shiny streamers, bows, balloon, with a larger gift package sitting on a chair.

DREAMWORK:

In both dreams the light was not full, as if it was incandescently lit… subconscious stuff…

1) Feeding my personal drive and ambition (cat, orange) but the ‘food’ has been infested by fear (mice). This fear has seriously undermined me, beaten the stuffing out of me, literally. I ran to my unconscious (basement) for help but the two groups of people in the two rooms were too preoccupied to spare me any attention. They each seemed to be having a serious discussion of some kind. There was an intensity in the rooms, and everyone was very focused.

My knee-jerk reaction to fear is still one of avoidance, of stuffing it down or pushing it away. I don’t always have the presence of mind to own it, embrace it, stay with it until something else happens. Especially this fear of going back out into the world, of vulnerability. This fear that comes of not being rooted in my Self, and overly invested in personal ego, that shows up as lack of self confidence and assertiveness, as self-consciousness.

Yet when I did get up the nerve to look at my fear (the mouse), it was doing the most unlikely thing! Totally hilarious once I got over the shock. The fear is capable of navigating emotional water, shallow as it is, really nothing to worry about, and seems to be quite self sufficient (self propelling!) and resourceful. It appeared to be enjoying itself. This certainly took out most of the terror-induced adrenaline explosion for me.

Embrace my vulnerability? Admit I have thin skin and high sensitivity to anything abrasive? I’ve tried so hard for so long to appear the very opposite, jaded and tough old girl that I am. I, who have always disdained the showing of weakness and fragility, have to face my own share of them underneath the stuffing and the shirt… Do I even know how? I don’t feel that I do. It occurs to me suddenly that this fear, this vulnerability, has something to tell me. Being so open to all things external is a gift. It preserves innocence because it experiences everything anew, it sees with new eyes, feels with new skin, exclaims with wonder, is moved and cleansed by pain and joy, and finds a new perspective, each time, time after time. It is not so much an act of courage but an inability to close itself off.

Hold gently this vulnerability, and cherish it like a gem, for it is from this place of rawness and tenderness that I can best express the depth and authenticity of my Self.

2) Another dream on the self-help or self-serve theme… Searching for natural ‘cleaning product’ for my teeth, keeping them in good condition until the time when I can sink them into something worthwhile. But now I am prompted to ask some basic questions, such as: What does shopping mean to me? What does a store mean? What does a checkout?

These are recurrent symbols in my dreams, and very commonplace in waking life, but why are they so significant for me? I’ve always related it to my core personality of the enneatype epicurean, who inclines toward variety, options, thrills, hedonism, excess, pleasure, optimism, insatiability, jack-of-all-trades & master-of-none… A store symbolizes abundance to me, with its seemingly endless display of options and variety, possibilities for stimulation, the pleasure of the hunt and the fulfillment of gathering. This is heaven, where my personality and ego wants to go when it dies. The checkout means the point of gratification, when I claim the objects of my desire, the height of fulfillment. After that point everything’s downhill. Quite often I don’t even need those objects anymore, except in the sense of having something to try and sustain satiety. They may sit in a box in a corner for decades and never get used.

In this dream, it is a drugstore where one goes to get health-related product, so this is about healing. But I couldn’t get what I wanted, toothpaste, even after seeking help from my shadow. No spontaneous fulfillment of desire here. I cannot have control of my health, I cannot cure myself of every ill. I cannot prevent my teeth from falling out of my head if the Great Spirit wills it, no matter how much preventives I use. It’s true I have been actively, sometimes aggressively even, hunting down anything that ails me, digging into wounds, lifting scabs, and directing most of my energy into healing myself. But like everything I’ve ever sought after in life, I get caught up in the thrill of the hunt, and don’t know when to back off, when to stop. Is it time to take a breather, sit down and cast a level eye at where I’m at and what’s around?

In the dream I even tried to check myself out, cheating a little no less, self-indulgence self-served. The option of small coin or large coin in Chinese I didn’t understand while in the dream, but it seems to mean ‘win small or win big’ to me now, or ‘get small or get big’. Which do I go for? Somehow I’ve never dared to ask for the big win, to really dream big, to put all of myself on the line. But the time has come for me to consciously and decidedly make that choice, on the threshold of this momentous time of my life. Dare? Dare! If it be your will, Great Spirit, bring on the big!

I see now what I did not realize in the dream, the small gift on the chair in the back room, then the big gift in the decorated ‘stall’. Back room again too, this is the 4th dream with reference to ‘the back’, I think. This time I was directed to the back room, by my sister, my shadow familiar, who I trust. This is the 2nd dream in which I’ve won a surprise gift – is it a gift in myself that I’ve not recognized? In the previous surprise gift dream, the gift was my vulnerability, as was the message from the first dream I had today (see #1 above). Is the gift, which was wrapped and remained unseen in this particular dream, also vulnerability? Or something else? Perhaps another aspect of it? I don’t know, but the setting suggested a celebration of joy, and although the space was tight and outdated, a humble no-frill kind of place, it was clean and tidy, and full of the warmth of people and harmonious energy. Each group was doing its own thing, relating in its own circle (or stall, a ‘stall’ being a physical separation or division for the purpose of grouping and sharing, not to alienate or segregate), but all are safely held and connected within the whole space as one. It was like a speak-easy in the back of a bar under prohibition. It’s where life really takes place, where we are our true selves, relating to each other authentically. It is in the back because this way of living is still the ‘alternative’ style, not mainstream society where what’s true is often prohibited.

Can’t wait to see what this gift is, and what I will do with it, or, what it will do with me.

Drycleaning by Archangel Michael

DREAM that I was at a drycleaner and the woman behind the counter was telling me that it is better to have heavier items like bathrobes drycleaned. She was folding some dress shirts but I remember seeing a white bathrobe like Michael’s. I wanted to know why, was it economics? It seemed to me cleaning shirts yourself would be more complicated. So she handed me a pamphlet but it was purple type on black background, and near-impossible to read, though it was glossy and nicely printed. I stepped into more light but it was no use.

DREAMWORK:

Interesting that before I had this dream I was in that halfway place between sleep and waking, a time when things just float into my half-consciousness. This time it was about prescriptions for cleanses:

Heart Cleanse: Gratitude
Liver Cleanse: Forgiveness
Kidney Cleanse: Trust
Colon Cleanse: Surrender
Whole System Cleanse: Prayer

I scribbled this down in the dark, then went back to sleep.

So I am going to go with the ‘cleaning’ angle, but drycleaning is not do-it-self cleaning. It is hiring a specialist to do it for you. The specialist in the dream, my shadow figure(?), was giving me professional advice: have heavier articles cleaned professionally instead of the lighter stuff. Do I need to take my bigger and heavier issues to the professionals, instead of trying to resolve them on my own? Who are the professionals? Somehow the human variety doesn’t seem right… Professional spirits… I didn’t know there were such thing… or category… Emissaries of the Great Spirit, such as angels, animal spirits, and elementals. I am feeling a strong pull toward angels suddenly, even though I’ve never been before, and do not even celebrate Christmas.

I am to take my big issues, my core fear of being trapped for one, to an angel. Just one, not a whole choir. I don’t need to know who or when or where or how. I don’t need to analyze or compare or research the subject, they will not enlighten my mind, no matter how extensive, explicit, glossy and sophisticated the information is presented.

Something I am still missing about the dream… Michael’s bathrobe. Archangel Michael. That’s specific enough. Without doing any research I recall that he wields the sword of truth, and is ruthless and unsentimental when it comes to cutting out any manner of bullshit or falsehood. Hmmm… this will be cleansing indeed…

I am open to meeting and receiving Archangel Michael into my life. I am ready, though a little afraid. Thank you, Michael, my dreams, and Great Spirit.

The Milk of Forgiveness

DREAM that I kept avoiding eye contact with an ex-boyfriend who was hovering near me. I was sitting down, keeping busy doing things, he was standing to my right…

DREAMWORK: This is a recurrent theme, in dreams and waking life, of avoiding eye contact with someone. There is in it aloofness, arrogance, vulnerability, resistance, and my core fear of being trapped. It says I am unforgiving, I want to be separate from you, I don’t want to change my attitude about you. I reject you, because you have rejected me, because you might reject me. I won’t accept you, because you’ve not accepted me. Still that split of ‘me or you’, ‘me or them’. And I can’t face it because I fear the pain of rejection, because the pain had been too great.

How to heal this pain of rejection? I can’t make it go by will, it is too deep. I can see its jagged red roots like blades embedded in my abdomen, and I’m afraid to try and pull it out lest it creates more damage. It has to be melted, and I can do that with intention. It melted into nothingness, leaving root-shaped empty space where it used to be. It needs to be filled with something else. A milky white substance appears and slowly fills the space. It is the milk of forgiveness. I let out a big exhale. I have forgiven you, just as I feel forgiven by you. I have forgiven them, those who have transgressed against me, and I am forgiven my transgressions.

I recall the people who have hurt me, the pain from which I carried to this day, those I loved, those I hated, those I didn’t care about, those I depended on, those I passed by. I think of a few of them, a few of the stings I am familiar with, and I see that they rejected me because I had rejected them first, even though I hadn’t meant to present it that way, I hadn’t meant to hurt them. Although I am not accountable for their reactions, I can allow myself to be more loving, kind, and generous, by opening my heart to these energies. I can choose to be a channel for these, and keep this floodgate open, instead of keeping to myself out of fear.

What an immense gift, this milk of forgiveness, when I had little idea I still held grudges against so many, for so long. Honestly, it was like self-induced amnesia! But now I thank the Great Spirit and my dreams, as always, for this healing, for this day, for this life.

Sneaking In The Back Door...

DREAM that I was in an apartment building or condo complex, but for some reason I was sneaking around, trying not to be seen. The light was dim. I wanted to get from one apartment to another, and predictably there were many obstacles, like people, doors, walls, balconies, fire exits. Somehow I got through them, but towards the end of my escapade a father – dark skinned like an east indian – saw me and held the door open for me, because he knew my name from some fame I had.

Eventually I ended up on the ground floor, there a Chinese mother with a young daughter stopped me and wanted to set up an appointment with me for the girl. I was a teacher or a healer or something. I decided to go along with this and sat down in a chair in the hall. The mother was running down the child’s schedule to decide on a time, I was only half listening, still a bit shaken at having been discovered. She gave me some money and said that’s for the first 20 minutes of the 100 minutes. I looked down and saw that there were rolls and loose bills lying on me, from the father I ran into before. Then they were ready to leave, so I got up to walk them to the front exit, and the mother said “So we’ll see you Thursday at 10”. I realized that I wasn’t paying enough attention and didn’t know whether she meant 10 am or pm. I smiled and asked the girl with pretended casualness whether it was am or pm, and she said pm. I thought that was late but had to go with it now. All the while in the back of my mind I knew I was coming back to my work that I had taken leave of for a time, and had not planned to come back to, but I also felt a determination that I will not let it overrun me this time. I felt capable of drawing the line now.

DREAMWORK:

If this dream’s portent is telling me what I think it is telling me – that I will be going back to healing work with children – then my first reaction is one of fear. But I know that’s from old baggage. I have done a fair bit of work on the issues that caused me to withdraw – my fear of being trapped in responsibility for others, my lack of boundary, my lack of self confidence and self assurance, plus a bit of wisdom and insight that I did not have then. Although when I think of the how-to in addressing certain situations that will doubtlessly come up, like mothers calling all hours of the day for help, I still feel mired in helplessness, caught between empathy and self-sacrifice.

But I am assuming it is going to be the same work, with the same set-up, though there’s no reason it needs to be. I didn’t have a clear sense of the role I was playing in the dream, whether I was a teacher or healer. The parents seemed to look at me as if I was a teacher. Perhaps my mind cannot accept that because I’ve not taught children except in church years ago. Seeing the dream this way seems too superficial, perhaps I ought to look at it from more of an inner perspective…

Dim light, something from the unconscious or at least subconscious. I was trying to get away from having to relate to people and all their relationships. This is true of me in waking life. There were many obstacles, or so I thought, but I got past them. But a part of my masculine, from my unconscious, so a part I am not aware of, saw and recognized me, by a persona that I had. He engaged me in that role again, and I went with it. Why did I go with it? Why did I not say no, again? I was taken by surprise, as I said, and didn’t have time to ‘think’, so I did what seemed natural and went with the flow.

My attempt at staying out of sight of others, incognito, was like going in the back way in the other dreams I had. I was, I am, trying to disappear from public view, public life, surreptitiously, to escape judgment or being trapped. That’s my self-consciousness acting out. But Life caught me, and brought me back into the light, wanting me to go out the front door.

The father and the mother are the parts of my masculine and feminine that want me to grow up, to be educated in wisdom, nurtured, and brought to live out my full potential. In fact, they have already invested in me, paid me an advance to get me started. They believe in me and trust in life. The children are of course parts of me too. Everyone’s ready, just waiting for me to rise to the occasion. Well, I did in the dream, because I had no time to be afraid, I was too caught up in the flow of events. I am to ride along that current of trust, let my fears come and leave me, feel the wind and sun on my face, and enjoy the scenery and whatever may come.

Yes, I fear deep down that it may be too late in the day for me to start over, that I don’t have enough formal education, or inner resources, or any number of things I lack, but late is better than never. I am still here, stronger and healthier than I’ve ever been in my adult life, and I know what I did not know when I was younger. I know who stands behind me now, and has always caught me when I fell. I am never alone, even when I am most afraid. This is that core of tensile determination and earthy resolve that I feel, in spite of the fears buzzing around my head like flies to garbage.

Something’s still missing though, I feel, something still needs to be done… about the fear… more than just allowing them and letting them go, I need to give them expression. Hmmm… I don’t think I’ve ever done that… I’ve certainly given my anger expression, but my fears I’ve kept like fireflies caught in a jar, contained and ‘safe’. I need to treasure and cherish my fears just as I do with my joy and pleasures. Hold each one in my hand and see close-up the beauty of how they are made, the intricate miracle of this piece of life, for it is a part of life too. I have given it life, I have put a part of myself into it, a part I judged to be bad or wrong or ugly.

If I look at my fear of being trapped now, I can see even with my limited vision, that it is a fear born out of my belief that death is an end to life, an end to all things, to all connection, and that pain always precedes death. The pain that we feel day to day from living are the million small deaths that eventually kill us at the end of life. Under the dome of this fear, I cannot see that life is much bigger than this, that life and death are one seamlessly revolving cycle.

It is our biological determination that motivates us toward survival, to always put up a fight against harm, to rally an effort to stave off death, and that motivation is fear. So I’m supposed to have this fear of death, this aversion to pain and suffering, this vulnerability to danger. It is animal instinct. But an animal also accepts death, when the moment comes, it does not rail against fate, it does not sit at home immobilized by fear. It still goes out to hunt, to forage, to gather, to mate and rear its young. It does not stop living the life it was meant to, even though death could descend any moment. It follows the higher directives that it was born with, its potentials and its destiny, in spite of its instinct to survive, because this instinct is not higher than its destiny.

Those immobilized by fear, will surely die. Those who keep moving in spite of fear, have at least half a chance to live. This may be patently obvious, but somehow it is hitting me in the gut. It says I can’t hide from life. If I persist in letting fear prevent me from going into life, I will surely die, in more ways than one. I have to come out of hiding. I have to pronounce that intention and allow it to happen. In fact, fear does not prevent me, it is me who uses fear as a blindfold, a shield, an excuse not to move from the trap. And even though I do this consciously, the deepest part of me knows this is not good for me, it sees me stuck in this trap, and is afraid. I guess this is what they say about fear being the core issue of enneagram head types, that we fear fear itself. I’ve felt this to be true, but I have never understood it on the level of insight until now.

Great Spirit, help me come out of hiding, help me walk into the light, help me open to life. I thank you for everything.

Reframing Patriarchy

Winter Solstice + Full Moon + Eclipse

DREAM that I was meeting my dad to catch a train or a bus. We were supposed to meet at this house, a communal house or rooming house, but he wasn’t there when I arrived. I waited and asked some guys there but no one had seen him. Finally I decided to go to the station and see if he’s there. He wasn’t and then boarding time came, people were leaving, he still didn’t show. I went back to the house and tried to call home (I remember dialing our current home number, but it was forwarded to another number, the number of the communal house) finally got a voice mail message from him that said he had to return some picture frames because they weren’t right.

In another part I was inside a room looking at a telephone or cable wire that had come loose around a door frame. I said or someone said something about getting a stapler to fix it. I knew I had accidentally pulled it and the staples had popped off…

DREAMWORK:

Both parts were about communication problems, missed or dislocated, though not severed. Miscommunication or disconnection with masculine authority, not in sync on many levels it seems. Well, I’m certainly familiar with that one, having had problems with authority all of my life. In the dream we were meeting in a shared space, not personal to either of us, a transient kind of place that we were just passing through. A temporarily shared common ground. But the only people I saw there were young men on the go. We had agreed to meet there, but my dad, symbolizing patriarchy (for better and worse), never showed up. He was detained or distracted by some problem with framing.

Which part of me is my dad, is patriarchy? The part that sees only absolutes, that judges and rules with might and force, ruthlessly rational and unforgiving. Well, whatever it is doing, it is framing pictures the wrong way. I am framing some picture the wrong way, and quite possibly fooling even myself with it, as I am an accomplished reframer of pictures I don’t like. Also the wire cable that had fallen off the door frame. Something about the way I see patriarchy is wrong. That I see it as only bad, harmful, overbearing and destructive. That there’s nothing good about it. Okay, so what’s good about it? This requires a little digging, as nothing jumps into view immediately…

Rules and laws to live and govern by, order and structure… Hmmm, this is not resonating... Drop down deeper...

At bottom I am still afraid of it, oppressed by it, resentful of it, struggling with it. It still has me in its clutches, squirming and screaming. How to balance this? How do I stop blaming it for all the ills in the world? How do I end the victim story? Empowerment, the answer comes. How? Through acceptance. Accepting what is, accepting that patriarchy still rules, accepting that there are injustices, accepting that fear and anger and guilt and shame and victimhood exist. But not forgetting that the great wheel is also turning, slowly but surely, and that love and kindness and goodwill and wisdom and oneness and joy also exist. And feel the gratitude that comes from this acceptance of everything that is, the bigger picture, as big as I can take in. Then feel this gratitude open and expand my whole being to let in loving compassion and a greater vision of life. Patriarchy may still be the rule of the day, but life is much bigger than that, my life is bigger than that. Accept, and open the door, don’t try to keep anything out. Let everything come, and go, of its own accord, according to the Great Spirit.

A Weekend's Catch of Dreams

DREAM that I was looking up at the second level of a carpark building in front of me, and I could see many fire trucks parked along the half wall. A dozen or more of them, brand new and still shrink-wrapped. They were not evenly spaced. I said to someone beside me, “Wow, the city must be doing well!”

In another dream I was hanging out with a designer or art director, and we went into his office which was entirely transparent though tinted. He was working on a black-and-white illustration on his desk which was a long piece of angled nearly black acrylic or something like that. On the right side there was a slight concavity, as if someone had been leaning into it for a long time and the acrylic had sagged. I was reclining on the left side like Jiminy Cricket, watching him work. I can’t remember what the drawing was now, just that it was a conglomeration – a mosaic – of many smaller units or symbols grouped into the one drawing. There was a space in the centre that hinted at some space left, otherwise it was full. The drawing was very graphic and done in black ink, in a style that was simple but had thick and thin. I don’t recall the details now but I have the sense that when we were outside his office before, he had taken 2 things and put them on the page. Now it has grown.

Then a young mother with her child came and just opened the door and walked in without knocking, probably because she could see he was inside. He pushed her back out and said, “You can at least knock!”, and locked the door, or maybe I thought he should lock the door…

DREAMWORK:

When I told Michael my dream he said, “You must have a big fire to put out!” That feels true to me, but somehow I know that the fire is to come, and I am, or life is, mobilizing for it, though it is more of a civilian effort, because they were not parked with military precision and order. I, my true Self, am the city, and I am rich in my resources and support for this kind of emergency.

I’ve noticed that a number of my dreams lately involved the second floor or upstairs, and reminding me of the dream of having to go 3 floor underground in the elevator before going 10 floors up. At the time of that dream I had the sense that I was 2 levels below ground, soon to come up another level. Perhaps today’s dream is showing me the future, of the time when I will be on the ground level and seeing the imminent ‘fire’ to come, but today it is reassuring me that I will be prepared for it. I do not have any idea what the fire might be at the moment.

In the dream there was my creative self, the art director, trying to put together the bigger picture from smaller pieces, rendering it as one whole picture, in a graphic, symbolic, black-and-white way. It reminds me of contemporary jazz, very rational and measured, expressive but not of emotions. Like a conversation between friends about politics, or science, or philosophy, a kind of mental discharge. I think I understand its appeal, that it grew out of a need to have a non-verbal and universal outlet to express what we have accumulated in our heads from day to day, all the information, analysis, our own and others, and opinions and conclusions that we draw that comfort our ego, that pat us on the back (of the head) and say, “I know.” It is a kind of extroversion and probably appeal more to introverts than extroverts. It empties the mind out, to the extent that it does, and allows what’s underneath to make a little contact with the self. Just a gentle brush by, nothing too clingy, like lyrics or feelings. Safety within the comfort zone.

I can relate to that in a part of myself, but there was always the feeling of something missing in that world of rigorously climate-controlled, ordered cleanliness that borders on sterility to me. Gratifying like a mental masturbation brought to climax. But then the feminine is kept out, even as I am conscious of her now, standing outside the door of my transparent self, with the child that I have yet to own, the child of manifestation.

My world, my self, is missing animation, the animation of life – organic, colourful, tactile, gooey, messy, clingy, fabulously free and unlimited and out of control. That’s what’s missing in the middle of my picture, the 2 little empty spots. Let go of the shore and push off into the flow. Cut all ties with order and control and expectations and beliefs, in spite of fear. Embrace the fear, that’s part of the mess, part of the colours and textures that life is made of. Open the door and let mother and child in, and take them into my self, allow them to take me in. Relationships are also part of the mess that Life is made of, and responsibility is but another colour. I can choose another colour if I like, see responsibility as an exchange of energy, give and take in perpetual motion, acknowledge and feel the gratitude rise from a deeper, broader place in myself that sees the wholeness of the relationship that negates any fear.

This fear that I’ve had for so long, of being trapped, of which the fear of responsibility is just one facet, has come about because I’d lost the trust in the flow of life. Somehow I have come to believe that once I am stuck, I might not get out again. This belief has shaped my entire life. But so has grace. Now I throw open the doors wide, to let grace come flooding in, with all of its signs of life, all of its flotsam and jetsam, smells and tastes, sounds and sights, joy and sorrow. I welcome it all, I receive it all, and I surrender it all again. I trust.
_______________

Saturday, December 18, 2010

DREAMBITS:

1) We were being shot at by men across the way. There were 3 beds (that was as fas as I could ‘see’) – bare mattress and boxed spring – spaced apart that we were using as a sort of station and shield, although we and the beds were backed up against a wall so it was really no protection. I was by the middle bed. I could see one guy – the enemy, directly across shooting at me with a handgun, and none of us had anything on this side to fight with. I kept expecting to be hit but it never happened. I remember thinking about the trajectory of the bullet and how far it should reach. There was a guy in front of me at one point; he wasn’t hit either.

2) I was in the kitchen, a fairly spacious one, using the mixer. Something slipped and the mixture went everywhere, far and wide. I looked at the mess sprayed around the room – looked like a shake with blueberries in it – and laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor. Michael came and saw, but he only stared at me like I had lost it.

3) I was paying for a purchase of $200 in a department store like Zellers with my Amex card, the checkout was in the middle of the store. The cashier told me that it comes with a gift. The gift was something called Generations. It was a machine like a white plastic tube that a child gets into, then it inflates with hot steam, and the child just sits in it with only his face out. It was being demonstrated beside the checkout so we went and looked at it. I said to her, do you think I would fit in there? She said yes.

DREAMWORK:

1) Very seldom do I have dreams where I am attacked, though there wasn’t really a sense of violence in this one. I am still living dualism, still taking sides, still judging. And the other side is attacking me, or so it seemed, except we were never hit. The attack was, is, an illusion. There is no actual threat, nor did I sense any malice. Everything appeared to be offset on a white background, as if the whole scene happened in a white studio space. Kind of surreal and stark.

So what were the beds? Beds are the ultimate comfort and safety and haven of rest to me, like a nest. But they were as bare-boned as can be, just naked mattress and boxed spring, not the thing of real comfort, not the real thing. Yet I cling to it still, the side I’ve chosen to be on, presumably the good, the righteous, the light, the beautiful. And I feel powerless against the other side, even as I am choosing to be in the middle, to walk the Middle Way. It is still them or us. Them vs. Us.

How can I stop seeing the world in absolutes, in halves? I don’t want to see enemies everywhere I go. I don’t want to separate sheep by the colour of their coats. I want to raise my arms in surrender, walk across the divide, and open my arms to embrace those on the other side, because they are parts of me, my community, my world.

It is NOT wrong if someone chooses to pursue money and power, and I am not better than they are because I choose not to. We are all at different legs of the journey, different points of the spiral, but we are all on the same journey of life. I am not on a different journey because I am focusing on spirituality than someone who is focused on raising a family or climbing a career ladder. There are many tracks on the journey of life, and all are intertwined and woven with one another. Many walks, same path.

2) I’ve a feeling this one is about losing control, letting fly, and how enjoyable and cathartic it can be. Felt good. I actually guffawed in the dream, which I’ve never done in waking life. Michael, the Captain Stern part of me, is still there too, but he didn’t say anything or come into the room.

3) I don’t know what I ‘bought’ but it came with a bonus gift, a man-made device that seems to be for the incubation of the young, to help them ‘cook’ or mature into the next generation. It looked like a white coccoon but the child stays conscious and sitting up, instead of lying down and going to sleep. The face is exposed so you could see that he is awake the whole time. He remains conscious to the world he is in, unlike a fetus. I have the sudden feeling as I am writing now that the device helps the child to grow and mature his boundary, because children are so vulnerable. The child in me needs this alchemical ‘cooking’ to develop a healthy and functioning boundary, a balanced and joyous sense of self as an individual within a collective.

Seeds of Old Trees

DREAMBIT: I was in someone else’s home or building and saw out the window in the hallway with saffron yellow carpet that there were these trees outside. At first I thought they were those trees with the black serpentine seed pods which I harvested a few days ago outside Grampa’s apartment building, then I saw that they were walnut-like seeds or fruits, but bigger with a rougher looking shell. A man came walking by so I asked him what the tree was. He said it was a ‘knot’ or ‘knod’ tree. For some reason I couldn’t hear him that well. I also had the feeling that I came in the back way, up the back stairs.

DREAMWORK:

This is a place I haven’t come to own yet, even though it is already a part of me, a place with saffron yellow carpet in the hallway. This is the second or third dream with this particular colour, one of my favourites, and one that I associate with spiritual aspirations. I suppose it is my own version of the yellow-brick road… perhaps to enlightenment?? So this is a house of spirituality to me, but I came in from the back, which makes it also the second or third dream involving the back way. Instead of coming in the front door, the normal, conventional way, I chose the path less trodden. The back way implies sneakiness also, when you don’t want to be seen or recognized, though I did not have the sense of that in the dream. Why did I come in the back then? I came in the back way so as to avoid public scrutiny and judgment, from society, from my family and peers, friends and colleagues when I had them. I just want to do my own thing and not be obstructed or influenced by others around me. I am still marching to my own drums, but perhaps one day I will find my band.

The light is a bit dim in the dream, so some of this is unclear, unrevealed, to me as of yet. But I am in the House of Spirit, on the second floor, though the saffron yellow hallway was ever so slightly declining, like a ramp, suggesting perhaps that there are still small ups and downs in my path ahead.

Outisde, in nature, was these trees with the strange fruits that really captured my attention. In waking life I had found these twisted black seed pods last Saturday and collected a few. To the best of my knowledge I believe they were honey locust trees. I am fascinated by their shape – serpentine instead of straight, or slightly arced like the seed pod rattle I bought in Mexico. These make great rattles too, except you’ll need a bunch of them together to produce enough sound. I guess i’ve become very drawn to the tactility, variety and beauty of nature lately, and sometimes I feel like a little child who could play with stones, seed pods, leaves, and berries for hours, as if they are the crown jewels of my kingdom.

Seeds are potentials for the future, possibilities of what is to come, genetically coded by nature. In the dream it was somehow a matter of urgency for me to know what kind of tree the seeds were growing on, my desire to know the origin, my origin, and the name of my forebearers. It wasn’t trees of the black serpentine pods, but ones with a husk or shell that looked like weather-roughened wood. A seed, with new life unborn, yet ancient.

‘Knod’ is not a word I know, but apparently is a variant of the word ‘knot’, according to the Dictionary of English Etymology, imparting to me a sense of evolution, change over time. I had trouble hearing what the man said, as if the sound was distorted or muffled, so perhaps it is not time for me to know yet. But maybe I could be permitted to explore a little… ‘Knot’ on a tree is like a scab or a scar, which grows over the spot where a branch used to be. It is a sign of healing, literally. Seeds from a tree that has experienced the loss of a limb(s) and healed—a wounded healer—bear imprints of that experience and the wisdom from healing, an ancient and inherent wisdom, the wisdom of nature. I have within me that wisdom too, for I too am a seed from the great tree of life.

But what I needed to be reminded of is that a tree has roots, and a big tree has long roots. I have been unaware and consciously disconnected from my own roots for most of my life, even now the idea of roots and ancestors feel barely within my grasp. Seeds are the future, roots are the past. Both are essential to life, my life.

What’s old, weathered, wise, and traditional has been figuring more and more prominently in both my waking and dreaming life lately. Perhaps this is the healing of another kind of split in me, the past and the future, meeting and mending in the present. I, who has had her roots lopped off by christian beliefs 3 generations back, am now harking back to the most ancient of spirituality of my lineage, the Dao, the oldest of my roots. Perhaps this is how I am coming to it, through the back way.

To Belong, Or Not To Belong

DREAM that I was in a dimly lit house and I heard someone complain about me from the back of the house. It was a little stringy old man and he said, “If she wanted to build the house anywhere but on her own land, she should’ve said so.” So I charged up to him, full of indignation and said, “If I didn’t tell you something, it was because I didn’t know. Okay? Thank you!” Then I stomped away again.

At another point I had to go into the kitchen but it was jampacked with people, people who were Amazon-sized. The little kitchen was dark with so many bodies in it. I couldn’t get to the cupboard so I said to a girl in front of it, “Sandra, can you pass me a knife?” She did and I left.

DREAMWORK:

This is stuff below my awareness… The small stringy old man is an embodiment of my Animus, whose grievance against me is trying to tell me something in this dream. Apparently I had instructed him to build a house for me, but he had found out somehow that it is not to be built on my/our own land. What does that mean, building a house anywhere but on my own land? I didn’t even know that myself, even though I ordered it. It must’ve been a higher order. So I am supposed to build my s/Self on someone else’s land, not my own. But there is some disconnect in communication, between my ego and other parts of my s/Self, so we are all being informed of this now.

My pride, my ego, is prominently featured here, which overpowered and overruled my aggrieved Animus, who appeared as a life-long labourer, overused, and if not actually abused, was not exactly well-treated and cared for. Again, the message is that I have not nurtured and tended my masculine very well. Basically I used him like hired help. Perhaps this will give me a clue how to make amends. First, respect. Second, gratitude. Third, love. He is a bit cantankerous because of the years of undernourishment and disempowerment, and never cherished for himself. He has skills that I rely on him for and wisdom of the aged, yet I’ve never asked him for it because I’ve always looked down on him. He has stuck by me because he cannot survive without me, but he is resentful. He is my loyal warrior but I am his less than benign master.

Respect, Gratitude, and Love. How I would want to be treated. My dear Warrior, how could I have been so ignorant and arrogant as to have mistreated and taken you for granted all these years? Please forgive my immaturity and let me redress my wrong. Help me elevate you to your rightful place, my right-hand man, and never forget how precious you are to me.

But what is my land? It is what I have claimed as my place in the world. That is, at the moment, here in this city, in this country, with Michael, with all the knowledge and experience that I’ve had. As I dig down for this I see myself in my ‘place’ as a lilly pad, floating on a current, not anchored by anything but gravity. Rootless, yet it gives me a feeling of quiet joy and contentment. There is a time to be anchored, there is a time to drift. Do I have the wisdom to just allow?

I have become much more rooted in my relationships these past few years, at home, with family, no close friends to speak of, and much closer to nature. It has been the most stable and ‘at home’ I’ve felt in my adult life. Is this to end soon? Or is the building on other land a metaphysical manifestation? Whatever shape it is to take, change is afoot.

In the other part of the dream I had the sense that it was my kitchen. It was full of big people who towered over me, their shadowy presence made the tiny room a bit sinister looking. But I didn’t get any bad vibes from them, it was as if they were just hanging out, like people do when they are at a house party and there’s more people than space. In the dream, I knew these people.

The kitchen is the most friendly social setting to me, a place of warmth, easy conversations, intimate relating. You can eat, drink, be creative, and just relax. You can be yourself even with outsiders. Feelings and expressions flow easier in the kitchen. So why is mine crowded with people who overshadow me, in my own space? They are ghosts of society that still haunt me. Friendly and harmless ghosts, but taking up space.

Who are they? They are the expectations that I still carry from social conditioning, that tells me I ought to be friendly and sociable, approachable and charming, be a part of society, be nice. If I don’t I will never belong. If I don’t I will never reap the rewards of public recognition and acceptance, even when its due. I will always be an outsider, even from my own kitchen. Was that what the knife was for, to sever my ties to these ghosts of my social past? Now that I don’t have any actual social ties anymore, there are only the ones in my mind, embedded in my fear of ostracism.

To belong, or not to belong. That has always been the question for me.

It seems to me that this might be connected to the ‘I and thou’ divide I was exploring yesterday (and agonizing over most of my life). To have boundary or not, to have a separate self or not. But why can’t I have both? Like a cell in a body. It has its cell wall as a boundary, and it belongs. It has its unique functions and life, within the larger functions and life of the whole body. It does what it does without question or doubt. It does not try to be different, it does not try to be special, it does not fear conformity and cooperation with the greater whole, the way I do. There may be illness and imbalance going on in the body, rampant malignancy and toxins galore, but the cell goes on obeying its code, serving its purpose, manifesting its function for the body collective. It knows no discontent even if it is breached, it fights until the last, as it was design to. But always, it lives for and under the directive of the whole.

If I am that one cell within the body of creation, would I not have been encoded with my purpose, to live and function for the glory and joy and fulfillment of my own little life as well as the greater Life that holds us all? What and who am I fighting against? And what for? Isn’t that what a cancer cell does, attack itself and its neighbours, having lost sight and connection to the whole? A cell wall can differentiate, just as I can discern, but there is no need to pass judgment or take sides – good or bad, right or wrong, them or me, friend or foe. No need to take it personally, as they say, it is just business. The business of Life.

3 Down, 10 Up

DREAM that I had to go down 3 floors in the elevator, below ground, then come up 10 floors. I thought to myself that it was redundant to do that, but did it anyway. Strangely, I did not feel coerced. It was as if I did not have control over it, that I didn’t even have the concept of control.

DREAMWORK:

When I woke up from the dream, the first thing I wanted to know was, am I going up in the elevator now? Next was, does 3 floors mean 3 years, or what? But then I realized it doesn’t matter what the actual measure of time is, if that’s what it is. It matters that I understand and accept the process that is being shown to me in the dream, that I have to go underground, dig down into myself, for 3 counts, before I am ready to make my ascent. And even though my ego balked at the idea and thinks I can take the shortcut, as it is inclined to do, my being knows the wisdom of the process. I know now that I do not have control, and the acceptance of that gives me immediate relief and comfort, because I can see then that something greater than myself has the control, and I can just relax and let it take over. That, is trust, and that, is ALL I need.

I thank Life and Source deeply for the immense gift of this dream.

School of Wisdom

DREAM that I was in a school-like building or complex, on the ground floor. In fact, the place was quite earthy, a bit shabby, although functional. I was looking into 4 classrooms, each long and rectangular and in a row, but I was going in the backdoor. I was looking for my stuff, so I could go to my class. I had a bright emerald green dress on, very short with the hem slightly puffed. I was worried that it was so short, because apparently I didn’t have underwear on.

At one point a man I was acquainted with asked me if I wanted that drink he had given me before. I smiled and said I was fine for now. I knew he liked me but I didn’t want to encourage his affections because he was too old and scruffy for me. He seemed a bit morose.

DREAMWORK:

I am still a novice in the big school of wisdom, but at least now I am closer to ground. From what I understand Daoism is a practice that revolves around reverence and love of nature as ‘deity’, all creation being equal and there is no god or one that has power over all other. There is no beginning, therefore no creation story, and there is no end. Life as we know it is one big circular swirl of energy that goes on in perpetuity, and that is all we need to know, all we need to live.

I think this is the school in my dream, and the 4 classrooms – were they daoism, buddhism, sufism, and zen? Shamanism? I am investigating to see which has ‘me’ in it. Perhaps there is something in each I need to learn. Perhaps I am to retrieve a piece of myself from that room. Perhaps that’s what I’m doing with daoism. I am going in the back way because that’s a shortcut, but I need to stay open to going in the front – formal – way if that’s best for me. I have been studying on my own, without the help and influence of a living teacher or institution, which would be what I consider as the front door way.

But it was none of the 4 classrooms I was meant to end up in. I was only getting my ‘stuff’ from one of them, then heading to where I belonged. Hmmm… the fifth room… Maybe I don’t need anything to go to my class with, I could just go as I am, bare-ass and all…

The colour of my dress was vivid and jewel-like, the colour of the heart chakra. The cut of the dress was a child’s smock, without a waist and the puffy hemline gives it a suggestion of a formal or courtly appearance. So it’s not just a plain everyday dress. It’s somewhat special or for a special occasion. I was a bit too old in the dream for the dress, as a teenager, no more than 20, but on the level of spirituality and practice I do indeed appear in a child’s garb. Does this mean I ought to put on something more becoming of who and what I am, a more mature appearance in the way I present myself, because that’s more true to the picture? Am I being falsely modest and trying to hide inside a child’s dress? Do I ‘have’ more innately than I allow myself admit? Am I afraid to be caught ‘short’ – self-deficiency being the core fear of a type 7 – by public opinion? We are taught from childhood that exposing oneself is a mortal sin, for which you will be stricken with the worst kind of mortification. But isn’t it just man-made conditioning after all? Shaming is not practiced anywhere else in creation.

But I am still bound by the fear that I am not enough and I will be judged as such, that I am not an authority on anything, that I have not deepened into anything, that I still have so much to learn. I can still learn, without the fear though. That’s my prayer today, to let go of this fear, and all of its influences.

The old scruffy man was an Animus figure, who loves me and wants to help me. But I rejected him because of his appearance. I am still judging by the standards with which I have been taught, and that which I fear to be judged by. Still stuck in the mirror on the wall.

I had accepted a drink – help – from him before, most likely when I really needed it. Now I’m not feeling the urgency or desperation, I can afford to be judgmental and refuse his offer to help. Can I though? The drink was probably a shot of wisdom, which I def’ly need.

So amend or addend my prayer: I let go of the fear of insufficiency and the conditioning of judgment, with all of their ill influences. Thank you, Source, I am deeply grateful.

Let Go of the Shore

DREAM that I had just left this big sprawling house where many people were, and I was one of them. I was pulling my bundle buggy behind me, following a man, but not to seem as if we were together. More like a little sister would follow her big brother, but not side by side. The ground was a little bumpy and my bundle buggy was rattling because it was empty. Then for some reason I turned around and came back to the house, remembering that 3 of my girlfriends were there when I left. The place was packed with people eating, as if it was a restaurant, but I didn’t see my friends. I wandered around trying to see what people had ordered, to get a sense of what’s available and what I might order, but I didn’t see anything near appealing…

DREAMWORK:

I have been following my brother Animus who has left the collective, the safety of the status quo, to journey on the path of the Middle Way. I had extricated myself of my belongings except my bundle buggy, the container for gathering what I might buy. So even though I’ve detached myself materially, I’ve not given up on the desire to acquire and amass. I think brother Animas had a backpack or a small bundle too. We were at the very beginning of our journey to Dao. The ground was bumpy, I have been full of niggling doubts that were like little siren calls to lure me back to the safety of status quo. I caved in and went back for another look, and the place had turned into nothing but a restaurant, an established place of business marketing to our need for comfort and fulfillment. I have been here countless times before, everyday of my life, trying to get my fill. But like all ‘good’ and ‘successful’ marketing, it keeps you coming back for more, not because of any great business acumen or strategy, but because it pacifies our base desires for a time. In a way it is very natural, we have the need to eat, a business is build to provide for (and milk) that need. Except we’ve forgotten the spiritual part of eating, the sacrament, as we have with everything else, so that part is always starved. But the spiritual is bigger than and contains the physical, so we never feel sated entirely, not for more than a few minutes at a time. Hence the pursuit for more and more and more, and the fear of not getting it.

So I went back for more, because I am still in the grip of this fear. Probably this fear also prevents me from getting closer to my Animus. I’m not ready to commit my whole self to him or the path, because I still believe I have to get my fill elsewhere. But it is, as I already know, an exercise in futility, for there is nothing that appeal to me in our society and culture anymore. My fear is all that remains of my compulsions.

Let go of the shore, as one of my favourite poems and teaching says below. Let go, of my personal desires and fears, and be carried by the river, then I will find the people who are in there with me, and together we will celebrate the sacredness of all life.

~~~~~~~~~~

From The Elders Oraibi – Arizona Hopi Nation

"There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river,
keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we've been waiting for."

Pink Shoes and Wallpaper

DREAM that I was in a house with lots of people, some kind of communal living. I had lost my hot pink running shoes, and my friend, another woman, was trying to help me find them. I had given them to J., an older woman from my old church, but she was gone, and the shoes with her.

There was an image at one point of people – all of us – lining up one after another along the walls of the house, like wallpaper being put on. At the same time I had the impression we looked like round logs with a sharp, pointed end on top, as if we are making a walled fortress inside the house…

DREAMWORK:

Yet another shoeless dream… I am still missing what it takes to go out there, shoes being the last thing I put on before going outside, this time my full creative expression of the feminine. Something’s in the shadow still, something I’m not aware of having suppressed that my shadow woman carries. J. was someone who I mostly looked down on and looked away from since I was a child, because she was unattractive, coarse, and there was an awkwardness to her that I couldn’t bare to see. In my youthful arrogance, I thought her stupid. Yet, to be fair, she was kind and had a big heart. I heard that she had cancer a while ago, but I don’t know what kind.

Of course, these things I attribute to her are things I would never want to be, a person I would hate to admit to being, yet I have had glimpses of all of those images in myself. Without doubt I saw the feminine in her, but only as a cow or a sow is feminine. This seems unreasonably cruel and unjust, as the worst thing she had ever done to me was to bore me. How had I come to despise this negative image of the feminine so much? From fairy tales and cartoons of childhood we have been shown the opposite of a beautiful, delicate, young princess bathed in the golden light of benign approval and adoration was the ugly, coarse, misshapened, peasant female. As if the difference excludes the possibility of a good heart, a wise mind, or a beautiful spirit. We were all brainwashed as such. We were all taught to run the other way from the dark, the ugly, the bad. Unless, of course, you are a male, then you can try and kill it and become a hero.

Had anyone seen through the unappealing exterior into J’s loving heart, I wonder? Had she recognized and cherished it in herself? I have that loving heart too, though it’s usually well-hidden. And I admit that I have not allowed myself to full recognize nor cherish it in myself, let alone giving it expression. Here’s what Ambika Wauters said about the colour Magenta, in her book “Homeopathic Color Remedies”:

This color represents the highest level of creativity and is associated with the collective unconscious… It corresponds to the Alta Major Chakra… and is concerned with our higher purpose in life… It is the color Rudolph Steiner believed stood for ultimate creative expression.

This reminds me of other fairy tales where there were beautiful and noble princesses and princes trapped within bodies of ogres because they were put under a spell, who were usually in need of someone wise and kind, who can see through the ugly packaging to love them anyway, and in the process the spell is broken. Well, the immature child I was could not see through the exterior and was bound by her conditioning, but I am older and know better now. Someone like J. had a lot of love to give. She may not always know how to give it, but she made it a priority to give as much as possible. This is her beautiful spirit. And this is what I have denied in her and in myself. But now I am not whole without owning it, these pink shoes I’ve lost. I’ve stifled the natural expression of feminine creativity because I have pursued masculine endeavours all of my life, even now, just as J. has remained single and a spinster, when she clearly loved children and loved to give love. We have lost our way to our higher purpose. At the end of that is the disconnected, unlived life. J. may have passed from this life now, but it is not too late for me.

How to find my way back? How to love the unloved parts of myself? The bad, the ugly, the undesirable? I feel like going down to the beach and finding stones that are these shunned and stunted parts of myself, and hold them to me, put them into my heart, nurse them in my lap like little hurt animals, incubate them in magenta light, until their spirits are healed. I ask also for J. to forgive me.

There is nothing in the way of opening my heart and letting love flow where it is meant to, not even fear. I only have to let it.

The other part of the dream seems to be in the same collective theme. Those of us in the house were called to the same task of lining the interior walls with ourselves as reinforcement of a kind. Fortressing, as I said before, against attack, though it must be against an inner enemy. Who is this inner enemy of mine and my collective? The house and the rooms gave me the impression of being traditional, basic and unadorned, but solid and almost staid. No feminine touch or ambiance anywhere. Us, the people/wooden stakes, were like soldiers, identical and uniform.

Perhaps there IS something in the way of opening my heart after all, perhaps I am still focused on fortressing my inner walls, so nothing can penetrate, nothing can even be hung on the walls to decorate it, to soften its austerity. Have we as a collective built our walls too well, intending to keep the big bad world out, but also cutting ourselves off from all the opposites: beauty, grace, love, and joy? I have the feeling this collective is women, all of us women who have learned to become good soldiers like men, strong and stalwart, but also rigid and closed. We’ve not dared to live fully as women, being soft and yielding, giving and nurturing, creative and abundant. The men in our world are also denied these qualities in themselves, lest they be seen as weak.

So how do I dismantle my inner defenses, and end the need to put up more? Again, just allow it. See the motion of the spikes lining up in reverse, see the people walk away from the wall, as themselves, talking and connecting. And if there’s any inner enemy lurking anywhere, we can love it together. But there’s a feeling in me that says love is soft, therefore not strong, so what if I need inner strength? Love is love, love is not strength or weakness, light or dark, good or evil. Love, is just itself. But love GIVES strength, if I choose to accept it, accept love.

On Dualism

DREAM that I was in a church building, my old church but not physically the same. I was on the second floor in a big hall kind of room. My sister was with me. I was cleaning out the piano bench. It was full of papers that had been left stuffed in there over time, like kids’ handiwork from Sunday school. I was aware of other things going on in various other places on the premises, like over there in another room there was a meeting or some kind of voting taking place, and the PA system was paging for Michelle Coby to go to that room, and I thought, oh, Michelle’s family has changed their last name. I was also supposed to be somewhere else but I didn’t want to be there.

As I cleaned I happened to glance out the window into the yard downstairs and saw that the kids were playing. They were in some kind of a boat or sled, although I couldn’t see anyone or anything pulling them, boys in one boat, girls in another. I said to my sister, the girls are so much cuter, because the boys were scruffy and untidy. Then I looked around the room which was bright with large windows, a few things on the wall but generally clean and neat. I thought about the room in the basement which was windowless and smaller and full of clutter. The basement was not directly under the part of the building I was in, it was in another wing.

DREAMWORK:

This dream seems to be about contrast, comparison, opposites: neat vs. untidy, girls vs. boys, light vs. dark, space vs. clutter, above vs. below; also making choices or voting. My sister shadow was with me, so there’s some things here I am not conscious of yet.

I am still seeing things in a dualistic light, making judgments as such. Light is still better than dark, order better than chaos, feminine better than masculine, etc. Even though in a deeper place I know that the whole animal has both sides, is only one continually changing and moving whole. This divisionistic, reductionistic view is more than a view, it is a deep seated belief in me, in the society I grew up in and still live in. The church is all about right or wrong, good or evil, heaven or hell. The keyword is ‘or’. You can only be one or the other, never both, never neither. In that one little word, ‘or’, there is a chasm from here to eternity, and you are forever banished from ‘the other side’ once you made your choice. At least that’s what the church has us believe. In that gap there is an ocean of fear, and you will surely drown if you try to cross it. With this fear the church has dominion over you.

In the dream, even though I chose to be where I was supposed to be, I was still in the church, under its rule and influences. Just as I am in real life. I’ve left the physical church, but here I am, still judging and condemning by pointing my finger – this is good, that is bad; this is beautiful, so that must be ugly. Definitely stunted and immature.

How do I healing myself of this then? By changing my last name, my family name, that which I’ve identified with since birth. I just remembered, Coby is the brand name of something I saw on some electronic equipment yesterday, and at first glance I thought it said Sony, but it was actually Coby. I wondered to myself whether they chose the name because it looked like Sony in a hurry. (It is actually a joint venture between a Hong Kong company and one in New York, and the owner is a Korean named Lee Young Dong. Interesting that Michelle’s real last name is Lee. Apparently the logo font is the same as Sony, so that’s why I had that first impression. They came up with Coby by dropping letters from the word ‘cowboy’.)

So, coming up with a name that echoes in some way my old name, but something new and youthful (Somehow I think of Coby as younger than Sony, with more energy and movement, but perhaps less stability? Sony being a symbol of established order and standard?) to grow from and build my own identity. This is about the part of my identity I want to show in the world. It is who I am, but not all of who I am. I will put all of who I am into it, however it may appear on the outside. (I am refining this for my own understanding – of myself – as I go.)

I ask my ancestors now, for help with finding this new name that is still part of them, and will also embrace the new me that will be revealed. This is a name for the new me who embodies oneness, who sees and holds everything as a whole, without fear or the need for approbation. I will leave this with you, my ancestors. I am grateful.

I want to be wisely discerning, without becoming narrowly judgmental. I want to have the courage and openness to embrace chaos and destruction and dirt, when that’s for the highest good. Being that this is an important underpinning of Daoism – nondualism – I am sure to learn a lot as I continue on this path, the pathless path, as Osho called it. I guess it is because of its formless nature that I resonate but at the same time feel intimidated by it. Much of who I am is formless, as if lacking boundary, yet I’ve spent so much of my life so far trying to have form, to con-form I suppose, to my own deep unhappiness. But this IS my form, this formlessness. I am happiest when I am in need of no armouring of any kind, just playing in creativity with kindred spirits. Like when I used to play in a band or music ensemble, feeling effortlessly in the flow, carried by the current of Life underneath, AND in great company.

But I see now that I need to change the way I hold things in black-and-white absolutes, before I can see past it to become one with all.

Reading Osho’s “Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself” now. All I can say so far, is that I wish I had read it sooner…

A Bonus Healing?

DREAM that our upstairs neighbour S. was showing her apartment because she is moving out. (She is actually moving out but we haven’t seen anyone coming to see the apartment yet.) Suddently I realized that Nemo is out there in the staircase because our door is open. I ran to get him before Sarah sees him, but it was too late, she was coming down the stairs already. Surprisingly, she had a cat in her arms! It was black and white like Nemo but smaller.

DREAMWORK:

Our relationship with S. has been tense because of her aversion to cats. I would say the whole unpleasant thing between us is one concerning boundary. We were told unofficially that she will be moving in with her boyfriend, but we don’t know when. We have been keeping Nemo inside, much to his chagrin, as he is used to more space to roam than this. In the dream the die had been cast and she was moving, although that may be the wish-fulfilling element. But I can definitely see S. as an aspect of my shadow, the part of me that has boundary problems, that feels victimized and encroached upon, feels self-righteously taken advantage of. But also one that is over-compensating for her sensitivities with preemptive fear and anxiety.

So I was shocked to see her holding a cat, much less a cat that looked like mine, just smaller. A regular sized cat, unlike our hefty champion here. Had my shadow healed herself of victimhood? If so, how did that come about? Does it have to do with my dream yesterday with the seagull and the eagle?
Hmmm… How does it all fit together?

I sense it has to do with emotional eating to soothe the pain of vulnerability; times when I felt hurt by something or someone or just generally the big bad world. When I used to come home from work and start eating non-stop until I go to bed. But having now ripped out the gullet and stomach (the seagull) with which I used to feed my addiction, and offering it as sacrifice to a higher level of spiritual growth (the eagle), I will no longer be feeding the need to eat as an emotional response. Hmmm… it’s kinda like healing backwards, removing the compensation somehow eliminates the trigger… I can’t see how that can be though… I would think that removing the compensation but not the cause will lead to my psyche looking and finding another form of compensation, unless, the cause is somehow also balanced…

Has it been? Has it been healed because of my new-found relationship and perhaps even integration of Daoism, non-dualism, non-doing, non-interfering Middle Way? I was able to realize and admit to Michael the other night that I was allowing my judgment to interfere with how he sees and runs his life, that it was really not my place or business. My anger and frustration left after that. It was quite liberating, like a boulder, though a small one, rolling off my right shoulder (I saw it on the right). En-lightening, you might say, is truly about letting go, not about getting anything. If I had never learned a darned thing in my life (or as little as possible), but I also never learned to hang on to things, and I never lost the innate ability to let go whenever it’s called for, would I be a happier, healthier, and fuller human being today?? Hmmm…

Well, I will keep an eye on myself the next time a potentially victimizing situation arises, and see how I respond. But I feel it is still apt to give my thanks for this dream and its healing and insight, and if I truly am healed of my boundary issues (which I came into this life with), then this has indeed been a bonus healing! Life has never, ever ceased to blow me away.

The Seagull & The Eagle

DREAM that someone had hoid of a seagull and was shoving their fist down its gullet to pull it out, and offer it to the white-headed eagle standing right beside it. The person had dabbed something on their wrist that persuaded the seagull to open its beak and swallow the fist. I remember seeing the little balloon of the seagull’s ‘gullet’ that came out, and knowing the person was going to have to ripped it out…

DREAMWORK:

I felt apalled and shocked when I started to wake up from the dream. Fear of pain for the seagull, for myself…

Seagull, a common bird with apparently little virtue, was me. The eagle standing by like royalty, waiting for the offering, was me. The person enacting the sacrifice with knowledge and certainty, was me. Or I should say, they were all parts of me. Two birds. One lives in a flock, one lives alone. One nests low, one nests high. One hovers near human society, one soars above it. In between the two divergent paths, heaven and earth, spiritual and material, there is a place of convergence, the Middle Way. In the middle there is also me, the priest/priestess, making the necessary sacrifice of one to feed the other, the earth to nourish heaven, by shoving my fist down the gull’s gullet, my own gullet, and pulling out the stomach, the organ for food, the source of appetite, hunger, and satiety, the container for excess emotions, cravings, vitriolic acid.

What would happen if my physical body is deprived of its basic survival need, no longer feels hunger, free of appetites and cravings? It surprises me that I have never even come close to pondering this question before. I would be freer and lighter, unfettered by the necessity of labouring for food, looking for food, getting food, preparing food, and eating food, not to mention worrying about food. So much more energy and focus will be available to me then, and it is not lost on me that I have planned to fast for a day tomorrow while Michael is away. He left me a note this morning that said: “Stay home and do your fast.” Signed: Oracle.

Not to be driven by the need for survival, I think this is the message and practice. Even more personally, the gorging that has been the side-effect of this drive to avoid hunger, the mania to consume.

The eagle needs to eat too, but she is a discerning eater. She has the bigger picture, yet she never misses a detail. She is distant from the baser desires, for she blazes her own flight. She is alone, not lonely. There is always wind beneath her wings, the truth and laws of Nature her providence and guide.

Yet somehow the seagull must be willing to open its beak, it must be made to comply without a struggle. What was the substance that enticed its cooperation to surrender such a fundamental part of itself? What will get me to surrender? Something that smells and satisfies the senses like food. The fragrance of fulfillment: Oneness. In Oneness there is constant exchange of energy, and no such thing as lack or deficiency or emptiness.

Why did I just think of David’s, a restaurant in Spadina Village?? I have some warm and fulfilling memories with good food and good friends there, I guess, although I’ve not thought about that in years. Had I near-perfect moments there that were the closest I came to the feeling of Oneness? Food to share, love to share, warmth to share, laughter and tears. Basic and trite, yet so dear to our animal being. But where am I going with this? That it is the sense and sensations of satiety that is our object of desire, the state of the nursing infant at the breast that is the home where we are longing to return to. But that is the path of regression, even though it also leads to Oneness.

My dream is showing me a path of maturity to Oneness, through purification of all the baggage I’ve taken on since my original state of Oneness at my mother’s breast. It is the path of spiritual growth and completion of individuation. It is time to wean my squabbling, gobbling seagull self and feed my nobler, self-possessed, regal eagle spirit.

Saffron Ceiling & Mango Salad

Thursday, December 2, 2010

DREAM that Michael and I were staying in a large livingroom on the groundfloor of a large public building, like a big hotel or conference hall. There were sectional sofas around the room. Suddenly the ceiling overhead separated along its perimeters and lifted upwards until it met the ceiling of the next floor up. I remember seeing the edges of the ceiling fold in slightly, as if it was made of fabric or some kind of flexible material instead of plaster and concrete. It was a saffron yellow colour. We were shocked and scared by this, and it was just darkness upstairs around the ceilings. So we decided to move over into the next room, which wasn’t really a room because there was no wall, just an understanding or perception by the dropped ceiling structure and the furniture that it was another room. In large hotel lobbies you see this sometimes.

In another dream I was eating with some people at a kitchen table. My host was the man of the house. I was eating a mango salad of just slivers of mango and nothing else, shoveling it into my mouth like a robot. Another guy, maybe Michael, was sitting to my right. Our host stood up to clear the table and said that he was going to put aside some food for his wife who was back there somewhere in the house. He took my plate and took some of the mango salad then gave it back to me. He was friendly and easy-going. I was kind of dull and on auto-pilot.

DREAMWORK:

The spiritual ‘ceiling’ (limit) of my life within the context of my collective (whoever they are) had just been raised. Saffron yellow is a colour I love and one I associate with spirituality (buddhist monks’ robes) and hope and life, like sunflowers. The ‘ceiling’ appeared to be organic and flexible, and either had a mind of its own or there was a mind behind it that controlled it. There was extraordinary care in the way it crimped just enough to avoid damaging the edges when it began to move. It was like a horizontal ‘veil’ that lifted, and Michael and I have been on our individual and collective journey for just that moment. Although when it did happened we were so startled and afraid because it was so unknown to us. It seemed to just go into a darkness we could not see past, and we were afraid of what might fall out. Perhaps I ought to ask to be shown what’s up there… through another dream.

Mango is also that same bright orange yellow and one of my favourite fruits, though I was eating it like it was a bowl of noodles. I was eating it definitely without tasting or savouring it, a dish that’s so full of flavour and colour and pleasure. I wasn’t enjoying it. I am not enjoying my spiritual food, even if it is only a salad, an appetizer. Why is it tasteless and joyless to me? Because I’m tired of the automatic feeding, even if it is now me who’s doing it. I have been conditioned to keep eating, keeping taking stuff in, even when I don’t need it. There’s probably nothing wrong with the food, or the knowledge, or the wisdom; it is me who is not ready to take it in and make use of it and enjoy it. As a vessel, I am not ready to receive. So my host, my animus, is taking some of it away to save it for the time when I will be ready, for the time when my feminine, his wife, will come to the table and be fed too.

Am I mindlessly stuffing myself with spiritual learning, whether it’s good for me or not? I am, the answer came. At least that’s what I have been doing for the last few years, as I have what can be called an ‘open appetite’ for learning. But it is time, and I have been feeling this lately, to focus on one path. I have been feeling the need to clean out my closet of all the pieces and loose ends of all the faiths, religions, philosophies, and practices I’ve taken in and accumulated. Some I’ve used, some still in their wrappers. The latest one is my time with the Six Nations Sacred Fire, in other words, Native American teachings and ceremonies. I felt very clearly that I am finished with it during the last ceremonial weekend we spent there at the end of November. A few days later I started to read Osho’s book on Daoism, and knew with certainty that it is my path.

Now I am debating whether to go to the workshop this weekend on indigenous wisdom and ecology, because after reading the founder’s personal story of how she returned to her own indigenous roots, I was quite moved and felt maybe I should go. I also liked the idea of the storytelling format for the workshop. But are those reasons I ought to go, or are they just exciting ideas of stimulation to me? I want the experience because they seem new and novel to me, and yes, I could very well learn something, or meet someone, but is it my path? I am a millimeter away from saying yes to it, I have planned to write an email to them tomorrow morning first thing with my reply.

Brushing Teeth, Cleaning Deep

DREAM that I was brushing my teeth most intently, even though people around me were eating. I thought that even if I eat, I could just brush again later…

DREAMWORK:

Hmmm… yesterday I dreamed of a piece of my tooth breaking off… What are teeth to me? They are for me, means to get a firm hold of something – sink my teeth into – to deepen into something meaningful, and with purpose. They are a part of my body, my own innate resource, my sense of wholeness and vitalness, and I fear to lose them. In my dream I’ve opted out of eating to cleaning them instead, and this is a big deal, because I have by nature a voracious appetite, with my eyes always bigger than my stomach. My hunger is for everything, food, knowledge, learning, experience, emotion, anything new, anything that feels good, anything stimulating. This is what feeds my addiction, my drug of choice that takes away the pain of emptiness, of not having enough. So my teeth are a symbol of what I have innately as a tool, to chew before swallowing, to deepen into an experience, a practice, a path, and not rush to eat the next thing that comes across my plate.

Perhaps all these dreams of not getting food is telling me also to fast for awhile, slow down to nothing, sift through a lifetime of gorging and undigested accumulation, and heave out what I don’t need. At the same time I could clean my teeth, keep them in the best shape possible, for those things I ought to sink my teeth into, when the time comes. It is time for some deep cleaning…

Barefoot in the World

DREAM that I was in an enormous auditorium/amphetheatre packed with people. I had taken my shoes off and now I can’t find them… As I was searching a couple of guys came up to me and 2 other girls to inform us that we were chosen for the contest or competition. One guy handed me a paper to sign and asked me if I would take his team with me, as if it would be an act of charity…

In another dream I had a sexual relationship with G., although I knew he had at least one other woman. I was tidying up and came across stuff he left behind, clothes and personal items. There was a zippered toiletry bag with surprisingly many compartments – I opened a zipper to find another one. It was made of thin material like a windbreaker… I was longing for his return…

DREAMWORK:

Back in the great collective of learning life… I wonder if it has to do with discovering Dao through Osho’s book “Tao, the Pathless Path” which I finished last night. I felt as if a part of myself had been found to have a door, and the door just opened a crack… so, back to the dream…

My shoes are what I put on to go out into the world with, and now I can’t find them, I can’t go out… which reminds me, I had a dream a while ago that I went out in barefeet because I couldn’t find my shoes but I wanted to stay with my group. Which begs the question, do I need shoes to go out? No, it is ideal, conventionally speaking, it is safer and more comfortable for sure, but not absolutely necessary. In a way, shoes are objects of empowerment that we have been trained to put on, like a power suit, or an armour, to hopefully impart to us a sense of power and confidence we don’t actually feel we have. So it becomes an excuse for me to not go outside because I can’t find my shoes.

And why do I resist going outside? The answer is illustrated in the next part of the dream. Two guys (the masculine) came to me and two girls (the feminine; making 4, the number of wholeness), informing the women that we are the chosen for the race. Whatever the race or game or competition was, it felt like a matter of survival to me in the dream. Women, the feminine, are the chosen for this race. One guy asked me to take his team, his men, under my wing. I suppose to give them a chance too, whatever the objective was. In essence, to be responsible for them as well as my own. This is a big issue for me all of my life, having had responsbility for my siblings since a tender age. I loathe responsibility, especially responsibility of anyone and anything other than me and mine. There were times when I used to fantasize about not having to be responsible even for myself.

Going out and being in the world means taking on responsibilities of all kinds to me, and that thought alone makes me feel like the Titanic in its final hours. So I’m still dragging around that anchor of an issue, inside, where it’s safe. The big, wide, world is more of the trap for me than in my pared down little life.

I guess this massive little ailment of mine also stands in the way of uniting the feminine and masculine in me. What needs to happen then? First, I need to get over the idea, and conditioning, that I have to wear shoes (or anything else that will speak for me before I speak for myself) to go outside. Dorothy never really needed those shoes, she could’ve made her wish come true by voicing it and clicking her own heels. She already had courage, heart, brains, and eventually wisdom to be whatever she was meant to be. Most of all, she had love, from her family, from Toto, from the spirits of Nature. But it took the heroine’s quest for her to realize all that she already had.

And so did I. Except I have the delusion that I cannot handle responsibility, that it will snare me and drag me down, that it will mean the end of me. If I click my (bare) heels now, and ask for that fear/delusion to be lifted from me, will it happen? In my mind, I see myself not only clicking my heels, but stomping my bare feet on bare earth, stomping solidly, in a circle with the 2 women and 2 men (are they split because I am?) We hold hands and raise them to the centre, stomping and chanting. In our palms we lift up the burden of our fear of responsibility and offer it to Source for renewal. I let go of this fear now. But it did not lift off, instead, it sits heavy in our hands. We knelt down on the earth then, still holding the weight in the centre, our foreheads kiss the earth, and the weight seems to slide off onto the earth, freeing our hands. We stood up and danced in a circle, our voices rose higher, lighter, and we began to spiral around the boulder in the middle. Several spirals later, we danced off down the hill into the golden distance.

In the other dream my masculine/Animus is what connects me and my feminine/shadow. Perhaps he’s trying to bring us together, for she is not my enemy, though I feel threatened by her. My insecurity is soothed by the fact that I have his most personal belongings, I know him intimately, and he will always come back to me. The pouch, his innermost sanctum, his true Self, was under several layers but easily penetrable to the core, and available to me. My Animus was in the figure of G., a most unlikely source of help in my opinion, the unlikely hero, because I’ve always believed him to be weak, misguided, and cannot help even himself. Yet in the dream he appeared to be reddish and robust, his upper body filled out nicely, an image of red-bloodedness and strength. My masculine is stronger than I thought, and I need him very much.