Three Coins

DREAMBIT: My sister and I are picking up as we are about to leave a restaurant after a family meal, and I see 2 very small silver coins and one a bit bigger that have fallen under the table and chairs. There is the same engraved head on each of them, though I do not recognize who it was, just that it was a man’s face. I had seen another set, with a different face I think, earlier in the dream. I think they were my brother’s. I ask my sister why I don’t have any? She says that they were given to them by our grandparents (my grandmother was alive in the dream), but because I don’t go to church anymore, I wasn’t there when they were given out. I wanted them too.

DREAMWORK:

This is a dream about how I feel disinherited by the mainstream collective – wow, I never thought of it like that – because I do not conform to its beliefs and conditions and expectations, I miss the chance to collect what is due to me. They do not actively reject me though, I am the one who rejected them, made myself absent. I am the prodigal son. But even though I do not regret leaving them, I do not hate anyone either. I know in my heart that they still love me and remember me as one of their own. It is only my own belief that I AM SEPARATE. In the bigger picture I am always part of the tribe, no matter how far away I go from it, or what I do to denounce its ways.

I belong to a family and tribe far bigger than my kin and their church and community, this I know, but my tendency to (again!) throw the baby out with the absoluteness of black-and-white is what disinherits me from my legacy, my birthright, and entitlement. The world did not say to me, if you leave us and do not follow our rules, you will not get anything from us – you will be disowned! I assumed, out of my own fear, that punishment in the form of banishment (because I abandoned them first) would be the consequence. But the world simply went on, old and wise, it has seen much, including the messes that we have made in it.

The world is not guilty of dispossessing me; I cut myself off from it to make a point, but I impaled myself on that point. I recall now, that I had done this once before, 10 years ago, on a smaller scale, but for no less extreme of a reason. I was certain that I would be disowned by my family when I left my marriage, divorce for no just cause was not only unacceptable but a disgrace to the family. But it never happened. After the histrionics died down and the dust settled, we all went about picking up the pieces in our lives, and life went on. In fact, we have become closer since I took on healing as a priority, and as it is true that you do not heal without it happening to your family too, no matter where they are, we have seen much healing in our family, including, quite necessarily, our relationship as a whole.

Oh me of little faith that I did not apply this lesson to how I have been relating to my bigger family, the world...

Perhaps I had this very healing dream because of this talk I went to last night, and what it brought up for me... see section below.

P.S. the coins are a legacy from my family, gifts bequeathed to us from our lineage (funny how I was just half-joking to Michael yesterday that my family hasn’t given me much interesting material to write a memoir with, after reading about a Chinese-Canada writer who just published a memoir which involved visits to her villages in China where her parents came from, and how her father came to Toronto to work in the Chinese laundry probably as indentured labour, etc. etc., when my dad was just a plastics engineer who worked for DuPont...)

The 2 smaller coins are actual financial inheritance though modest, but the larger coin which appeared apart from the other 2 is the true legacy. It is the gift given each of us to develop, to use, to expand as the purpose of our life, what our heart truly desires, and what we are in pursuit of.
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Tossed and turned in the night again... it occurred to me that I’ve had tension in my head for over a day now, then this morning I woke up to rain and the tension’s gone... so it wasn’t psychological after all ☺. I tend to believe there’s a non-physical cause for everything – though that does not exclude a physical one – headaches, car accidents, cancer, leaves falling... at the very least, these things all came into being because of intention.

At The Introduction to the Secret of the Golden Flower last night, Sonam Gayatso, the Tibetan Buddhist Lama who gave the talk showed us a book called “The Self-Aware Universe: how Consciousness creates the material world” by Amit Goswami, in which he postulates that matter came into being because Consciousness ‘willed’ it, and not the other way around. My body though, does not agree. It tells me that both Consciousness and Matter existed at the same time from the very beginning, and like yin and yang, they played into and off of each other. Consciousness is masculine, and Matter is feminine. Our mistake is, as usual, that we see them as 2 separate things, paired perhaps, but still 2 distinct ‘entities’ in our minds. In the same way we see an arm as distinct from the rest of the body, not convinced that it is in direct communication with many other parts, or that it has a relationship with our psyche far more intimate than we realize.

If an arm is cut off and lies cold on the floor, is it an arm anymore? It may look like one and feel like one, but it can no longer function or move or heal itself the way it could when it was Body.

But, did the tension first happened in my head when the barometric pressure became too much, or did it happen because of that AND because I was already driving myself too much to achieve, not to mention I am pre-menstrual, thus creating a susceptibility or weakness for the external pressure to get into my head? Homeopathy makes much of this pre-conditioning, as the terrain that diseases can take hold of in an organism. When conditions are right, things happen, whether we can see them or not. Perhaps that’s when we call it synchronicity, or bewildering tragedy when what manifests is not what we desire.

I’ve begun a practice of simply checking to see what’s left on my ‘doorstep’ each morning, and this is what I found today.