Tuesday, October 12, 2010
DREAM that I am with a small group of people in a workshop which had to do with horoscopes (that’s the word in the dream, not ‘astrology’). People were sitting around long work tables joined together and there were objects that represented or were related to the astro signs on the table. They varied greatly in size and all of them appeared to be made of the same material, at least the surfaces were all a dark-charcoal grey but not completely covered by the paint or pigment – a kind of ‘distressed’ or faux finish look. I picked one up that was lying face down and it was a lion with a smaller lion in its hollowed-out forehead. It was surprisingly light for its size, as if it was made of styrofoam or plastic. I saw my friend L. sitting on the other side (I was standing) of the table on the right, and I saw objects related to Scorpio in front of her (though I can’t remember what they were now). She is a Scorpio.
In another part I was in a house or ground floor apartment with my sister. The light is slightly dim, as if lit with an incandescent bulb overhead. I was standing just inside the front door in the open common space – to the right and left are bedrooms along hallways – and I was looking at the toilet/sink unit right directly ahead, just out in the open. I said to my sister, we really ought to cover that up, build a room around it or something, besides, it’s in line with the front door and I don’t think that’s good feng-shui.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that there used to be a separate sink and toilet but the sink had been removed and the new combo unit (the sink was where the tank of the toilet was) installed. All the pipes and tubes ran along the wall to the right from it. Then I noticed there were at least 2 more bathrooms or toilets in the place, one in the room where my sister was, immediately to the left of the front door.
DREAMWORK:
Another workshop/seminar dream, this one not about higher learning as I would usually presume, but about how I’m not studying or learning in the best way for me. My first clue? The use of the word ‘horoscopes’ rather than ‘astrology’; I tend to associate the former with the quick and often irrelevant blurbs on sun signs that we pick up like fortune cookies. But seeing how I’ve been reading Caroline Casey’s book on astrology lately and feeling as if I could actually get into learning it, perhaps the dream is pulling me aside to tell me that I am doing it the wrong way, and showing me how I’m doing it the wrong way…
The objects on the tables, supposedly related to the signs, were uniformly finished in dullness and lifelessness, made not to last, nothing of interest until I flipped over the one of the lion, which I assume is Leo. This leo had a brainchild, literally, a miniature twin in its forhead – the small self inside the larger Self. So if I look at Leo as a being like myself, it has a self, which has its centre in ego, and it has also a Self, the whole of what Leo is, which includes the ego. The Cowardly Lion in Wizard of Oz wrestled with his fear, doubting the power of his Self, believing in what he thought to be true, when all along it was only this belief that stood in his way of seeing his true and opposite nature of the hero. He was courageous, but he couldn’t see it because of his belief. Whereas the Hero knows what he wants, and though he encounters obstacles and feels fear, he does not linger there. He has his sight set on the object of his quest, and he moves on without giving his fear a second thought.
So this Leo is speaking to me after all, for I am the one so often immobilized by fear, trapped in my own head.
Leo is governed by the Sun, seated in the solar plexus, the place of personal will and personal power. That means the little lion in the head needs to be brought down into the centre of the big lion, as part of my individuation (finding and embracing the self). So what is this belief or thinking that I have blocking me from manifesting my radiant, golden and powerful self? It is that out of habit I avoid facing a fear until I absolutely must, and sometimes even getting away with not confronting it at all, though I never get away from the fear either.
How do I break this habit then? It is a matter of replacing this habit with another, through ritual.
What ritual? A ritual with fire, to burn away my fears. I see the fire burning in my mind’s eye now, and I name my fears one by one as I toss them into the fire:
Now I burn away my fear of failure.
Now I burn away my fear of being too small.
Now I burn away my fear of taking up too much space.
Now I burn away my fear of not having enough.
Now I burn away my fear of being out in the world.
Now I burn away my fear of the world being a dangerous place.
Now I burn away my fear of not being good enough as I am.
Now I burn away my fear of pain and suffering.
Now I burn away my fear of being vulnerable.
Now I burn away my fear of being trapped.
Now I burn away my fear of responsibility.
Now I burn away my fear of being my true self.
I burn away all the beliefs I have relating to all these fears,
And I burn away the habit I have of running from my fears.
I see myself surrounded by a ring of fire made of bud-shaped flames, and I am dancing inside the ring, feeling great joy and the wonderful heat from the fire. But there is the sense of something missing, something not done. Something else I need to burn away… the fear of not being in control. I spin out faster suddenly, spinning in circles along the circumference of the ring, and my dress flares out from me just under my breasts like a ring of ribbons, the topside is purple and the underside is saffron. How I love the colours and the pattern, the energy and the dance, the heat and the fire! I feel beautiful and capable, loved and cherished. My feet are a blur of spinning and stamping to the mantra of “Let. Go. Let. Go. Let. Go…” and I feel them fly out along my outflung arms and fingertips, my body lighter and lighter as the fears and beliefs leave me. I drop down to the ground and the dance ends, with my deep gratitude to the heavens and love for the earth spread all around me like the radiating beams of my dress.
The ritual will continue to play out for the next while as I release what is still releasing, but I can already feel my body open all the way down nearly to my navel, the inner sun in my solar plexus beginning to rise and peek out from the darkness it has been kept in for so long. Welcome to the world, my little sun, may you shine big and bright!
And as there is a piece of each astrological sign in all of us, I need to find the piece of each in myself, and see what it has to teach me and heal me. This is how I ought to learn, practice, and teach astrology, should the opportunity arise.
P.S. My friend L., my shadow in the dream, was the embodiment of the unconscious, as symbolized in Scorpio, a sign that embraces both creative and destructive powers, it holds hidden a great depth but is capable of penetrating it to find the wisdom of the mystery. She guides me quietly yet steadily, anchoring my flighty tendencies, not letting me off the hook (pun!) however menacing the dark may appear. (Found an interesting description of Scorpio: http://www.soulindia.com/12signes/scorpio_txt/scorpio_txt.html)
P.P.S. A scorpion cannot sting itself to death as it is immune to its own venom
~~~
Moving along to Part 2 of the dream…
I knew that toilets and bathrooms are symbols of emotional outlets for me, but this dream tells me that inherent in the picture is also the damming of my emotions, out of fear of losing control of my emotions (and my bowels!) in public. My house in the dream, my self, had 3 bathrooms. One to the left where my feminine lives (and also where my shadow sister was), one to the right for the boys, and one right in the middle where the two can meet, a common ground. But I was more concerned about hiding that one, right out in the open and in front of the entrance, even if it had been combined into one unit. It was simply not acceptable to my toilet-trained and socially conditioned ego.
The sink-and-toilet-in-one combo was a streamline of cleansing and detoxing functions, cleaning of outer and inner toxins, really quite ingenious, and complete with the necessary plumbing parts. The streamlining and the ‘completeness’ were the key here, because this is what happens in the Middle Way, where the feminine and the masculine reconnect, and it is calling me to let go of the tight reins I have on my emotions, a safe and state-of-the-art outlet is provided for me there. Uncorked, I will be able to express my creativity and my true self, and allow what the divine wills to come through me.
All of this has triggered the memory of a childhood trauma… I was about 8 or 9 y.o. and standing beside my teacher’s desk doing I can’t remember what now, but it wasn’t anything bad, except I had to go pee. Being the painfully shy introvert that I was, I could not ask the teacher for leave to go to the bathroom. So I just stood there in the same spot, until I couldn’t hold it anymore and I wet myself. Soon I was standing in the middle of the puddle, but my teacher had not noticed, so I thought perhaps she would think someone had spilled tea on the floor and my secret shame will not be revealed. She never said anything to me about it, but the memory stayed with me ‘til this day.
I don’t think it was caused iby some kind of Freudian toilet-training trauma, I was just so lacking in a sense of Self and paradoxically too self-conscious to want to draw attention to myself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-consciousness). This is at the core of my personality, and will only heal and change with individuation.
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