My blogging friend Ali wrote this post, which resonated with me and what I experienced growing up. What a damaging disorder for all parties involved. I feel deeply for anyone struggling to live in this type of relationship. This was my childhood in so many ways. I also want to add how harmful it can be when there is an enabler of the narcissist. For me it was, and still is, my mother enabling my stepfather, to the severe determent of all her other relationships. It is an extreme form of abuse, where everyone else but the party causing the pain is blamed. I’ve been there so many times, and the irony of my mother placing this label on me because I had the courage to heal and write about my experiences has been the final straw. I can no longer allow myself to suffer from misdirected blame and abuses, nor allow my children to. Please read Ali’s post, it’s so incredibly thorough and helpful.
Category: Energy Healing
Rejection and Resilience
It was my dreams, and later an email from a friend, that reminded me of a legacy of rejections, but it was the great blue heron in its silent flight to water, who reminded me of resilience and strength.
As Ted Andrews notes in his book Animal Speak, the heron is a symbol of self-reliance and inner strength. Although the heron has the power of voice, it is known for its quiet, stealth-like nature. Unless it is breeding and tending to its young, the heron is often alone. The choice to spend much of its life in solitude benefits, instead of hinders the heron’s ability to survive and thrive.
In light of recent events, I have been thinking about the concept of rejection. I was, in essence, rejected before my birth. My father had wanted a boy, my mother, no child at all. Yet, I was born a girl of “truth.” I was destined to experience the lessons of resilience and rejection throughout this life. What started as a birth mark, became legacy of wounds that would cut into my soul, scar-over, and open again, and I would learn how to persevere and survive.
The heron teaches us how to find the truth inside. When I started unraveling my mother’s truth from my own, I experienced the slow, painful, yet freeing release of the bonds I had desperately held throughout childhood.
In her email, my friend wrote about feeling like an orphan with family. It is a concept I have often associated with. When I began to reject to truths I was raised on, I was rejected once more by my mother, and the stepfather who’s truths she has always favored. I have, in essence, become an orphan with living parents. Yet, I have not lost everything. I have, through this process of rejection and self-discovery, uncovered my truths, and with them, the permission to love and include the people in my life I once rejected.
Last night I had a series of dreams, most of which have by now become the blurred snapshots of scenes. It’s funny how the feelings that are evoked from our dreams linger more strongly sometimes than the images. Like most nights since Easter, I experienced dreams about my childhood family. Last night, I was back at my childhood home, but as an adult, attempting to hide from my angry stepfather. He found me in the garden, where I was emerging from the covers of a bed.
This brief snapshot of the dream that I recall is filled with symbolism. Not only am I still unearthing the fear deeply imbedded in my cells from childhood, my soul is seeking the rebirth of the true self.
My friend and I have been corresponding about rhizomes and the totipotent abilities of plants. Referencing the french philosopher Gilles Deleuze, she wrote, “to our detriment, western society has been too obsessed with the idea of unity, progeny, singularity, seed–the model of the tree.” Instead, it is the metaphor of a rhizome that he applauds, as she wrote, “a tuber who can shoot off brand new shoots in any direction, at any time, and is not “unified” so that several new places of growth can’t always be linked to the same seed. I love this sense of family! I am and I am not my father’s seed. I am so much more and other.”
As am I. I am my mother’s daughter, and my father’s (both of them), but I am not. I am a collection of cells and their memories that have chosen to grow a new form, to break apart once more, and grow again, new and separate. I have retained the memories of the original form(s), yet I am becoming my own, self-reliant self. As my dream reflected, I am still shedding the imprint of fear to emerge new and whole from the garden of self. Fear, I have found, is a hard habit to break.
Later in the night I found myself flying, it seems, as I was level with rooftops, along a street with beautiful buildings. As I passed each structure, my eye examined the intricate details of the designs. Instead of the clutch of fear I had experienced in the previous dream, I was filled with the breath of freedom and bliss. I was the heron studying all the gifts I held inside (and out).
The Body of Night
I enter the dark body of night to heal. To recover the parts of me that have been lost to fear over lifetimes.
I’ve always enjoyed putting together puzzles. The more intricate and mysterious the art of creation, the more I am drawn into the process of discovery. I have found no better place to build the puzzle of self than at night, where I can slip into the inky abyss of darkness where everything exists. It can take some cunning and a good dose of courage to find what I am looking for. Night is the place where veils dissolve, and the landscape of the soul is laid bare. It is the place where mysteries blinded by the sun become tangible when we are brave enough to extend our grasp into the black abyss.
Each dream that unfolds through Night becomes a path with a promise of a gift, or many if we can find them hidden amid the shadows. The dreams that cause the greatest tremor of emotion within our “sleeping” form, often hold the most sought-after treasures. I have learned to love nightmares, for they lay bare those pieces that lurk in the crevices of self, which can only be found after putting the easy and obvious together. They are the stuff of the inside that likes to hide, deceptively camouflaged within an unassuming palette. Yes, it is these gems I know seek, for each piece recovered brings me closer to the whole self that is Love.
Love. That is, after all, what it is all about. This quest we are all on. It is said that to love another, we must first love ourselves. I believe that the more fully we love ourselves, the more fully we love others. I believe we can only love in others, what we love in ourselves, and when we are able to accept and unite those aspects of self that are mirrored uncomfortably in others, we finally achieve the whole self that is Love. When we do this, we are loving not the fear in the form of anger, injustice or abuse, but the aspect of universal self beneath it that we all share. The piece of self yearning to be whole that was once love/loved is still, in essence, love.
Now when I discover a piece of self that has become disconnected over (life)time(s), and has forgotten love in favor of the energy of fear, I rejoice. My dreams are a tool, they work with me, taking me down the paths of self-recovery. They lead me to the source, where the hand of fear tries to hide the light. The clues to how I got there are always found in the scenes. Past lifetimes are revealed with vivid faces, costumes and languages I have not encountered in this lifetime, interwoven with a present-day landscape. It is not my job to judge, but to accept. It is not my task to hold on, but to effortlessly let go. I am brought here to seek, to find, and unite into love. I have learned that our fears do make us stronger, when we accept them with understanding, release the energy that traps and reunite the lost love.
Orange
When you look at the color orange, what do you see? Years ago, before I started working with the chakra centers in the body, I wrote a poem about an orange and compared it to love. Here is the poem, in revised format, with the essence still intact:
Orange
Love should be
like a ripe orange
before it is peeled. Thick,
heavy, sweet
When you turn
its bumpy surface
in your palm, there is
no beginning
no end
Love is the color of the sacred “womb” that resides inside all of us. It is the place where we grow our creative and sensual selves into being with the fire of our soul. The color of passion and love manifested in the form of our unique gifts, it is always present, yet sometimes hides.
I have been thinking and writing a lot about orange these days, as I rebirth dormant gifts held inside the second, or sacral chakra that vibrates in this hue. Rarely do I wear this bold color that tends to overwhelm my complexion, but there I was in a lovely boutique last Friday, buying a dress adorned with orange flowers.
On Saturday I peeled sweet potatoes, carrots and gingers and cooked them into an orange soup. We are drawn to the colors that want to bloom inside of us. There is a reason why our bodies and senses crave certain palettes. I cook with orange to kindle the fire that hides in my belly. Today, my eye is drawn to the flames that warms my house as I nibble the flesh of mango and write, my orange dog staring me down, waiting for her walk.
Not broken
Seven days ago I broke my middle finger after a week of lessons and night healing. For more on this please read my post The Wounded Healer, which I have just revisited to add some clarification and edits (it was not a very polished post, please forgive me).
The morning after I broke my finger, I was about to head downstairs to leave for my doctor’s appointment where I would learn what type of treatment I would be receiving for my break. The fracture was in the inside of my middle knuckle, and there was some speculation about a tendon being misplaced and the possibility of surgery. Now, as many of you know by now, I don’t tend to view occurrences as accidents. As I looked down at my finger, swollen and bruised, I heard the words inside my head, It’s not really broken.
I won’t go through the details of my brief visit with the orthopedist, but I will tell you how pleased I was to discover that my appointment had been made with a physician that took a nontraditional approach to breaks. Yes, my finger was fractured, but, as he told me, there was no reason I couldn’t heal it myself. Now, to be fair, I had not yet told him what I did for a living. I told only after he offered physical therapy referrals, etc. as options to help me recover full mobility after the swelling and pain went down.
To be honest, aside from the pain that occurred immediately after I fell, my finger didn’t hurt unless I over-did my attempts to bend or flex it. I walked out of the office in the elated air of slight disbelief, but I knew I could heal without help. I had never before broken a bone, but I was ready for the challenge.
One week later, I can form a fist, albeit not a tight one, and flex my finger fully. What did I do to heal? I trusted my body. Except through client healing, I never channeled healing energy through my hands. This healing, I knew, needed to come from within. It wasn’t hard, I simply allowed the process to occur.
All healing ultimately comes from within, from allowing and trusting that we hold inside of us the infinite capacity to be whole. That, in fact, our body and soul desire this more than anything else. This is why I share my story with you. When we think perhaps that we are broken, when we even have a fragmented bone to prove it to ourselves, we always have the choice to heal.
Healing what we think is broken can be a beautiful journey to self. I needed this break, along with the lessons of last week, in order to progress on my journey to Truth. That soft fire within me needed to be ignited, and the old flames of fears burned away.
The Wounded Healer
The tag on my tea yesterday read “Be Heard,” but let’s start back at that mountain from two nights ago. Part of me hoped I was done releasing, at least for awhile, after I woke on the morning of the March 11th. I had, after all, opened a door to let out the trapped energy of fear. Naturally, when you go through a doorway (note the significance that this dream occurred early in the morning on the 11th), you need to deal with what’s inside. We never know quite what we’ll meet, or how long it will take to go through what we find.
So begins the journey that started with a single crow, perhaps the largest one I have ever seen, perched high in its glossy black cloak atop a bare tree as though waiting for me to pass by on my morning walk. The crow calls us to enter the darkness we hold inside, and through doing so create light from the shadows. It is a messenger of magic and the divine feminine energies that reside in all of us. There was one crow, I knew the job was mine alone.
Then the robin appeared beneath my apple tree, pecking the frozen ground to pull a treasure from the snow. The single crow, followed by the single robin, a messenger of spring, renewal and the birth, or rebirth, of one’s truth with its sky-blue eggs, told me this new phase was only just beginning.
I won’t deny that I had been feeling it. For the past few days I have literally felt as though I were pregnant. My lower abdomen felt achy and crampy, as women’s bellies often do in the early stages of pregnancy as the womb begins to adjust to new life. My lower chakras were, and still are, adjusting to that freed-up energy from two mornings ago. In fact, my entire body felt achy and tired.
The next night, after I dreamed of the mountain, I experienced a night of fitful sleep. I can’t tell you where I went in most of my dreams, my only memory of the first half of the night was waking to the message, healing, healing being played over and over inside my mind each time I woke before falling back into a restless slumber.
One dream, occurring again in the early hours of the morning, stayed with me. I was at Bowdoin, where I went to college. It’s perhaps worth noting that I last, physically, returned to Bowdoin for a reunion in the summer of 2011 (a doorway year). Right before, and during the time of the reunion, I came down with walking pneumonia and was quite ill, fatigued and feverish while I was back on campus with my family and the two friends I had stayed in touch with.
Can it be a coincidence that I dreamt of Bowdoin on the night of the 11th/12th? In my dream I was searching for comfort and peace, a space to freely express my truth, much like I had during my college years. I found myself in a dormitory with cluttered and dirty carpets, beyond which was a long room with a pristine polished wooden floor and organized, uncluttered furniture, but I needed to find a way to clean up the space I was in in order to get there. I walked into a large kitchen, like I had the night before on the mountain, only this time the cook opened an oven to reveal a large, pink, roasting pig. I was hungry, but this meal was not being cooked for me. Something was holding me back from partaking in the succulent feast that was being prepared.
Yesterday morning brought more fatigue and that strange pregnant feeling in my lower abdomen. I chose an Echinacea tea, and as I sat down to sip it, read the words “Be Heard” on the end of the string resting against my mug. Now, to be fair, Spirit had been trying to prepare me for this healing and release phase for quite some time. For weeks the repetition of signs kept appearing in various forms.
In her book The Hidden Power of Dreams, Denise Linn writes about learning to pay attention to messages that come in sets of threes, in particular. I had been seeing the number 3 for days, and had recently done 3 tarot readings for fellow healers/lightworkers that were eerily similar. Each querent, it became revealed, was, or had recently been dealing with, trapped fears in their lower 3 chakras. There was energy calling for, or being released in all cases. Denise Linn also tells her readers that the wounded healer draws to her what needs to be healed within herself, thus by healing this energy in others, she also heals herself. I have found this to be true in my own healing practice.
Now I’ll take you to last night. Although I was tired, I had trouble falling asleep. Perhaps it was the selenite crystal I had moved from the vanity beside the window and activated for dream healing before I went to bed. It had been a bold experiment. I had never before activated a selenite for dream work and placed it beside my bed.
I fell asleep sometime between midnight and 1:00 p.m., when I woke abruptly with my dream-voice calling for help, and filled with desperate fright. The dream began on the side of a road near my house. I was walking up a hill on my way home with my two dogs on leash beside me. Several construction/plow trucks were passing by on the left side of the road, I was on the right (the logical side of our bodies). To prevent my dogs from attacking the trucks, I pulled the 3 of us over an embankment. Suddenly, I was struggling to hold on to the dogs, which were both orange in my dream, and the earth, so as not to fall down the steep ravine below.
Before I jump ahead to where I next found myself, let me draw your attention, as I did mine, to the time during which this dream occurred. Linn states in her book that the hours of 11 p.m to 1 a.m. are the gallbladder time according to the ancient Chinese clock. It is a time where we deal with unresolved, outwardly directed anger and test our courage.
After dangling from that cliff with my two, “loyal” dogs, I found myself home, inside what I knew to be my house (it appeared differently in the dream) with my family. I looked out the window and saw fire trucks and media vans pulling up the hill beside my home (again on the right side of me), and noticed a large white barn that was about to catch fire from my burning neighbor’s house.
I turned into rescue-mode and began gathering clothes, which are often symbolic of our outward appearances/coverings that hide our true selves, and blankets to bring over to help out. (Years ago I witnessed a fire in a neighboring apartment building and gathered clothing, etc. to donate). My husband went outside to investigate and I told my children to start getting ready for bed. Suddenly, our house turned into a Red Cross van (an overt symbol for healing, and since a vehicle often represents our bodies, this could be interrupted as a call for self-healing) and I could not get “upstairs” to my children, because there was no longer an upstairs, but a small, unreachable set of windows above me.
I began to panic, and looked out a lower window where I saw my husband on the hillside axing what I knew to be the remains of our house, which was what had actually burned. He was standing before a large pile in the shape of a teepee (I lived in a tepee for several months as a child), containing the stacked remains of what we owned, encased in some of my shirts. One shirt, which was purple and stiff like it had been starched, stood out in particular. In her book Linn notes that an ax can be symbolic of the “fear of loss” and “cutting away that which isn’t needed.”
As I watched my husband, I could feel his devastation and anger. He was, like most people in our dreams, symbolic of my own shadowed fear. In the middle of the pile I knew was my old white computer, which contained all my work and writing. My manuscript, not yet published, was lost in the middle.
Along with the fear of losing my belongings and my creative work, I was now worried about our pets that I knew must have perished. I was filled with grief and helpless frustration. Yet, next to my husband, and the rubble of our house, there was a new, unfinished house wrapped extensively with plastic that was our new, unfinished home. Still, I was ravaged by my grief brought on by this fire, and woke to my struggle to express my emotions at 1 a.m. My body was feverish, my stomach upset, and the side of my big toe on my right foot was aching, an area associated with the throat and the thyroid. The word “mother” popped into my head.
It took me a long time to get back to sleep in those early morning hours as I thought about my dream and what it meant for me, trying to shed the fears it brought up as I did so. The sleep that came after was deep and restorative, I can’t tell you where I went, I don’t remember, but I woke without aches.
Again, I hoped I was done with the healing and release, but Spirit wasn’t quite finished with me. As if to make sure I’d gotten the message, the first part of my dream played out in the morning in slightly different form. I gathered up the dogs, as I always do on school days, and walked with my children and husband down the driveway to await the bus. I only made it half-way. Rosy, my orange-and-white dog, decided to lunge suddenly at a small animal, likely a cat or squirrel, pulling me in the process over an embankment of snow beside the driveway. I fell backwards and landed, not too graciously, on my right hand. It was a painful experience, to say the least.
Can you guess what I broke? My right, middle finger. The finger that holds our fire energy, which we house in our lower chakras. Message received!
The Sifter
It appeared to me at the end of a dream last week. I held the large metal sifter in my hand as I surveyed the boxes of artifacts from my past on the floor of my childhood basement. The sorting and discarding was finished, or so I thought. But, left in my hand was a sifter. What do I do with this? I wondered.
When I dug out my kitchen sifter to take a photo for this post, I noticed how similar it was to the one in my dream. As I studied the metal holes and edges, I realized this sifter, although cleaned after last use, was holding onto debris stuck stubbornly to its meshwork. Instinctively, I started to scrape away at the stuck residue with my nails, then stopped. There’s always something left behind, lingering, isn’t there? Whether it is an actual artifact we can feel through the caress of our fingers, or a memory tucked into the folds of our brain. When we clear the clutter, it never really disappears.
It can only transform. Before my dream of the sifter, I had spent weeks sorting through past fears. Have you ever noticed how the Universal Spirit has a way of kindly dumping a load of our fears at our feet, not one-by-one in a gentle fashion so that we might lightly skip over them, but in a pile so large we have no choice but to notice it? We have no choice, but to make a choice.
We can try to climb the pile to get over the top, then down the other side, but chances are if we do this, its jumbled contents will cause us to trip or fall. We’re likely to get hurt and bruised with the effort, and the pile is still there, slightly less neat, waiting behind us.
Another option is to bury ourselves inside of it and hide. The task of sorting being too over-whelming to accomplish, we simply let it enclose and crush us. How many people do you know who look like they’re carrying the weight of an invisible world on their shoulders?
Years ago, before I started healing my past, I realized it was no fun to carry my fears with me all of the time. It not only weighed me down, the effort made me physically ill. So, I started sorting and shedding. I’m still doing it today. That’s what I was doing in the weeks before I saw the sifter in my dream.
It started with the uncomfortable weight of fears presenting themselves in various daily circumstances. Not fun, it never really is. But, thankfully, I’m learning to take a different perspective on these periods of learning that Spirit sends to me. Ah, ha! I say after I get over my state of grievance (lengths may vary ;-), It’s time to shift! Lets do this!
Yep, that call for sifting is a cue to us that we are ready for a spiritual shift. Our soul is calling us to release a particular burden of fear and transform it into light. So, after I grudgingly accept this (again, the length to time it takes me to do this often varies :-), I now say, Bring on the joy! I’m ready to receive!
The end result of first sifting through our pile of fear, then shifting it into light, is joy! We have now opened ourselves to receive more of the Universal Source of Abundance, that I call the Light of Love, Joy and Truth. Let me give you my most recent example:
For weeks I played with my little demons called fears. In my daily life challenges, and in my dreams, I worked with shifting the energy that clutched my heart and throat, going to the source of the pain, and bringing it out to light. It wasn’t fun, playing with this last patch of fears. As I sifted through them, they brought me back to my childhood in this lifetime, they brought me way back to distant past lives. They danced in my dreams and I woke up to a heart thumping with exertion.
I even shifted the energy in my home, with the help of a gifted friend. I burned clutter that was weighing me down, asking the fire spirits to transmute its energy. I rearranged and sorted, nothing too drastic, but all with the intention of bringing in more “light” and abundance.
As the shift started taking effect, the metaphorical pile, with its bulky weight, lightened, transforming into a path of abundance. 4 crows and a hawk appeared in the sky while I walked, followed days later by an unexpected surprise in my email box. WordPress had Freshly Pressed one of my erasure poems. I was pleased, but didn’t hold on too tightly to the tether of hope, instead I released it and a few days later my inbox was flooded. 400 pages views in one day on a single poem (I was lucky to get 10 before), over a hundred likes, numerous comments and reblog notices appeared, and the flow has continued with each day. My audience has grown by hundreds, without any direct effort on my part. I simply cleared the clutter abstracting the path. I brought in more light.
Healing A Body of Memories Self Reflection Scan #trauma #healing #pastlives
Lie down and close your eyes. Take three deep belly breaths and relax into the space your are in. Now, through your mind’s eye, go inside your body. What do you feel? What do you remember?
If you have an ache or pain, whether it is chronic or acute, what is it telling you? You are relaxed and lying down, yet your body may hold a pain from the past.
Our bodies hold onto our aches and our pains until we are ready to heal them, or release them. Sometimes we hold them for many lifetimes. Do you have a birthmark or unexplainable scar or blemish on your skin that you’ve had all of your life? Chances are your body has retained this imprint from a traumatic past life that has yet to be healed.
My friend Karen Kubicko writes about birthmarks on her blog, and shows us that when we heal the trapped emotions that result from a past life trauma, our body responds by releasing the imprint, or birthmark left-over. Denise Linn also explores this concept in your book Past Lives, Present Miracles.
Even if you don’t believe in past lives, or are not yet ready to explore them for yourself, you can heal the trapped fears in your body from this lifetime. We heal when we are ready to release a fear, and often our bodies will tell us when we are ready by expressing discomfort or pain.
As some of my readers know, I began to heal my body of memories out of shear desperation. For two long and painful years, I endured the side-effects of IBS. No doctor could tell me the cause or the cure, I had to go within to heal a belly that had trapped fear for as long as I could remember.
When I wrote my memoir, A Girl Named Truth, I started peeling away the memories hidden within my body. My earliest memory, I discovered, was created when I was two-yrs. old. Sitting on my Grammy’s sofa with my sister and cousin, listening to my parents fight outside the window, I discovered the pounding beat of fear that pushes the heart towards bursting, yet stills the body into silence.
The memories came back to me over the course of the next two years and, as I wrote, I began to heal. I discovered patterns. Oh, so many patterns! As I wrote my story, I realized I had often taken on the role of the silent victim who hides her voice. We attract what we hold inside, and I held a lot of fear in the form of guilt, low self-worth, and being afraid to speak my truth. I trapped my fears in my stomach and in my throat. I trapped them in my neck and in my shoulders. They’re still coming to the surface to be healed.
I healed my IBS symptoms overnight, after I made the deep, soul-level decision that I would listen to my heart and become a writer. Yet, the IBS itself was a form of healing the memories trapped inside my body. For those two, exhausting years, my body worked to shed the fear and anger I had held dormant inside of me. My body, you could say, had literally reached its carry capacity. It had to heal, or succumb to a worse fate.
These layers inside of me go back to many past lives which, like my present life memories, have a way of surfacing when I’m ready to face them and heal them. When I decided to work on my throat chakra, where my body trapped my “voice,” and as a result, developed thyroid disease, past-life memories began to emerge. At the same time, I met my guide Eagle.
The first image that came to me occurred while I was meditating outside beside my swimming pool about four years ago. I saw an image of a young man bound and suffering in a darkened room. Deep within my cells, the memory that this man was me surfaced. Then Eagle appeared, full of power and urgency, with an over-large orange beak moving silent words at the base of my throat. The pattern of repressed truth and victimhood, I realized through that mediation, was carried over from past lifetimes. It was time to speak. It was time to heal.
Just as our fears can come in many forms, so too can the way they imprint upon our bodies. Quite often there are patterns to the way they nestle inside the folds of our tissues. A silenced voice can results in thyroid cancer or disease, trapped anger and fear frequently takes the form of the vaguely diagnosed ailment of IBS, Crohn’s disease, or other intestinal ailments. Allowing others to disempower us can result in chronic lower back pain, while upper back, shoulder and neck pain can be a side-effect of the tendency to take on too much stress (much of which is not ours to take on).
When you explore those places within you that are calling for healing, see if you can find out what fears are trapped there. Allow your mind to be open to recalling the memories associated with those fears, whether they are from this life, or a life that has already passed.
Healing can also occur through many forms. It can happen when you reclaim the power that you have too freely given away, allowing yourself to pursue a passion that always resided inside of you, but were afraid to express. It can occur by going back to the source of the pain and shifting the energy there from fear to light. Sometimes an energy healer (through the various modalities they work with), can help you release and shift this energy to light, but you can often do this yourself. Going into that memory and flooding it with the light of love and forgiveness can heal the trapped pain, as well as changing the circumstances of the actual memory.
Both Karen and Denise speak to these ideas in their books/blogs, but I will give you an example of how you can work with this approach. My fears often surface during the night in the form of dreams. Lately, I’ve been using them as tools for healing. Sometimes, when I am “aware” enough, I enter the dream while I am still in it, and heal the energy around it. I switch from a victim to an empowered character within the actual dream, for example. If I am unable to do this while the dream is occurring, I do it when I wake from it. In my “imagination” I go back inside the dream and change the events and the outcomes, shifting the energy from fear to empowerment and love. Sometimes, I don’t just change my character, but those affecting me. I make them amicable and friendly, if they are hostile, and I shower the scene with love.
If you are interested in this form of healing, I urge you to explore the writings of Denise and Karen, who have both done extensive work and exploration into past lives. You may find that the more you do to heal your trapped fears, the more this healing extends to others. I am recalling an example from Denise Linn, who tells the story of a woman who healed her son’s speech impediment after revisiting and healing a past life they shared together. It’s a beautiful act of self love to heal your body’s fears, and often that healing, whether we are aware of it or not, extends to others. The energy that moves through us is, after all, shared with everyone else.
You Can Go Your Own Way
Often, when I am feeling lost, confused or in need of direction, Spirit takes me back to school. I call it night school. In that often blatant, but still cryptic manner that Spirit has, I return to the scene of my high school, college or graduate schools while I sleep, yet the characters and events are exaggerated, twisted, and labyrinthian in nature, like an M.C. Escher painting. Usually, it’s not a very pleasant experience. Who doesn’t feel, at least at times, lost and over-whelmed when they’re at school, especially in the school of dreams?
Spirit though, has a way of hammering a point home until you get it. Two nights ago, I found myself back at Brown University, only it was vastly different from the Brown I knew for only a year. The campus had changed into a congested city of buildings hugged by the sea, and I found myself following my husband (who had not attended Brown with me). I was losing track of him as he wandered through the city on his way to class, and suddenly I was alone, by the wild ocean, with only his black cell phone. Naturally, the phone did not work, and I found myself panicking as I punched in numbers to no avail. I was lost and bewildered, unable to find my own way to where, I was not sure.
Instead of exploring all of the symbolism in this particular dream, let me take you to last night, where I again returned to school. This time I was at Bowdoin, where my husband and I completed our undergraduate education together. Bowdoin, when I attended the school many years ago, was a place of mixed blessings for me. My husband took full advantage of his time at Bowdoin, and found the rigors of the education and social environment fulfilling. I, on the other hand, found it hard to adjust to an environment I found to be, in many ways, a repeat of high school, only here everyone was an over-achiever. I couldn’t find my place in the sea of cliques.
It was no surprise that the Bowdoin of my dream last night was an exaggerated scene of what I had experienced years ago, there were even characters from high school. Here I was in a crowded cafeteria of sorts, filled with tables and people figuring out their schedules and where they needed to go. In my personal confusion, I was trying to follow their examples. A confident and sure friend was going one way, my husband another. I tried to follow him to an early biology class, but I was late, twice.
The dream changed, and I was in a metaphysical store. A woman was making miso soup. I told her I loved miso soup. I could smell it. I could taste it in my mouth. The colors in this scene were vivid and more real than life. I was wearing a natural face devoid of make-up, and a peach-colored shirt. The walls were hung with hand-bags, just out of reach, and in the center of each was the rounded form of a globe. At the counter 3 or 4 women poured over a map. I approached them, looked over their shoulders, and watched their scenes unfold. The map came to life, characters interacted in scenes, which the women understood clearly, yet I struggled to make sense of.
Suddenly, in this room, my senses were becoming dull and tired. My face swollen, and my eyes heavy, as though I was taking on energy that was not mine, and in the process, draining my own. When I woke, this lyric from Fleetwood Mac started playing on repeat inside my head, You can go your own way. Go your own way. You can go your own way…or was it find your own way?
Both versions, it seems, I needed. I thought of The Fool card in the Rider Tarot deck, blithely skipping along his own path, unhampered by the potential of danger ahead. I thought of the 2 of Wands, depicting a traveler holding the world in his palm, and I thought of the dreams I had just left.
That map on the counter was not mine, nor were those paths I was trying to follow at the revisited school(s). The world held inside that wall of handbags, which had seemed just out of reach, was waiting for me to reach up and grab it. To find my own way. I thought of Goddard College, the literal school in this life in which I found home. When I dream of Goddard, I dream of paths in nature, I dream of mysteries waiting to be found. At Goddard, I found my own way, through the gentle, nudging guidance of its faculty, my peers, and its wonderful connection to Spirit. I found home among a place where everyone was going his or her own way. There was no path of convention to follow. Instead, success was measured by the mostly personal barometer of finding and embarking on the creative journey of the soul.
I graduated from Goddard nearly 3 years ago. My environment, and the characters within it have changed, and I have been challenged by their individual lessons. There have been paths I have been tempted to follow, like the path of martial arts, which led me to the painful (yes, it is often painful when we uncover our truths and shed the weight we no longer want to carry) truth that it was not the path intended for my spirit. I have had to let go of judgement too, realizing that a path (martial arts was one) may be right for my husband and others at this stage of their journeys, even though it is not right for me.
There has been that struggle to find connection to others, along with the courage to travel my own path. Even though I am on my soul’s journey with my writing and healing work, I have sometimes struggled to stay true to my own voice and trust that my individual path will unfold it its own unique way. It seems to be the quest of humanity, to find that balance between connection and individual truth. How many of us have tried to follow a path of “conformity,” while forsaking our soul’s truth? We can too easily forget that we are all here to do something unique, perhaps radically, or only slightly different, from someone else, yet none-the-less, a purpose that is only ours. This is why we are here, to blend our own voice of truth to that universal breath we all share. This is how we balance the world, this is how we balance ourselves.
I am a writer and and a spiritual/energy healer, I have a path that is not, by nature conventional. I often find myself in places where I feel more alone than connected, yet when I fall to the temptation of conformity, I am quickly reminded that I am on the wrong path. I doubt I am alone in this feeling. How many of these people around me are trying to follow a path of conformity that doesn’t make them feel blissfully happy and free? I think, sadly, too many.
It is indisputable that the world, and its inhabitants, struggles in a battle for balance. We are striving for destinations that are not our own, we are walking paths of conformity that cause crowding and strife, and we are, in this sea of masses, often left with a feeling of loss.
When I opened the curtain of my bedroom window this morning, I saw the blue feathers of truth worn by a jay, flying into the evergreens. When I opened the door to my house to step outside, 3 crows flew in front of me, calling out to me in that loud, unmistakable voice of magic. Later, as I walked the dogs, those 3 crows became 4, and I was reminded that to follow the magic of individual creation does not mean we must leave those we love behind. That, in fact, each path will merge and mingle in the mysterious song of harmony when sung in the vibration of truth.
The Act of Being Still
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with a young woman about her health challenges. The Universe, in that uncanny way it has, brought me a mirror of my former self in her image. Here, before me, was a girl suffering the side-effects of trapped emotions held inside a swollen abdomen. She is only 16.
As I spoke to her, I thought, What are we doing to our youth? Before me was a young woman already wrapped up in a culture of belief that to be still is wasted time; that to do more means a day well spent, even if our bodies cry out for rest. Her doctor (wisely) told her that her intestines where suffering from anxiety and stress. She is only 16.
Yet, she too is wise, beyond her years. Although she struggles with a drive to go, go, go, she knows that healing will be easier when she can learn the act of being still. Unfortunately, stillness has become something one must learn, an “action,” many of us must master. We are too used to over-stimulating our bodies and minds. Simply sitting, standing, or lying in stillness takes, in some cases, great effort.
Often, a busy mind and body is a mask for a soul in need of healing. We can fall victim to filling our days with activities, often multi-tasking in the process, in a subconscious effort not to go within. A quiet mind hears the truth.
Again, What are we teaching our youth? The younger generations learn by example, just as we, older generations did. They look to their parents, but they also look to their peers and the media, who are often feeding the notion that more is more, and to keep working harder to be “better,” and to “succeed” in a society driven by greed and competition.
I know it’s not an easy life to shed. When I am quiet, which I have learned to love, and even relish, sometimes the ego’s guilt will step in and tell me I need to accomplish more with my day. A quiet mind and body is open to receiving the vibration of Love and Truth.
A quiet mind/body/soul is in harmony with the Universe and receives its infinite wisdom and healing.
How humbling and gratifying it was to stand beside this remarkable young woman and hear her speak to me about her efforts to be still. She is taking yoga classes, something that was not common when I was her age. There is so much hope for our future and for the younger generations. Can we teach our children to be still, and, in doing so, be embrace the stillness of being ourselves?
I think we can. I think we need to. I think we have no choice.
The Light Behind the Story 