Are You Okay?

In one of my yoga classes last week, we went out for a walk in the middle of doing yoga. The whole class walked around the block. I noticed I was walking by myself, not talking to anyone. I heard other people talking behind me, including my teacher. I was suddenly aware that I felt really uncomfortable and that I was trying to pretend that I was not uncomfortable. I was trying to pretend that I was super self-sufficient, having my own experience, very comfortably. And I felt how familiar that pretense was and how, underneath it, I really felt lost and was longing, really aching, for some kind of attention from my teacher. I was able to drop the pretense and just feel that unmet longing, like a kid feels when she can't get her mom's attention for a really long time and she's starting to give up. Or when the teacher never says anything nice to you in class; never praises your work, or gives you special attention. 

Remember that?

In the end, feeling the ancient/current sadness was a hundred times better than the fakery I've put over, on myself, for who knows how long. There was a book on my parent's bookshelf when I was little called I'm Okay, You're Okay.  Elizabeth Kubler Ross once quipped that a better book would be I'm Not Okay, You're Not Okay, And That's Okay. 

Half the value of psychotherapy is seeing someone once a week who will remind you that it's okay not to be okay in this crazy world. The other half is perhaps leading you to feel so okay about not feeling okay that you actually begin to feel okay without changing a thing. You become at ease with the suffering that is a natural part of being alive and human. And, because paradox is the rule of life, this ease with suffering leads to feeling joyful. 

And the next step is to feel at ease with the shifting from one to the other so that you stand your ground as joy comes and suffering goes and vice versa, and you begin to appreciate the dynamic quality of being alive without being so attached to a particular feeling state. There's some kind of freedom in that--so much less oppressive than the breathless, anxious struggle to be happy, happy, happy. It's bizarrely controlling, in a way, and narrow, this obsession we Americans have with being happy. 

Stacey Says

I shared the book with my friend Stacey, who read the part of the book that recounts the dream and said, "I'm sure you already realize this" (this is how people always preface revealing insights that I am completely blind to) "but it's interesting that you were saying to that part of yourself how much you love her, and how great she is, and she said she wanted to be alone and went away." She went on, "So, there's this part of you that can't really take that in." 

I would say this is my number one problem. 

This is what I love about dreams. You can read the same dream over and over from different angles and get different messages, all of them revealing and relevant. Other people tell you things about your dream that you didn't see and those things verify your best/worst suspicions. I suppose, in a way, the whole book was a love letter to that part of myself, and I do believe it was received. It won't be enough. I'll have to keep making things and reaching in to that wounded aspect.

I remember a time when my husband and I were on sort of a shamanic journey, if you will, and he said there was this fierce little warrior living in my second chakra ready to kill anyone who tried to get too close. She is the same one who will not be loved, or she is at least closely related to her. I see this so often in my clients, in my friends, in myself--defense mechanisms that have become independently functioning beings who will act out in ways that saved us when we were kids but which are hurting us now. Being wounded and defensive... can I begin to let that go? Wait, what the hell's wrong with me? The question is, can I begin to embrace and own being wounded and defensive so that those qualities might be integrated into my whole self, rather than split off... 

The question in the book: How would it feel to embrace that part of the self, instead of leaving it behind like some loss you have to cut to survive? How would it feel not to reflexively look away?

Ritual For A Dream Pt. 4 (The Book and the Mandorla)

I decided, at some point, to make a little book as part of the dream work I was doing. In Owning Your Own Shadow (Johnson, 1991), I read about the mandorla, which is not an alternate spelling for mandala. It's a whole other thing, Ethel. Mandorla means almond in Italian and it refers to the almond-shaped form that appears when two circles intersect (see above). This image inspired the structure of my book. 

The left side of the book contains images of the "dark" that represent my dream figure. In the middle, there is a mandorla, in which the images of the dark and light sides of the book intersect and overlap. The right side of the book contains images of the "light" and methods of healing. This is where the recipe for the salve is, as well as the image of the healing goddess. 

The book itself is an altar, like that of the curanderos of South America "who are a curious mixture of primitive shaman and Catholic priest" (Johnson, p. 111). They divide their altars so that "the right [side] is made up of inspiring elements such as a statue of a saint, a flower, a magic talisman; the left contains very dark and forbidding elements... The space between these two opposing elements is a place of healing. The message is unmistakable; our own healing proceeds from that overlap of light and dark" (p. 111).

I dedicated the book to my grandmother and "to all people who have been powerless to protect themselves against physical violence and abuse of any kind," and I can say without hesitation that I have experienced a healing in this process. 

I would be happy to share this book with anyone who is interested in experiencing it. I don't want to post too many images from it, because I don't want to reduce the impact of experiencing it as a whole. The image at the top of the post is the front and back covers of the book; in other words, it's the book lying open,  cover side up. The circle on the left symbolizes the dark images, the shadow, the unconscious, the beaten woman; the circle on the left symbolizes divine, healing light. It has been powerful to physicalize the merging of the two. I can't recommend it highly enough. 

Ritual For A Dream Pt. 3 (The Salve)

How To Make A Healing Salve

I found a recipe in the June issue of Delicious Living, cut it out, and then lost it. I decided to think of this loss as an opportunity to be more intuitive with the process. I tried to remember as much as I could and then improvised.

I gathered equal amounts of comfrey, calendula, and St. John's Wort, put them in a pot, and covered them with olive oil. I heated this mixture on the lowest heat possible for three hours. Then I strained out the herbs, put the oil back in the pot, and added cocoa butter--about three times more than the amount of olive oil--and stirred until it melted. I added some essential oils, just a couple drops, and poured the liquid into glass jars leaving them to cool over night. When I woke up in the morning, they had hardened into a salve. Ah, sweet alchemy. 

The cocoa butter makes it smell a little like chocolate, which seems appropriately healing. This process also makes me think of other simple things you could make in honor of a dream figure. You could make a meal or knit a scarf--so many possibilities. 

Ritual For A Dream Pt. 2 (The Altar)

I create altars often as places to focus my energy and intentions. Altars can be simple or complex, temporary or as permanent as anything can be on this mortal coil. 

I created an altar as a way of working with the energy of my dream figure (the abused woman). It became a middle ground for the making of the healing salve, and the book I made. The altar changed continually, as it was essentially a place for containing the pieces of the processes before they were integrated into a new form. Herbs that would ultimately be cooked into the salve or images that would be glued into the book found a temporary home there. I lit the candle and burned incense before beginning work on any of these related projects. 

The photo in the upper left corner of this post contains an image of a woman who has been badly beaten and is lying in a hospital bed. I placed her in the bowl of comfrey, calendula, and St. John's Wort. Later in the process, I placed an image of a healing goddess on the altar, as I was very ready to incorporate her energy into the process. Working with the images of abused women for the book was very difficult, and having a place to contain them, as well as an antidotal image of the feminine (a healing goddess) was essential to my sense of well being. Darkness with no light is intolerable. With a little light, things begin to shift. You can see enough to do the necessary work. 

Part of what made the process so powerful for me was that it allowed me to concretize and externalize my feelings of woundedness and my desire to be healed so that they became things I could see and hold and move. In this way, all the actions I took were affirmations of both the grief and sorrow of being badly hurt, and the powerful possibility of healing.

Altars are containers for transformation. Even without making the salve or the book, I could have very successfully worked with the narrative of the abused victim coming into contact with, changing, and being changed by, the divine healing presence, just by placing images and symbols on the altar. It is hard for some people to believe that this could actually change us in a profound way, but this is the essence of effective ritual. 

Ritual For A Dream Pt. 1

In Inner Work, Robert Johnson recommends "acting consciously to honor dreams" (1986, p. 97). He writes, "this... requires a physical act that will affirm the message of the dream. It could be a practical act... or it may be a symbolic act--a ritual that brings home the meaning of the dream in a powerful way" (p. 97). I've spent the last ten days or so absorbed in the process of creating and executing a ritual in honor of a dream figure that I wrote about in the post titled "Recovering Fragments of the Feminine". In that dream, a female friend of mine appeared covered in cuts and bruises, bitterly sad and angry about having been kicked out of her house by her abusive male partner.

I felt it was important to do something for her, to take an active role in her healing process. I came across a recipe for a salve in a magazine, and decided that I would make a salve for healing cuts and scrapes. I liked that it required gathering ingredients, and that I would be working with herbs--calendula, comfrey, and St. John's Wort. I also liked that the process required the herbs to be cooked in olive oil over low heat for three hours. I believe that the longer you spend on something, the deeper you go into the experience, and the more deeply you are affected. In other words, it felt healing to do something that would require me to be present to a process for three or four hours. I am tired of moving so fast all the time. When we asked our professor Gary Penn what he got out of his six years in psychoanalysis, he said, "just to slow down." Whenever I manage to slow down, I know this is no small win. 

This post is the first in a series of posts in which I'll go into some detail about the work I did with this particular dream and dream figure. In addition to making the salve, I set up an altar and made a little book based on the structure of a mandorla, which is the almond-shaped form that appears in the middle of two intersecting circles. I'll write more about all these things--the salve, the altar, the mandorla, and the book--in upcoming posts. 

For now, I just want to inspire readers to try this for themselves--take action on behalf of a dream and write a post about it. It doesn't have to be complicated, and I genuinely believe it is transformative and awakening. If it's not, you never have to do it again. I hear my inner midwesterner saying, isn't this all just a bit self indulgent? In truth, I think a case could be made that not honoring your dreams is self-indulgent. We do a lot of self-indulgent things--watching hours of TV, for one; talking at great length about trivial matters, for another--but taking time with our unconscious is not one of them. But I'm not here to debate, or to judge, my inner midwesterner and how she spends her time or what she thinks is right or wrong. I'm here to do inner work, and maybe you are, too. If so, I'd love to hear from you. 

(A quick thank you here, to Matt Silverstein, who provided the space and time for some of us to present our dream work, in conjunction with the Jungian Dream Workshop he offers at Antioch. It was vitalizing to connect with other dream workers--to give from my own unconscious and receive from the unconscious of others. Thank you, Monica, Adriana, and Laurette.)