How Jane became the shaman of her own soul

As I rose from sleep on Saturday, I saw my friend Jane leaning over my bed. She had news for me, but I couldn’t stop to talk with her because I had a phone interview with a reporter scheduled that morning. Later I called Jane to ask, “Do you have news for me?”

She did, indeed. She reported that I had recently appeared in one of her dreams, wearing a necklace with a crystal globe. This is her journal report:

It's a clear crystal you can see inside and it has two worlds. One is easy to see; the other is hidden. He takes it from his neck and shows it to me, allowing me to see inside. I easily see a castle world and a little switch that turns on colors and movement. The other world is very hard to see and looks like a hologram of geometric lines like etchings. I just get a glimpse of it but it's vague. I return the globe to Robert, thank him and wake happy and intrigued with this vision.

I don’t wear a necklace with a crystal globe in ordinary reality, but the image had great significance for me. I have used clear quartz crystals in soul retrieval work. I recently asked participants in one of my soul recovery trainings to bring quartz crystals with them. When I escort soul-parts of people who lost a vital part of themselves through pain or trauma on the homeward journey, I sometimes find that from the perspective of those younger selves a crystal can appear as a luminous beacon or as a spacious, light-filled transporter or “waiting room” where it can stay safe until soul integration is complete.

I was excited by Jane’s beautiful image of a crystal globe that contained “two worlds” for its own sake. What a marvelous portal!

“The best came later that night,” Jane told me. “I think your appearance with the crystal prepared me for it. But when it started, I didn’t know whether I could live through the night.”

Jane returned to sleep after recording her dream of my visit. A few hours later, she woke in extreme pain from a dream that had thrown her back into the trauma she had suffered at age 16.

I dreamed I was being raped, and I could remember clearly the feelings of humiliation, chaos, confusion, misunderstanding, sorrow, fear and anger that I felt way back when I was sixteen, the clear emotions I have not been in touch with since then. In my dream the circumstances were different and I was being rescued by two good men.

“At the moment of my rescue, I woke with intense chest pain that lasted for twenty minutes. I wasn't sure if it was a heart attack. I wondered if I should call for help, such penetrating pain came from my heart, through to my back, like being stabbed by a lance, but I stayed with it, thinking it was a healing pain because it came directly out of the dream. I knew something big was happening.

“It eventually passed and I rolled over and went back to sleep. I woke thirty minutes later absolutely charged with life, ravenously hungry and thrilled at simply being alive. I was changed by the dream; I know that major soul recovery came through.”

This powerful and beautiful experience speaks to us of soul, and how through dreaming we can become shamans of our own soul and bring healing and wholeness to our family of selves.

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I am leading two-day depth workshops titled Become the Shaman of Your Own Soul at Mosswood Hollow, a lovely private retreat center near Seattle, over the weekend of April 9-10 and at Equilibrium, a nurturing center in Chicago, on November 12-13. Isn't it time?

"Bathers" by visionary artist and poet AE