Celtic metamophoses

Your gatekeeper is a horned god
who stands back to back with a second self. 
You enter a field of metamorphoses.
You may turn into the curl of a wave
or a waterbird in flight or a wild bull.
You may sprout leaves or tusks or antlers.

Fish becomes man, dog becomes dragon.
You reach for a flagon of unmixed wine.
When your hand closes on the handle,
it becomes the hound that is chasing a duck
that swims into your mouth on a red river.  

Long-beaked bird-headed men spring from a cross.
Gold and silver and bronze glint at the throats
and on the forearms of queens and heroes.
Everything is in connected, everything in flux,
vital energies change form and surge beyond form. 

Here art is a technology of enchantment;
it can seize your mind and bind it like ivy.
Obscure shapes become tendrils, endlessly looping,
making knots without end or beginning,
with no strings you could pull.  

The boar runs before you and around you.
Be careful. You pause to hear the hot howl of war
from the throat of a boar-headed carnyx.
Swords and shields, iron and oak, ash and bronze.
Shields with hidden powers, serpents coiled at the grip. 

   

You find your end in the great silver cauldron from the bog,
when you brave the stare of all those gods you cannot name.
You swim in bull's blood down to the mystery at the base,
where a naked woman warrior exults, sword in hand,
over the body of a dying bull. His potency will be transferred,
with the rush of his blood, to those who willed this ritual.

Image: Base of the Gundestrup cauldron. This richly decorated silver vessel, thought to date from the 2nd or 1st century bce, was found in a bog near Gundestrup in Denmark.

How did I get here?

You set off from home and find yourself on a high mountain top, or another country, with no idea how you got here.

You close your eyes in a dream and wake up somewhere else.

You're in one place and then suddenly in another, without any recollection of how you got from A to B.

These are common experiences in dreams.

If we are too quick, on waking, to flatten our adventures into a single linear narrative, without pausing to reflect on the unexplained transits, we can miss a very important opportunity to learn more about what goes on in dreaming - and about the nature of reality itself.

When you jump from one scene to another, you may have stepped from one dream into another, as you might step from an outer to an inner courtyard.

Make it your game to ask, while dreaming, "How did I get here?" when a sudden scene shift takes place. This may cause you to wake up to the fact that you are dreaming.

Stay with your experience, and you may find yourself embarked on a full-fledged lucid dream adventure.

Look deeper, and you may find you are traveling between different realities, no less real than the one where your body is lying dormant in bed. You have not only switched dreams; you have changed worlds.

Drawing: "In the Dream Cinema" (c) Robert Moss

IN THE DREAM CINEMA

It's 3 in the morning. I don't feel like sleep so I go to the Dream Cinema. Lion is with me. I'm not surprised; I felt him stirring beside me in bed. Like the neighborhood the cinema is dark but the lights come on as we approach

"You can't bring a lion in here," says the ticket person.

"Nonsense. This is MY cinema."

We take comfortable seats in the screening room but no movie comes on. Maybe this is punishment for bringing the lion. I feel relaxed and close my eyes

When I open them I see an amazing complex of stone arches and structures, some natural and some shaped by hand, in a desert landscape. There is hidden danger here. An adventure is about to unfold

A man in bush clothes steps into the middle of the screen. He is dressed like Indiana Jones. No wait. He is wearing a leather hat with a crocodile skin band, one I brought back from Australia a quarter century ago. I am looking at a screen version of myself

The lion pads ahead of him, ready for trouble. So the Dream Cinema is screening a movie for me after all.

I step into the screen, with the lion, and we take on our starring roles

- the opening scene in a thrilling series of cinematic dream adventures between 3 am and 7 am on April 25th.

Where is your body now?

Wherever spirituality is alive, conscious or lucid dreaming is recognized as the most important source of instruction on the soul’s survival of death and its condition in the afterlife.   Even St. Augustine – who had problems with dreams when he abandoned his lover for the church and decided that sex was disgusting – recommended paying the closest attention to dreams in which the dreamer is conscious he is outside his body. In a letter he wrote when he was working on The City of God, Augustine quoted the experience of one Gennadius, “a physician of Carthage”. 

   In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before. 
   At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
    The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. Since the publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
    In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
    Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:

What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory

Behind the singers rose the buildings of a beautiful university. I have been able to visit this wonderful place of higher learning, meet some of its faculty, and audit some of its classes. For me it is the true Alma Mater, the school of Mother Soul. 

    None of this is beyond your abilities!

    You are born to fly and in dreams you remember the soul has wings!

Text adapted from Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by Three Rivers Press.


Drawing: "Carried by Storm Bird" by Robert Moss

The Practice of Dream Archaeology

Marija Gimbutas declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess:  “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth."
    The emerging discipline of dream archaeology provides powerful tools for refocusing collective memory, exactly as the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess proposed. Dreams guide us to the necessary past, to the history we need to know and use. Dreams may also trigger and direct specific lines of research. Dreaming, we have direct access to the realm of the ancestors. Sometimes they reach to us, in dreams, as an ancient priest of Nippur appeared to the Assyriologist Herman Hilprecht when he was puzzling over the meaning of two fragments of agate or as an ancient atetshents (“dreamer”) of the Mohawk people called me to work that required me to study her language and reconstruct the shamanic dream practices of her tradition. We can choose to reach to the ancestors through dream incubation and by developing the skills of shamanic dreaming.
    The practice of dream archaeology involves reclaiming authentic knowledge of ancestral traditions, including those that may have been buried or suppressed in the course of history, through a combination of careful research, active dreamwork and shamanic journeying across time and between dimensions. The dream archaeologist combines the skills of the shaman, the scholar and the detective.
    We let dreams set us assignments. Secrets of the past, of which the waking mind may know nothing or very little, come to us in dreams because we are ready for them, and because the ancestors speak to us. As dream archaeologists, we work with such dreams through focused investigation, tracking that strange word, looking again at the fragments of that figurine.
    We also carry our exploration into the dream space, by learning to go back inside a dream, wide awake and conscious, as an archaeological team may penetrate to previously hidden levels of a site, or the inner caves where the great revelations are to be found. I call this technique dream reentry. It is practiced wide awake and conscious, and may be a joint venture by a whole group of active dreamers. We use shamanic drumming to fuel and focus our expeditions, using a dream image as a doorway to harvest more information, open direct dialogue with the ancestors, and go to the deeper levels of reality where the meaning of things can be found.
    We travel to ancient sites and dream with the land, opening communication with the ancestors. In The Boy Who Died and Came Back I describe what happened when we made group shamanic journeys at Kernave, an ancient capital of Lithuania, and I found myself in contact with a legendary shaman-priest, a veritable Merlin of the Baltic.
    We are open to the phenomenon that Yeats, with poetic insight, called the “mingling of minds”. This means that when we give our best efforts and passion to our chosen work or study, we draw the support of intelligences beyond the everyday world, including those of past masters in the same field. After her death, Marija Gimbutas appeared to her friend and biographer Joan Marler in a powerful dream. Marija said fiercely, “You must remember us.” Joan understood that the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess was speaking from the realm of the ancestors, “a place of collective memory and wisdom”.

Image: This mysterious figure, dubbed the  "Idol of Pomos" was found in a Cypriot village and dates from the Chalcolithic period. It is an inviting subject for dream archaeology.

Nine Keys to Living Consciously in the Multiverse

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.

Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking.  Tinker Bell told Peter Pan to look for her in the Place between Sleep and Awake. This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and transpersonal visitors. It is also a place of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs, where it is easy to make connections that escape the daily mind.

We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.

To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.

We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.

We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.

We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.

We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own – the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.

Text adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Moon Door" by René Magritte

Architects of the Imaginal Realm

"You are a space architect,"one of my students declares. "You create tents of vision and bring us inside for shared adventures."
     I like the idea that I am an architect of imaginal space. I dream of scholar cities and pleasure domes, of temples and libraries in a real world that is constantly and delightfully under construction. I invite others to accompany me to the Moon Café, and the House of Time, to the Silver Airport and the Cosmic Video Store. I give them route maps and floor plans. I tell them how to deal with gatekeepers, what to offer and what to leave behind.
     I help invited visitors to frame their intentions: to meet a guide or an ancestral soul, to find a find a new song or look (if they dare) in their Book of Life, to design a home on the Other Side, to embrace a lover in an apple orchard at the edge of Faerie. I don’t lead them around like a tour guide. I open space, then turn them loose to make fresh discoveries on their own.
    The travelers add to the locations they visit. Their very presence makes the ground more solid, the structures more durable and more complex. They are composed of subtle stuff, but may endure longer than buildings of steel and concrete.
     The taste and imagination of visitors add flourishes and sometimes whole floors. In these ideoplastic environments, every visitor is a builder and decorator. A bronze mirror replaces a daguerreotype; a cello is heard in a music room that wasn't there before; a wall of books in the Magic Library rolls back to reveal a druid wood; golden carp gleam in the pool of the Garden of Memory.
    I created a huge tent, the kind used for family reunions and elegant outdoor weddings, and told my invited guests that they could come here to encounter and reclaim multiple aspects of self and soul. I showed group after group the way to this House of Gifts, and to make sure they did not get lost, I assigned the sheepdog of shamanic drumming to sort out their brainwaves. These visits produced marvels. Then I noticed that what I had raised as a tent had grown in wondrous ways. From one side, it looked like a fairytale castle; from another, like a Victorian mansion with many wings and countless rooms to open one by one.
     The act of observation, we are informed by quantum physics, makes things, even worlds. Looking brings definite events into manifestation out of a soup of possibilities, Heisenberg's "world of tendencies." Frequent explorers of the Imaginal Realm are quite familiar with the observer effect. I am constantly astonished, though rarely surprised, by how the travelers who follow my maps change what they look at. There is now a pink woman with an elephant's head at the ticket counter of the Cinema of Lost Dreams, and there is a three-headed oracle on the dark side of the Moon.

Art: René Magritte. "The House", 1947.

Dreams of France in World War II

A Swiss painter dreams on the eve of the German Occupation that millions of little French souls are playing like multicolored butterflies. An army of robots appears and attacks them with giant clubs, injects them with toxic words from newspapers that make them fight each other, and then chews them up with the sound of shattering crystal.

A septuagenerian philosopher, ashamed that he is too old to be mobilized to defend France, dreams that he is transformed into a moldy, rickety armchair that falls from a high window to be kicked by rag-and-bone men picking over the trash below.

A wealthy socialite suspected of being a German agent dreams before his suicide that he is up on a platform in a beauty pageant in which brothel madams are choosing the most likely man. He thinks he is looking really good but when the prize goes to an obese lump of a man he is enraged. He wrestles the prize away and puts it around his own neck. It is a dog collar.

The French-Hungarian novelist and painter who took the pen name Emil Szittya ("Emil the Scythian") collected and published 82 raw dream reports from people in all stations of life over the years of World War II. He introduces the dreamers but does not comment on their dreams. Fascinating but hardly cheerful stuff since the dreams are as dark as the era and leave some of the dreamers - as one told the collector - "swimming in sweat".

An artist interned at Drancy concentration camp reports that every night he dreamed "the best dream of my life". Racked by stomach pains all day long, he dreams he is given a vast platter of sweet noodles that he devours with gusto. In regular life he always detested this dish.

A bold young aviator confesses that "in my dreams I am a man who wets his pants." (un homme qui fait dans ses culottes).

A conscripted pimp with a soldier friend dreams he is looking for his poule in the house where they operated in Paris. The madam tells him she has gone to the 16th with les Fritz. When he finds her there, his army friend is threatened by German soldiers with machine guns. Waking he breaks with his only friend for fear he will bring him into danger.

In these oppressive dreams of war, humans are often transformed into objects - the philosopher into an armchair, Goethe (in the dreams of a German officer) into a poison pill and objects come alive in awful ways. A dirty military boot burst through a painting by Douanier Rousseau, tearing it apart. 

A malign wind blows through many of the dreams. "It's only hot air," a German officer tells Szittya in a gallery when asked whether he thinks the paintings are Jewish art. He recounts a strange and complex dream. "C'est du vent. It's wind. It's all wind." A young French girl dreams that a wind blows her father, a slater, off the roof where he is working into a hole where soldiers are doing evil things.

Szittya's collection sending me back to books in which two other French authors recorded their dreams and let them expand into stories without analysis: Georges Perec's La boutique obscure and Michel Leiris' Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (translated by Richard Sieburth as Nights as Day, Days as Night).

Books that were life rings: Seth Speaks

“You must read Jane Roberts!” the lively, voluble Latin woman shouted at me on my doorstep before she had even crossed the threshold, on August 5, 1988. I had met her in Brazil, a couple of years before. We shared a taste for caipirinhas and spiritual adventures, and when she told me she was visiting a daughter who lived half an hour south of me, I naturally invited her to visit us at the farm.
    I had heard of Jane Roberts, and was aware that I was living in her neighborhood, since she came from Saratoga Springs and later lived in Elmira, New York, whose other familiar presences included my beloved Mark Twain. But I had never opened one of her books. I was wary of psychic mediums, maybe because one in the family had foreseen my death (accurately) when I was three years old. I was usually unimpressed by channeled material, which sometimes seemed to come through in overly pompous, foggy or inelegant forms.
    I could not resist the archetypal cameo of the messenger on the doorstep. I went to a bookshop and purchased everything by Jane Roberts that they had in stock. I started reading Seth Speaks, as Romelia suggested, and discovered one of the books that became life rings for me in a period of psychic storms and shamanic trials.

Who is Seth? In describing himself, he prefers not to use the word “spirit”. He jokes that he is a “ghost writer”. He says, “I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter...     To write this book…I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem most appropriate.” He can communicate through Jane Roberts because she is a "window". Within her psyche is “what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived.”

    Where is Seth based? Not in what we think of as the afterlife. “You must die many times before you enter into this particular plane of existence.”

    The plot thickens when, quite late in the book, Seth makes room for an entity called, for convenience, Seth Two, a personality operating on a level above his. In her introduction, Jane Roberts speculates  that “Seth may be as much of a creation as his book is.” A form of the Speaker generated by a multidimensional intelligence to communicate in her time, and ours.
     As a former journalist, I am trained and disposed to check on the reliability of any source. But the true test for a source of this kind is the quality of the material that comes through. And the Seth material is extraordinary. Here are the main things that Seth Speaks confirmed for me, while helping me to grow my ability to explain the rules of engagement in the multiverse to myself and others:

We live in many times, and it is all happening Now

“You live many existences at one time." We are connected to personalities living in the past and the future and in parallel realities. Their gifts and their dramas are relevant to us. And it is all happening Now.
     Reincarnation is for real, but only one of many after-death options, and we mustn't get trapped in linear conceptions of karma and in past-life "passion plays" because any past or future is a probable reality that can be accessed and changed Now.

    “You may draw upon knowledge that belongs to other independent selves.” We can tune into parallel selves by switching consciousness and by above all by waking up to what is going on in our dreams. Great creativity is "multidimensional art", in which the creative mind is able to draw on the gifts and the energy of many selves, In ordinary life, we may be able to borrow physical strength and skills from other selves who developed differently from our present self by drawing on "latent layers" that are traveling close to us.

    You can tune in to parallel selves by switching consciousness “They are a part of the same river of your identity.” Great creativity is multidimensional. “Its origin is not from one reality, but from many, and it is tinged with the multiplicity of that origin.” 

Wake up and dream

Seth is one of the really great dream educators. He is crystal clear about the important things that go on in dreaming. Consciousness travels outside the body, every night, in dreams. Dreaming, we travel to other realities, no less real (maybe more so) than the physical world.  Dreaming, we choose from an infinity of probable events those which will become physical. As we become conscious dreamers, we can not only shape reality on other planes, but can engage in reality creation on the physical plane. Thus:

“You can learn to change your physical environment by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment.” 

“Each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states” 

“This sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.” 

“As there is continuity in your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life...Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your waking life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned. You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams.” 

If we want to become better dreamers, and thereby more conscious citizens of the multiverse, Seth insists we much change our relationship with sleep. He recommends two sleep periods in the 24-hour cycle, each of about three hours. He notes that oversleeping results in sloth and fogged memory because consciousness or spirit has been away from the body too long. All of this becomes clearer is we grasp the simple fact that consciousness leaves the body during sleep.

We are in the afterlife now

Seth tells us, that in sleep and dreams we are already engaged in the same dimension in which we will have our after-death experiences. 

“You are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death.”

“When you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native in a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death.” 

As for ghosts, well, the living manufacture ghosts all the time.

“You yourselves appear as apparitions to others, particularly when you send strong thought-forms of yourself from the sleep state, or even when unconsciously you travel out of your physical body...Your rooms are full now of thought forms that you do not perceive.” 

 How multidimensional teachers are made

What thrilled me most in Seth Speaks was the account of the training and functions of a true teacher in the multiverse.

“In my work as a teacher I travel into many dimensions of existence, even as a traveling professor might give lectures in various states or countries. Here, however, the resemblance ends, largely, since before I can begin to work I must set up preliminary psychological structures and learn to know my pupils.” 

“When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction...

When I contact your reality…it is as if I were entering one of your dreams."

A multidimensional teacher is trained to monitor and engage with all “probable selves” of a subject in different times and dimensions. (In her Oversoul Seven trilogy, Jane Roberts gives a simplified and engaging version of how this work).

    A teacher of this kind opens paths and doors in the multiverse where none were perceptible before. “The pathways we make continue to exist and can be used by others.” 
     This kind of ambassador of the multiverse remembers enough of life and death to have developed a cosmic sense of humor.

"When one has been born and died many times, expecting extinction with each death, and when this experience is followed by the realization that existence still continues, a sense of the divine comedy enters in."

I jotted in the margin, I want that job! 

Art: Rob Butts, Jane Robert's husband, made this picture of Seth, which Seth (in channeled session 168 in which he called Rob "Joseph", as he called Jane "Ruburt" ) pronounced an excellent likeness.

    

Time and the dreamer

I look at my watch. It is nearly 4:20. I must get on with my lecture. I close my eyes.
    I am standing before to a group of forty or fifty people seated in chairs arranged in a relaxed horseshoe pattern. It is rather irritating that behind the audience is a café area where people are talking quite loudly. At one point, I have to call to the café crowd to keep it down, and they do.
    My subject is time, and the dreamer’s relationship with time. I talk briskly and smoothly about how, especially in dreams, consciousness is forever traveling ahead of the body, returning with reports about conditions on the roads ahead. We can use these travelogues from the future to make better choices at the crossroads that lie before us.
     I next talk about how we also travel into the past. We visit scenes from our earlier lives. We visit other eras across history, sometimes as observers, sometimes entering fully into the mind and experience of other personalities. I talk about how we need to discern carefully whether we are dealing with ancestors, spiritual kin, reincarnational dramas – or counterpart personalities living in other times and other realities.
     To get a handle on all of this, I suggest, we need to rise to the perspective of a self on a higher level, a hub personality or oversoul. From this perspective, we may be able to recognize that a number of personalities – including our present selves – are joined to a central personality, a slightly higher self, as spokes join the hub of a wheel. Looking from this position, from above and beyond linear time, we can see that the dramas of many personalities are playing in the same spacious Now, and turn with each other.
    This is all being received well, but I keep looking at my wristwatch because I am determined to finish in precisely forty minutes, on the hour. I succeed.
    I open my eyes and look at the wristwatch I left on my bedside table. It is precisely 5:00 in the morning. The time I spent giving my lecture, in my dream, exactly coincided with the time that I lay in bed. Contrary to what people may say, dreamers can get things done on time.

The alphabet of blocks

If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them. Three examples, from different gatherings I have led over the years.

Granma’s collar is too tight

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. When she seized up in one of my workshops, I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She said, "It feels like a choke collar."
     I asked if she could see that collar.  After a moment, she nodded and said, "I can see it now. It's a collar of  antique lace. It's buttoned too tight."
    "Does that lace collar remind you of anyone?"
    "My grandmother used to wear that kind of lace collar."
     Memories started spilling out, of the grandmother who sternly upheld a family tradition that girls - and grown women - were not permitted to speak truth to power, that a woman's lot was to mute her emotions and never challenge the man of the house.
      Once Mandy had the image of what was stealing her voice, and the family history that came flooding back, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

Releasing Dad

On another occasion, I was leading a short evening program for a large audience. I drummed for a while to help people call up dreams or images from any part of their life that they might want to play with.
     A woman I'll call Norma put her hand up and said, "I got nothing during the drumming.
    “So what are you feeling right now?” I asked her.
     “Frustration.”
     “Where do you feel this frustration in your body?”
     She indicated her torso.
     “Put your hand on that place. Now I want you to follow your feelings into that place. Can you pretend you are moving into that place in your body?”
      “Yes.”
      “There is someone or something there. Do you see it?”
      “Yes. It’s my father.”
      “What do you need to do in relation to your father?”
       “I have to find out whether I can forgive him.”
       “What would you need in order to do that?”
       “I’d need to get my little girl back.”
       “I think she’s right there. Can you see her?”
       “Yes.”
       “Can you welcome her back into your life, and release your father?”
       “I’ll try.”
       There were tears now, and a fierce hope shining through the tears. In that moment of revelation, and self-expression, we all felt the potential for deep healing. Later, Norma agreed to write a letter to her father (now deceased) expressing what she needed to say to him, and wishing him healing and forgiveness in his journey. And she readily agreed to do certain things in her regular life - eating a certain sugary snack would be one of them - that would convince her inner child she would now be fun to be around.

The Alphabet of Blocks

At the start of another gathering, I drummed for a few minutes, inviting everyone to allow a dream, an image or a memory from their lives to come to them. A man in the group told us he got nothing, even though he had been doing inner work for a long time, journaling dreams for twenty years.
    I asked, “What are you feeling?”
   “I’m blocked.”
   “Where do you feel the block?”
    He indicated his heart area.
   “Can you describe the block?”
    It’s huge. It’s a cube.”
    “Is it like stone, or metal, or maybe wood?”
    “It’s wood.”
    “Could it be an alphabet block, like kids play with?”
    “That’s what it is. It’s an alphabet block.”
    “How old are you when you get close to this block?”
    “I’m four years old.”
    “Can you see yourself, helping your four year old self to make a word?”
    “Yes. We’re making the word DREAM.”
     He readily agreed he would buy a set of wooden alphabet blocks later that day and that he and his four-year-old would play with them.