He's
a cynical, worldly Englishman and right now his body is broken and screaming
with pain. He's fallen from a cliff and he's on his back in a hut on an island
in Southeast Asia, racked with fever. He is visited by a beautiful
bronze-colored girl in a sarong who talks like she's been educated at Oxford
before or after spending a year as assistant to a bodhisattva. She knows things
about healing that his culture doesn't know and his mind is absolutely
unwilling to accept. But she finds a chink in the closed door of that cynical
mind, using memory.
He is from England. Does he
know the city of Wells? Of course he knows Wells, he snaps back at her.
She says she used to go walking there, by the water. There was an
extraordinary sense of peace. And when she closes her eyes now she can see it
all so clearly, green grass and golden sunlight on the stones of the church
across the moat, and she can hear the bells and the jackdaws in the tower. Can
he hear them too? Yes, he can hear the birds.
In this way, in her soft lilting
voice, chanting more than speaking, she leads the patient inside a scene he
remembers until he is there as well as on his sickbed. He can see the daisies
and dandelions in the grass, the austere geometry of the cathedral tower
challenging the tender blue of the sky.
"And the swans."
Yes, the swans. Impossibly
beautiful, yet entirely real. He sees the curve of the swans' white breasts
lifting and parting dark waters.
"Effortlessly floating."
The words give him deep satisfaction.
As the dreamy voice leads him, he finds himself floating with the swans, on
that smooth surface between darkness below and tender blue above, between here
and far away, between one world and another.
Floating like a white bird on the
water, he allows himself to slip into the flow of a great smooth silent river,
allowing the sleeping river of life to carry him into a profound peace.
The patient drifts off, contented, as the voice continues to
chant. Above the river, he sees huge white clouds and at her suggestion, he
floats up towards them until he is streaming on a river of air, up into the
freshness of high mountains. He feels a delicious cool wind on his skin, and
falls deeper into sleep, his fever broken.
I have paraphrased an extraordinary passage in
Aldous Huxley's last novel,Island (first published in 1962) that
is a magnificent description of imaginal healing. When Susila, the beautiful
young healer, reports to her doctor father on what she did with the patient
(the cynical journalist Will Farnaby) she says "he went off more quickly
than expected" because she opened his imagination by calling him to a
place in England that he knew. She explains that she worked with indirect
rather than direct suggestions. "They're always better." She gave him
a different body image, one that suggested grace and strength to carry him
beyond his present injury, so it became "a miserable thing in revolt
against a huge and splendid thing."
There is a model here for how to grow a vision of healing
for someone who is in need of images to make the body well. Start by taking
them through the doorway of a life memory. Don't harp on physical symptoms.
Give the body - as well as the mind - of the patient living images strong and
graceful and fresh enough to shift it beyond its current complaints, as the
swan glides on the water or lifts off to claim the sky.
I teach a similar practice I call dream transfer, in the understanding that we can gift a dream - a healing image, a vision of possibility, even a road map to the afterlife - to someone in need of a dream.
photo by Romy Needham