The swan’s cure – a wonderful script for imaginal healing from Aldous Huxley

 

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

Coming back from the dead as a dream shaman

 

My retelling of a wild tale of soul retrieval and shamanic initiation among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. After putting a dead man's vital soul back in his body and telling him he will now be a shaman, the great wolf shaman explains how he will know how to heal: "I will always make you dream".

This is what the old ones say about Lebid. He was of the people called Kwakiutl or Gwasila. Their place was up in the north of Vancouver Island, where the winters can freeze your marrow. Lebid got pretty sick and no medicine could help him. His people watched him die. They couldn't bury him the old way, because the earth was frozen hard. They just laid him outside on the ice. They would deal with his remains when the ground thawed, if nothing took care of him first. In the meantime, the next snowfall made a blanket that covered him up. 
    Wolves came around after a couple of nights. The people heard them snuffling around Lebid's mound. The wolves started to howl, maybe calling the rest of the pack for free meat. What happened next was unexpected. A man's voice joined in, and the howls began to sound like a song. Nobody went outside to see what was going on.
     Time went by. Some days you could see the sun. One morning it showed a wolf pack nearing the village. The wolves scattered at the sight of the people, but one remained. He slowly rose up on two legs and became a man. The man was rail-thin and naked except for wreaths of dark  hemlock, round his neck and waist.
    When he came close to the lodges, people saw this was Lebid, the dead man. They saw he had become a skinwalker, a shapeshifter. Some thought he was also a zombie or a witch and wanted to drive him away, or burn him. A grandmother spoke up.
     "Bring him inside. Give him soup . Let him tell his story."
     "I was dead," Lebid started with what they knew "But the wolves dragged me to their place, and their great shaman. His name is Nau'alakume.He wears a crown of red cedar."
      He described how the wolves licked him all over his body. Then the wolf shaman vomited a crystal that he inserted in Lebid’s lower sternum. The shaman opened his palms to reveal something that might have been inside the crystal, a tiny fluttering creature the size of a fly or a lightning bug. Lebid understood that this was his vital soul, that had left his body with his last breath. The wolf shaman pressed down hard on the top of Lebid’s’ head, again and again, as if to loosen the bone. He blew the tiny soul throiugh the fontanel, and sealed the opening.
     He gave Lebid his own name, with its numonous power. He told Lebid that now he had died and come back, he, too, would be a shaman, "You will be a life bringer for your people."
    Then his followers rose up, put on their wolf masks, dropped to all fours, and and escorted Lebid home.
     The revenant sang a song to honor the wolf shaman who raised him from the dead, put his soul back in his body, and gifted him with his own powers. He sang of treasure again and again. 

They took me to the edge of the world by the magical power of heaven, the treasure
I was healed when the power of Nau’alakume, the life bringer, the treasure, was really thrown into me
I come to cure with this power of healing of Nau’alakume, the treasure. Therefore I will be a life bringer.
I come with the water of life given into my hand by Nau’alakume, the means of bringing to life, the treasures 

     If his people had any doubt that he now possessed the powers of a true shaman healer, a "life bringer", Lebid reassured them that he would operate under the wisest direction, delivered in what they all knew to be the most reliable way.
     He said that the great shaman, Nau'alakume, had told him, "I will always make you dream". Lebid told his people, "When you get sick, I will dream for you and my dreams will show me what you need to be healed."

 

Source: I have retold a report of the narrative of a Kwakiutl informant in Franz Boas' classic work The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930) vol 2, pp. 46-50. It is worth noting that an elder of the Kwakiutl told Boas that "dreams are the news the soul brings us when it comes back from its journeys.". Franz Boas, "Ethnology of the Kwakiutl" in F. W. Hodge (ed.) Thirty-fifth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921) pp. 724-725.

Wolf Mask. A Northwest Coast wolf dance headdress in Rayna Green, The British Museum Encyclopaedia of Native North America, Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 1999, p.177. 

Great Mother Bear

 

You feel her under your feet.
You enter her realm through the roots
of the tree that knows you.
She is endlessly nurturing, fertile and abundant.
She will nurse you and heal you as she cares for her cubs.
You can call on her blessing at any time,
once you have found the courage to enter her embrace.

She calms the mad warrior in men.
She strips the berserkers of old skins.
Serve her, and you join the army of the Great Mother
whose purpose is to protect, not destroy.
She will defend you, even from yourself. 

When you call back your lost children,
she will hold you together in her vast embrace
until you are one, and whole.
When you reach across the jagged rifts in your family
to forgive and make well, you feel her rolling pleasure.

Poem and drawing ("In the Grip of the Bear Goddess") by Robert Moss

 

 

In Praise of Great Mama Bear

 

Great Mother Bear

 

You feel her under your feet.

You enter her realm through the roots

of the tree that knows you.

She is endlessly nurturing, fertile and abundant.

She will nurse you and heal you as she cares for her cubs.

You can call on her blessing at any time,

once you have found the courage to enter her embrace.

 

She calms the mad warrior in men.

She strips the berserkers of old skins.

Serve her, and you join the army of the Great Mother

whose purpose is to protect, not destroy.

She will defend you, even from yourself.

 

When you call back your lost children,

she will hold you together in her vast embrace

until you are one, and whole.

When you reach across the jagged rifts in your family

to forgive and make well, you feel her rolling pleasure.

- Robert Moss

Painting by James Uxcell

From the Blue Lake of Healing

Bucegi Mountains, Romania

There is a blue lake of healing, on top of a mountain. You must earn the right to go there, by tracking a wounded animal through the woods, following it up steeper and steeper trails even when mountain mist swallows your sight. The animal is connected to you. The places where it is wounded reflect your own condition.
    At the top of the mountain, you are amazed to find a shining blue lake. As you watch, the animal staggers to the lake and falls in. It is gone for so long that you fear it has died. Have you come here for death?
    At last, you see a stir in the waters. The animal surfaces on the far side of the lake. As it takes off, you see it is whole, and healed.
    It is your turn to enter the waters of the healing lake. You may go far deeper than the world you come from. How far you go will depend on your courage and imagination. 

This is a summary of the simple instructions for a group journey that I gave to the intrepid dreamers who gathered in the Bucegi mountains of Romania with me in October, 2013 for my program "Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dream Healing". The Blue Lake of Healing is a real place in nonordinary reality. You can read about how I discovered it, and the full instructions for the journey, in my Dreamways of the Iroquois.
    We found once again that our shared adventures in shamanic dreaming and soul healing produce gifts that keep on giving. I asked our dreamers to write summaries of what they experienced and what they learned in the journey to the Blue Lake. Here is a first sampling of their travel reports:

"A wounded deer was completely healed as she entered the blue lake in the mountains. In the middle of the lake there was a crystal and from there healing was being sent for Mother Earth and for all the living creatures on Earth. I was healing people and animals and through healing a part of the light was being sent, so that they themselves became filled with more light."

”The aura of your heart will soften the hearts of those around you. It will transform them into clay that you will mold until it becomes liquid. It must be left ripening in the dark until it becomes light.” 

"Healing comes from the depth ! You can heal yourself there, where you did not think that you could even live! The diamond tunnel with rays of divine light help you heal yourself."

"The mountain goat was hurt in many places and still she had the power to reach the lake. The drums and the fire were calling me, recognizing me as one of their people. I was asked why I needed healing. I said, 'Because I want to make art with colors.' Again, I was asked 'Why?' I said, 'Because in this way i can travel.' I brought colors to my heart and my body." 

"The animal I met was very young and very beautiful. He was bleeding in the neck area. In the deep of the lake I found a rock, removed it and got to the top of a mountain, where I sat in lotus position. I felt myself being charged with energy. I met some dynamic forms, light green in color. I received a gift: a schoolbag with pockets with buckles."

”A giant eagle was my guide. I became one with her and felt her pain As I came out of the water my body was translucent. I was light, I was love. I saw my dear ones - I sent love to them and they sent love to me. Together, we created an immense sphere of light and love and sent it to float above the lake, the country, the planet. Then I transformed into a tree.”

”I follow a big stag, wounded in the chest, in the left. He is limping, but still I cannot reach him. I arrive at the lake, just in time to see him going into water. I run to the lake and I see him getting out on the other side, healed, running towards the forest. I dive into the water, which on the inside looks like an immense lagoon, with light in every corner. There are nymphs and gods at the bottom of the lagoon. My chest hurts, on the left side. I feel the energy healing me. When I get out of the water I notice I have a big scar on the left side of my chest, where my heart was healed.”

"Dancing with the eagle and the bear and the lion. Great festivities in an underwater city. Ceremony around a cauldron. Diving into the cauldron, swimming through a curvaceous tunnel and arriving in the kingdom with all of our loved ones."

"Heart wounded, I realized I came here to die. I let myself fall in the blue lake. Sweet fall, like floating. Beings, translucent tall beings put this golden, shiny, small energy ball inside my heart center and it started spinning. Golden light revived me and i started breathing the blue, good water. Breathing like the first breath in my life. Came back from the journey with a new song in my head: It is a new life, it is a new dawn.

“I was dancing with the shamans around the fire. In the rhythm of the drums I started spinning - faster and faster - until at a certain point I was not touching the ground any more. I was at one with the wind."

"The stag is bleeding from the eyes and his back right leg is injured. When he comes out of the blue lake, he is healed - and he has dropped his antlers. As he moves away, the antlers grow again, larger than before, and golden. 
   "Ravens strip away dead energy & disease from the energy field of the group. Bear dismembers some people, cleanses their hearts. Below the lake is a hospital of animal doctors. We are covered by angels' wings, blazing bright."

"The giant with the head and antlers of a stag was standing on the lake shore, with six of my ancestors flanking him, with staffs in their hands looking at me. He gave me his blessing to enter the lake. Now is your time. I entered the lake cautiously, and found I could breathe normally.
     "I came to a gate near the bottom of the lake. It was like a lens. When I passed through, I was flying within a blue horizon. I realized I could create anything from my heart. The Heart Fairy appeared. We put our chests together and our hearts were united. They were one, with a tremendous power. And then my chest opened, as I was flying and i connected with thousands of hearts. We were linked in a net of love, light and healing. I realized I was golden. I was there for a long time.”

"I met the bear. He was weak, wounded and tired. At the blue lake he dived below and then he came out all shining. His fur, once grey and without light, was now shining in the moonlight. After my healing I was given a white and silver dress that looked like the fur of the bear waiting for me on the shore. I climbed onto his back and we went into the forest where a shaman woman taught me a dance and an incantation for cleansing: "I release to the fire, water, earth and wind what does not belong to me and is a burden for me.'" 

Vindecarea exista in fiecare dintre noi. Crede. "Healing exists inside each and every one of us. Believe.”

For an expanded version of this report please see my new book Growing Big Dreams.

Healing ghost sickness in Vietnam

In a dream last night I am at a conference in Vietnam devoted to healing the trauma of war veterans and survivors. I am impressed by how traditional healers and their methods seem to have been integrated into government-sponsored health care, in the understanding that to heal the complaints of the living it is necessary to encounter and heal the spirits of the dead. What happened to the old prohbitions on spiritual practice under the Vietnamese regime? All of this is approached in non-nonsense, pragmatic faction. I quite like my hotel room, and its polished wood furniture, too! 

The dream led me to look up an article on "ghost sickness" in Vietnam that I wrote after reading a remarkable book on this subject when it was first published a decade ago.

At night, Sam shakes so violently in the bed that his girlfriend is thrown out. He screams in a language not his own, "Give it back, give it back, give it back, motherfucker, or I'll eat your mother's soul." He isn't willing to believe what he becomes in his sleep until his girlfriend tapes one of these screaming nights. He listens to another man's voice coming from his vocal chords. He knows the stranger's language only slightly, but he has a notion what this is about.

Back in 1968, he was a combat G.I. in Vietnam. After a firefight in which he lost an arm, he was flown out of Khe San. As he was carried onto the plane, one of his buddies pressed a souvenir into his remaining hand. It was the blood-spattered ID card of a Vietcong fighter, retrieved after he was gunned down at the perimeter of an American base; the name has been scratched off.

For decades after the war, Sam holds onto this grim memento. through the nightmare years when he is thrown back, night after night, into the hot savagery of the war and is tormented by the searing pain of a phantom limb that - strangely - is not his missing arm but what feels like an extra leg. He takes the Vietcong ID card with him when he returns to Vietnam as a tourist in the mid-1990s, falls in love with a Vietnamese girl and decides to settle in Hanoi with her and work as an electrician. In Hanoi, his nightmares are no longer inside him; they are spilling over into the waking life of his bedmate.

Her culture has prepared her to recognize this kind of problem. Her Texas boyfriend is bi benh ta, "made ill by a ghost." There is a name for this type of ghost in Vietnam. It is called con ma or "angry ghost". There are a lot of them. Five million Vietnamese died in the several phases of war in Indochina, and a further 300,000 are missing. Many of the war dead were never buried, let alone accorded the traditional funeral rites and food and honor at family altars. There are bodies that were literally obliterated by B-52 carpet bombing. The result is many restless, raging souls that envy the living and take out their frustrations in ways that cause illness, depression, crazy behavior and temporary possession.

Where do you go if you are bothered by angry ghosts? Traditionally, in a country where animism is strong, you would go to a diviner or medium to get a correct diagnosis of who is causing your problem, and to a shaman or exorcist to send it away. Though the Communist government outlawed all forms of spiritual practice, it's still possible to find a medium or a "spirit priest" if you go about it discreetly.

Sam and his girlfriend agree they'll go to a medium whose day job is as a fish vendor in the central market. They travel to her houseboat at night and wait for her all clear signal, a flickering light. In the session, Tuyet covers her face with a white cloth. She uses a scratchy tape of clicks and drums and a weird horn to get herself ready to receive. She starts speaking in a high, eerie voice. "He is Van Nguyen," the voice begins. It describes the death of a 19-year-old Vietcong soldier, killed at the fence of a U.S. base in a welter of blood. Something was taken from his body before it was thrown in a hole and bulldozed over. "Is this him?" Sam holds out the ID card. "Yes, he is very angry." She tells Sam what to do. He must take the card to the boy's mother and make his peace with the family. After Sam does to the mother with the identity card and offerings, his nights are quiet; the ghost no longer needs to scream through his vocal chords.

This is one of the cases recounted, as first-hand testimony and observation, in War and Shadows, a remarkable book on the war ghosts of Vietnam by Mai Lai Gustafsson. [1] She details no fewer than 190 cases of spirit possession or obsession (a useful old Church term she doesn't actually use). All the others are the experiences of Vietnamese, mostly in Hanoi or the immediate vicinity. She attributes the willingness of so many Vietnamese informants to share their intimate secrets with her to two factors. She is half Vietnamese and (at the time of her fieldwork) she was enormously far (over 300 pounds); she states that the Vietnamese regarded her obesity as a sign that she was a fellow-sufferer from ghost sickness.

“The Vietnam War has had an effect on both this world and the next," writes Gustafsson, memorably. "Long after the peace treaties were signed, the war rages on in both realms: the battlegrounds are living human bodies; its warriors, the enraged ghosts who invade and assault them.” She finds an official high up in the Ministry of Health in Hanoi who is prepared to concede the extent of the problem, contrary to Communist orthodoxy. The war ghosts, he tells her, are "a national health menace." Contrary to its own laws, it seems that the Vietnamese government now employs a select band of psychic mediums to locate missing dead and diagnose and treat egregious cases of ghost sickness.

Gustafsson includes a fascinating table at the end of her book summarizing the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of her informants. Symptoms include head pains, depression and hearing voices to glossolalia, self-mutilation and violence against others. In most cases, the suffererers sought physical treatment - both traditional herbal remedies and Western medicine (when they could afford it) - before seeking a spiritual cure. The ones who found relief from their symptoms, according to Gustafsson's data, are those who found effective ways to placate the angry ghosts and/or relocate them. Appeasing the restless dead might involve making offerings or changing personal behaviors. Methods of relocating souls might include staging a symbolic burial ceremony or "installing a spirit in a Buddhist temple". My favorite example is of a man whose life was blighted by the presence of a deceased friend until he was finally guided to perform a ritual by which the energy of the dead man was transplanted to a bonsai tree.

-
Gustafsson's information about the laying of ghosts in this second sense is limited because she made a point of not visiting the ritual specialists in the Buddhist pagodas or the gatherings of the popular cult of the Mother Goddesses (called Tu phu, the Religion of the Four Palaces) and does not appear to have had contact with anyone who could properly be termed a shaman, capable not only of channeling or dialoguing with the dead but of taking them where they need to go. She had her reasons - including the valid fear of encounters with the police - in not going further along this road, and must be commended for the great amount of fresh material she was able to collect.

However, the book is flawed by her failure to discuss the anatomy and variety of Vietnamese spirits. She contrasts the con ma (angry ghost) with the to tien (ancestral spirit) that is traditionally honored and fed at family altars, but this is not explored in detail. In Vietnamese animism - as in Chinese traditions, especially Taoism, which have greatly influenced Vietnam - multiple aspects of soul and spirit are recognized. They are identified with different parts of the body and have different destinies after death. For example, in Chinese vocabulary, the po soul, associated with the liver, is a lower entity that must be safely contained after death or it may trouble the living by joining the ranks of the kuei, the wild and hungry ghosts. By contrast, the shen spirit may ascend to higher realms and can function as a benign family helper.

Such distinctions are vital to our practical understanding of how to heal relations with the departed. You can't negotiate with the lower aspect of the dead; you need to get it off the living by other means and put it in a safe place. You can negotiate with a higher aspect of the dead, and in practice this is what is going on in some of Gustafsson's success stories. Making and working such distinctions is the traditional province of the shaman, and we need to revive the shaman's way of identifying, guiding and relocating the spirits because the problem of war ghosts is not confined to Southeast Asia. I chose the example of Sam, the one American in Gustaffson's book, to suggest that dealing with war ghosts may be central to healing the wounded warriors among our vets in the United States and other Western countries.

I know this to be true from personal experience. Many years ago, a Vietnam vet came to one of my workshops. He had been a combat lieutenant and he lost every man in his platoon in a firefight, He had been haunted ever since by terrible dreams in which the ghost soldiers wanted to kill him, screaming at him that he had abandoned and betrayed them. In order to free him - and them - I had to lead and escort him in shamanic lucid dream journeys in which he dialogued, one by one, with the dead soldiers and made peace with them. He then agreed to perform a ritual of symbolic "second burial" to lay to rest the wild and unreasoning lower aspects of the dead.

-

Mai Lan Gustafsson has performed a distinct service in showing us how the ghosts of a collective tragedy can weigh on an entire people. I congratulate Cornell University Press for publishing this important study by an anthropologist who was not afraid to go "bicultural" twice over, in reporting from two worlds, in two senses.

-

[1] Mai Lan Gustafsson, War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009)

Photo: Animist shrine in northern Vietnam by Richard Mortel.

Healing with an artist's brush

In these crazy times, I am going to repost some of the pieces I have written about imaginal healing: how we can draw on inner resources, dreams and creative imagination to help ourselves and others. I am privileged to work with many visual artists, and I know they will be nourished by the marvelous vision,in a French novel by Henry Bauchau, of healing a disease brushstroke by brushstroke, Perhaps this will arouse the artist in each of us, to take up the brush of imagination, or the literal paint brush, or both.


He is a pyromaniac, but he burns only what he loves. She meets him at the port of a Mediterranean city, sketching vivid but unromantic scenes of seagulls converging on the barges collecting refuse from garbage trucks. She sees him crumple and burn his drawings, one after another. Strangely, as one of his sketches burns, it lifts high into the air and becomes a fiery seagull.

     He is Florian, a legend among art collectors and gallery owners. To burn even the most tentative of his sketches is to burn a banknote of the highest denomination. He is a man who has been fleeing certain things all of his life. The young woman has also come to this southern port in hopes of escape, from a disease which is never named but whose nature we can guess from the way the cells multiply and progress, like those moving mountains of garbage in the harbor.

     The young woman becomes the elderly artist's helper, the one he can lean on in every sense. As she gives to him, we understand that he is giving to her. He embarks on a new series of paintings, making her model for him. She cannot understand, to begin with, why he studies her and then paints more of his pictures of steaming garbage and grim harbor walls - until she grasps that he is painting the interior of her body, the living landscapes of her disease.

     He burns and crumples, but the work progresses, until she has stripped herself naked  under his eyes and the result is a canvas that fills her with terror, a scene of a dark, intractable wall, a vista without hope. He lashes himself into a new burst of creative power and little by little something like a tunnel opens in that iron wall.

He takes his brush and digs into the wall. I suffer, we suffer together. He is digging a tunnel through the middle of my illness. He drives it through with his brushes...He knows me...I have the impression that an enormous nail, the one that pinned the seagull that resembled me, now pins me to the wall...We are crying out together. I lose consciousness, with the sense that I am swimming, naked, in a very calm blue-grey ocean...

When she returns to herself, the artist shows her his last image. A deep tunnel goes through the rubble and rotting garbage, all the way through that terrible, unyielding wall. through the tunnel, she sees two white seagulls flying towards open blue water and a rising sun. Her heart leaps.

Beyond happiness, incandescent joy rises in me. I think only of the two seagulls winged by wild freedom, the harsh and savage freedom of the world.

When she goes to the doctors for her next tests, they are dumbfounded. There is no trace of her disease. The artist has burned it out of her with his fiery brush.

This is a summary of the passage through art into healing described in an extraordinary novel by Henry Bauchau titled Déluge. It is an inspired and mobilizing vision of imaginal healing by a deeply wounded healer, and I recommend it strongly to all readers who can cope with the French language.

    The story takes us further, into Florian's work on an immense canvas that holds the whole experience of the Flood. Bauchau's word-pictures take us right inside a great artist's perception of color, and a creator's trembling sense that the same powers that can make a world can also destroy it.
     Not the least remarkable thing about this novel is that the author completed it at the tender age of 96. Bauchau (1913-2012), a poet, dramatist and psychoanalyst, was born in Belgium in 1913; he was a friend of Albert Camus and fought with the French Resistance and the Ardennes during World War II. 

Déluge by Henry Bauchau is published by Actes Sud, 2010. The translations are my own.

Great Mother Bear

You feel her under your feet.
You enter her realm through the roots
of the tree that knows you.
She is endlessly nurturing, fertile and abundant.
She will nurse you and heal you as she cares for her cubs.
You can call on her blessing at any time,
once you have found the courage to enter her embrace.

She calms the mad warrior in men.
She strips the berserkers of old skins.
Serve her, and you join the army of the Great Mother
whose purpose is to protect, not destroy.
She will defend you, even from yourself. 

When you call back your lost children,
she will hold you together in her vast embrace
until you are one, and whole.
When you reach across the jagged rifts in your family
to forgive and make well, you feel her rolling pleasure.

Art by Tracy Cunningham. In author's collection.

Laughter is a life preserver

I received a distress call from a mother who was worried that her adult daughter was despairing of life. She felt her daughter might be getting ready to check out, not in the sense of self-destruction but in the sense of giving up the game and welcoming a "death door" - an opportunity to check out early - if she found one opening,

    The mother asked, "How do we help those we love not to welcome death's door prematurely?"
    I shared  what I've found to be practical truth. To help others - and ourselves - choose not to take one of those "death doors", it's vital to identify what makes each of us lighten up and want to stay on this good earth, and to do as much of that as we possibly can. No judgment. The answer might be sex or chocolate or French fries or tree-hugging or a walk on the beach. It might be a kitten rubbing itself against your leg, or a puppy running after a squirrel.
    We want whatever gets us to laugh and start to play life as a game again. Laughter is a sovereign healer and life preserver.

     I was reminded of this in the early hours when my youngest daughter - a night owl like her dad - asked me to watch "The World's Worst Cooks" with her on the Food Network. We both snorted and guffawed as we watched the chefs in charge selecting the absolute worst cooks from a long lineup of kitchen wreckers nominated by their families. One of the guys who won a chance to go to culinary boot camp produced his best dish - a can of Campbell's tomato soup tossed in a saucepan and topped with pre-grated cheese from a plastic pack. We laughed until tears were rolling down our cheeks.
    Laughter that convulsively rich and life-renewing doesn't come from stand-up comics and hand-me down jokes. It comes out of the deep organic humus of life, out of spontaneous play.

     Sometimes this kind of laughter rises up out from a chasm of pain and grief, even tragedy, and brings healing.

     Remember the story of Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun (no less) in the Japanese myth, who withdraws her light from the world and secludes herself deep in the Netherworld after being shamed and abused? The first thing that persuades her to start coming back towards the surface world - which is withering without her - is raw, bawdy humor.

     Medical science backs up the myth. Studies show that laughter reduces the level of stress hormones like cortisol in the body, while raising levels of health-enhancing endorphins. Laughter increases the number of antibody-producing cells and boosts the power of the T cells. This tones up the immune system and reduces the physical impact of stress. A good belly laugh is truly an inner workout: it exercises the diaphragm, contracts the abs and works on the shoulders, leaving muscle groups more relaxed. It strengthens the heart.

     Laughter has the power to cleanse and to heal. And it's contagious. It's hard not to catch the spirit of laughter that arises from the joy of life.

     So - quick - check your memory bank as you ask what brings out a good belly laugh in you? Better still, what makes you laugh till you can hardly breathe? Take those memories and play them as your inner version of Funniest Home Videos. Maybe you actually have some of those scenes on video, so you can laugh along as you replay them on your monitor.
     I may regret this, but I am going to insert a video that is, literally, in my collection of Funniest Personal Videos. In the closing session of one of my trainings, someone caught me doubling up with laughter, temporarily unable to get through reading the comic first verse of a poem I had composed that day. The title of the poem is "Women Dream Dreams that Would Terrify Men."
     When you laugh hard enough to come up gasping, you'll find that as you suck in air you are also drinking, pure and undiluted, the life force.

The Japanese myth of Amaterasu the Sun Goddess is one of the great healing stories of humanity. I retell it in my book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination. The text of my poem "Women Dream Dreams That Would Terrify Men" that produced uncontrollable laughter is in Here, Everything Is Dreaming.

Photo of Mongolian child and camel by Han Chengli.

Jung heals with a lullaby: the healing power of song

Jung agreed to see a woman who had “incurable” insomnia that had resisted all previous treatment. In her presence, he found himself remembering a lullaby his mother had crooned to him in childhood. He started humming it aloud.

     The song was about a girl on a little boat on a  river, full of gleaming fish. It evokes the rhythms of wind and water. Jung’s patient was enchanted. From that night on, her insomnia was gone. Her regular doctor wanted to know Jung’s secret.
     “How was I to explain to him that I had simply listened to something within myself?,” Jung reminisced, late in life, in the presence of his assistant Aniela Jaffe. “I had been quite at sea. How was I to tell him that I had sung her a lullaby with my mother’s voice? Enchantment like that is the oldest form of medicine.”
     Ancient and indigenous peoples know that the right song is a way of transferring power and of raising and entertaining the spirits. In the Mohawk Indian language, the word for song, ka'renna, literally means, "I am putting forth my power. In the language of the Temiar-Senoi of the Malaysian rainforest, a song of power, typically delivered by a dream, is a norng, which means a "roadway"; this may a path for the soul between the worlds, or a path for the traveler through the jungles of everyday life.
    When I open circles, we often sing a song for Mother Bear I have borrowed from the Mohawk people. It is both a shaman song that calls the great medicine animal of North America into the gathering, and a traditional lullaby used to comfort children in the night.

Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you

    When Jung acted, spontaneously and intuitively, to bring healing with an old lullaby, he acted in the tradition of the spirit singers and word doctors all our ancestors new and valued. We need to reclaim their ways.

Art: Child with Boat by Edmund Tarbell (1899)

Healing with twisting, twisting words

Yaminahua shamans in Peruvian Amazonia use complex, opaque metaphorical language in their power songs, which are their most important tools for journeying and opening an interactive space with the spirits – and for bringing energy and healing through. This is called, literally, “twisting-twisting words”. One shaman explains that with ordinary words, you’ll “crash” in this deeper reality; “twisting words” let you circle around and see.
    Wherever the old ways of dreaming and soul healing are still alive, poets of consciousness - those born and dreamed to be our shamans and Speakers - know what this means.We'll never be able to travel the song lines and the story lines into the space where worlds are made and can be recreated until we come up with our own fresh words.
    We need twisting words to change and twist the behavior of the body, in the direction of health, and to re-weave tangled or torn energy webs. We need to twist and shout our way out of the boxes, constructed by limited and self-limiting belief systems, that we sometimes mistake for home.
     Keeping a journal and letting fresh words and images burst from our dreams and adventures is a way of putting yourself on the way to becoming a poet of consciousness who can offer word doctoring in this way.

text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul. by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Image: cover of a dream art journal kept by dream teacher Véronique Barek-Deligny

The Journey to the Palace of Light upon the World

Pârâul Rece, Romania

"You cannot heal the body without healing the soul." The first time this statement is recorded is in a dialogue of Plato called the Charmides. The source of the quote is Zalmoxis, described as a "Thracian" god king who had established a unique school of soul healing. Zalmoxis was actually Dacian, and for the past four days we have been building a temple of soul healing in his country, now called Romania. We succeeded in journeying as a group on Saturday to his "palace of light upon the world" in an extraordinary collective experience that brought through tremendous light energy.
     The journey began when I invited the members of our circle to go on a walk in the woods, up the steep slopes of the mountain behind our villa. I told them they would find a wounded animal along the trail. They would follow it through the mountain mist to a blue lake where the animal would be healed in the waters. They would follow its example and plunge as deep as they needed to go for their own healing. They might find that the blue lake opened into another world.
    At the end of the drumming, a woman named Gabriela electrified us with her travel report.
    She started out up the forest trail, in the dappled sunlight. She saw something sparkling among the fallen leaves, then realized it was blood. She looked for a wounded animal and saw in the distance what she thought was a white eagle, a bird that had been her ally in the past. The message came, "Look closer, please." She looked again, and found the animal was a black mountain goat. She found it was injured in many places. The deepest wound was in the heart. When she reached out in an effort to help, her hand came away dripping with blood.
    Despite its wounds, the goat ran up the mountain, and she followed it, into deep fog in which she lost her bearings for a while. When the fog cleared, she saw the goat hurling itself into a blue lake. It was submerged for a long time, and she became worried it would not come up again. At last it surfaced and bounded away on the far side of the lake, apparently healed.
    Gabriela jumped into the lake. She feared she was drowning, then found she could breathe underwater. A guide she had met in previous journeys appeared to her and asked, "What do you want?" She replied, "I want to see." "Then open your eyes."
    She opened her eyes, deep underwater, and saw a clearing in the forest, in another world. Drumming sounded from the clearing, and she approached the source. She found shamans in animal masks and skins drumming and dancing around a great fire. She joined them for a time, then understood that she must go into the fire.
    When she stepped through the fire in the lake, she found herself in yet another world. She recognized Sarmizegetusa, the ancient capital of the Dacians, not in ruins but as it may have been at its apogee. She was drawn to the temple of Zalmoxis. It was blazing with light. She approached an immense being of light, and knew she was in the presence of Zalmoxis. "I knew him by his righteousness, by his light energy, by his endless desire to heal."
    Zalmoxis asked her, "Why have you come here?"
    "I have come to be healed."
    "Why do you wish to be healed?"
     The question shook her. She thought for a moment, then said, "I want to be healed so I can draw and make art. My drawings are my way of traveling."
     She felt that her response was accepted.
     She felt him encouraging her to step outside herself and look at her body from another perspective. She felt compassion, observing her body and noticing what it had endured.
     The god told her, "You must bring a gift to your body."
      She did not understand how to accomplish this until he gave her a further instruction, "Bring colors to your body."
     She felt a rain of light descending and saw it entering her body, streaming to the heart, where it coalesced and became a shining green crystal. From the green crystal at the heart a rainbow of colors radiated out, bringing specific but uncalculated healing energy to every part.

We were all seized with excitement by Gabriela's vivid report. With her permission, I took the key elements from her journey and turned them into a travel plan for our whole group. We would journey together to the city of Zalmoxis. We would find our personal responses to the question, "Why do you want to be healed?" - and they would need to be creative responses. We would seek the source of that tremendous light energy, and bring its gift to our bodies in a rainbow of colors.
     The group journey was extraordinary. I was now able to understand why Mircea Eliade told me (in a vision the previous day) that what is written about Zalmoxis in the Charmides is more important than the world understands and that even in his own immense research he had only began to scratch the surface.
      I believe we succeeded, as dream archaeologists, in traveling to the city of Zalmoxis and in experiencing something of what became available in his school of soul healing. The etymology of the name of that city, Sarmizegetusa, is uncertain. There are at least three versions. I like the version that gives its meaning as the Palace of Light Upon the World. That is where we found ourselves in our group journey. 
    After the final drumming, we stood in a circle, letting light energy flow hand to hand. We became a great wheel of light, as light burst from our hearts and streamed to the heart of our circle. We called down more and more light to the heart of our circle and sent it out to those in need.

Photos: (1) Ruins of the ancient Dacian capital of Sarmizegetusa by Ionut Vaida (2) Our neighborhood by Robert Moss

Healing the fragmented self in the lap of Great Mother Bear

Gore Mountain, New York

If we are to be whole, we must gather and bring together the divided aspects of our selves. Some parts of our soul may have been missing for a very long time - from the time of trauma in early childhood, or in the birth canal, or even inside the womb. Dreams will put us on the track of these lost boys and girls, as will a childhood memory. Caring friends, gifted therapists and genuine shamans can help us to bring them home.

With or without help, bringing the vital energy of our younger selves home to our present bodies can be a bumpy process. Say you have succeeded in making contact with a child self who checked out of your life many years ago because the world seemed so cold and so cruel. To persuade that younger self to come into your body and your world now, you will need to persuade her that you are safe and you are fun. To do that, you'll need to promise that she will never be shamed or abused again, and that you'll do things and eat things that please her. She may not believe your promises unless you can invoke some powerful helpers. Here the animal guardians can play an essential role, because a young child who doesn't trust you may trust the bear or the tiger that is supporting you.

If you succeed in reclaiming a younger part of yourself, the blessings may include fresh energy, imagination, skills - and joy. But to keep that part of your vital soul with you, you are going to have to make good on your promises over the long haul. There will always be the risk that if that part of you senses a recurrence of an old trauma, or simply finds you drab and boring to be around, she'll try to take off again.

In my personal work in facilitating soul recovery over many years, I have found Great Mother Bear an impeccable ally. She is renowned as a fierce protector of her young, especially against possible harm from the males of the species. On several occasions when a child self was reluctant to come home to an adult self - or was threatening to leave again - I have found that invoking Great Mother Bear can serve wonderfully to confirm or re-make the union.

In my gathering of active dreamers on Gore Mountain over the weekend, I introduced a group journey to work with Great Mother Bear in this cause.

We had begun, as we usually do, by finding ourselves standing with a special tree, rooted in the earth rising between earth and sky, drinking the light.

I invited our dreamers to go down through the roots of the tree, into the Cave of the Bear.

"You will find yourself with a family of bears of all ages. Going deeper, you will find yourself with Great Mother Bear. Let her fold you in her deep embrace. You will receive blessing and healing and nourishment in her lap.

"When you feel ready, turn around in the lap of Mother Bear so you are facing out. Extend your arms and invite a younger part of yourself - one that has been missing or tends to go absent from your life - into your own embrace.

"When you feel that younger self in your arms, let Mother Bear fold you both in her great embrace and bring you closer together, so close that you become one."

After giving these directions, I drummed for the group and each member pursued her own journey down through the tree roots, into the Place of the Bear.

At the end of the drumming, we shared our journey reports. Most of our dreamers reported experiences that were vividly real, comforting and energizing.

"I had the wonderful sense of being rocked in the arms of Mother Bear," Grace told us. "When I extended my arms, my four-year-old self came to me. We were then blessed by an amazing family reunion. My favorite grandmother, who died when I was four, came to join us, taking on the appearance of a child of the same age. Then my two daughters, also looking as they did when they were four, came to join the party. I feel like having a birthday party for all of them."

In the Cave of the Bear, Dale told us, she had "a kind of Goldilocks experience." She met three young bears that shapeshifted into child aspects of herself. They joined her in the family hug, and then they all proceeded to set up a tea party.

Donna had the experience of rebirth, of being born through the generous body of Mother Bear.

Another woman in our group had tried, in the past, to reach out to her own four-year-old self who had gone missing because of abuse. In one encounter, that very young self had told her. "I can't be with you all the time because you get too distracted." Then the child self added, fiercely, "All your good ideas are from me and you have to make them happen." At the start of the drumming, the four-year-old reappeared and told her, "I'll spend the weekend with you because this stuff is really cool." She did not consent to enter the dreamer's embrace, within the arms of Mother Bear. Instead, what came was a "golden child" who seemed to be more than a younger self, carrying great gifts of creativity, innocence, and light energy.

Yet another dreamer met a younger self who was urgent for her to go beyond the Cave of the Bear, back to the childhood home where bad things had happened. She complied, and found herself intervening, as her adult self, to close and lock the bathroom door, so her child self would have safety and privacy. She felt deep closure and resolution, and commented, "If you can strengthen the adult, you can save the child."

She Bear painting by James Ursell

When the world is your body

In one of my workshops, a woman I'll call Lara shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it.

I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding motorcycles. The stars seem very close. I don’t want to look at them. I don’t know where we are to begin with, then I realize we are near my home town. Enemy missiles are coming in. Our people are firing missiles to stop them, but their aim is all wrong. I keep yelling to warn them they are missing their targets, but they don’t hear or don’t act. An enemy missile hits the place where I was born and I know it has been obliterated.

Lara connected this dream with a series of “end of the world” dreams, but found this one the scariest. In our early discussion of her dream, she did not tell us that she had been undergoing medical treatment and has been worried about her doctors. This came out only at the end of the process, and we did not ask for details.

After some hesitation, Lara agreed to my suggestion that she should try to go back inside her dream through our Dream Reentry technique. She also agreed to allow all the other dreams in the workshop - a circle of 35 - to make a group journey into her dreamspace, where we would support her and gather further information for her as dream trackers.

I asked her to set a clear intention for Dream Reentry. She stated that her intention was to “heal the dream” by preventing the enemy missiles from getting through. I then started drumming to give the group fuel and focus for the group expedition.

In her Dream Reentry, Lara made interesting discoveries. She found the dream cities full of “pink houses” that she had not seen or remembered before. The stars, once again, were ominously close and she did not want to look at them. She was unable to fulfill her intention to "heal the dream". Something more remained to be done.

In tracking for Lara, my first aim was to establish whether her dream related to a literal threat of war or terrorism. It soon became clear to me that it did not. I looked for the women in green that Lara had described and found they were wearing nurses’ hospital scrubs. These nurses are aware of alternative approaches and can help to temper the allopathic approach.

I called on my dream allies to support Lara and I saw the Bear come through and wrapped her in healing energy. It seemed to me that the world of Lara's dream was the world of her body, and that all the war was raging within her body. I saw the menacing stars as cancer cells, threatening to metastasize. The “pink houses” were Lara's cellular system. The missiles being fired off were her doctors’ efforts to come up with the right mix of chemicals to treat her condition. The threat of missing or misfiring reflected the danger that the doctors would get the treatment wrong.

I tried to assist Lara in her intention to “heal the dream”, experimenting with setting up shields. I saw the missile fired at her birthplace deflected so that it landed in the river and was washed out to the sea.

I had the strong feeling that Lara could work with her dream imagery in the direction of healing, that it might even be possible to re-weave the pattern of the stars.

When we shared travel reports at the end of the group journey, I was cautious in telling Lara what I had seen, not wanting to project any negative images or scenarios. "In my dream of your dream," I began, She accepted what I brought quickly and gratefully, telling us immediately that there was a very real danger that what her doctors were doing – or might try to do – would misfire. She resolved to carry the dream warning as an advisory and to look for help from the “warrior nurses”.

Other members of the group reported that in their own journeys, they had seen the Bear embrace Lara and surround her with its healing and protective energy.

This adventure in group dreaming brought into sharp focus the need to determine whether the world of our dreams is the world out there, or our personal world, or the world inside the body, in which dramas and battles are also playing out. Because dreams work and speak on many levels, an individual dream may relate to all three of these worlds, and to a world beyond the ones we know.

For a full explanation of Dream Reentry and tracking, core techniques of Active Dreaming, please read my books Conscious Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination.

Night battle via Future Invention Gallery