When the Bull was My Healer

I am going to continue to post and repost some of my personal narratives of healing through the imagination in the hope that they may arouse you to work more actively with your personal imagery, your animal spirits, and your inner guides. I recorded this experience in Barcelona on February 13, 2013

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I did [before the pandemic]. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and another depth workshop I was leading in Utrecht the following weekend. I looked forward to exploring Gaudi territory and enjoying a little sun and sea .
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today, Wednesday, in Barcelona. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It takes me some thinking before I get the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I say, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sense approval.
    Then a power rushes into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminds me of the bull, and I recall my encounter, walking the city the previous day, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I feel this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me, expanding my energy field. I start to feel huge, and strong.
    I feel a second stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light comes washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision forms spontaneously, showing me how my body has been invaded and how its defenders are now moving with decision to trap and destroy the invaders. The scene resembles the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the portcullis of the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watch with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders. Now I see the brilliance of allowing the agents of infection through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watch the mass execution of the germs under the direction of a lordly figure wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack falters and the grisly germ-warriors die, I see a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leap from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle has been won. I go to the bathroom and cough over the sink. No pain. The phlegm that comes out is now brown, not green or yellow. I am expelling the corpses of the illness army. I feel vastly restored.
     When I return to bed and close my eyes, I am back at the scene of battle. Again, it is vividly alive and the action has clearly continued during my bathroom break. I am delighted to see that the defense forces are now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summons women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appear on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.
     I get out and about happily that morning, and travel on to my next workshop full of bright energy.

What can you take from my story? For starters, the need to recognize that we have inner as well as outer resources and can invoke greater powers for healing. It is very important to set our intentions wisely. If we are going to engage the active support of those greater powers, we must do more than ask for a quick fix, or recycle some hand-me down stuff. It is no less important to trust in the vital reality of the imagination, and to work with the spontaneous images that come to us. And to recognize that the most propitious time for adventures in imaginal healing may come in the twilight zone between sleep and awake.

The key takeaways are these:

1. Remember to ask for help from greater powers
2. Be ready to work with animal spirits and mythic allies
3. Imagine that if an infection has entered your body it can be confined in a holding space and defeated there without gaining access to all of your body. My spontaneous imaginal battle, played out in what seemed to be the barbican of a medieval castle, becomes extraordinarily relevant when we look at the spikes of the virus, so reminiscent of a medieval war mace.

 

When the bull was my healer

Saintes Maries de la Mer, May 31, 2015

It's a glorious sunny day in Provence. I am driving with a friend across the flatlands and rice fields of the Camargue. The lunar horns of the black bulls rise from the high grass. We are going to Saintes Maries de la Mer. The plural forms are not a typo. This seaside town in the  Département du Gard is named for two Maries who are counted among the first apostles of Christ: his aunt and the mother of James and John (called Salome). According to legend they made their escape to Provence by boat around the year 46. The walls of their church include extraordinary votive paintings showing how their intercession saved people from fatal accidents and storms at sea and life-threatening illnesses. In some of the paintings, they float in midair, above the sleeping forms of dreamers.
    I pause for tapas at a cafe near the beach, in front of a magnificent statue of the black bull of the Camargue. My friend captures us together. As I munch tapinade on crostini, and slices of saucisson de taureau, I recall a time when the bull was a central figure in self-healing.
    I am returning to Barcelona, where this episode unfolded, next weekend, to lead a workshop on Active Dreaming. Between now and then, I am leading a training in imaginal healing in southern France. After these adventures, I will launch a new online course on the practice of imagination for The Shift Network.
    So I inspired to re-pots my horns-and-all narrative of how the bull became my healer in a crisis of illness in Barcelona nearly two years ago. This provides a very personal answer to the question: how can we use images in healing?


Barcelona, Spain, February 13, 2013

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I do. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and my next depth workshop in Utrecht next weekend, exploring Gaudi territory and hopefully enjoying a little sun and sea.
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It took me some thinking before I got the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I said, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sensed approval.
    Then a power rushed into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminded me of the bull, and I recalled my encounter, walking the city on Tuesday morning, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I felt this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me and expanding my energy field and my sense of my physical size and strength.
    I now felt another stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision rose spontaneously, showing me how my body had been invaded and how its defenders were now moving with decision to trap them and destroy the invaders. The scene resembled the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watched with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders.Now I could see the brilliance of allowing them through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watched the mass execution of the germs directed by a lord wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack faltered and the grisly germ-warriors died, I saw a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leaped from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle had been won. I went to the bathroom and coughed. No pain. The phlegm that came out was now brown, not green or yellow. I was expelling the corpses of the illness army. I felt vastly restored.
     When I returned to bed and scanned my condition, I was delighted to see that the defense forces were now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summoned women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appeared on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.

I readily concede that my methods of imaginal self-healing may not work for everyone. And there is really no need to send me lists of remedies and preventives for my future use. I have known since boyhood that my body believes the images I allow in, and I most certainly know that we all do better when we remember to ask for help in the right way.
    
Photos: (1)  RM with black bull of the Camargue in Saintes Maries de la Mer on May 31, 2015 (2) RM with thinking bull on the Rambla de Catalunya in February 2013 

My new course for The Shift Network is titled "Dreaming Wide Awake: Tapping into the World-Creating Power of Your Imagination". It starts on June 11 and runs for seven weeks. Recordings and transcripts are provided for all classes. 

Barcelona cannot be found on the internet

Barcelona, Spain

I came to Barcelona in the company of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, one of its native sons. More precisely, my in-flight reading was La Sombra del Viento, which opens in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a nonlinear literary necropolis where books that no longer have readers are preserved against the day when someone will bring them back from the dead. I love the author's insistence that "every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived it and dreamed with it." I devoured this superior modern Gothic novel when I found the American edition (The Shadow of the Wind) in the Crow bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. I returned to it, in the original language, in hopes of bringing my Spanish up to speed for a ramble among Barcelona's haunted and haunting landscapes in between leading workshops in Frankfurt and Utrecht.     

     Perhaps my literary selection helped to script my odd journey from the airport to the Eixample, the Gaudi-era district of Barcelona outside the Old City. My taxi driver was no novice. Elderly and formal, he carried himself stiffly, as if any slip from punctilio would scatter him to wind and shadows. He wore a triangular Velazquez beard, his speech was pure and courtly Castilian. I was not surprised when he denied all knowledge of my small hotel. I had printed out the details and read the address. My taxi driver declared that the street address I had printed from the hotel’s own website was a fiction. "There is no number 286 on the Carrer de Provença."
    He was not interested in the printout. He produced an ancient street guide, immensely fat and brightly colored, with loose pages that threatened to blow out the windows as we drove up the Rambla de Catalunya. "See," he pointed a pontifical finger. "There is no number 286 on that street." I thrust my printout of driving directions from the hotel website in front of him at a stop light. He glanced at it, then showed me, in cool triumph, that the directions led to number 249, not number 286. Odd, not even, and further down the street. I looked at the directions again. He was right.
    "Barcelona cannot be found on the internet," my driver declaimed. It took a mix of firmness and diplomacy to get him to make the necessary loop to come down Provença from the other side. Ah, there was Gaudi's Pedrera on the corner, an unplanned gift. Yes, there was a number 286. No external evidence that the grand bourgeois building housed a hotel, but a doorman hiding in a booth inside the entrance court allowed himself to be stirred from his esoteric studies to concede that there was, in fact, a hotel on the floor above. He escorted me up marble stairs to one of those cozy European elevators that give you the choice of sending your bags up alone or sacrificing your manhood.
    “Thank you for initiating me into the Barcelona of shadows and mysteries,” I greeted the charming girl at the hotel reception.  “Yes, we did direct you to the wrong building,” she agreed when she looked at my printout. “I don’t know why that happened.”  But I did. I could feel a story building. Entering neo-Gothic Barcelona in a style worthy of Shadow of the Wind, I was primed for adventures, though perhaps not for the battle that I was required to fight on my second night in Barcelona. 

This is the missing first page from my Barcelona journal, as posted on this blog. The way in is the way out.

Barcelona journal: Building a City of Life and Death

Barcelona, Spain

On Wednesday morning, after the Battle of the Barbican, I walked in the sun and took the metro to see Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. In the park opposite this amazing pile, I met a headless man, impeccably dressed. He came alive enough to whistle for a tip when I took his picture. Keeping one’s head can be quite a trick in Barcelona, but there are those who manage to get by without one.
      In the afternoon, I was buried alive. 

I have been buried alive. I agreed for this to be done as some kind of experiment that I myself may have initiated. I am lying now in a coffin-sized chamber of hardened earth. I tap on the roof above me when I decide I've been in here long enough. No one responds. Can they really not hear me? The earth above me is only a few inches thick. I am going to cry out, nervous now. Instead, I find a way to get myself out, maybe just by pushing really hard.

I woke feeling cheerful, even triumphant, and greatly restored in my body. I smiled at the mirror function of the dream. I recognize that I have a tendency to get myself into some holes without checking how to get out!

For most of the night that followed, in the default reality of my dreaming mind, I am writing while listening to an inner voice narrating the kind of book you can live inside. As the narrative goes on, and I continue to create in concert with my inner voice, a great city takes form all around me, its architecture stranger than Gaudi's.
     In this City of Life and Death, travelers step back and forth easily between different dimensions. There are doors through which veteran travelers can step back and forth between life and death, whenever they like. There are clothing stores with impossible price tags, or no prices at all, where those who make an arrangement with a private shopper can change into different bodies as easily as regular people change clothes.Like the living statues of Barcelona, they can shift without warning from suspended animation to elegant acrobatics.

Barcelona journal: Thinking bull at the barbican

Barcelona, Spain

There are occasional penalties for living and traveling as I do. Sunday before last, I flew back from Hawaii to the frozen Northeast, a journey of almost 20 hours including a redeye overnight flight. I enjoyed three days at home, in temperatures nearly 70 degrees F below where I had come from, then caught another series of planes, including another redeye, to Frankfurt, arriving for breakfast last Friday. The temperature here was only 60 degrees F lower than in Hawaii. No problem, then, in walking around the part of the city where I was staying for three hours in a light coat, under slightly heavier snow.
    As we entered the weekend, I noticed I had major symptoms of oncoming cold or flu. I tried to drive these away by eating like a bear at breakfast and dinner, and did not let my condition interfere with the workshop, where we had a royally good time. But, with my nasal passages largely blocked, I found it hard to get more than two hours sleep at night. No problem, I told myself. I had already planned to spend a few days in Barcelona between Frankfurt and my next depth workshop in Utrecht next weekend, exploring Gaudi territory and hopefully enjoying a little sun and sea.
    Fast-forward to 3:30 a.m. today. I am hunched over the sink in the bathroom, my chest screaming with pain when I cough, and a slosh of stuff I don't want to look at heaving from me to the drain. I don't get colds or flu, I have told myself for years. But this is moving very fast, towards bronchitis and possibly pneumonia. I recall, without cheer, how fast that happened when I was a boy, and suffered life-threatening bouts of double pneumonia twelve times over eight years, between the ages of three and eleven. I thought I had put all that behind me, and found a way to show up in this body on a reliable basis, at least on most days.
    I'll need to find a doctor, I realize. Or at least see if a local pharmacy would sell me some powerful antibiotics without the formality of a prescription. Back to bed, my chest aching. At least, with this sudden and serious descent of my condition down through the respiratory system, I could breathe a little through the nose.
    I lie on my back, finding some slight comfort in the surprising quiet of this part of Eixample  (the Gaudi-era section of Barcelona outside the Old City), hoping for at least a little rest. I continue to be gripped by a sense that my condition is serious, and could get very much worse. Okay, I tell myself. Try your own stuff. Start by asking for help, and ask the right way.
    It took me some thinking before I got the words of my petition right. Speaking to the Universal Healer, I said, "I ask for the health my body requires to serve the purposes of the soul." Wait, let's be more specific. "I ask for the health my body requires to serve my purposes as teacher, creator, writer, healer and father." From somewhere in the depths, I sensed approval.
    Then a power rushed into me, entering me from behind, around the kidneys. Its wild rush and its potency reminded me of the bull, and I recalled my encounter, walking the city on Tuesday morning, with the thinking bull of the Rambla de Catalunya. I felt this huge, bull-like energy spreading all through me and expanding my energy field and my sense of my physical size and strength.
    I now felt another stream of energy, rising like a great serpent from the Earth, up through the soles of my feet, and through all of my energy centers.. And  yet another stream, a tremendous flood of light washing  down through my crown to join the others in dynamic, confluent movement.    

Now a strong vision rose spontaneously, showing me how my body had been invaded and how its defenders were now moving with decision to trap them and destroy the invaders. The scene resembled the barbican of a medieval castle. The barbican was the space between an outer and an inner gate, in front of the main castle walls. It was designed as a death trap for attackers who managed to break through the outer gate. Once invaders got inside the barbican, the defenders could seal the outer gate, leaving the inner gate closed, and then massacre the intruding force by firing arrows into it through slits in the inner walls and sometimes in a roof structure overhead. Hurling down stones and pouring boiling oil over the invaders were also popular defense stratagems.
     I watched with delight as the defenders of my immune system dealt with my body's invaders.Now I could see the brilliance of allowing them through the outer gate, into the death trap. I watched the mass execution of the germs directed by a lord wearing the silver antlers of a stag on his helm. As the attack faltered and the grisly germ-warriors died, I saw a giant of my cause, wearing the horns of a bull, wading among my body's enemies, finishing them off with his great ax.
     I leaped from the bed, absolutely certain that my battle had been won. I went to the bathroom and coughed. No pain. The phlegm that came out was now brown, not green or yellow. I was expelling the corpses of the illness army. I felt vastly restored.
     When I returned to bed and scanned my condition, I was delighted to see that the defense forces were now scouring out the space of the barbican. Finally the bull-knight summoned women in long white dresses to finish the cleaning, checking that no marks appeared on their fine white linen.
     I am quite sure I am good to go.

I readily concede that my methods of imaginal self-healing may not work for everyone. And there is really no need to send me lists of remedies and preventives for my future use. I have known since boyhood that my body believes the images I allow in, and I most certainly know that we all do better when we remember to ask for help in the right way.
    Oh, yes, I must add: the only teachers who interest me are ones who truly walk their talk.

Thinking bull on the Rambla de Catalunya. Photo by R.M.