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

Shark Tales from where fresh water meets the salt

 

Jenner-Sebastopol, California

-

The little California town of Jenner hangs from the cliffs where the Russian River meets the Pacific. Approach it from the south, following the bends of Highway 1, and you'll come to a sign that states that the population is 107, which seemed like a fine number to me. Drive through Jenner and return from the north, and you'll be informed by the sign at that end of town that the population is 170. That's a pretty big difference.
-

I pulled up at the River's End for clarification and liquid refreshment. "This seems to be liminal territory," I remarked to the civilized bartender as he worked the tap on a local amber ale. "You have a floating population."
-

"Our sign painter is dyslexic," he said. "The census might clear it up, or might not." In fact, Jenner is famous for one type of floating population: the harbor seals that gather here in great numbers in May. I was a few weeks too early to see them.
-

Out on the deck, I inspected the place where the Russian River - slow and gentle at this point, but feared for sudden floods twenty miles up stream - meets the ocean. A place where fresh water meets salt water is liminal in one of the most important and mythic senses. In imaginal geographies, this is often a preferred point of entry into the Otherworld. In my many years of leading retreats at the Esalen Institute, down the California coast at Big Sur, I often had participants study how the cold, fresh water of the creek splashing down through the ravine, meets the Pacific, among the rocks. Then, with the aid of shamanic drumming, I would invite them to take off from this point in a visionary journey to make the crossing to the Other Side, have timely and helpful communication with people on the other side of death, and learn about conditions in the afterlife through first-hand experience.

-

"I've seen sharks come up the Russian River," says the bartender when I go back inside. "Of course, they don't stay for long."

-

Could that be a great white out there, among the whitecaps? I'm not sure, though I've heard that great whites breed in these waters and are often seen. But I've felt the nearness of the shark since I arrived in California. The night before Jenner, a woman shared what she called the most powerful dream of her life. Swimming in a warm ocean, she found something brushing against her and discovered it was a great white. The shark told her it would protect her and proceeded to open its jaws and hold her inside its mouth. She rested there, safe and cozy as a baby in its crib, throughout the night and rose in the morning feeling wonderful.

-

I asked her if anyone in her family or circle of friends had been challenged by cancer. She mentioned a couple. I observed that if this were my dream and my family situation, I might feel that I had not only been granted the personal protection of a powerful ally, but might be able to draw on this relationship to help others. The shark rarely develops cancer, and I have found that if I can encourage a cancer patient to picture a shark swimming through the courses of her body, devouring the cells of her disease, she often does better. The shark dreamer wanted to explore this.

-

When I got to Sebastopol from Jenner and spoke at Copperfield's that evening, I told a story of transferring the healing power of the shark to a cancer patient. In the morning, swimming in circling loops for two hours in an outdoor pool, I enjoyed the sensation of drawing the shark power close. When I arrived to open my "Dreamgates" workshop on Saturday morning, a car pulled up in front of me with a window decal that read "THUNDER SHARKS."

-

My workshop host told me she had dreamed within the past week of an happy and empowering encounter with several kinds of shark, including the Australian sawtooth shark, the most primal and ferocious member of the species. This very ancient Aussie aquatic killing machine has something like a chainsaw on its nose and can pursue its prey - who might include both humans and crocodiles - up freshwater creeks by pumping out a saline solution that produces the salt water it needs. Now that's a bloody shark, mate!

- from my Travel Journal for April 11, 2010

Drawing: "Great White Breeches" by Robert Moss. From a dream of March 11, 2023

Doctors in Dreamland

 

One of a set of documents received through oneiric channels that describe a future commonwealth known colloquially as Dreamland.  Internal evidence suggests that the Dream Commonwealth was established as a "Switzerland of the mind" - and its independence and neutrality guaranteed by the world powers - after after an earth catastrophe known as the Singularity. 

Our doctors are dreamers. No one in Dreamland would consider diagnosing or prescribing without consulting dreams. In our medical schools, we learn, as Galen already knew, that the dreaming mind can travel throughout the body and report on its condition in exact detail. A change in a single cell can be detected in a dream many years before the condition has spread far enough to produce detectable physical symptoms.

Many of our physicians have a sign on their wall that reads “MY PATIENT IS MY COLLEAGUE”. Some have expanded this into a personal charter. One of the ways doctors and patients learn from each other is by swapping dreams.

But dream diagnosis begins long before a visit to a doctor’s office, in regular dream-sharing and – where the dreamer feels that specialist knowledge may be required – in wellness or pre-need clinics where the dream helpers are often nurses.

Imagery harvesting is central in the treatment of illness. Our approach is that any dream image can offer a path to healing, if it is worked correctly. This often requires continuing the dream, often with the aid of a helper who will accompany the dreamer on a conscious journey back into the dreamscape. Dream reentry is one of our core techniques for healing. A personal image provides the doorway for a conscious journey, in which the dreamer may be accompanied by a friend or guide, even a whole family of dream travelers. Relaxation and focused intention are the keys to this mode of conscious dream travel. In many cases, sonic driving (especially when generated by live shamanic drumming) is used to deepen and accelerate the journey.

Some dreams provide portals for soul recovery, an essential mode of healing that the ancestor shamans helped us to reclaim, to save at least some of our kind from joining the march of the husk people, the living dead. Shamans know that soul loss – the loss of vital energy and identity – it at the root of illness and despair. We loss vital soul through grief and trauma and heartbreak, through wrenching life choices that leave us divided against ourselves, through habits of deceit and addiction that drive our bright spirits to abandon us in disgust. Soul loss can reduce us to the condition of the walking dead, passionless and dreary, forever trying to fit in with other people's needs and expectations, lost to any sense of purpose.

Dreams show us where our missing parts may have gone, and invite us to reach in and bring them back. When we dream again and again of the “old place” (maybe a childhood home, maybe a space we shared with a former partner), we may be learning that a part of ourselves is stuck in that place, or went missing at the time we lived there. By going back inside the dream of the old place, we may be able to locate that lost aspect of our own identity and energy, and find the way to bring it back into our hearts and our lives.

In the hearthfire circles where we gather with our intentional families at least one evening a week, we tend the dreams that show us where the soul has gone and help each other with fierce compassion to bring it home.

Our flying doctors work with the souls of the dead as well as the souls of the living. Our best clues to where we are needed come from spontaneous night dreams in which sleepers receive visitations from the departed and travel, often unconsciously, into realms where the departed are at home. Such encounters can be the source of much-needed healing, forgiveness and closure, as well as mutual guidance. When they are released from the second body, the departed may become wise counselors and “family angels”. Prior to that liberation, they may need help from our healers because they are enmeshed in the sticky stuff of old cravings, rancor and desire. “The living have the ability to assist the imaginations of the dead,” as the poet said. Our flying doctors operate in this understanding, on both sides of the swing-door of physical death.

The First Peoples say that the Big stories – the stories that want to be told and to be lived – are hunting their tellers, like predators in the bush or sharks in the water. In healing, as in education and in family life, we are constantly engaged in helping each other to let the Big story come through.

All of us are living a story. If we don’t know what it is, it is likely to be a little story, a limiting one, woven from past disappointments and stitched tight by the people who are forever telling us who we are and what we can and cannot accomplish. If we fail to define ourselves, we let ourselves be defined by others. When we are seized by the Big story, we step beyond limiting definitions and beliefs. Great healing and great creativity become available because we can now draw on the immense energy that becomes available when we know we are serving a larger purpose.

Text adapted from Active Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Wolf Doctor" by Robert Moss

 

 

Sekhmet Time

 

Sekhmet is much on my mind this week. Here's how it began. My main desk computer had a meltdown on Monday and the Geek Squad guy on the phone couldn't help me fix it beyond saying that the situation was "unfortunate" and "quite rare". So I rushed out and bought a new computer. I had only a couple of hours before a very important recording session to set up the new computer and remember all my passwords and download all the key apps. Paleo-Man here was sweating and still trying to figure out the audio settings by the time he had to join the zoom meeting room.

In this emergency, I abandoned my study and my normal home studio "set" and set up on the dining room table. My hosts observed that my backdrop - red wallpaper - was rather fiery. They could not see that at eye level, across the room from me, was a bust of Sekhmet that has been with me for a very long time. There may be a little more fire than usual in the program we made.

Sekhmet has a fearsome reputation. She is sometimes called the Eye of Ra, a title shared with Hathor in her warrior mode. The association between Sekhmet, Hathor and the Eye of Ra is dramatized in a text known as "The Book of the Heavenly Cow". The version we can read today is a compilation of tomb inscriptions from the period or Ramses II, but is much older.

The top god in the story, Ra, learns that humans are plotting against him because he has grown old. He is advised by other gods to mobilize his Eye, which has been used to maintain order and fight the forces of cosmic darkness. He plucks the uraeus cobra from his third eye and it becomes Hathor in warrior mode. She receives his order to destroy humanity and appears on earth as Sekhmet, an unstoppable, ravening lion.

While some humans are left, Ra relents. But he can't turn of the killing frenzy of hie Eye (Hathor/Sekhmet) until he has 7,000 jugs of beer dyed red to look like blood poured in her path. The Lady of Destruction likes a drink. She drinks until she passes out - which is why she is also known as the Lady of Drunkenness. When she wakes up three days later, her killing lust is gone and and humanity survives.

You can't keep a great goddess in a frame.

Initiation into the realm of Sekhmet required braving up. During the Heb-Sed festival at Saqqara, devotees of Sekhmet guided a  shamanic rite of “passing through the skin” of Sekhmet in lioness form. This gave the right, in turn, to wear the skin. [1]

I have guided group experiments in shamanic lucid dreaming to enter the realm of Sekhmet, with all due respect and preparation. This resulted in personal blessings when I was in profound need of healing from a sudden and overwhelming health crisis in a foreign country. Here's the story. 

Istanbul, June, 2014

I spent a very rocky night after my long journey from upstate New York to Istanbul. My body had been depleted by 23 straight hours of travel, more than half of it spent in the recycled air of airplane cabins. I had also been exposed to some rather murky psychic influences, not to mention a drunken neighbor who not only sprayed me with his miserable view of life but with some horrendous sneezing, insufficiently contained by the back of his grubby hand.

I found myself coughing and coughing, and by 3 in the morning the infection had rushed down my bronchial chords, hurting my chest and making me rush to the bathroom sink to throw up. I was appalled to realize that whatever infection had gotten inside me, my body's exhausted immune system was letting it go where it wanted. What to do?.

I lay on my back on the bed in my room and basically said in my mind, I could use a little help.

The image of Sekhmet, as I had met her and led others to meet her in a workshop called "Dreaming like an Egyptian" the previous weekend, filled my inner screen and brought all my inner senses vividly alive.  Her eyes were red as carnelian, red as murder, as one of her praise poems has it. She was mad at the agents of my infection. With her came a whole pride of lions.

They soon defined a field of battle. I understood that they were going to fight whatever was making me sick. Something slashed at me from behind. I turned to see a rabid hyena. Ah yes, the right form for an adversary of my lion protectors. Lions and hyenas are mortal enemies.

There seemed to be hundreds of hyenas, but they had no real chance against Sekhmet, in furious Eye of Ra mode, and her pride. The lions slaughtered hyenas until the survivors fled the field, then moved over the ground of battle licking up any nasty stuff that remained. I felt this as deep healing inside my body.

There was a small catch. I had been wounded by the hyena who attacked me from behind. But now Sekhmet tongued the wound, erasing it, restoring my energy field.

I turned on my side, profoundly grateful, knowing that the crisis was over. My immune system was fully functional again, and I had all the help I needed.

As I lay on my left size, a beautiful lioness my own size settled full-length on the bed, facing me. I felt the warmth of her body. I felt her breathing her energy into me. We lay together like lovers, hearts beating together.

I was more than fine on the rest of that trip after the lions licked the hyenas.

Imagery is healing. The trick is to find the right imagery that the body believes and will act upon without delay. It helps when you have reason to believe that greater powers are engaged. 

I have learned that I have an imaginal metabolism, a mythic constitution. My body responds at astonishing speed to the images I permit it to entertain. When the images come charged with mythic, transpersonal power, they work wonders. My experience with Sekhmet and the sickness hyenas is one example. My book The Boy Who Died and Came Back contains many more. I think we are all alternately beneficiaries and victims of the power of imagination. We want to learn how to use it well, and how to draw on those greater powers. This starts with becoming more conscious of the stories we are living, and the images we invite to live in us.

1.Normandi Ellis, Imagining the World into Existence: An Ancient Egyptian Manual of Consciousness.  (Rochester VBT: Bear & Company, 2012) 286

The program we recorded under Sekhmet's eyes this week is a free introduction to my new advanced course for The Shift Network on Shamanic Lucid Dreaming. You can watch it and participate in a shamanic lucid dream journey on Saturday October 23.

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.

 

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.

Imaginal Healing in the Realm of the Goddess

Imagery is healing. The trick is to find the right imagery that the body believes and will act upon  fast. In these scary times, as we try to cope with a pandemic, I am being asked more than ever where we can find the images for inner healing and protection. Let me offer a personal case of imaginal healing from infection in the realm of the Goddess. This report is from my journal for June 21, 2014.

When Sekhmet licked the Hyenas

I spent a very rocky night after my long journey from the United States to Istanbul. My body had been depleted by 23 straight hours of travel, more than half of it spent in the recycled air of airplane cabins. I had also been exposed to some rather murky psychic influences, not to mention a drunken neighbor who not only sprayed me with his miserable view of life but with some horrendous sneezing, insufficiently contained by the back of his grubby hand.
    I found myself coughing and coughing, and by three in the morning the infection had rushed down my bronchial chords, hurting my chest and making me rush to the bathroom sink to throw up. I was appalled to realize that whatever infection had gotten inside me, my body's exhausted immune system was letting it go where it wanted. What to do?.
    I lay on my back on the bed in my room and basically said in my mind, I could use a little help.
    The image of Sekhmet, as I had met her and led others to meet her in my Egyptian workshop the previous weekend, filled my inner screen and brought all my inner senses vividly alive.  Her eyes were red as carnelian, red as murder, as one of her praise poems has it. She was mad at the agents of my infection. With her came a whole pride of lions.
    They soon defined a field of battle. I understood that they were going to fight whatever was making me sick. Something slashed at me from behind. I turned to see a rabid hyena. Ah yes, the right form for an adversary of my lion protectors. Lions and hyenas are mortal enemies.
     There seemed to be hundreds of hyenas, but they had no real chance against Sekhmet, in furious Eye of Ra mode, and her pride. The lions slaughtered hyenas until the survivors fled the field, then moved over the ground of battle licking up any nasty stuff that remained. I felt this as deep healing inside my body.
     There was a small catch. I had been wounded by the hyena who attacked me from behind. But now Sekhmet tongued the wound, erasing it, restoring my energy field.
     I turned on my side, profoundly grateful, knowing that the crisis was over. My immune system was fully functional again, and I had all the help I needed.
     As I lay on my left size, a beautiful lioness my own size settled full-length on the bed, facing me. I felt the warmth of her body. I felt her breathing her energy into me. We lay together like lovers, hearts beating together.
    I have been more than fine since the night the lions licked the hyenas.

I have learned that I have an imaginal metabolism, a mythic constitution. My body responds at astonishing speed to the images I permit it to entertain. When the images come charged with mythic, transpersonal power, they work wonders. My experience with Sekhmet and the sickness hyenas is a fresh example. My book The Boy Who Died and Came Back contains many more.
     I think we are all alternately beneficiaries and victims of the power of imagination. We want to learn how to use it well, and how to draw on those greater powers. This starts with becoming more conscious of the stories we are living, and the images we invite to live in us.

Shamanic Dreaming with the Goddesses of Rebirth: This is a new 7-week online video course I am leading for The Shift Network. Classes begin on April 9. You can take part in a free introductory mini-workshop on Saturday March 21.
Photo of Sekhmets at the Louvre by Robert Moss. 

In the Cave of the Dreaming Bear

Some nights, at the edge of sleep. I picture myself approaching the roots of a great tree – the oak that once called me to a country home, or a beech, or an ash – singing the chorus of the song that was given to me as a key to a place of regeneration and creation.

Praise and serve the Mother
and let her grace unfold
Praise and serve the mother
and reenchant the world

An opening appears for me among the roots, and I go down into the breathing dark of a warm and cozy space. I snuggle with a family of bears. We are family. I am welcome.
    Then I am called into the embrace of a primal form of Earth Mother, and am nourished and loved and replenished.
    I can now go down to a cave deep in the world of the tree. It is light-filled and full of creative tools and toys, especially art supplies. There is a long wooden pointer there. It points unerringly, like a huge compass needle, in the direction I need to take. Sighting along it, or with it, I can see scenes of possible and desirable futures in the outer world.
    I can go from here along paths where other adventures await. I may start following the flow of an underground river to a waterfall, where I can enter a place of the ancestors by going through and under the falls, or leap up over the falls into a different kind of experience.
    I can picture myself rising up through the tree, as through a library from a Borgesian dream, with countless levels filled with bookcases and galleries. I can make it my intention to read in these books and bring back a few pages in the morning.
     I always hope that the pages I’ll bring back will be from books of my own that are not yet written or published in this world, but can be.

I am launching my new online video course.The School of Imaginal Healing, for The Shift Network this week by leading a journey to the Cave of the Dreaming Bear.

Art by Tracy Cunningham

Dreaming to heal our lives

In our dreams, we have access to a personal doctor who makes house calls, provides an impeccable diagnosis of our physical, emotional and spiritual condition, and doesn’t charge a cent. If we are not in touch with our dreams, we are missing out on a tremendous resource for self-healing. Here’s why:

·         The body talks to us in dreams. It shows us what it needs to stay well and previews possible symptoms long before they manifest. If we recognize these messages from the body, and act on them, we may be able to avoid painful and costly medical intervention further down the trail.

·         Dreams are also experiences of the soul, and show us the spiritual sources of wellness and illness. The Iroquois say that dreams reveal the “secret wishes of the soul” – as opposed to the narrow agendas of the ego. If we honor the soul’s purpose, as revealed in dreams, we move towards health and balance. In traditional Iroquois practice, it is the duty of the community to listen to dreams in order to help the dreamer to identify and honor the wishes of the soul.

·         Our dreams provide us with fresh imagery and energy for self-healing.

·         By going back inside our dreams and consciously reshaping our inner dramas, we may be able to help shift the body in the direction of health.

·         Dreams invite us to reclaim vital soul energy lost through pain or grief or addiction. Absence of dream recall is sometimes a symptom of soul loss. Dreams in which we encounter a younger version of ourselves or return again and again to earlier scenes from our lives may be invitations to bring home parts of our energy and identity that went missing.

·         We can bring through dream guidance for others as well as ourselves.

·         Dreams give us a direct line to sacred sources of guidance and healing. In sacred sleep, the ancients not only sought diagnosis and healing images; they sought a direct encounter with the Divine Healer. We can ask for dream healing in the same way.

Here’s how to bring the energy and magic of dreams into daily life, in four easy steps:

1.       Make a date with your dreams

Before you go to sleep, write down an intention for your dreams. Make this a juicy intention – eg “I would like to be healed” or “I want to meet my soulmate” or simply “I want to have fun in my dreams and remember.” Have pen and paper ready so you can record something whenever you wake up. Write your dream in a journal later, give it a title and see if you can come up with a personal motto or “bumper sticker” distilling the message or quality of the dream.

2.       Share dreams with a partner

Regular dream sharing is wonderful fun, builds heart-centered relationships, brings us fresh perspectives on our issues and helps to nudge us towards taking appropriate action to honor our dreams. You’ll want to begin by creating a safe space where you and your partner will give each other undivided attention. Whoever is sharing a dream should tell it as simply and clearly as possible, giving the dream a title. The partner then asks a few simple questions. Start by asking how the dreamer felt when she first woke up – the first feelings are usually an excellent guide to the general character and urgency of the dream. Ask the dreamer whether she recognizes any of the elements in the dream in waking life, and whether any parts of the dream might possibly be played out in the future.

   You are not going to tell each other what your dreams mean. You don’t want to steal the dreamer’s power, or to lose the energy of the dream in verbal analysis. You can offer helpful, non-intrusive feedback by saying to each other, “If it were my dream, I would think about such-and-such.” Finally, you’ll want to ask the dreamer, “What are you going to do to honor this dream?”

3.       Act on your dreams

Dreams require action! If we do not do something with our dreams in waking life, we miss out on the magic. Real magic consists of bringing something through from a deeper reality into our physical lives, which is why active dreaming is a way of natural magic – but only if we take the necessary action to bring the magic through. Keeping a dream journal and sharing dreams on a regular basis are important ways of honoring dreams and the powers that speak through dreams. Here are some more suggestions:

·         create from a dream: turn the dream into a story or poem. Draw from it, paint from it, turn it into a comic strip

·         take a physical action to celebrate an element in the dream, such as wearing the color that was featured in the dream, traveling to a place from the dream, making a phone call to an old friend who showed up in the dream

·         use an object or create a dream talisman to hold the energy of the dream: A stone or crystal may be a good place to hold the energy of a dream, and return to it.

·         use the dream as a travel advisory: If the dream appears to contain guidance on a future situation, carry it with you as a personal travel advisory. Summarize the dream information on a cue card or hold it in an image you can physically carry.

·         go back into the dream to clarify details, dialogue with a dream character, explore  the larger reality – and have marvelous fun!

4.       Go back inside your dreams

When I started living in rural New York, I dreamed repeatedly of a huge standing bear. Though the bear never menaced me, it made me uneasy because it was several times my size. I realized that I needed to face the bear and find out why it kept appearing in my dreams. I made it my intention to go back inside my dream, and “brave up” to whatever I needed to confront. I stepped back into the dreamspace – as you might step back into a room you had left – and the bear was there, vividly real and tremendous. There was nothing cute or “made-up” about this encounter. I had to push myself to approach the bear.
    When I found the courage to step up to the bear, he embraced me and we became the same size. He showed me we were joined at the heart by something like a thick umbilical, pumping life energy. He told me he would show me what people need in order to be healed. I later discovered that the bear is the great medicine animal in Native American tradition, and that the most powerful healers of the Lakota are the members of the Bear Dreamers Society, composed of those who have been called by the Bear in dreams and visions.  Today, when I lead a healing circle, we call in the spirit bear.

    Our dreams may offer us gifts of power and healing that we can only claim by going back into the dreamspace and moving beyond fear or irresolution. We may need to go back inside a dream to overcome nightmare terrors, to clarify whether the dream is about a literal or symbolic car crash, to talk to someone who appeared in a dream, to reclaim our own lost children, to use a personal image as a portal to multidimensional reality – or simply to have more fun!

     Dream reentry is one of the core techniques that I teach and practice. If you would like to experiment, start by picking a dream that has some real energy for you. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dream from last night or from 20 years ago, as long as it has juice. Get yourself settled in a comfortable, relaxed position in a quiet space and minimize external light. Focus on a specific scene from your dream. Let it become vivid on your mental screen. See if you can let all your senses become engaged, so you can touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Ask yourself what you need to know, and what you intend to do inside the dream. And let yourself start flowing back into the dreamspace…

    In my Active Dreaming workshops, we use shamanic drumming - a steady beat on a simple frame drum, typically in the range of four to seven beats per second –to help shift consciousness and facilitate travel into the dreamspace. The steady beat helps to override mental clutter and focus energy and intention on the journey. If you are doing dream reentry at home, you may wish to experiment with a drumming tape or soft music.

    The applications of the dream reentry process for healing are inexhaustible. In this way, for example, we may be able to travel inside the body and help to shift its behaviors in the direction of health. In her wonderful novel for kids of all ages, A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle describes a journey into a world inside one of the mitochondria of a sick boy; when things are brought into balance inside a particle of a cell, the whole body is healed. As we become active dreamers, we can develop the ability to journey in precisely this way. Our dreams will open the ways.

We will practice these techniques and explore further paths of adventure, creativity and healing in my new online video course for The Shift Network, The School of Imaginal Healing. Classes begin on November 20.

Art by Robert Moss: (1) "Serpent Staff in the Sky" (2) "Dancing with the Bear"

Blue depth

Healing and amazing discoveries await us if we are willing to dive deep. We do that in certain dreams, which may help us to understand why in the vocabulary of the Inuit shaman, or angakok, a word for dream means literally "that which makes me dive in headfirst." We can learn to take the plunge into the blue depth of healing waters wide awake and conscious, as I did in the journey with the drum that is briefly recounted here.

I am entering a blue depth. It is vast and oceanic. I see many sea creatures swim by: dolphins, whales, sharks, schools of fish, squid and octopus. The blue whale is very close to me, and I swim with it for a while. It is surprisingly elegant. When I join the blue whale, I am no longer aware of any difference of size between us.
    I begin to explore lower levels of the blue depth. I descend to a place of bones and shipwreck, to something like Davy Jones’ Locker. I glimpse treasure here, like pirate gold. But I do not want to become enmeshed with the spirits in this underwater locale. Among them are soul-parts of living people that have been lost or stolen, often through addiction . There may be work to be done here, but this is not a place to linger without a clear mission.

   I go deeper. Far, far down I have a strong sense of contact with a different kind of being – a being that produces its own light, a soft glow. These beings have bodies that resemble a soft, mobile coral. They can shapeshift and grow new organs very easily. What they know and what they are can be very helpful in mending and strengthening bones, including generating new cartilage, and in releasing pain from joints.

   I enter more and more deeply into the rhythms and resonance of the sea. The drum itself seems to be singing the song of the whales. The sonic effects are quite amazing, healing and relaxing.

Photo: This amazing picture of a harbor seal was taken by underwater photographer Kyle McBurnie.

Invitation to the Voyage of Imagination

The secret of manifesting a desirable future through the power of imagination is to take yourself to a scene in which you are enjoying the fulfillment of a deep desire.
 
You will name that desire and you will check that your body believes you and your heart is with you. You will project yourself into a place in the possible future where you have manifested your heart's desire.   

This is more than a visualization. You must taste it, touch it, feel it, inhabit it richly with all your inner senses. You must bring back sensory impressions you can hold in your body.   

Then every day you arouse those impressions in your body and let them become fully physical. With this your vision of the outcome you desire will grow stronger and closer.   

Do you need a prompt to get you started? Frame your intention: to find your dream home, or publish your book, or achieve healing and recovery, or union with your perfect partner. Make sure you reach into your heart and your gut in framing your intention. Let it be more than an agenda coming from your head.    

Now picture this: you are looking at a golden path leading into deep, rich woods. You are going to follow this path as far as you need to go to reach the place or the encounter that will embody your fulfillment of your desire. 

You will be in this situation with all your inner senses. I do mean be there. Taste it, touch it, smell it, open your hearing as well as your vision.

You will bring back a vivid, tactile impression you can hold in your body as well as your mind.     

Here's a simple example of how this recently worked for me. On the eve of a total knee replacement, I set the intention of achieving fast and full recovery. I had been told that while the surgery today is usually straightforward and successful, the rehab phase can be long and painful and frustrating.    

With the aid of a little shamanic drumming - less than five minutes - I set off on that golden path into the woods. I breathed in the freshness of evergreens, laced with wild berries and the sweet decay of nurse logs. I heard birdsong and the stir of animals in the undergrowth.    

I found myself moving at increasing speed, excited by the wild beauty of the woods around me, eager to see what might be waiting for me round the next bend of that golden path. 

And there he was, three times my height. I was shocked to find him on my path, though I have long counted him an ally in healing and all my shamanic work. The bear was the color of golden honey. 

He swept me up into his embrace and we danced together. His fur was soft and smelled like fine cashmere. He span me loose and inspired me to dance solo, in a free-spirited Irish jig. My body felt strong and supple.  
 
I came back from this journey certain that I had been given the perfect vision for manifesting fast and full recovery. I immediately celebrated the bear by eating salmon and berries. I purchased a fine honey-colored cashmere scarf to hold the wonderful smell and feel of the golden bear's fur in my senses.    

After knee replacement, I found my body healing very well with the help of the golden bear. I was discharged from hospital the morning after surgery after a physical therapist checked me out and declared that my body had remarkable flexibility, already able to accomplish exercises that might take others months to master. 

Two weeks after surgery, I took myself off opioid painkillers and was given a rating of 121 percent for mobility by an outpatient physical therapist. I started walking my little dog and managed an 8-block ramble round the neighborhood less than three weeks after surgery.  
  
I'm pretty sure the day will come when I will do that Irish jig.   
 
Are you inspired to embark on a journey towards manifesting what you deeply desire? Your ideal departure point for this voyage of imagination is the twilight space between sleep and awake when your body is dormant. 

You can set off the shaman's way, with the help of drumming. I have made a recording of my own shamanic drumming that is ideal for this as well as lucid dream adventures.

Bon voyage!

Art: "The Invitation" by Lalenya Laurie Vann