Fine Tuning

                                                           Feeling His love for me

This past week my work has continued with looking at the places where I get stopped by my vulnerability and also to feel into my new relationship with the Animus.  Today at this moment I am feeling very loved and supported by Him but I know that there are still more edges to confront and more buried feelings  to come to the surface.  I had a dream this week of cleaning a dirty bathroom so I know that some of the old shame still lingers. As I begin to trust and look to the Animus more and more in my outer life I am also aware that there are still some doors that are closed to him.  Most notably those to do with sensuality, but there is also a stubborn streak of independent, self sufficiency that I cling to like a ship wrecked sailor holding on to the remains of a life boat.  In my life in the world right now I am living alone without a partner.  Although it can be
difficult in terms of finances and house maintenance, I value this time to focus my total attention on building a relationship with my own soul and God.  My dreams have changed greatly over the past six months as I descended down into those places of wounding and trauma that have left me so isolated.  The lifetime avoidance of this pain had resulted in a wariness of intimacy with men, a collusion with darkmother type women and untold amounts of physical suffering.  In truth, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way down that dark stairway to face what lay below...but bit by bit, dream by dream my will was broken and my heart opened.
So here I am having come through another doorway.....where I'm actually getting married to the Animus
and he wants to be a part of my business.  I feel all aglow when I hug him and take his suggestion for us to set up two looms in the same room so that we can work together .  I feel excitment about the possibilities of working as a team and not having to bear all the burden myself.  But can I go all the way with him?  Can I
really surrender all my will to him and trust in him completely??  Ironically in the dream the Animus is a gay man from Minnesota who is a weaving friend of Norman's.  He is sweet and kind and full of enthusiasm  for weaving and for life .  So why would the Animus come as a gay man?  It is because he is safer that way?  We can be great friends, platonic partners.  Just like Peter and I ended up being ...which was ok for me, but not for him.
So now I take another step in....to find those places in my life where I feel unworthy and scared of rejection if I risk being myself.  Since I don't have a partner right now to mirror this for me I need to look to my other relationships in the world and use them as my polishing tool. And I need to keep feeling His love for me more then anything else.

Speaking out....

                                                                   The heart speaks

I am enjoying some new transformations in my body these past few weeks and it has me feeling almost intoxicated!  The pain and headaches have vanished and there is a flow of energy that I haven't experienced in years.  My mind is freed from the chains of that old torment and my heart feels light and full of joy.  I have become engaged in life again...I have a re-newed interest in my work...I want to go for walks...I want to cook...and I want to be with people again.  I'm not entirely sure what has happened to effect these changes but I feel as if I have returned to the land of the living.

In my last session with Christa we worked many dreams; some which were of my openness with the Animus and his support - which affirmed my surrender of going over the waterfall, and others which showed where I can still get sidetracked and stopped. Where there is still a crack where the dark mother can find her way in. In one of those dreams I am riding my bike over the Golden Gate bring in San Francisco going to work.  When I get there I realize that I am hours late and that I have forgotten my work shoes.  Instead of going back for the shoes and torturing myself for being late, I make my apologies and bag the whole work thing altogether.  I go to visit a man friend who lives nearby and we spend the rest of the day together having a wonderful time.  As it gets late I decide that I'd like to spend the night with him but....and here's the crack....I worry about what my mother will think about me not coming home.  In the dream I do go home but when my mother starts hollering about where I've been, I stand up and start hollering back at her.  I am feeling so angry that she still wants to run my life ...and for god's sake....I'm 58 years old!
The anger is good.  I am finally standing up for myself....my right to live the life that feels true to me.  But why do I get stopped in that crucial moment of wanting??  There is a moment of extreme vulnerability where I feel scared that I will be rejected if I ask for what I want.  Then the shame comes in and the dark mother can have a field day with me.  So this is the moment that no matter how scared I am I must speak out.  I must ask for what I want and honor my needs and desires.  This is who I am.  This is who I am. I keep repeating this over and over like a mantra and I can feel the fire building inside that allows me to shout it out.

I am getting to see in my life how this dynamic with the dark mother plays out in relation to my recent health crisis.  With the telling to friends and family of my possible cancer diagnosis, I am getting lots and lots of advice about how to deal with it and what I should do.  I have an instinct about what is going on in my body and when I share how I plan to work through this I often get vehement reactions against this idea.  I then feel a surge of anger energy rise up in my chest and I very clearly speak what is true for me.  In the past I would have acquiessed and agreed....to afraid to rock the boat. But not now.  I am standing up and speaking out.

Imagine a life without fear.....

                                                           Demons in the Shadows

I was halfway through this blog post about my recent struggle with my fear demons when the phone rang. While I was on the phone the computer phased out and I lost everything that I had written. Maybe it was a sign that it was all crap anyway. I tried to rewrite what I had done and I found myself getting very tired and bored with all my droning on about what I am afraid of and how it rules my life. The phone call, as it turns out, was from my new oncologist telling me that the cancer marker blood test that I had this week is lower then the previous one. It is still higher then the normal range but it has gone down instead of up. What good news that was!
Instead of jumping into the next series of tests and procedures I told the doctor that I want to wait for three months and see what things are like at that point and then we can decide the next step. I felt really enlivened and uplifted by being able to make my own decision about this and know in my heart that I am doing the right thing.

So what was my point with asking the question above....about living a life without fear. This past week I lived out the opposite of that possibility and I got to see how miserable it is. I also got to
see that I am going to falter and not always been in the man's arms going over the falls but that
there is always the next moment when I can reach for that place. When I say "no" to the fear of those bullying demons I feel this new energy moving through my body. I could ride a bike for miles or even skate a marathon. I feel a peace of mind that is like listening to the waves wash in and out on the shore. There is a stillness in my being like standing outside on a moonlit winter night. For me, a life without fear is mostly about standing still and not running away.

Who is this man the Animus?

                                                                Hearts Merging

In the dream of going over the waterfall I am with a man who I love very much. In this dream he has a recognizable face....the character -Father Peter Clifford - the Catholic priest from the Irish TV Series - Ballykissangel. This love that I feel for him in the dream is not like any love I have ever felt in my earthly relationships. It is like I want to merge completely with him...body and soul....to infuse every one of my cells with his. To let go of my independence, my self sufficiency and my ideas about who I am and who I'm supposed to be and to be completely his. It is hard to describe and I'm not sure if I have really portrayed this merging in the drawing. It is unlike anything that I have ever felt before or even been aware of.

In the dream when I sense that by going over the waterfall we might be killed, I am frantic to find a way for us to escape. I can't bear thinking that we will be separated by death and that I will lose this newfound love that I have waited my whole life for. Something in his being....maybe it was just a look...draws me away from my scurrying about back to his side. There are just a few seconds before the boat goes over the edge ......and before I wake up...when I feel the comfort of his arms around me and I know that I can face anything with Him.

So who is Father Peter Clifford to me?
In the series, Ballykissangel, Peter Clifford is a young, English priest who has come to minister to a small Irish village. He meets a fiesty, strong willed woman named Assumpta Fitzgerald who has no liking for the church even to the point of disdain. Long story short - they fall in love and just when Peter decides to leave the priesthood and marry Assumpta, she dies in a tragic accident. He has given up everything that was hitherto dear to him for the love of this woman and then his heart is shattered into pieces. My broken heart resonated with his broken heart and I felt his pain as my pain. I think that he came as the Animus to me because of his capacity to love in the face of all opposition and to risk everything for his beloved. And I felt the same
as we stood ready to go over the falls.
without any

Encountering the "No".......

                                                         Reaching for the Light

Last evening I had a body work session with Isabelle where she was guiding me in a visualization of softening into the pain of my physical body. Near the end of the session she invited me to reach out to the Divine Mother and Father who were gathered above in a circle of light. I felt some affinity with the Father....imagining my own earthly father...and the tenderness that I had with him in his last years. When it came to the Divine Mother though I had a feeling of blankness descend upon me and I could not go any farther. There was an enormous wall of resistance that came up when Isabelle asked me to literally reach up my arms to these Divine figures. She actually had to guide my arms upwards and although I let her do this I felt not one bit of yearning for this embrace. What was this "No"all about, I wondered?? Years and years of trying to find an affirmation of who I really was from my mother that never was received?? A sense of ultimate betrayal?? A wanting and desire for some validation of myself as woman??
The list goes on and on and even now that my mother is dead I realized that I am still angry and hurt for all these past transgressions. The gift of this realization was that there is a part of me that is wounded and hurt but that there is also another part that can stand alongside of this child self and show her that there is love to be had if we will only reach out for it. This can be a new piece of my homework...to open my heart and let my arms reach for the light of the Divine. To acknowledge that there has been a big ''No"inside of me but that it doesn't have to be there forever. To stay with the Animus and go over the waterfall and not hold back this yearning for love because of wounds from the past.

Back in the trenches.....

The voices of the pathology have been relentless since receiving this newest tidbit about me possibly having cancer. The anxiety of others to my plight has added fuel to the fire and I ended up being very far away from going over the waterfall with the Animus. I began to believe all the horrible lies about how my life is over and the only thing that I have to look forward to is pain and more pain. In the middle of all this deception and despair there was a tiny spark of anger that has moved me to reconnect with both my homework of surrendering to the fall and that of being with the small girl and baby boy from another dream. In that dream I am drawn to a young girl who is working on a drawing and a small baby boy comes to sit in my lap as I watch her. The love that I feel for them broke my heart open to the pain of how separate I am from that part of myself. How the years of tending to others and all my worldly distractions has created a gulf that I thought I might never be able to cross. Sitting on top of that pain is an anger that I am hope can give me the energy to fight back these voices of nihilism and shame. I want to crush this part of me that keeps me running in the same old circles. I want to be transformed into something different. I don't want to talk about my health, my headaches, my treatment, my remedies. I want to go over those falls into the unknown and find my heart's desire.