Post Retreat...

How to express the experience of a NOE Archetypal dreamwork retreat? It is hard to put into words. To see the arc of my work through the week is humbling and I realize more and more how little I really know about how the whole process works as a psychological construct of the teaching and how my not knowing doesn’t matter right now. I don’t know where I am at, stage one, stage two, etc…and I don’t fully understand the alchemical process, but the clarity which came to me this past week as we moved through my particular work and through the work of others is a gift. I witness and am witnessed.

What I am understanding today is the level of gratitude I feel for the healing power that is within us and of the Divine. I have a new understanding of what the real war is. What I also understand is my commitment to the integrity of my work that I feel in my heart. No matter what happens, I don’t have to go it alone. I have the support of the Archetypes, my therapist, my teachers and my comrades in arms. If we make mistakes or miss something, the truth will come through the next dreams. I just have to trust, even when the demon would cast doubts like gossamer, sticky webs that float gentle or wrap fierce to entangle me, engage me, cause me to turn the fight back out into the world. I have a new understanding that somehow this work, this part of my journey, has become paramount.

I am experiencing new sensations in my body. These are feelings I have never felt. They are completely new or perhaps not remembered. How is this possible? How can I have lived half my life without discovering this? If you are reading this and in the work, then you probably already feel the sensual climb up your back. Perhaps you feel it now reading this. The suffusing, encompassing ecstatic feeling that moves you and moves through you. If you are are not in the work, or are in the work and have yet to experience this, then know that this is part of the why. This is why I do the work, to find that part of me that was lost, which is my soul. My soul which knows this feeling, the essence of itself as feeling and experienced in this way. What is the depth and range that is possible? It is scary to contemplate.

1/21/12 Dream:

A woman comes to me and says she wants to ask me what I know about three deer antlers that she says she found on her property. I see that they have images carved and painted on them. She shows one to me that looks like a bird’s eye view of animals running and looks very fluid.

This is the corrective dream to the young deer who has its horns cut off (see previous post). We worked this dream originally as the Animus showing me how I need to drop my defensiveness (which is definitely accurate). But the real truth of the dream comes through. In the process of the dreamwork at the retreat, this new dream showed that the horns are being returned to me as something sacred and special that was lost, taken from me through my trauma. The cutting of the horns and the eyes moved me into the pain of my trauma. The Anima, the Yellow Spinner, in Her capacity as the Divine healer comes to me. I feel the grief of what was lost, the not knowing of the loss, the gift of the return. I feel my deep need for Her and my gratitude that She has come to me in this way. I feel how much I want to be with Her, to have Her with me always.

Some moments in the work appear to be watershed moments. The work tumbles forward in a rush of dreams and alchemical feelings until you find yourself on the precipice of something new. It is terrifying and exhilarating.

And the waves of feeling in my body continue, easily accessed and stunningly intense.