Humbled

I don’t know what to write. I am at a loss. My friend, who subscribes to this blog, tells me that it is some deep shit, that my writings might scare people from this work. I don’t believe her, but I see how the flow of trauma work, which has been going on for months, could seem endless. It does to me. I want to say, I am done with this part. Or, I have dealt with that trauma, done. Period. End of story.

Yet how can I deny the dream. How do I speak of these things?

Since the last retreat, I have had several dreams of blood associated with my period. There is no shame, but there is the blood, and sometimes a lot of it. In the latest, I am with a group of NOE people. I go off to be alone in the bathroom thinking I have to go, but instead there is all this blood. A man comes along whistling nonchalantly and finds me. I think he is waiting for me. I feel no shame in him seeing me there in my blood which covers my legs and hands and is in clots on the floor. I feel no pain. I do not understand what is happening. I step over this. It is messy, a problem to be solved.

Sue, my therapist, and I work the dream from the point of view that there is no shame. Blood is life, passion, primal energy. It is coming from me and He is with me. This all sounds good, right? And I want this. I like that I am feeling no shame. I am OK with my blood.

Phoenix Rising - Form of Girl

Dream:

I am moving past a scene that I see playing out next to a warehouse-like building. It is like I am on an elevated train. I see a young woman in short shorts. She is getting in a fancy sports car that belongs to some man. I think she must be a prostitute because of the short shorts. I see the man pull a large bag out. There is another man talking on the phone and he says that she should know better than to go with a man who would make her get in a body bag. I see the girl climbing in the bag and realize that she is probably going to be killed by this man. It has a zipper on it and he zips it part way up and then bunches it together so he can carry it. Then I am traveling on the El in the other direction still watching the same scene. The man picks up the bag with the girl in it and throws it down really hard on the ground. Then he quickly peers in through the top to see her reaction. I think he is going to torture her.

My therapist Sue says when we work this dream, “He really wants you to see this”. I feel into the girl who would climb into a body bag, willingly. I recognize this disassociated girl.

I left home when I was 16 and this dream references a period of my life when I was a teenage runaway in Florida. I did not look like a woman. I was what people called a “late bloomer”. I didn’t have hardly any breasts or start my period until I was 16. I was thin and fair with wispy blonde hair. I’m sure I had attitude, the deals had already been made: “no matter what you do you can’t hurt me” and “no one is going to take care of me but me.” Contracts signed years earlier in the virginal blood of a child.

Duality

In the Carl & Me class last week, Carl touched on the idea of dualism. He talked about his work in the context of hot and cold, east and west, logos and essence, the dark and the light, the good and the evil, life and death. It was a fascinating class for me because of one of the dreams I had worked with my therapist just before going into the class. I feel this is one of the most important pieces we have learned about so far from the Carl & Me teachings.

Dream:

I see a woman [the Anima]. She is holding two miniature planets in her hand: Mars and Earth. Mars is hot and earth is cold. They are in opposition to each other. She oscillates them in her hand like you would with Chinese medicine balls and I feel that they are moving back and forth between the two states of hot and cold or light and dark. I see other planets that appeared to be paired in a similar fashion.

I felt as if in the section of the reading (starting at the bottom of page 277 titled First Day), Carl was talking about the hot/cold duality of the logos vs feeling. Where the east and west meet at the horizon between these two places, is a place where one meets and perhaps even seeks the other. If you go too far towards the light of the east then you are oscillated back towards the dark and the west. We cannot leave behind the “poison of science” of what we know in the world because it is too inherent in our nature. For better or worse, we do have a brain that functions in a very specific and well grooved way. I had the idea that perhaps the enlightened person cannot exist solely in her essence and still teach what she knows. She needs the mind. Carl talks about how we need the mind in Primus.

In the Terror

Your work is to be in the terror. You see how easy it is to want to turn away. You know that this is a place in you that you don’t want to face. You are afraid.

From the Dream:

I am sitting on the floor in a circle of NOE people. Sarah L. is sitting next to me...Then something shifts and I can’t see. I hear Annie W’s voice say that she smells filth. She says it is a prevailing filth. Suddenly I smell it too and the minute the smell comes into my nose, I am screaming. It smells like unclean human bodies. I have a sense of some prevalent evil surrounding me. I feel the scream, but it is like I am having someone else’s experience…I feel my arms fling out and know that I am struggling. I can’t make sense of what I feel under my hands, just that it is naked bodies. I am not sure if it is shoulders, arms, legs, necks. I feel as if hands are either holding me or pulling at me. The scream is one of absolute terror.