Turning it Over

Dream:

I am in a large hanger. A man, who is a mechanic working on the planes, sees me and shows me a two-seater plane. He asks me if I want to go up in it. It looks pretty flimsy but I figure if he’s the mechanic he must know that it is safe and I feel the thrill of adventure at getting to go up with him. Then we are in the plane and he is working the instruments to take it up.

There is a great deal of fear that comes up for me around the letting go of control, turning it over. I feel it in the cockpit now as I am writing. The terror of giving over control, the terror of surrender. The flip side of it is the thrill of adventure, the excitement of being with Him and ready for anything, the intense feelings allowed. Not having to be in charge. Getting to pick my head up and see all that there is to see when I am just the passenger.

I have been in a feeling of terror relating to what happened to me in my last session with my dreamwork analyst. When Sue asked me to feel what it is like to be in the cockpit with the Animus, the intimacy of that moment, a wave of feeling came into me that was so intense that I felt myself falling into the abyss of it and became terrified that it wouldn’t stop. Which of course snapped me right up and out of it. I did not have that feeling in the dream and so it was completely unexpected. Working this homework is difficult because each time I get close to that feeling, I get scared. It is like when I first started doing the inner work, I was afraid to go into the feelings of pain around trauma because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stop crying. This idea that I need to get out of the feeling is like a blind spot. It just happens and I don’t know it is happening in the moment.

Staying with the Feelings

I have just returned from a North of Eden Archetypal Dreamwork retreat at Kripalu in Massachusetts. This was probably some of the most intense spiritual work I have done. I have a new understanding of how trauma reaction covers me, how I am taken out by my projections and reactions and how this relates to the trauma. I have a new awareness of how much my body is telling me about where I am in terms of feelings or reactions. I am beginning to really recognize, in a visceral way, when I am going into my trauma reactions, when the truth of what is happening is taken over by my reaction to something that has already happened, usually a long time ago and the LIE that comes in through my mind that wants me to project the trauma reaction onto the world of the present time. This awareness gives me the choice to name it, to ask for help, to withdraw the projection in the moment.

For the past few months, I have been learning about visceral feeling in my body. Specifically sensuality and how this distinct feeling moves in me whether I am feeling pain, grief, desire, or fear. The dreams and my homework around the dreams, which have learned this into me, have carried and held a very specific intention, which is to feel me into my body. I have lived outside my body for most of my life, not feeling and not knowing that I was not feeling, assuming that the emotional responses I was having were feelings. The ecstasy associated with love (or, more to the point, love making), fleeting. Pain was avoided, fear was avoided, joy was manufactured, grief was skin tearing…definitely a feeling to GET OUT OF.

At Kripalu, we worked my “Strings”, which is to say the dream was enacted in group process with group members playing elements of the dream and me, the dreamer, challenged to step into the dream, feel whatever comes up and be rigorously honest about it. No small task, I can assure you.