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.


The feeling in my session was the wave of sensuality, which I have come to recognize and know as alive in my body. But, then it kept intensifying. I felt dizzy and I am sure if I was standing I would have fallen over. Then I felt intense heat in my body followed by the disassociation of jumping out. I am pretty sure I have never experienced anything quite like that before. It was actually terrifying because I was no longer in control of anything, not my body or the feeling that was moving through it. My mind was gone for a moment. It was like pure sensation, no mind; absolutely terrifying and also exquisite.

The places in my life where I am the talking head, or in my shame, or needing to be in control are all constant places for me to work the edge, to bring in the cut if I can notice when I am in those places and if I can muster enough willingness to do it. It is hard to turn it over to Him. There is a refusal that I want to say is not about my faith, for I believe my faith to be strong. I would like to say it is about my trauma or my ego…it’s not my fault. It’s true that faith is shaken by trauma and that ego defenses come from the shaken and embattled place of trauma, but it’s also true that faith is not enough. Faith without works is dead, just as my body without spirit is dead. And I want to live in the faith. This is the place where the right use of will must come in. Because it takes every ounce of will sometimes to continue the descent, to allow the feelings, to allow the love, to allow the Archetypes in, to know the voice of the demon and to cast it out. To feel and know the truth and be in the faith each time I am challenged. Something in me knows about this faith. Some deep place that manifests as the feeling that comes into my body in the moment of surrendering to Him in the cockpit. Nothing for me to do but be willing to be with Him and let Him take me where He will.