Death of Pathology

Dream:

I am young woman. I am walking along a wooded path. It is dark out and there are people walking with me. I am barefooted and wearing some kind of light weight wrap. We come to a clearing and I see a woman (30’s) standing over a fire. There are other people around perhaps in a circle around the clearing. I think some people must be holding torches. I feel fear coming into my body. The woman has some unleavened bread and some kind of thick porridge. I know I am supposed to go to her. I walk over and stand across from her. She gestures to the bread and I take a piece and dip it in the sauce. I am feeling very scared now. The random thought comes into my head, “I will be like the pigs we eat and they will find this food still in my throat after I am dead.” Other people are there, but they don’t matter. I am only with her now. I tell her that I am scared. I feel tears coming to my eyes. She says, “I know”. She takes a small piece of bread and dips it in the sauce. She says, “Take small bites like this.” The random thought comes into my head, “I took too big of a bite before. I am not doing this right.” Then she pulls out a knife, as I knew she would and she pushes it toward my heart. I say, “No”, but stay facing her. I feel like there is no other choice. I feel so scared. She pushes the knife and I feel it pierce my chest. I feel a deep pain in my heart and a heaviness.

Ever since this dream with the Anima, I have been very aware of my heart. I am aware of its physical presence in my body in a way I never have been. I feel the pain of the knife in my heart more than I do not. It is like it is living there right now. I feel the heaviness of it.

In some way it is connected to my mind too, because it is the knowledge of my alignment with the pathology that brings the pain to my heart. The knowledge of how I have turned away so totally from the Father. How I have lived under the tyranny of a closed heart. An open heart can feel this pain. I never wanted it. I never understood how the avoidance of the pain created the suffering I thought I needed to avoid.

My whole life has been built around this total rejection of the Father, the Uranian Father, God. Rejection of men, self will run riot, rebellion, independence, pride, shame. There is no one who will help me, but me! No matter what you do, you can’t hurt me; a pathologically prideful place of turning away, closing my heart. And underneath it all has seethed the rage and hopelessness that fueled the maintenance of these contracts. It was a trick. An awful, horrible trick.

Of course, I couldn’t have known. Because we don’t know until we know.

“I am scared”, I say. The Anima says, “I know.” I wonder if the staying for me is simply the acknowledgement that there is no other way, no other choice. The fear is enormous; I feel this fear directly in my heart. It is a different kind of fear than I have experienced, perhaps tempered by the fact that it is my beloved Anima, cutting my heart. Or perhaps it is because this fear doesn’t come out of the mind, even though the voices of pathology try to get in there. Some place in me trusts her completely. In the dream, I think she is going to kill me and yet still I trust her. Some place in me knows this ancient circle, this spiritual place. Some place in me knows that “I” won’t die. That what is being killed is not “me”.

I feel in this moment how much this divine aspect of the feminine principle, this knife wielding Valkyrie, loves me even though She wields the knife which pierces my heart. She sees me in a way that no human being can.

Dream:

I am with a man. He wants me to look inside a room. I don’t want to but I do. I see a decapitated head and a pile of guts.

When Sue, my dreamwork analyst, asked me to be the decapitated head/pile of guts in our session, at first I couldn’t even begin to try and do that, right?. I had no feeling, no way of stepping into something like that. And then, I was there and I felt the malevolence of this thing, the mindless rage that it was experiencing being in that room, no body, only a pile of guts and a decapitated head. I felt it as something completely separate from me. This is the voice in my head during the ritual. This is the voice that wants to judge or shame. This is the voice of rage and hopelessness. It does not want to die.

Every time I hear the voice that judges or shames, the voice of the rage or hopelessness, my work is go to the Anima and let her pierce my heart. To let the pain move through me and to know the demon is dying, decapitated, eviscerated.

And to know that this death opens me to a deeper knowledge and discernment from the heart as I step into becoming a student analyst in this work.