The Body Remembers

Beneath the Water by Laura Smith

My current dreamwork prayer (I have decided to call it a prayer instead of “homework”) is to feel the vulnerability of the bunny/lamb as I bring my spiritual/inner work to all the places of my life and to stay in the alchemy of breathing the sulfur water in the deep well, even when the Anima leaves.

I think this is the prayer, my homework...with alchemy it always feels like a tumble...a blurry line between my inner life and my outer world. I can’t possibly know what is happening and so it is not the confusion of trauma, but the mystery of alchemy that is in direct opposition to the polemical vagaries of my mind.

It is true for me too how when I am in alchemy, my body experiences pain in the shifting. For several weeks, I have been suffering from asthma and the physical reactions associated with allergies, sneezing, headache, congestion, aching in my lungs and back. This is common for me in the fall and my partner, Vanessa, reminds me that the fall is a hard time for me. When the leaves find their color and the air turns crisp, my body remembers the pain of loss...my brother and my birth mother both passed in the fall. I got sober in the fall...the mountain in me erupted and the lava began to flow and I was burned.

The body does remember these things you know.