“When there is a conflict of priorities, one must follow the heart.”
When we split off matter from spirit or mind from body and elevate spirit and mind to a superior place over body and matter, something in us dies. We suffer a loss of connection, not only to nature, but to our own souls.
Ancient traditions have long held that the heart is the seat of the soul. Vibrating in the heart are not only feelings and emotions, but memories and images of our past, our ancestral stories, early traumatic events, our wounds and painful places as well as images of our future. Imagination is the authentic voice of the heart. This makes the heart central to a spiritual or symbolic life and raises our understanding of compulsions and desires—sexual or otherwise—to their spiritual or symbolic meaning.
In this chapter, I explore out outer images and events are carriers and therefore patterns of energy at work with us. I examine how an image reflects is own consciousness, putting wisdom, divine intelligence, transpersonal reality back into nature and matter, back into the object, even into the object of our desires.
I dream
I am walking with a female psychoanalyst. I put my hand over a spot on her back at her heart area. I feel energy of a wound or illness. As I hold my hand there I begin to feel the energy moving, as if I am extracting or healing this energy. This experience intensifies. She begins to convulse. She falls to the ground as if having a seizure, eyes rolling back into her head, contorting. I become somewhat anxious, wondering if she is going to be okay. She goes back in time to where she falls off a tricycle, hits her head, and dies.
Suddenly she quiets, eyes return. She gets up and says, “I haven’t felt this good after ten heart surgeries,” indicating that she has heart disease or a heart condition, something I didn’t know. Her husband is waiting for her in the car. She says that she is going to send people to me. I say, “I never did this before,” intimating that I may not be able to do it again. I just noticed that when I put my hand on your back, I felt dark and heavy energy there and the healing just started happening.” (Journal, 11-01-08)
The feeling in this dream was intense and powerful. I had this dream after doing a soul retrieval journey. In that journey I entered into what is described as the four chambers of the soul, which compares to the four chambers of the heart. In the first chamber you explore an original wound. In the second chamber you discover and renegotiate your soul’s contracts that have kept you bound to repeating the events of the wounding. In the third chamber you retrieve the soul part that was lost because of the wounding, and in the fourth chamber you receive gifts that will help the recovered soul express and live its purpose.353
When I did this shamanic journey, I did not have any particular images come to me in the various chambers. I just accepted that whatever was happening was occurring on the energetic level where every- thing is pure energy. Even though I wasn’t aware of anything happening on the soul retrieval journey, the dream would indicate otherwise.
This was another dream about energy healing and healing the feminine. This time the healing was at the heart level. I was healing the heart of the feminine, or perhaps I was getting to the heart of the matter of the feminine. I am reminded of the Swan Lake dream where the lady in the dream says, “When there is a conflict of priorities, one must follow the heart.”
But what does it mean to follow the heart? The lady in this dream was a psychoanalyst. She was the same psychoanalyst in the dream that ended chapter 14, where she asked her husband if he was finally going to admit that he did energy healing. In this dream she made reference to having a heart condition. What was this heart condition? Since I accepted that dream figures represented parts of me I had to ask “What is the issue at the heart of the psychoanalyst in me?”
A psychoanalyst is someone who explores how unconscious factors contribute to problems in a person’s life, believing that bringing unconscious factors into consciousness can result in the elimination of problems, contribute to healing, and move us toward greater wholeness. I have long accepted the idea that unconscious factors influence most of what a person does. My journey into Jungian psychology and my own Jungian analysis had proved that to me. Although we think that our problems are with the people or the circumstances of our lives, such problems are often reflections of the conflicts between parts of ourselves.
At the time of this dream, I was in a psychotherapy practice with a group of colleagues, two of whom were trained in Freudian- based psychoanalytic theory. One of them was the psychoanalyst in the dream; she was in training to become a psychoanalyst. My own personal journey into shamanism and energy medicine was taking me increasingly into the nonrational realms of non-ordinary reality and transpersonal subtle energy states. As a result I came up against the Freudian psychoanalytic view, represented by my colleagues, which tended to pathologize attempts to carry ascent development to its transpersonal conclusion beyond Piaget’s formal operational stage of cognitive development and rational world view. These latter two constructs are widely recognized by conventional psychotherapies and mainstream science, which view such ideas as neurotic immaturities of a prerational, magical thinking stage of development. They are there- fore deemed to be inferior and less developed when contrasted with elements of possible, higher stages of development such as vision-logic, psychic, subtle, causal or non-dual, suggested by some developmental researchers.354
As the psychoanalytic and shamanic stories, with their differing theories and assumptions, increased in their power and presence, the core conflict between these two world views collided and became activated. I felt as if my colleagues saw my journey into shamanism as invalid, regressive, and inferior and that they believed psychoanalysis to be superior. However, I did not have any concrete evidence that either of my colleagues held such classical Freudian beliefs or world views and because both were very supportive of my journey into shamanism and energy healing, I had to assume that this conflict was entirely within me and had become projected onto my colleagues, given that they carried the hook for such a projection.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the assumption that humanity exists as a unique entity only because of our capacity for rational thought is still the metaphysical base that prevails in our culture and in much psychotherapy, perpetuating the soul-splitting effects of the Cartesian mind-body, spirit-matter dichotomy. This spirit-matter, mind-body split was the underlying archetypal cause of the conflict that emerged in me between my heterosexual and homosexual selves, between the masculine consciousness of the parsonage in which I was raised and the one emerging from the depths of my own soul.
This conflict now emerged between the psychoanalyst and the shaman in me. This most recent conflict seemed to get at the heart of the matter by throwing me headlong into a reality in which there was no such split. Spirit lived in matter, one with it. Perhaps this is what is at the heart of matter. And perhaps this is also what is at the heart of the feminine. Is this what the feminine knows? Is this what the heart knows? Is this what is vibrating in matter—there is no separation between mind and body, no separation between spirit and matter? My journey into shamanism and energy medicine had brought me face-to- face with this ancient wisdom. As I held these opposing world views, much like I held my homosexual and heterosexual selves as both being contained in some underlying whole, a journey into the Under World would provide an answer. From my journal:
I travel to the Underworld to visit with Huascar, the guide and guardian of the Underworld. We come to a pool of water surrounded by beautiful vegetation. I notice many hummingbirds. Huascar tells me “This is the Place of the Hummingbirds.” I look into the pool, which is crystal clear. Mist rises from the pool, and Huascar tells me that the mist rising from the pool is the wisdom of the hummingbird. He instructs me to visit this place regularly and that I will learn to read the mist rising from the pool.
Suddenly I hear these words, “Look deep within the pool that is inside you and you will find the wisdom of the universe.” I’m thinking, “I don’t know whether these words come from Huascar, the pool, or the hummingbirds.”
It is as if Huascar hears my thoughts and answers “It doesn’t matter because they are all one. Energy of the one is continually exchanging itself with the energy of the other.”
I think “But then how does one distinguish between them?”
Again as if hearing my thoughts, he answers “There is no distinction. It is the human mind, the ego that has the need to separate.” As I continue to meditate on this image, I see mist rising. The mist takes various forms. (Journal, 5-6-12).
There is no separation between mind and body, no separation between spirit and matter. The energy of one is continually exchanging itself with the energy of the Other. This was the message—a message that science itself is now asserting. Everything is made up of energy and everything exchanges that energy with everything else at all times.355 The above dream suggested that a memory of a previous lifetime continued to vibrate in the heart. The psychoanalyst in the dream said that the energetic healing of the wound that she carried in her heart left her feeling better than ten heart surgeries had. This dream showed the effects that energy healing can have on what we carry in our hearts.
But what is it that we carry in our hearts? What is it that the heart knows? We experience our emotions, our passions, our longings, as well as our hurts and wounds—the very essence of who we are—in the chest and heart area. One only has to recall the pain of a significant loss or the excitement of falling in love to know that these events register in the heart. The dream infers that an earlier traumatic event had created a disease or condition of the heart—a condition I knew nothing about. What was the heart condition?
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