Chapter 14 The Music Begins
“All life sings. It is your birthright to express your soul through song, adding to the universal song of life.” —Sandra Ingerman, Walking in the Light
The psyche seeks its goals independently of external factors or the ego’s desire, a process that provides a path to self-discovery, healing, personal growth and even one’s destiny. The symbolic meanings of sexual dreams, fantasies and attractions may represent the soul’s desire to bring alive some other part of us.
When we are unable to express a thought of a feeling, the body may create a symptom to express it for us. The symptom becomes the symbol. Seeing something as a symbol allows us to get in touch with something that cannot be known in any other way.
Images in our dreams or images that we create with our intentions are connected to that particular energy as it exists in the energy or spirit worlds. Our relationships with this subtle energy as the forms in our dreams and creations may serve as guides and helpers or avenues for healing.
In this chapter I show how images in my dreams and that began to appear spontaneously in my art became guides on my journey.
I dream
I am in an office with two Jungian analysts. One of the analysts is working on one of my dreams. I say, “You have what ego-consciousness does and you have what the unconscious does. It is these two working together that influences a life.”
The other analyst then draws a model of three circles. He says the other analyst doesn’t accept this piece—God— pointing to the third circle. This analyst says “There are three things that influence a life—the unconscious, which is revealed through dreams, ego-consciousness, which is the I you know yourself to be, and God, which is a force that transcends both and acts on its own. It is all three that determine one’s life.” (Journal, 8-14-94)
I have maintained throughout this book that there is some divine spirit or transcendent purpose in my same-sex attractions and fantasies. This divine spirit is that numinous and highly charged transpersonal vital life-giving energy that responded to my cries in 1981 to sing my song by coming to me in a dream as powerful swirling rings of energy described in a previous chapter. I have maintained that this divine spirit and transcendent reality carries the highest creative function and ultimate reality of the psyche and invokes the sacrifice of the ego on behalf of its purposes.
Three years after our move to Indianapolis, I completed my Master of Social Work degree and began a second career as a clinical social worker and therapist for a community mental health center. The MSW degree and job as a therapist provided the container for me to continue to pursue my interest in dreams and psychotherapy and provided me a new lease on life—one that was more congruent with the images that I had discovered living in my soul.
My original plan had been that once I obtained my MSW degree and gained some clinical experience I would pursue my interest in Jungian psychology and begin analytical training to become a Jungian analyst. However, once I completed the MSW and began my work as a therapist, I found that my motivation and need to continue such training had decreased. Also, the logistics of paying off a school loan that had been necessary to get the MSW—an additional minimum of five years of study and the projected $50,000-plus it would cost to pursue analytical training at that time—seemed beyond my grasp.
Although my dreams continued to bring up the topic of studying at a Jungian institute and becoming a Jungian analyst, I began to understand those dreams as symbolic of a process happening inside me. They referred to my continuing individuation process rather than my potential striving to achieve the more tangible goal of becoming an actual Jungian analyst. I still hold some sadness around the loss of that dream. However, I came to understand through years of working with my dreams that there is indeed a process in the psyche that seeks its goals independently of external factors or the ego’s desires—a process that provides a path to self-discovery, healing, personal growth, and even one’s destiny.
As stated earlier, when the unconscious purpose of a behavior has been fulfilled, the energy then moves on to a next gradient or level of development. 313 As I came to understand that the internal spiritual and symbolic meanings of my same-sex dreams, fantasies, and attractions were my soul’s desire to bring alive another man living in me, I began to make choices to give that man life. This energy had become the impetus to the many changes I had already made, including leaving my former life as musician, church leader, and high school teacher, to become a psychotherapist. In many ways becoming a psychotherapist was yet another projection of my own soul’s longing for healing and expression.
As I settled into my life as a therapist, my dreams began to point me in another direction—one I had not anticipated or ever contemplated—shamanism and energy medicine.
I dream
A woman is sick. I am called to come heal her. I go to the house where the woman lives. Her husband comes out to meet me as I walk up to the house. He stops me and says he doesn’t know me and won’t let me in the house to see his wife. A lady, his wife’s mother, comes to the door and says, “He’s okay. I called him to come.” He then lets me enter.
I go to the sick lady’s room. She is in bed. I sit on a chair beside the bed and just sit quietly with her. Suddenly I see myself with bird feathers—like a headdress you might see a Native American wearing in a Native American dance. I’m just sitting there with this feather headdress on. I then realize that I take the lady’s ill energy into me and it is transformed, that is, it is healed and made healthy as it passes through my energy and returns to her, much like blood is cleansed by passing it through one of those machines that removes contamination from diseased blood. I wake up with a peaceful, healed feeling and a sense of “okay-ness” and purpose. (Journal, 4-21-96)
Although this dream may be understood as the continued healing of my own feminine, it might also be understood as a call from the feminine to become an energy healer. This theme of the call of the feminine and energy healing continued in another dream. I dream
I am with a chiropractor and energy healer. She is training a group of us to heal pain in the body through energy. She demonstrates by touching the area where the pain is located and then touching the herb that is needed for the healing. She then touches the body in various places to balance the energy. It is the balancing of the energy that eliminates the pain. I ask her how she knows what herb to use. She says that she sees it. She sees the herb the body needs. The body tells her. (Journal, 8-25-96)
I dream
My daughter and I are walking in the town where we used to live. We are walking on familiar streets. We come to another street and turn left. Suddenly we are walking in a different place. Everything is different. We turn again, trying to figure out where we are when we meet a man, a woman, and a little girl living in a house up on stilts. We don’t know them, but they look vaguely familiar. We tell them we were in Bluffton, and we made a turn and suddenly we aren’t in the small mid-western town anymore. (Journal, 09-10-00)
Either I woke up and went over this dream in my mind, or I woke up in the dream and went over the dream. I then dream
What has happened is that we had walked into another dimension. Upon this realization, my body is filled with chills. I realize that this is what happens to people who can see into the spirit realm. They go into another dimension. I then practice going into this other dimension, moving back and forth between the two realities. I go into the other dimension and then struggle and struggle to come back. My body is very heavy. I can’t move. I have difficulty swallowing. I know there is this other realm or reality happening simultaneously. I had walked into that realm. I am discovering that I can do it at will, move in and out of these two dimensions at will or consciously. It is for the purpose of seeing into this other realm, to see the sources of people’s problems and to help them heal. It is a strange and powerful, yet somewhat frightening experience because it is almost like I can’t get back. (Journal, 9-10-00)
It would be several years before I would understand the implications and importance of this dream. As I began my study of and training in shamanism, I discovered that central to shamanic healing practices is what is called “shamanic journeying.” When journeying, the shaman enters into an altered state of consciousness and travels outside of time into the hidden realms, which are called non-ordinary reality or the spirit realm. In these hidden realms one is able to see the root cause of problems. In these realms are helping spirits, compassionate spirits, who offer their guidance and also their healing and help on behalf of all life on earth.314
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