Between mind and matter exists a psychic realm of subtle energies. Subtle energies manifest as images. These images dissolves the split between the physical and the spiritual.
The Green Man is the archetype that represents the spiritual intelligence in nature. As such the Green Man dissolves the split between spirit and matter. To accept the Green Man is to return to the awareness that there is a divine reality in matter.
The Shaman maintains a oneness with nature and discerns the wisdom and intelligence in nature, working with the spirits in nature. Images come from the depths of our souls. We try to think them when we should dance them, paint them, love them, befriend them, and allow them to carry us into their worlds to learn their stories—stories that will once again connect us to the spirit that connects us all.
In this chapter I explore how the entrance of the Green Man into my consciousness opened up avenues for healing the split in me between matter and spirit, between body and mind and ultimately the split in me between my heterosexual and homosexual selves.
I am at a religious service, like a church service. A man who is a healer is there. This man knows what to do when there is a need for a healing. He handles it. I tell him, “You are right where you are supposed to be. It’s nice to be right where you are supposed to be even though it was me that got you here.” By this I mean that this man came to see me because he was attracted to me. It was his attraction to me that put him right where he is supposed to be in order to take care of a healing situation. That is what he knows. He knows how to heal.
I reach up to kiss him. I put my arms around him. He is tall. I have to stretch up in order to kiss him. I think that he’ll embrace me and kiss me, that this is a mutual attraction, a coming together. However, he is hesitant. I kiss him. (Journal, 11-29-10)
As discussed earlier, dreams often mirror back to us what is happening in the unconscious, what is happening in the matter of our own souls. Dreams of a healer, healing, and energy healing had been showing up in my dreams for some time. I believe these dreams were part of what attracted me to shamanism and energy healing. This dream said that the healer was right where he was supposed to be, which I understood to mean that I was right where I was supposed to be. According to the dream this male healer was there because he was attracted to me. Not only was he attracted to me, but I was attracted to him.
I hypothesized that this attraction to the inner masculine as healing energy is what fueled my attraction to men and is what I sought in my same-sex relationships as an attempt to heal the masculine split in me. The man’s hesitance to embrace me in the dream mirrored my own ongoing hesitance to embrace both the healer in me and the integration of this other man in me. Both would heal the split between the inner man and the outer man, between the mind and the body, between spirit and matter and the split between my homosexual and heterosexual selves.
The dream ended with me stretching up to kiss this male healer. A kiss is a meaningful and highly symbolic act. Although the meaning and symbolism of a kiss varies according to the type and location of the kiss, a kiss on the lips represents a close union between two people, expressing a closeness of two hearts. Kissing on the lips symbolized the communication by one’s inner spirit to unite with another’s inner spirit. In other words, kissing goes deeper than the physical meeting between two people’s lips. Kissing touches both the heart and the mind.386
Because kissing involves an act similar to breathing into someone, kissing becomes a symbol for rebirth, renewal, and transformation. We only have to think of the symbolism of the kiss in fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty.387 The “breath of new life” is delivered through the lips. Think about what happens when two people fall in love or are strongly attracted to each other. At the touch of their lips every cell in the body comes alive with new life and the soul awakens. The fact that I had to stretch up to kiss this masculine healer suggested that some stretching or expansion of consciousness or action was required to embrace the masculine healer.
Who was this other man I stretched up to kiss? Who was this healer with whom I longed to unite, into whom I longed to breathe life? Or was I longing for him to breathe life into me?
I dream
My wife and I are at a shamanic healing. A person hands me a note. The note says “Don’t panic.” The note also said “critical” and was signed “Ona.” I know that Ona is involved in a healing with someone and the situation is critical. She is handing out notes to ask certain people to be in prayer, holding the space to assist energetically in the healing.
I move up to a place and sit on the floor in order to be in the circle of people holding this space. Suddenly I start to vibrate. I vibrate so strongly that I start to fall over. A man puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me. He knows what is happening. However, the vibration becomes so strong that I start to fall over again, and he gently assists me to lie down. The vibration continues until I start to move. I float across the room and end up back in a corner where Ona is working with a woman who is lying on the floor. It is obvious that the woman is in serious trouble. Suddenly I start talking. I tell this woman that I am her grandmother, giving her grandmother’s name. I tell her that I am from South Africa and that I have been watching over her all her life and that I have come to heal her. I then tell her other information. I speak in some other language. I then hug her and whatever her problem was, it’s resolved. She sits up. At this point I wake up. My body is still tingling from the energy and my speech is slurred. My arms continued to tingle for some time. I feel overwhelming emotion, joy, and gratitude. (Journal, 9-11-11)
Here is another dream about healing and healing the feminine. But was this only a dream? Ona is a shamanic healer with whom I had worked on multiple occasions. She was also one of the faculty in the Light Body School of the Four Winds and one of my instructors during my training in shamanic healing and energy medicine. At the time of this dream Ona was also my mentor with whom I sought supervision. I shared this experience with her. She told me that at the exact time of this dream, she was in fact conducting a shamanic training. According to Ona, there was a lady in the training from South Africa who was in need of significant healing. Had I had a spontaneous shamanic journey while sleeping? Had I actually picked up on the healing session being conducted by Ona in another part of the world and somehow participated in the healing?
Whether this dream is describing aspects of my own unconscious with all the figures representing parts of me (which is certainly a plausible and useful understanding), or whether the dream is describing images and archetypal processes from the collective unconscious (another useful interpretation), or whether I had actually traveled to this healing session during my sleep to assist in this healing (a rationally more challenging interpretation), the dream could be adequately under- stood through the lens of imaginal sight as discussed in the previous chapter. These images were presented to me as real, not subjectively real but imaginatively real, not externally or objectively real, but essentially real.
To that extent, this dream and these images had a real and essential effect on my consciousness, healing the feminine in me and connecting me more directly to the healer in me. However, Ona’s confirmation that she was in a healing session with a woman from South Africa that needed healing at the exact time of the dream suggested there was some external and objective reality to this experience also.
Imaginal sight provides for the embodying of Spirit and the spiritualization of matter. As mentioned earlier, between mind and matter exists a psychic realm of subtle energies whose characteristics manifest in mental and material form.388 As we have stated before but bears repeating here, when we recognize that the realm of the imagination— the imaginal sight of the heart—mediates between the physical and the Spiritual then the split between them dissolves. In the physical realm Ona was participating in a healing in which she made a call for assistance from the spirit realm, a practice common to shamanism. That mental call made its way through the energetic web connecting us and showed up in my dream as images of a healing session in which I then participated.
Given the individual work I was doing at the time, I can certainly interpret this dream as mirroring my work with both the masculine, indicated by the man in the dream assisting me in the healing process, and the feminine, indicated by my being grandmother energy that assisted in the healing of the lady in the dream, representing some aspect of my own feminine energy. Ona, the shamanic healer, could symbolize the shamanic healer in me—some part of my own emerging self. However, I was at that time learning the skill of shamanic journeying, also known as astral travel or soul travel. Astral travel, soul flight, or the practice of shamanic journeying where it is believed that a piece of the soul or the luminous energy body leaves the physical body and travels to other realms and places, is often disbelieved in western science.
However, astral travel and soul flight was the subject of a dream I’d had eight months before this experience. I dream
I am involved in a court case, a trial. There is a woman there who knows information. When we ask her to testify, she claims immunity. Dr. Dzera is there and says something about astral travel. He says, “I would never have believed it (astral travel) possible, but I saw Linda Finch do this. It was a dark night and I saw her just take off and go zoom (flying through the sky).”
He then puts on an astral travel suit, buckling it up at the waist. This has something to do with him being able to travel to get information regarding this case. I am getting ready to leave to go to some training. As I leave I stop by Dr. Dzera’s office and get something. I am driving on the road going to the training. (Journal, 05-29-10)
At the time of this dream I was continuing my study and training in shamanic healing. Shamanic journeying into non-ordinary reality to track or “see” phenomena on the physical, emotional, mythic, and energetic levels was a central part of this training. The doctor in this dream was a psychiatrist with whom I worked. He symbolized the rational, Western, scientific, medical model of treatment and healing. The woman named Linda in the dream was a master shaman and at the time was the dean of the Light Body School and one of my instructors. The dream showed that the more rational, scientific, medical model part of me (the psychiatrist) was accepting the shamanic reality of astral travel (Linda) because of what he had seen. This dream showed that because of my experiences in shamanic training and actually my personal experience with shamanic journeying, the more traditional, Western medicine man in me was putting on the consciousness and the way of the shaman, symbolized by the “astral travel suit.”
The previous dream where I participated in a shamanic healing, a healing that my shamanic instructor and mentor had confirmed was actually happening at the time of the dream, can also be understood as astral travel or soul flight. Part of the training and initiation into the shamanic path is to learn to send part of the soul forth intentionally on a soul flight. One of the purposes of the soul journey is to obtain information (another topic of the dream), information that can be used for healing, spiritual growth, or to work through emotional and psychological issues.
The point of this digression into astral travel or shamanic journeying is to emphasize its central role in shamanic healing. Putting these three dreams in chronological order, the dream on astral travel that came first showed the merging in me of Western psychiatric medicine and the indigenous ways of the shaman. The second dream where I kissed the male healer showed my embrace of the healer in me. The third dream showed my participation in the healing ceremony with Ona. It brought these two aspects together—astral travel and the healer—resulting in shamanic healing. But who was this healer in me? In January of 2012 I awoke early in the morning with the urge to paint. Painting had become a way for me to interact with and bring into consciousness the images stirring in the unconscious or in the depths of my soul. I had learned to pay attention to such urges. These urges come from a place deep in my body, somewhere around the heart and solar plexus.
I proceeded to paint a background as instructed by the “painting dream” ten years earlier. As I stared into the background I saw the image of a man’s head. The image reminded me of a man in a previous painting. I also kept being drawn to two other paintings, The Call and The Gift, which have already been discussed in a previous chapter. Since the image that wanted to appear on this canvas called my attention to these three men, all painted green, I wondered if “green man” had any meaning or significance. Acting on that hunch, I Googled “green man” and to my surprise I came upon a whole body of knowledge related to a concept called “the Green Man.” I then realized that I had been painting a “green man” in various forms for the past nine years. In 2003 I had painted an image of a green man. I called this painting Emerging. (See figure 15.)
Figure 15. Emerging
In my search for the collage of the heart and hands discussed in the previous chapter, I discovered that the theme of the Green Man had entered my work many years before but had remained completely cut off from my consciousness. In fact, I was quite surprised to find the presence of the Green Man in a collage that I had done in response to a dream eleven years earlier, back in 2001. At that time I dreamed
I enter a large house that is being remodeled. My wife and a man are with me. I am wearing two shirts. I take one of the shirts off and am now in my underwear. We walk through the house, which is in various stages of remodel and repair. We go to the very last part of the house. My wife has been doing the floors—removing old tile, stripping the floors of their old finish. There is only one floor left. It is hard work. She is working on her hands and knees. The owner of the house and his female companion arrive. I walk back up through the house. I’m a little concerned about being in my underwear. The house is dark. I can’t see and therefore I have to sense my way up and through the house. (Journal, 4-15-01)
I had this dream on Easter Sunday. In the years that I had been involved in church music, serving as music director, Easter was a significant and important day in the life of the church. As music director I had often been in charge of the music on Easter, directing choirs and writing and arranging musicals celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection. To have such a dream on such an important day, not only in the life of Christianity, but in my previous life in the church, going all the way back to the life in the parsonage, seemed significant to me. On that Easter Sunday and in response to this dream I wrote:
We go through deaths all the time. Every death resurrects into a new form. The physical (ego) resurrects as the spiritual, which is actually a transformed awareness. If we allow the resurrection power, the remodeling, the remolding, to do its work, the old transforms into the new. The statement in the dream that “I have to sense the way up and through the house” suggests another kind of seeing. (Journal, 4-15-01)
At this time in my life I often made collages in response to a dream as a way to work with the dream and to allow the unconscious to speak to me through its images. I would hold the dream in my mind and search through magazines, choosing pictures, words, and phrases, anything that might speak to me or attract my attention or, in some cases, repel me. I took these images and shaped them into collages. Here is the collage that I did in 2001 in response to this dream.
Figure 16. The Remodel
This collage had been archived away with many other collages and paintings. In 2012, eleven years after I had completed it, it entered my life again through a seemingly unrelated event. As I searched for the collage of the heart and hands discussed in the previous chapter, I came across this collage. Several things jumped out at me that had previously escaped my attention. First, in the center is a man dressed in green. But more importantly, in the lower right corner is a reference to the Green Man. The statement under this image says “The Quest for the Green Man.” For some reason I had put pictures of three tombstones in the collage. On one of the tombstones I had put a picture of John Matthews’ book, The Quest for the Green Man. Underneath the tomb- stones and the picture of the book, it said “John Matthews tracks this ancient archetype of the green and growing world through forest and woodland, folklore and ceremony, and world mythologies to produce the widest-ranging book on the Green Man to date. A colorful history aimed at reconnecting humankind to the spirit of nature.”
I had no memory of placing the specific image of the Green Man into this collage. I was completely shocked and surprised by this discovery. Although I had apparently forgotten its appearance into my life until I happened upon it while searching for the heart collage, it appears that something in me had been attracted to the Green Man for some time. In light of the fact that I had the dreams on which this collage was based on Easter Sunday and that I had placed this reference to Green Man on a tombstone spoke to the idea that something that had been dead and buried in my soul now wanted to return. Apparently, it now wanted to rise from its burial ground in the depths of my unconscious, seeking resurrection. Even though I had been painting a green man for several years, I had lost awareness of this connection and certainly did not know its meaning nor its archetypal significance. Nor did I know how the Green Man was connected to my journey into shamanism and energy medicine or my soul’s attempt and desire to heal the mind-body, spirit-matter split in me.
However, further investigation would reveal that long before the making of this collage and my paintings of green men, a hint of the Green Man and its transformative process had entered a dream. Of course, I didn’t understand it at the time. But way back in 1978 at the beginning of this long journey, I had dreamed I am riding a bicycle along the ocean. I fall off the bike and into the water. I get up and notice that I am covered in what looks like green paint. I go back home and clean up.
I am again riding the bicycle on the beach along the ocean. Again I fall off the bike and into the ocean. Again I get up and walk out of the ocean. Once again I am green, covered in what is like green paint. I awaken with the feeling and taste of sand in my mouth. (Journal, 1978)
Green is the color of nature and a symbol for growth, renewal, and rebirth. The color green is associated with the heart and the heart chakra. As such, green creates a balance between head and heart. This alone would have great significance and meaning for my journey. But looking back, I wonder if the Green Man had begun to make his appearance in this dream some twenty years earlier, long before I knew there was such a concept as the Green Man. Could it be that the archetype of the Green Man was behind this journey all along, pushing and pulling me to bring into consciousness this other side of the masculine—a masculine that is the spirit in nature?
Was this dream in 1978 the beginning of the man that would eventually emerge from the ocean as my soul’s next manifestation, which I had painted in response to the orb dream? Was this the man that was behind my same-sex attractions?
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