July, 2008 - Dream: I am sitting across from a large man at a table set for a feast. I know that he is special, larger than life. He asks me how I am. I am surprised. I say, Fine! People are talking about my sister and how wonderful she is; I agree that she is, too, and I am smiling. He leans forward again and asks: How are YOU? I am surprised even more to see that he really wants to know about me. I feel a little scared and a deep warm pleasure.
When the Animus comes now in my dreams, I recognize him, even though I sometimes still am surprised that I am so special to him. I feel his authority, his love, his large presence. Sometimes I feel scared and jump away, but I know who he is and what he wants. This is a big shift from the early days when I saw the Animus as a potential rapist, as a blind driver who didn't know what he was doing, or the man who wanted to marry someone other than me. Now I believe in his very personal love and care.
It has been a long journey to come back to Him. I hesitate about putting the capital on the H, but the truth is that the Animus is more than just a him or a he. The old me wants to hide this knowledge. I grew up in my father's extended family where the Divine had no place. Who you knew and what you accomplished were the tickets to satisfaction. Everyone seemed to have good looks, brains, talents, and plenty of money. When I first married at 29, I refused to allow the word God in my wedding, explaining to Patrick that "my friends and family aren't into God and it would just be embarrassing". Belief in God seemed optional, something for weak unimaginative people who "needed something" to prop up their lives. And we McLanes believed that we shone on our own.
I personally subscribed to psychology, and became a therapist, and a "good" one with lots of stories. I delved into the inner life, mine and other peoples, but with no real direction. Maybe the goal was getting people to adjust better to the outer world, to feel more successful? I knew the field of psychology had no cohesion but I shrugged it off.
I had three life changing events which eventually brought me to this work. The first was spending time in India at Meher Baba's home, where I had experiences of something profound - something I knew to be what people throughout time called God. I had no doubt. Even though I thought I had everything (good marriage, work, and family), and I wasn't even "looking" for anything, I understood that these experiences of love were precisely what everyone in their deepest beings longed for. I fell in love with the Divine through Meher Baba, although I kept it under wraps when I returned to my old life in the US. I knew something of the truth, but I still didn't want to risk exposure around friends and family at home.
The second event was my husband Patrick's death in a car accident when I was 36. In the midst of terrible shock and pain, I felt the presence of the Divine. I could feel it physically when I sensed my hand being taken and held; when I cried and cried, I could feel arms around me in a loving embrace. I was given a million signs that Patrick was fine. While his death was a total accident on the physical plane, he was prepared on another level and I was totally taken care of. I was in a state of complete love, totally natural, no longer taking care of others or worrying about anything. I became the child, like a newborn, twenty four hours a day. Eventually I returned to the world, but for a time I knew how it felt to live in His love and have a truly open heart.
The third event happened many years later, after I had become hidden again, after I started paying more attention to the world's opinion than to my relationship with God. We had a family crisis that tore off our masks; I felt the pain and fear of losing my image, of living in imagined humiliation. I could see that this was an even greater terror than losing a loved one through death. This horrible fear sent me in search of a deeper help, first through Pathwork, and eventually the Archetypal Dreamwork. Eight years later, I count all the disasters as blessings. My craving to be OK in the outer world, to substitute approval for love, is losing its grip. Not gone, as seen in the following dream, but loosening.
Dream:
I am following a man upstairs. He is showing me to my room in a hotel. He gives me a foreign bill (money), and as I climb after him, I see that now I have many bills in my hand. I pause, worrying that I have mistakenly taken the waiter's tip off the table downstairs and need to return it right away. I want to follow the man, though, and hurry after him. I'll deal with the money later.
I feel the urgency to be with Him, not to lose sight of Him. I am grateful for all the ways He lets me know of His presence, like in this dream. Here also I face my anxiety of "not enough", which is something I worry about in the world. Not enough time, money, friends, love, space. I still have difficulty believing in the abundance, the many bills I hold in my hand that most likely do not belong to anyone else. That is my story: that others have a right to it, that I can't have it.
Dream:
I am on a bus with a group of people from North of Eden. I feel a hand on my face, and I ask whose it is because I am not sure which body it is attached to (like when you stand in a circle with everyone's arms around each other). A man calls: Mine! He has a young, loving face. His hand is so soft, both male and female. I caress it on my cheek, relaxed in His love. Nothing else matters.
Here is true abundance. Here is where I am in love. Here is where I embrace my self, my belonging. Here is where I receive His reminders, His caress. I want you to know, and it has taken me all my life to say it, that love for God is at my center.
August 12, 2007
What happened to me yesterday? In the morning I felt pure peaceful joy. I was in the moment totally, connected with God, but then what? I must have felt afraid of the joy and let myself be pulled away. I worried about my daughter, made up scary movies of her dying of a drug overdose, of my son being killed in a car accident. I made phone calls about my daughter and outlined plans for her life. I took the car to get fixed and worried about the brakes not working. I felt like blaming someone (was it my husband's or my fault?) I focused on other people but then forgot to go to my friend's gathering. I ate too much for dinner, stayed up too late. I forgot my homework and have trouble recapturing it now.
Tell the dream again, you say?
I am holding a little girl whose heart is beating very very fast. It is bulging out of her chest and I feel panicky, scared something is wrong with her. I even feel a bit repelled. Then I hear someone telling me that there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing wrong. I believe the voice.
I believe the voice. I am just scared - all that fast heart beating is scary. I am just scared of naked heart beating, bursting out of her chest, pulsing powerful. Raw power. When I did a gestalt with Marc, I so much loved being that girl. So clear. Are you there, little girl?
I'm here, of course, I'm you! You are just scared of this power in yourself. You want to return to management, but I am just here doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, just feeling my heart beating. I am with Him, without any plans of what I'm going to be doing because the future isn't my business, it's His business. I am in His arms. I am so happy - there is absolutely nothing to worry about. I am also in your arms even though you are scared of me! You are holding me and I feel your fear, your uncertainty. You aren't responsible for me, for my racing heart. You can't do anything except hold me, and it doesn't matter if I live or die because He is with me. There is no death like you think of anyway.
I have a message for you: just look around, see things here, feel what you feel. Feeling scared is good - it means you are aware of me! Don't shrink, don't go off into numbness. Be me, slide into me, I am all fluid. Never mind if you can't remember your dreams. You dreamed you were underwater with a boy, that's all. Don't get hung up on this or that dream, keep inside yourself. Don't give so much away. Don't worry about Mani, stay with yourself. Enjoy all the details, the sensual life - the grass, the dirt, the smell of laundry on the line, cleaning the stairs. Don't disappear - everything is right here for you, right now. Every time you plan the future or review the past, you miss it. And all the time the apples are growing and growing on the tree outside the window, still growing even if you miss it.
My heart is still racing and pounding. I can stand it, I love it. You just imagine that it's scary. Don't let them scare you with stories. Just be scared of being me, the naked raw girl self, but don't go away. It's scary to hold me and slide into me - you think you'll lose something. But He has us all in His hands, always. Do you know that I need you, too? Sometimes I need a planning ego, but I need it in His service. I need you to join me, become me. He's got plans for us! I don't know what they are - I don't even care! I'm sure it will be fun!
Another dream:
I am outside a little house. Children are playing all around. I see a black panther walking nearby in the woods. I have seen this panther before. I get scared the panther will attack us and begin running to the door of the house. I call my little girl to come but she ignores me and keeps playing. I stand at the door, fearful, picturing danger. The children all keep playing. I turn back to them, I don't go inside. I begin to feel excitement along with the fear as I watch.
My current choice point is whether to run from the panther or turn back toward it even if I am afraid, especially when I am afraid. It's hard for me to stay in the feeling of all this fast heart beating and panther power, but I want it, I want it. I want to just see, and not be watching, watching all the time. I want to be so quiet inside that I only hear Him.
June 2, 2006
One evening, a couple of years ago after a Bache dinner, I came outside onto the porch at Deb and Bill’s and found Michael crying in the center of a pile of people who were holding and comforting him.
Without thinking, I threw myself into the pile because I wanted to be “in the love”, too. And from that place of being a child and in the love, more love poured easily out of me toward Michael, who I barely knew, and toward everyone. I wanted us all to stay there forever.
Usually I hold back. I tell myself things like: they all know each other better; they won't want you to join in; don’t be so needy; you shouldn't really need that anyway, etc. I prevent myself from even knowing how much I want to be at love’s center. I wanted it as a baby, as a child growing up, and now in a new way. I want to be the Real Bride, in the deepest center of love. I didn't and couldn't have this growing up in my family, but now I believe that it is possible with Him.
I dreamed once that I was going to marry a beautiful man I deeply loved. I was so happy until I thought that his family had arranged for him to marry another woman. Then I just gave up; I was just going to leave, maybe say a casual goodbye, shrug off my pain and disappointment. My homework, naturally, was to go back and let him know how much I really wanted to marry him. It felt like such a relief to just want him. I have protected myself all my life from feeling big wants and needs; safer to be content with whatever comes my way.
Even when I have let myself know how much I want love, I make up reasons why I can’t have it or don’t deserve it. Then I feel sad and separate and no love flows from me to others. My ability to receive is blunted, too, and I feel even more forlorn.
Since I really hate feeling sad and disconnected – too vulnerable - I make up more explanations and move into my cheerful, competent mode. I give to others less from a place of true love than from needing to be needed, to be “good”, to feel in control. I try to become like my pathological version of Jane Goodall - very proud of her independence, admired, brave, endlessly energetic and creative. I don’t want to need Him. Long ago I was proud of denying any belief in God; that was for weak pathetic people who needed some myth to live by. Even now, on the days I fall into a proud independence, if He is driving the car in my dream, I am convinced He is blind and I try to grab the steering wheel before He gets us into a wreck. Or I think he is going down the wrong road and I scream and hit Him and threaten to throw myself out of the car.
Sometimes I am a child walking with Him, holding His hand, walking anywhere. Then I get scared. Maybe I’m scared of where He’ll take me, like when He wants to drive off the road into the woods. The reason doesn’t matter; I just get suddenly disconnected, alone, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable. I try to make myself bigger, more powerful. I criticize others in my mind endlessly. I compare myself to everyone to see who has more love. Who has more friends, more intimate marriages, happier children, more lush gardens, thinner bodies, paints more pictures, writes more stories, makes more music, has more satisfying work…on and on. I want to be better, be more. It’s a lie. But now I am alone with the lie and I feel really ashamed and pathetic and think I cant go back to Him. He won’t want me. He won’t love me either. I am too yucky. Yucky on the inside and now a judging greedy liar on the outside.
But there is hope. I dream:
I am climbing up a mountain with Him (after He fixed my broken car for me). I drag the car behind me as we climb, drag it up by the bumper even though it is awkward and heavy. Near the top the car slips out of my grasp and rolls down the mountain, crashes below. I know I can’t catch it, can’t stop it. I feel momentary regret as I watch it go. There is no getting it back now. So I turn back to climbing up higher with Him.
The car is my independence, my pride, all the ways I separate myself from others and Him. It is getting harder to hang onto, this burden that slows me down.
The Man doesn’t react when the car slips away He just keeps climbing. I asked Marc why He even fixed it for me in the first place. Marc said He will meet me where I am. If I think I need to drag my car around, He’ll fix it until I am ready to give it up. He doesn’t judge me the way I judge myself. I think: having car is Bad; letting car go is Good. I always want to measure how I am doing on the Good-Bad scale.
He just loves me however I am. I don't know how to take this in very well. Pathology tells me that I have to be perfect in order to be lovable.
Another dream:
We come out of a beautiful house onto a terrace with a broad view of mountains.
There has been a big storm and the black clouds are clearing away. We are excited because a rainbow will be coming. I search the sky; at first I see it faint, but beautiful, over the mountains. Then it becomes clearer, then brighter, and increasingly brilliant with electric charges and patterns running up and down it. I am awed and peacefully happy. It is beyond any rainbow I could have imagined, as if I never had a concept for this.
I am grateful for His promise, this rainbow.
I am very excited and very nervous about coming into the Noe group.
I am excited about deepening my relationship with Him.
I want to depend on Him for everything and think about Him all the time.
I am scared that I will get judgmental, aloof, competitive, defensive, controlling and all those other lies I don’t want anyone to see. I know I need to show others all the ways I protect myself before I can let the mask go and really depend on Him fully.