August 2008 - As my relationship with the divine has deepened, the archetypes are challenging me with their love to move ever deeper into the truth of my soul self. That truth is much about revealing who I am not, the part of me that still holds back and hides from speaking what I know in my heart and the part that becomes frozen with fear and shame when I don’t know what to do. In this place I am separate and alone and do not ask for help. Here I believe the lie that in my vulnerability I am unlovable.
This is the place where the boy, who is emotionally incested to the dark mother, hides. Who is the dark mother? This is the pathological relationship I have with the feminine born out of caretaking and managing my alcoholic mother who used me as an emotional replacement for my father. Me, as the boy, could no longer be in his feelings. It was either not safe to express what I felt or I was not heard. My mother became the child and I, the parent. I felt ashamed, resentful, and angry. Without a safe harbor to be in my feelings I shut down. What I presented to the world was a highly functional, emotionally flattened, nice guy. This is the grip of my pathology.
I have worked hard to open to God’s love. The truth is that I am His boy, full of joy and spontaneity, wanting only to follow the Animus’s path, holding His hand. Here I live in immediacy to my feelings and become an open vessel to His teaching me.
My pathology is smart and accommodates. As I’ve cleaned out and aired the room of my soul, pathology still hides in corners, like dust bunnies. They blow around to the next corner, hard to sweep up. Here my incested boy follows the dark mother’s bidding, like Grendal in the Beowolf story. Without the love of the Father I become passive or reactive with the dark mother’s rage and control.
Dream:
I am in a huge Castle with others from North of Eden. Grendal is coming to attack us. It is inevitable. I situate myself, not so much to hide (as Grendal will find all of us), but to engage him in battle where one of us will fall to our death. I know I have been here before, maybe I have died maybe I have defeated Grendal. It doesn’t matter. I am in the battle.
Grendal is my incested boy. My growth has brought me to the point of my separation from Grendal and facing him in a battle to the death. I am not afraid because I cannot die when I have the Divine at my back. I know this in the dream and my work is to know this in my life. I can carry my sword while feeling my terror and knowing God’s love and truth.
Dream:
I see a new baby. I come up to him and smile, feeling so much love for him. He smiles back and begins to speak to me in sentences. I am amazed and want to know what he is telling me. A woman who acts like she is his mother says the baby is only imitating speech. Some babies can do that. I know she is the demon. I know the baby can speak to me for real.
In this dream I know the truth from lies and want to be in relationship to the baby. My work is to listen to that truth coming through me and not passively listen to the dark mother. This is the choice point for me: To feel the truth and lean in against pathology or listen to the lie and shut down from my vulnerability.
This is where I can get into trouble. I can feel and see pathology in the room and not lean into it or name it.
Dream:
There is a beautiful red songbird in a cage. It is my bird. I see a large lizard monster in the cage about to eat the bird. I reach in and grab the lizard with my left arm as I take the bird in my right hand. I release the bird into the air. As I do this the lizard monster bites deep into my left hand. I can feel its teeth into my bone. It hurts so much but I know I am stronger than the lizard.
The bird is my spirit. To free it I have to grab onto and face the pathology and get bitten. It hurts deeply but I do it anyway. This is my work of facing pathology and staying in connection to my feelings, to be scared and speak the truth anyway. To be in connection with my feelings is to be in relationship with the divine.