April 2009 - The root of the word commitment comes from com- “together” + mittere “to put, send.” To put together, to send together.
“Commitment is God’s love returned.” Marc Bregman
I have been doing the work of following my dreams for over ten years, facing into each dream, facing into my resistance, facing into any trauma that came up, facing into the hurts I have received and the hurts I have caused. I have felt my resistance and then moved through it, I have felt my fear and moved through it, I have spoken when I did not want to speak. I have been incredibly obedient to the course of the journey through learning my story, learning how I keep separate from the Divine that my dreams have laid out.
Everyone separates from their child self; it is the way of being human. When I separated from my child self, the way I survived the separation, survived being in the world as a vulnerable girl, was to hide. I hid in books as soon as I could read, I hid in my room. In my teens, I hid behind a loud, bold, obnoxious exterior. In my adulthood, I hid behind many different personas I tried on – poet, traveller, writer, rebel. In every instance, in every way, I have hidden myself and stayed hidden from myself. I have not wanted to know who I was because I have believed a story that who I am, the very soul of me, hurts other people and then makes them hurt me.
It is a good story and I have constructed many justifiable and convincing stories around it. Having a childhood trauma helped to feed that story, helped to send me further into hiding. But I was already hiding.
The dreams from the beginning have shown me my hiding, shown me how I step away from myself even as I am stepping toward myself. It is a dance, a whirl of duck and spin. A whirl of constant movement.
But the girl in me has another story. Her story is the only true one.
Dream:
I am at a hockey game and there is a small girl sitting a few aisles away from me. A puck soars over the plexiglas and hits the girl on the forehead between her eyes. Switch. I am at the girl’s funeral, she is being buried in a casket that looks like ice. Everyone is in mourning, but I can see that she is alive, screaming to get out. I am screaming at everyone to let her out, but no one can hear me.
This is a dream from early in my work. This is what I did. I buried my girl, packed her in ice so that I would not have to feel what she feels and would not have to see what she sees. I buried her deep in the ice, buried her and walked away.
In my ten years of work, I faced into my work on one level, a level that felt safe. I threw myself into the dying process, knowing that I wanted the icky pieces of myself to die. I felt into my trauma, dropping down into it and through. Learning to come into a relationship with it rather than living in reaction to it. I even wanted the girl, wanted to free her and to be in my relationship with the man, with the Animus. I felt my desire. All the while, there was a part of me that was saying, “This is all well and good, because I have a lot if icky things in me, just as long as it stops there.”
Dream:
I enter a run-down building. Inside are women and girls setting up dirty, torn bedding on the floor all along the walls. I wonder if this is some kind of brothel. I see a friend doing it. When I approach her, I see that she is weeping. I take her bedding and try to wash it, but it is no good. I go to a woman who seems to be in charge to see if she can help, but it seems that she is part of the whole thing. She has many girls with her who are looking at her in admiration. I am horrified and sickened.
Switch.
I am on a motorcycle with a few others. We have children on the bikes with us. We are at a doorway that leads out of the brothel building. Outside the door is a long series of steps that lead down further than I can see. It is all light, surprisingly. At the door, I hesitate because I am afraid that the children will fall off if we go down the stairs on our motorcycles. I wonder if we should go out another door.
In my presenting dream, the first dream I brought to my first session, I am a girl being held in a prisoner camp. Held by my mother. I am a radiant girl, obediently following her even as she takes me away from the liberators. I followed her.
Now, ten years later, I have worked through following my mother. I see that the woman in the brothel is not a protector but part of the brothel, keeping the girls enthralled to her. I can see how she is the one whoring out the girls.
But, even as I take the girl and put her on my motorcycle, I hesitate. I hesitate at the threshold, hesitate to rev the engine and fly out of there, popping a wheelie as I do with all of my potency. Even after all these years, I hesitate at the threshold.
I hesitate to let myself go into the light. To follow the steps that lead down, to let the gravitational pull of the light, of His light, pull me down. To be that girl.
There was a period of six to eight months about a year ago when I was that girl. When I stepped into being her and I felt in my body as I had never felt in my body. In my work. Everything was sensual, everything was full of color again. I felt alive and whole. I felt, yes, this is what I have been working toward. Yes, this is the place. Then I had this dream:
Dream:
I am a girl and I have a heavy sword in my hand. I am watching while Lord Voldemort (the evil wizard from the Harry Potter book series) is moving in and out of people’s bodies, possessing them without them even knowing it. I know it, can see it. I think to myself, “How am I supposed to fight him? Fight this? I am just a little girl.”
I am the little girl in this dream. I had reached the end of the arc of a piece of work where I became the girl, but becoming the girl was surprising. Becoming the girl meant that I had to realize that I had a sword in my hand. Becoming the girl meant that I had to see what I saw in this dream.
I had believed, wanted to believe, that becoming the girl meant that I would become the girl and that would be the end of my journey in some way. That becoming the girl would be the answer, that I would enter into some joyous state and then live and create from that place. Maybe I would write poetry again, maybe I would learn to paint.
But the dreams take us down into the depth of our knowing, the depth of our gift that the Divine has given us. My work took me into my girl. I began to learn what she knows, I began to feel what she feels, I began to feel that what she knows is beyond the issues of my own life that I had worked through. I began to remember being her. As the woman in the alcove, I had wanted my work to be just about what I needed to work through from my past. Becoming the girl, I felt that there was more.
The work takes us through to the place of our deepest knowing.
Dream:
I am a girl. I am living with two older women. I know that in the dream story, I had been an orphan in a horrendous orphanage and that the women had come and taken me out of it. There is a story on the news about the orphanage, about how the reality of the abuse of the matron of the place was coming to light. Someone tells me I have to go back. I do not want to go back.
Switch
I am back at the orphanage. The authorities are investigating and they are taking it apart, taking care of the girls. I realize that I have to go into the sub-basement. I do not want to go, but I go anyway. In the sub-basement, on the dirt floor, I see a cage made of human bones and it holds more girls. They are just barely alive, some of them like animals. There is a man on a bull dozer a little ways away and he is bulldozing into the dirt, digging up more bones. I am filled with utter horror at the scene. I start walking back up the stairs to get away from it. I realize I am picking my teeth. When I look, I see that the stairs are made of bones and that I am picking my teeth with a bone. I am even more horrified.
As the girl, there is a way that I know about this kind of horror. It is not something that I understand, not something that I can say is true. Underneath the story of my own story, is something else that I know as the girl.
But when I am not the girl, when I am walking up the bone steps and picking my teeth in oblivion with a bone, then I am completely in denial. I am denying what I know.
When I am hesitating at the door, then I am the woman picking my teeth. It is horrifying. When I hesitate, I can convince myself that I am doing my work when I am actually a step away. A step away by protecting the girl on the motorcycle rather than being the girl. And in this place, I am stepped back from everything; my partner, my work, my relationships, my passion. My girl.
In the world, when I am the one hesitating, I am a step away and I am unconsciously always ready to bolt or ready to live as the orphan – not believing that anyone really cares for me, staying away from relationship, feeling like I have to be aggressive and grab for what I want because no one wants me to have it. I can seem sweet, but my edge is sharp and mean. I become like the matron of the brothel or like one of the girls in the basement, like an animal feeling I have to survive by grabbing and stealing. I do not trust that anyone really loves me and so I stay stepped back or I disappear entirely.
As the girl, I want the love. I am screaming inside every time I hesitate.
When I am scared to be the girl because of what I see and know as the girl, because of what I feel as the girl, I am in a story of my own making. I choose to return to my trauma because in the trauma I was not feeling and it is familiar. I have used my trauma to stay away from my deeper self.
When I am the girl, the story of who I am is different.
Dream:
I am with one of my brothers at a shopping mall. He says, “You need to move back in with Mom. Can’t you see how upset she is? Can’t you see that she needs you?” I say, “Actually, you need to move out and away from Mom.” He says, “Why don’t you just go talk to her? Go make up with her” I say, “Can’t you see – she is mad whether I am trying with her or not trying. It does not matter. It is not even about me. I’ll go talk to her to show you.” My mom walks by and so I speak to her to show my brother. She ignores me. I go back to my brother and say, “See? She will never not be mad. I am not going back to her.”
I see a friend sitting by the wall. I go to see her and she is slumped over, looking exhausted. I call her by her name, but she just barely stirs. I leave.
Switch.
I am in a surgical room, lying on a gurney. My doctor is standing next to me. There is another woman on the gurney next to me who is having a procedure done. I am next for the procedure. I wonder if I have cancer and we are getting radiation. I feel reassured by the doctor. A woman applies a device onto the other women’s chest. The woman applying the device is a character from a medical show who had cheated her way into being an intern because her friend was a doctor, even though she did really want to be a doctor. I think, “Oh, she finally found the thing that she loves and wants to do. Then she holds it the device and I can see it. It is in the shape of a cross, with electrical devices at the center and at the end of each part of the cross. It is like she is embedding it in her chest, or branding her with it. Burning.
What is commitment to me?
I was once committed to my work of working through my trauma, of finding out I am so that I could be present in my life. But it was from the standpoint of standing in my own story. It was from the standpoint of believing that I could transcend who I was, transcend the brutal part of me and become a nicer person.
But dropping underneath my trauma, I realized that there was more to commitment. It does not just mean that I am committed to coming back to my self. To becoming the soul self who is both a girl and a boy. I have balked at the fullness of that commitment. I have been scared, not wanting to be in the world as the girl, wanting to get back on the train that would take me home, take me to where I came from. I have been scared that the boy energy in me is dangerous. The energy that is on the motorcycle ready to roar out of the hell hole and into the light.
He has another story. He has a story of who I am and who I am in the world. In His story, I am branded by Him. When I walk away from being the one slumped in the corner, from being the child trying to get my mother to not be angry with me for just existing, then I am with Him and He is showing me who I am. That I am branded, that I am His.
What is commitment now to me? It is committing to His story of who I am. It is committing to knowing my self in the way that He knows me. His reality. With Him. It is trusting that I am the girl, that I am to be at His side, working in the world. Surrendering to His story instead of my own.
Commitment means to put together, to send together. It is about committing to being put together by Him and with Him. To be sent together with Him. With all that I know and all that I am capable of learning. With all that I am and all that He will help me grow into.
It is about knowing that what I want, that at the core of who I am, is my desire for relationship. That I do not want to push people or Him away, but instead that I want to be open, receiving, to feel everything that comes from this place of being open with Him. The place of receiving His brand, His mark.
The core root of the word relation is a bringing back, restoring. To be in relationship means to be in the state of restoration. It is standing in the place of being restored to who I am and in that place being with Him. Being with Him in the world.
My deep secret is that I feel such passion for being in my particular relationship with Him, for being in the world, being in my relationship with Him in the world. Who I am is not one who hesitates, not one who picks her teeth with bones. I want to bring my passion that fills me when I am with Him to my relationship with my partner Bill, to my relationship with my daughter, to my relationship with everyone that I love, that I have pushed away, that I have walked away from. I want to bring my relationship with Him and my passion into my work with my clients, with my writing, with my creative life.
My commitment. It is to stand in His reality, in the place of who I am as He sees me. To be the vulnerable girl and know that I do not have to hide that vulnerability, I do not have to protect myself.
Dream:
I am standing with Christa and Annie. Christa and I make an archway with our arms and Annie walks through. I say, “Okay, what’s next?” Christa says, “Wait. Give Annie a moment.” I see that Annie is quiet, taking in the fact that she just walked through the archway.
My commitment is to walk through the threshold as Annie, to walk through the archway that is the clitoral archway, the threshold into becoming the girl. Not be the one creating the archway, but the one walking through. Not jumping away from the enormity of the moment, but letting it stay with me. Allowing the moment to be.
The most vulnerable thing I can imagine is being His branded girl in the world. It is what I have most wanted to hide. My commitment is to keep walking through the archway, over the threshold, into the light, into the world, over and over again, feeling His brand on my chest.
August 2008
Dream: A woman comes to the house where I am living and tells me to pack a few things, that I’m going with her. She is sexy and funny and she rides a motorcycle. Ok! I say. But why pack things? She says, trust me. As we leave the house through the basement, we are talking like kids about the things we hate. I see ants on the banister and say, I hate ants. Then I see roaches on the door and say I hate roaches. We are laughing – it’s funny. Outside, we get on her bike and she takes me away from the house.
She takes me, surprisingly, to a classroom. There, a man is teaching about writing and poetry. He gets right in my face and says, I did MY MFA thesis on Sonnets and Soliloquies. I can feel He is asking what I did my thesis on, but I do not say. Surely, I say to myself, this is not what I am supposed to be doing – this can’t be right.
Then the woman takes me to pee and I realize I am small and that I pee in front of everyone, including the man who is big and I don’t care.
***
When He leans into me and tells me what He does, I do not respond. I react instead feeling like surely this is not what this is about. I still have something, some block about my writing, about my own writing. It is attached to being vulnerable in the world, being the girl in the world. When He gets in my face about doing things that are not dear to me, I can often jump right in, but when it is something that is so full of passion for me, I get scared.
I got scared in the dream when I knew He wanted me to say what I do.
What He does is sonnets and soliloquies. Sonnets, of course, are often 14 line poems (though there are poets who are experimenting with the form in exciting ways) that seem to be about one thing, but then have a turn in them, often at the end in the last couplet. They are about this, then they are about the opposite. Soliloquies are monologues where a character speaks about what is really happening – an aside to him/herself. In Shakespeare’s plays (who I associate with both Sonnets and Soliloquies), the soliloquies often show the progression of the character. In Hamlet, if you take out just his monologues and read them, you can see where the arc of the play and his development as a character – the soliloquies are where he speaks the truth about himself, whether it is a pout or passion.
Both are like the dreams. This is what the Animus does – the sonnet with its turns, the soliloquy’s with the person doing the internal talk, the arc of the person – both of these are the dreams.
He’s saying – I do dreams! And they are like poems and plays.
What do I do that I do not admit to in the dream…what did I write my MFA thesis on?
I wrote my thesis on the poetic forms of women mystic poets. Compared them a bit to male poets who wrote about God and spiritual journeys, but focused on how women write about God. When a teacher read my paper, he said that it was not a thesis, it was a book that needed to be written. A book about how women have written about God, how they write about God. I choose mystic poets from Dante’s time, I choose Dickinson to parallel Blake and I choose Jean Valentine, a contemporary poet who writes often from her dreams.
After I graduated, I thought about writing that book. But did not. Surely, this is not what God wants me to do.
This is what He does – sonnets and soliloquies.
This is what I do – I write about God. I write about mystic poets. This is what I do – I am a mystic poet. Shakespeare is mystic poet.
Dream:
I am talking with my Aunt about NOE. About how we all live in the same area – I point out how I live in the Pink House with Bill and Christa and Ben and Amy and how next door, Annie and Robin live, then behind them lives…I go on and on naming the neighborhood, feeling excited about how we all live within a block of each other. She is very sweet and interested, saying that she met a nice young man named Peter Fischer who said he knew me. I said, Yes! Peter is a sweet man and he is part of this, too. I talk to her about our community. Meanwhile, my mother is sitting next to me, so livid with rage that she is paralyzed and rigid. It seems funny to me.
Switch
I’m with others and there is a man standing nearby. He has a vial in his hand with a lid. He pops off the lid and I think, oop, I guess that’s it. I know that there is a virus in the vial and that He has let it out, that there is no turning back, that it’s been done. I think oop, well, there it goes.
***
In this dream, I am not afraid to be vulnerable and in the world with us, with our community, with the sweetness of what we are doing, not even in front of my family. I am unaffected by the demon in the dream who comes at me as my mother.
But the vial has been opened, the virus is out. He has played His hand. When we worked this in session, Marc said – well, there it is. He has done it, the virus is out. The man, who is the Animus, has let something out of that vial and it is spreading.
Pop.
So, what am I going to do? Am I going to waste this? He has started something, let something out. What am I going to do? Waste the moment? Hesitate? He has popped the vial. Oop. How exciting.
So, this is what I do. I write about God.
It is scary, so scary. Not the vial, not the speaking in front of the demon. It is scary to know that what I do is write about God. It is scary to say that I write about God because I am a woman of God. I came into this world as a woman of God. A child of God.
It is not scary to ride out of the house full of shame with the ants, with the roaches, to go with the Anima (for the first time), but it is scary to sit with Him as the vulnerable girl, and say what I do.
I write about God. I am finding my form of writing about God. I am a woman of God.
Over the past week, I decided to change my name from Sue to Susan Marie because of another dream and experience around the dream. Dropping into accepting my name has been challenging and scary. It was hard the first few days, excruciating when Karla spoke my name in group last week.
But going by the name that He calls me has been dropping me down further. Dropping me down. Dropping me into my vulnerability with Bill, allowing my passion and desire and love for him, allowing my deep vulnerability with him. Helping me to feel into our relationship in a new way, helping me feeling into our love, our partnership in a new way. Dropping me further down into the pain and the grief of being the target of the demon.
I reacted to the vulnerability and passion with Bill after our weekend – felt scared. I reacted to the pain and projected it onto Sammie for a day or so this week.
And He keeps calling me out by my name and I keep dropping past the projection. He says, I do sonnets and soliloquies. He asks, What do you do?
Pop
I am a woman of God. I write about God. I am a woman of God who is in the world as a woman of God. Speaking.