March 2008 - I am still striving to be the boy and feel the Father’s love. This year my 45th year has been one of the most difficult in my life. As my children have aged I see more and more of my frustration and anger reflected in their relationship to me. In my inner work I see how I live so much in aloofness or the opposite taking responsibility. These are both the same thing, ways I avoid the pain of the boy. But the pain is where I need to be. In a dream the boy tells me when he cries he can fly. When I am feeling the pain, fear, anxiety, I am dying to self. There is nothing to do. In another dream I am bitten by a snake. My work is to allow myself to be bitten by the snake. I always want to run away aloof or protect. Fight or Flight. To be with the Father, I must become the boy. The boy doesn’t run or protect he lets the father take care of him.
I feel sad too. I have lived my whole life without being connected, knowing that this is what I wanted but never being able to break through. I see now some of the ways I hide to survive the difficult trauma of growing up in a family that was not there for me. My father was hardly there, my mother was struggling with her own mental health and my sister was always trying to get attention or focusing her attention on me to compensate for the lack of true caring in our family. I checked out. I developed a way of being in the world in which I did not connect with people around me. I had no best friends growing up. I still do not have any friends who I feel connected to even on a monthly basis. I have never been able to break out of my isolation. This is killing me now or should I say as I grow deeper towards the boy I feel the pain of this lost boy. Never feeling the love, only creeping towards the truth that I knew before I was born that God loves me.
When I have been able to break through to this love it has awakened in me a desire to share Him with the world but this only served to distance me further from the truth. I did this to avoid the pain. I have come to stand in the pain, feel the ripping apart of my heart, obliterating the last notions of my entrenched personality. Then I stand with him, filled with all he has to offer.
It is so hard for me to will congruence with him. I want to jump to the outer world of my life, explain that things have been difficult because of outer events. But the truth is that it is only a reflection of my lost soul. If I stand with God none of that matters. For I don’t need to have the whole picture or worry about tomorrow. When I do that I can’t follow him. I need to focus on my inner work. Drop down into feeling.
Last night I was strung. I sat before all the teachers in NOE and was seen as the lost boy that I am. I exposed the way the dark mother clings to me and I became the boy traumatized by the dark mother. The boy could not see the girl and the dolphin that wanted him to come and play. He got scared and did what he has always done and went to his father, his father who was not there and expected him to take care of me. I did not see, could not see that I need to choose, that I needed to be the one reaching out. I needed to believe in my dreams more then I believe in the old story of my life that God will save me from the dark mother. Who do I think God is? Some outside power up in heaven who will come down from the clouds and make things better for me? This is how I have lived. Today I keep wanting to put my head in the ground like an ostrich. I want to hide from the world like I have always done. But now everything is just dark and I feel the absurdity of having my head in the ground and my butt up in the air. This is probably what most people have seen of me throughout my life and I shutter to think of how I have continuously put my butt in the face of the people I love most. Turning away from their light and love. This also contributes to my self fulfilling prophecy inherited from my mother that no one likes me.
No one could ever care about me. I am totally unprepared for the possibility that I could be liked that I could like myself that I could be part of something and not be an outsider. I have always been an outsider. On the fringe keeping my distance. Now I see that this is about the fear of being the lost boy Even now as I write this I am taken out by the pathology shifting my thinking to some place else. I am a fatherless boy a long way from home and I am a motherless child turned inward and taking responsibility for caring for myself and failing. Because I need help but I don’t know how to ask. Won’t trust the boy to ask for what he wants. So introverted and nihilistic that even a gift handed to me I reject. I know this place in me and I am reaching out to you hoping to find the courage to find myself, to be worthy of friendship, because in the end that is all we have here on earth. The only thing we take with us is the love that we have made. I am passionate about that love.
The boy wants nothing more then to be a part of the great love making taking place on the planet right now. The dark mother hates this. She wants me to remain with my head in the sand and my butt up in the air creating disappointment and rejection. I have never been a fighter but I understand now that to live in the light we have to lift ourselves out of the darkness. It is a choice. Life is not a free ride, it is a ride to freedom and the ticket is the dream. Get with the dream, WORK IT and get on the road to living in the land of love. Going deeper. The lost boy is easy prey to the dark mother. He wants affirmation in the world, wants to take responsibility for his needs. He doesn’t even know he has needs. The lost boy being in the Trauma does not see the possibility of asking for help.
My homework right now is to ask the coach (animus) how I am doing. I am swimming in a pool against a current and I am sure I am not good enough; I will not win the race. This is how I live, this is the voice of my Mother that I am not good enough, that I must “work hard” to be better then I am. The truth is that I need to allow myself to listen to the coach, to not trust my mother’s voice and my feeling of not being good enough. I seek encouragement in the coach’s voice, to follow his course. I turn to him now and ask what I should do and he says: “Keep writing, you will find the way. I will be here to guide you now that you are open to listening to me. I love you and in this love you will find a way.”
I trust this voice and am becoming more obedient to the call.
I see how I become reactive to the world and this pulls me out of life and I lose myself and the ability to be supported by his voice, his love and direction. He says: I don’t want you to struggle, it is not about being good or bad it is about joining with me in this place of connection which is the creative principle which is constantly renewing itself out of love which finds its origin not in the world but which can manifest in the world.
July 2008
This is coming to be a yearly event writing a personal statement. I have not shared the last two years until now. My work continues to be showing up as the boy with him. At the summer retreat I had my homework of the last month corrected. Three dreams brought the same message using archetypal symbols coming as pathology to make their point.
1) I see a white bear running toward me attacking. I manage to get along side it and speak to it saying there is a choice to leave me alone or be killed. A man and a woman are there and tell me the bear must be killed and they have a poison that will eat away the inside of the bear. The man is being rushed by the bear and is able to get in position to stab the bear as it bites his arm. The poison goes in and then the bear is a man who no longer has brains. He is unable to think for himself and must be cared for. One hundred and twenty people come to a house to pay their respects and to figure out how to care for the man who can no longer care for himself. I wonder if he should kill himself.
2) I am in my childhood home and a huge wind is whipping trees around and shaking the house. I am afraid but no one else seems to notice or care. A huge tree is uprooted and falls in the yard and miraculously doesn’t land on anything (my tree house). I am amazed at the roots.
3) A metal milk can comes floating down out of the sky attached to a balloon. It lands in front of me and some kids come. It seems empty but then we find some messages.
These images: The bear, the tree and the milk can come because of the way my psyche is oriented to spiritual idealism. The pathology tricked Mark and I into thinking that the bear and the milk can were archetypal. My homework was be the bear and know when I am the brainless man and also know the milk can is god and that you are a seeker of god. In doing the strings it became very clear that the bear and the brainless man was pathology and that both needed to die. This dream also powerfully got the message through to me that I need to be the one to kill the pathology. The archetypes can’t kill pathology only we can kill our own pathology. In the dream the man (animus) injects the bear with poison but it only morphs it into the brainless man. Then I say, “He should kill himself”. But I must be the one to kill him. In the strings I fought the bear yelling as I did in the dream “leave or I will kill you” but the animus still was the one to inject the poison. But when it transformed into the brainless man I was able to realize he could not kill himself, I needed to do it. In another dream:
Spence gets me a job guarding a place. He hands me an automatic weapon. I am to work 11-6pm. A woman has caught the dangerous man. But she claims it was the air surveillance of the police that found him.
We joined this dream in the strings. Spence (animus) gave me the gun and with him by my side, I shot the bear/brainless man. This is an incredible breakthrough for me. My pathology is outside myself, breaking one of my biggest hindrances in the work, that I identify with my pathology and so it is able to live in me and not be seen. With it outside coming as archetypal image I am also able to know that part of me that idolizes the spiritual world. That part of my psyche is also revealed and the pathology is no longer able to find safety by hiding behind the archetypal image. The tree falling is pathology being uprooted and the milk can is an empty false god descending gracefully from the sky.
Standing with Spence, I feel his power enter my body, my heart pounds; I sweat, feel my skin being pushed out from the inside and grow taller and more upright.
My homework from the Spence dream had been: “Know the bitch is lying; she can’t get/touch the dangerous man”. I can feel this more deeply now as the demon woman is trying to shame me by being the one who has protected the place and then cloaking this by adding the police assistance. She does not want me to be in relationship with Spence, to work for him. She wants it to appear she is working for him, insinuating that she is on my side. I see the lie now and she is losing her hold on me too.
My sister and mother attended the recent retreat and it was scary to share the dreamwork, which I have done for 12 years now, with them. They have started to work with Marc and this is a miracle helping the boy to have an ally in Marc. Knowing where some of my patterns of mistrust, arrogance and complaining come from. But most of all being able to stand up for the boy. Facing my mother and sister and not allowing their pathology to send me cowering into the closet or joining with them in their twisted logic. They each had sessions with Marc before the retreat and my mother was for the most part resistant to the work, feeling Marc was too harsh and pushing his agenda with her. She was scared of the retreat and even wanted to leave after the first day. My sister, though she only had three sessions with Marc before the retreat was more or less accepting of the gift to attend.
I was not sure what to expect but I have come to trust the work and was ready for the opportunity for us to share the experience of this incredible work together. It was already helpful to be able to ask my mother what her homework was when she started to complain about herself or me or my relationship with my wife or children. So though I was scared I was open to the possibility of deeper relationship which the retreat would offer.
It proved to be a great experience for both of them and I was surprised by how it also brought other people in NOE into deeper relationship with me through knowing my family so intimately. Most of all it brought us together, allowing me the trust I needed to confront both my mother and sister with my feelings about them and have them be heard with less reaction. In fact, I feel we were able to experience a level of honesty that we have not shared before.
Each retreat brings me closer to my true self and desire. I have struggled for the past several years lost in the world of life changes, relationship, parenting and work. I have taken great risks trusting my dreams and the path to alignment with the divine. I find myself being brought round again to be a pathology hunter, working for Him delivering his message which comes in the form of a dream, tailor-made to fit each dreamer.