September, 2007 - As I write this I feel fear. I don’t often let myself feel it. I prefer to be in control, to be smart, knowing, looking good. But inside I’m afraid: afraid of failure, afraid of looking stupid, afraid of looking bad. My body is tense, I never fully relax. I’m wary, on guard. I trust no one, I don’t trust you. I want to trust you but I don’t. I am afraid you will hurt me, so I don’t let my guard down. I try to appear in a good light so you will approve of me. I don’t expect you to like me, so I seek your respect instead. I can’t be intimate with you because I am afraid of intimacy with anyone. Everyone I’ve ever trusted has let me down. That’s a story. It’s not true. But it’s what I tell myself.
I don’t trust God. What if it’s all a fantasy, a fairy tale that I tell myself to make me feel better? What if I’m deluding myself about God? I don’t really believe that. It’s a story. But I use it.
This pathology keeps me in bondage. It’s left me vulnerable to the Dark Mother’s wiles and seductions. I have been her man since childhood. Now I’m breaking away. It’s hard.
At the 2007 summer retreat, I sang a gospel song in my group. I sang, “When I’m on my mission Lord, guide me, teach me how to watch, fight and pray.” It’s one of my most favorite songs. I sing a lot, especially gospel, when I’m by myself but I hardly ever dare to sing in public. When I’m singing I’m totally in connection. This past summer was one of the few times people got to see me that way. I was open, but then I shut down again. That’s typical. I do that a lot.
I’m Bill’s apprentice. Bill says that when I’m in my fear I can teach, when I’m in my connection I can teach. When I jump away and I’m in control, looking good, being a know-it-all, I’m useless. Marc says I’m no use to NOE when I’m this way. It’s hard for me to hear that. My goal for so long has been to please the Dark Mother. She isn’t interested in my singing. She wants me to look good.
Dream:
A man tells me that he can help me get my ice cream vending machines into a supermarket chain in New Jersey, but he wants a kickback. I refuse, saying that I don’t do business that way.
The man in this dream is the Animus, and he demands his due for everything he does for me. Marc asked me if I was willing to pay my dues. I realized this: in fact I have been paying kickbacks -- to the enemy, the Dark Mother.
Dream:
I’m going to summer camp. A jovial, stout older woman greets me there. She has a slight French accent. She smiles and tells me that we will have a wonderful time at camp.
Marc said, “I don’t trust her. She’s a demon. Beware of her. What does she mean when she says you and she will have a “wonderful time?”
To me, she just seemed like a harmless, amusing older woman, but she’s the Dark Mother, the mistress of disguises.
All my life, I’ve been possessed by the Dark Mother. I’ve been her child, her lover, her husband, her slave and her whore. She dominated my life and is the central core of my pathology to this very hour.
She originally appeared as my biological mother. She was there when my father wasn’t, when he was in the Army and later when he worked long hours and his rare appearances were a source of surprised delight to the first-born child who adored him for his smile, his strong arms and his good Daddy smell.
Because he was absent, my attention turned to this first Dark Mother. She was a constant in my life, unlike my father, who came and went. She fed me and cleansed me, her hands knew every part of my body, and her presence gave me comfort. She was often distant, tense and moody. She was self centered, narcissistic, and frequently depressed. But she was the person I could count on the most because she was always there. I lived in fear of her disappearance from my young life and I followed her everywhere she went like a puppy even standing outside the bathroom door when she went in, eagerly awaiting her return, fearing she would never come back out.
I never had a girlfriend the entire time I was in school. I never went out on a date, even after I learned to drive. I craved the companionship of women, dreamed of being married, of sleeping beside my wife every night for the rest of my life, of having children with her, not making all the mistakes my parents made with me. If only I could find the perfect woman!
My daydream turned to nightmare after I went to college in New York City. My first sexual experience was with an older woman. She seduced me. I had no idea how to have sex with a woman. It was embarrassing, painful. I was ashamed.
The Dark Mother loves my shame. She wants to be my constant companion. She demands total respect, adoration, compliance with her every wish and desire. She sucks me dry and glories in my service to her needs.
I got into drugs and I lived with a woman who was also an addict. She prostituted herself to get money for drugs and she constantly put me down. She belittled me for being an addict, and at the same time she wanted me to shoot up with her. She blamed me for all her problems and I believed her and sank deeper into depression and addiction. I told her I loved her, that she was all that mattered in my life, that I was nothing without her. Whatever she did, no matter how crazy or irrational, I admired her for it. She scorned me for that and encouraged it at the same time. She encouraged me to be a prostitute also, to have sex with men to get money to buy drugs. I stole drugs and money from her, got caught and experienced her anger and scorn.
I finally broke away from her and ended my drug addiction, but I continued to be the Dark Mother’s slave. Every relationship became a screen for my Dark Mother projection. I went from one woman to another, always seeking the perfect one who would take care of all my needs and let me serve her.
When I couldn’t get what I needed from the woman in my life I became a workaholic, obsessing about career, seeking fulfillment through mind-numbing endless hours at my desk. When I didn’t get what I wanted from my job, I sought another, trying to climb the ladder to success. Each time I crashed. Each time the woman in my life belittled me and put me down for my failure and then I repeated the pattern, seeking yet another career, and another woman.
A woman therapist that I saw for a while, another one of my Dark Mother projections, told me about the ancient goddess Cybele, whose son Attis castrated himself. I researched Cybele, the darkest mother of all. Her priestesses were men who cut off their balls and openly dressed as women, worshipping her. I wanted to be like them.
I feel fear writing about this. Exposing this dark side of my life means I can’t look good, wise or competent. I am doing it because I want the intimacy that comes with truth-telling. If you scorn me or reject me because of it, I will accept it. I will go to my Father and be healed.
When I began the Dreamwork, I projected Dark Mother onto the Work. I looked for achievement and advancement in NOE, measuring myself against others, seeking Her approval like a good boy does in school.
For most of the last year Marc has hammered at me, helping me to see how I have let myself get distracted from what’s really important. As I learned to recognize the dark Mother in the obvious places like my projections on women, she has morphed and became much more devious, more subtle, till she found a resting place in the two aspects of my work: inner and outer.
I make a decision to pull back from my obsessive involvement with my current job and to delegate some of my duties there to others. The result is pain, sharp pain in my heart, the pain of separation.
Marc has me gestalt the pain and asks me what it is, over and over, until I’m able to experience it as just pain, sheer, pure intense sharp pain unattached to any reality or experience. It‘s unlike any other pain I’ve ever had. Different, so different. It’s the pain of separation from God. It’s longing for my Father, longing to be with him, longing to know him, longing for him to know me.
Like the prodigal son I long to return to my Father’s house. I know he will take me in with love.
Then She beckons. She offers so much. All empty promises.
I promise to do my homework more often, more intensely. I will be my father’s son.
Marc: “Tell her to fuck off. Tell her.”
I tell her to fuck off, loudly, emphatically. She retreats a little, then stands there, mocking.
Dream:
I am in the car with my father. We are on vacation. He is driving. He says he wants me to be part of his special family.
Marc: Let fear become vision. There’s no greater love than God. If you do that it will be enough. You know better. Choose fear over sentimentality. You’re not going to grow if you don’t push the envelope.
My new homework is:
Be with the Father all the time, not just two or four times an hour, but all the time.
I strive to do this. I am with Him more now, not all the time, but more and more and more. She hasn’t given up, but her power dwindles in the face of this homework. I experience fear. If I don’t reject the fear I can be healed. I can be with Him through feeling the fear.
Dark Mother, “Fuck Off!”
August 2006
An encounter with the Divine Self
Three dreams:
1. I am living in a house with my wife and two little girls. It is late at night, mid-winter. I wake up and look outside. The police are at the house next door. I remember the previous day someone had told me that these are the “fire police,” who inspect peoples’ chimneys and stoves to be sure they are safe.
My wife and daughters come downstairs. They are worried. I reassure them, tell them that nothing is wrong and that they should go upstairs and go back to bed. I assure them that our house is “perfect” and that the police have no reason to inspect it. I am particularly concerned about my youngest daughter, who is all dressed. I tell her to go upstairs, take off her shoes and get into bed. I tell her if she can’t sleep she should pretend.
Immediately after my wife and kids go upstairs the front door opens and four or five policemen, including some in plain clothes, come in. I ask them not to make any noise because my wife and the girls will be afraid of them. I beg them to go outside on the porch with me and discuss whatever they need to talk about with me there.They argue with me, but I am persistent, so we go outside to the porch.
2. My Father has died. I am at his funeral service with my wife Katherine and my brother and sister and other family members and friends. The funeral is being held in an old stone church. The church is very rundown, and neglected. I say something to Katherine about the condition of the church and how almost no one goes to these old churches anymore. A woman leans over and says, “yes, most people today don’t even have funerals. When someone dies their survivors just go to their lawyers’ offices.” I feel very sad and I am crying.
The funeral is over and we are back at our house. My brother has gotten there before us. He has been out in the garden and has pulled a huge amount of late summer lettuce to be eaten at the wake. I don’t like it when other people pick vegetables from my garden, but I realize that the lettuce is all past its prime anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.
3. I have been given the job of translating some verses from an ancient Hebrew prayer book into English. I meet with an elderly man, a rabbi, in a dingy room in the garment center of New York City. I give him the metal plates containing the Hebrew verses, along with my translations, so he can take them to the printer. I am concerned that the plates are not in the correct order and will get mixed up, because I can’t read the Hebrew letters. But he shows me that they have page numbers in the corner of each page in English. He suggests that my translations should also have page numbers.
His colleague, another elderly rabbi, agrees with him. They take the plates and translations and start to leave. In the next room I can hear another old man chanting prayers in Hebrew. I really want to be with the rabbi. His face shows endless compassion. He knows me and he understands me. I want to be with him all the time. I don’t want him to leave.
I came to the 2006 summer retreat full of fear and excitement. I’d been bogged down in the work for months, angry at Marc, at my wife Katherine, at the Work itself. In my worst moments I had considered dropping out of NOE and terminating my sessions with Marc; contemplating how I would take revenge by attacking the Work publicly. I had no joy, the Work had given me only intense pain.
Above my desk I had pasted Marc’s words: “Pain holds the memory of Love.” But they gave me no comfort. I felt nothing but my woundedness, like my limbs were hacked off and bleeding, festering, hurting all the time.
Earlier in the year Marc had said I could co-lead a group at the retreat, then he changed his mind, said I wasn’t ready, that I needed to “marinate” a while longer. My ego was devastated. I felt shame and opened the door for every kind of self-hatred pathology to have a field day with my tender psyche. What made it worse was that I knew he was right, that I wasn’t capable of guiding a retreat group without having my pathological needs intrude. I could do harm. I knew that, but the shame I felt at being passed over totally eclipsed that knowledge.
I had no expectations for this retreat. I hoped that “something” would happen to end the cycle of anger and accusation. Com-blaming, Marc called it, a new word added to the NOE lexicon. I hated being the one with the dubious distinction of giving rise to this disparaging term.
On the first night, Marc strung my dreams. My father had died and I was angry at my brother for picking lettuce in my garden. The fire police had come to the house and I wanted to throw them out. The rabbi was leaving and I wanted to be with him.
The strings ended with me all tied up in knots, unable to follow the rabbi as he left the room with his friends. Marc said I was “in Hell.” I felt frustrated and sad, but I couldn’t move out of the circle to run after the rabbi. I called to him to come back, but it was futile, he kept moving away till he was gone.
The next day our small group went to work. From the first moment after we sat and centered ourselves I began crying. The weeping continued uncontrollably for the next three days, as we strung the dreams of each group member, exposing every person’s common need for connection with the Divine Source. Our sense of comradeship and mutuality grew minute and minute and the presence of God was in the room.
Minute by minute the pain, which had colored every waking hour for months, dissipated and became something different: a sense of peaceful acceptance, no, a sense of peaceful excitement as my internal resonance harmonized and echoed that of everyone else in our group. In between tears I smiled, I laughed. I never felt so much love for so many people all at the same time. Marc had told me that pain would alchemize into something else, something beautiful, joyful, into a connection with the Divine. Now, here it was.
On the last day, it was time for the group to re-string my dreams. We sat on the floor. I clung to Kathy, who enacted my wife. I told her that I didn’t want anyone in our house, that we just needed each other and the children, that no more was necessary. I wanted to shut the door and lock it, to wall out any intrusion. And she looked at me and said, “I’m afraid when you say that. What it there’s something wrong with our chimney? Let them in. I’m afraid.”
Renee, playing my brother, talked to me about the wonderful times we’d had when we were young, how much he loved me and how glad he was to be my brother. I felt the love all around me. Far away, out on the porch, Phil chanted his prayer over and over, playing the rabbi. I wanted to hear that prayer forever and always, I never wanted it to stop.
Suddenly pain re-appeared, not like the pain I’d been feeling before the retreat, but a primordial, core pain that I have never allowed myself to get close to. I felt it in my body, deep in my gut, like no pain I’ve ever experienced. And I let it all out. The sounds that came from my mouth were sounds that I’ve never uttered before; they didn’t seem like human sounds. The expression of grief and anger was so powerful that it frightens me now to think that I had cried out in such a way. Deb, our group leader, nodded, encouraging me to give voice to everything I was feeling and have ever felt.
Afterward, there was peace. I felt the luminosity of love everywhere in the room and it followed me for days afterwards. I was in love with Love, the people in the group were its conduits.
Time has diminished the feeling a bit, but I can still find it, tap into it. Love is the gift of the summer retreat. Whatever happens now and in the future I will always have that experience to remember and recall. I’m feeling into it right now.
Last week I was told that I would not be leading a group at the Fall retreat. I could only say that it’s ok. If I had been a leader in July I might not had had the experience I just described. I am content with whatever happens. It’s only important that I once felt this great love and that I still feel it even now.
On the last day of the retreat I was exhausted. I fell asleep for a few seconds while Deb was talking and I dreamed:
I am a passenger on a very fast train. I am riding in the front car so I can clearly see the tracks ahead. The train goes around a long curve, then onto the straightaway at a very rapid speed. I can see the signal ahead.
It is bright green!
Dream, August 3 2006:
I have died.
An unknown, anonymous man menaces me, then tries to kill me with a long knife. I struggle against him. I don’t want to die. But it’s no use, he is way too strong for me. I struggle, then feel sharp pain, then nothing. All is dark, blank.
The man is transformed into a splendorous being, with a man’s body, but much larger then life, and four wings, like dragonfly wings. He is beautiful, powerful and frightening.
Marc: “Revelation. The animus is revealing His true nature. His revealing himself in this way is his gift to you. You behold him. Now you are a container. In the past you were a sieve. We have to change to be with spirit. It’s not as simple as believing something. Belief is cheap.”