choosing butterflies...
"Wake butterfly –
It’s late, we’ve miles
to go together . . ."
— Bashō Matsuo
Looking back through my dreamwork journal I found this entry from 2011…“This work is so raw…so hard. I go into every one of my dream sessions with butterflies….the visceral feeling of a stomach full of fluttering butterflies…a blend of fear and a willingness…to explore all that my dreams want for me and of me…knowing that everything I think I know about myself will be challenged.”
I could have written that entry this morning…I still get butterflies…entering my own sessions as well as those of my dream clients.
When we enter a dream not from our minds but from our hearts…we listen with our inner ears…we look with inner eyes...we speak from the tremulous place…we are willing to not know…and that is very scary…very vulnerable…the breeding ground of butterflies.
When we are willing to not know we have a different kind of knowing…an ancient knowing…a gnosis…that comes from our connection to something so grand and gorgeous…of which we are a part…we tune into the felt sense of what is happening in a dream…to something that is wiser and more knowing than we can ever be on our own…
The Gifts of Unknown Things
We did not come into this world.
We came out of it, like buds out of
branches and butterflies out of cocoons.
We are a natural product of this earth,
and if we turn out to be intelligent beings,
then it can only be because we are fruits
of an intelligent earth, which is nourished
in turn by an intelligent system of energy.
-Lyal Watson
We feel into the dream moment…in this place are we moving closer to a sacred encounter or are we moving away…avoiding it? And I trust my butterfly-filled stomach is like a cocoon about to manifest…the butterflies know what to do…and then…as the lines from Kim Rosen’s “In Impossible Darkness”…
“Do you remember what happens inside a cocoon?…
you liquefy…
there in the thick black of your self-spun womb…
you melt…
congealing in impossible darkness…
the sheer inevitability of wings”
(Image: Butterflies by Yorkshire Rose)
Mary Jo Heyen is a Natural Dreamwork Practitioner working with clients throughout the country and abroad in person, phone or Skype. Learn more about her work with dreams at www.maryjoheyen.com or www.thenaturaldream.com