first dream session...part 2

“I am skating along an upper balcony of what feels like a hotel, trying to avoid small frozen pools, worried that I will break through the ice.  Below, on the ground, I see a young elk with small thin antlers attacking another elk.  Then I see a large elk lying on the ground being attacked by a different elk.  His side is a huge gash, opened and bloody.  There is a large crowd of people watching.  A young man is walking back to a waiting car carrying the elk’s bloody rack of antlers.  I am horrified.  From the balcony, I yell, “That’s against the law!” It turns into a chant that the others pick up…in unison we all chant, “That’s against the law”.  

Here again, in another dream in my first session, is the opportunity for so many feelings… pain, fear and sadness, yet instead I go to my mind, making a judgement about this boy, about what is right and wrong.

Rodger had me feel into being the girl skating around the frozen pools, not wanting to fall through the ice.  This is a perfect metaphor for the frozenness of my feelings; I skate around them,  I don’t even want to know that I am afraid.  What would happen to me if the pools thawed and I was immersed in water? I would have to feel...so the pools stay frozen. 
One way I have learned to be in the world and not feel is to be in my mind, right and wrong, good and bad, an easy prescription to follow. It has protected me from feeling and being on the ‘right’ side of a cause can look very good in the world.  Even as I am faced with the wounded elk, a heartbreakingly traumatic scene, all I can do is raise the battle cry of righteous indignation about antlers, which is a reaction, an emotion, that looks and acts like true feeling but isn’t (later dreams will speak more to reactions and projections, and  feelings versus emotions.)

So the dream, ever sensitive to my readiness to face into something, shows me not a wounded Mary Jo, but a wounded elk. For now, I am being shown a wound, a deep and painful wound.  Through the image of the elk I am not yet being asked to feel my own deep wound, just to begin to know it’s there...for now, can I just know it’s there.  Even with that I react and go to my judging mind; it’s how I get to bypass feeling the pain...again and again and again. And by doing so...I remain separate from my soul, because the soul is about feeling, connection, relationship, libido (our sexuality, passion and desire)...where the love is.

As I wrote in the last post, here in my very first dream session, I am shown that I not only don’t know how to feel, even deeper, I don’t want to feel.  Why would that be?  Why would I, or any of us, be afraid to feel? What is it we fear will happen to us if we allow ourselves to feel difficult feelings? They’ll destroy us?  We’ll be traumatized? We’ll never stop crying?  We’ll be stuck in them forever?  Our dreams challenge us and want to bring us back to and through these feelings...as we are ready. Why? Well, one reason...if I can’t feel the depth of my pain, my fear, my loss, then I also can’t feel the depth of my joy and my love. Feelings aren’t a la carte; I don’t get to choose which ones I’ll feel. Once I begin to feel, and as I will learn through future dreams, I will come to feel it all, including the love and the pain, the desire and the fear. The soul feels it all.

Mary Jo Heyen
Archetypal Dreamwork Practitioner
mjheyen@gmail.com
Dream sessions in person, via Skype or on the phone
website: http://maryjoheyen.com/