dream

I'd like to share here some extracts from a post on another blog I write.  It continues the theme of dreams and water in a previous blog entry here.

For the full article please follow this link.

Dream recall is a relatively recent experience for me, and coincided with my introduction to aquatic bodywork around the millenium. Awake-dreaming in the water while receiving this buoyant form of movement therapy, seemed to give access to my night dreaming world as well.

Water, I found, could trigger an altered state of consciousness in which as a willing receiver I was flooded with images, perceptions, feelings, and sensations that made possible profound shifts in my being. I recorded these and encouraged my clients to do the same.

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I came to think of my warm water pool as a portal to the unconscious or the dreamtime where my dreambody revealed herself. In the past year, personal circumstances kept me from my pool haven. But interestingly, seven significant night dreams have offered me powerful water imagery.

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 Dreams seem to me to be Neptunian creatures of the deep and easily mistaken. They cannot be approached head on but they ought to be attended to respectfully, otherwise they turn from shy messengers into fearsome monsters.

In the years since I began aquatic bodywork, I have faced a few monsters myself, and cannot say that this is an easy path. This is what led me to consider the shamanic implications of this work when conducted in a manner that resembles journeying, diving below the surface of things.

For the full article visit Diving Deeper.

Inside the liquid sound temple

Back in July 2001, I attended a workshop at Bad Sulza, Germany, entitled 'Dreams and Rituals in Healing Waters' with Professor DeVierville and Musia Heike Bus that included aquatic bodywork (my practice and passion).

Over a period of 10 days we underwent ritual cleansing using hot and cold water, steam and sauna, bathed and received bodywork in warm natural salt water, walked in beautiful countryside and recorded our dreams which were reported back in morning seminars. One night towards the end of the workshop, the group 'slept' afloat in the liquid-sound temple (a pool inside a dome where colored light and sound are played over and under the water's surface).

The water dreams of that night were reviewed the following day in the light of both their personal and collective values. The experience was profound both personally and professionally, and further convinced me of the potential of aquatic bodywork when conducted with this kind of focus. I have found that dreams during a water session can be as vivid with imagery and meaning as night dreams.

Since then, I've wanted to make a collection of such 'water' dreams to see what patterns they might reveal, especially regards social dreaming (dreaming for our society).  I haven't progressed with this but who knows ...  I believe that the prototype for the liquid-sound temple is available for a US version ... if anyone has the enterprise and resources to do this! Join me?

Here is an account of a 'dream' I had during a aquatic bodywork session which came up again at the workshop in 2001, offering me another opportunity to find its meaning.  That was over 7 years ago now and the dream (along with several others at the same workshop) continues to unfold it's meaning.  I present it as an example of how such water dreams can be explored. It is interesting in the context of my earlier blog posting referencing the Grail legend.

Simultaneous with a dream image is a cry of grief/ bereavement. I see the shores of Iona and I am leaving. I am leaving the most beautiful place in the world and it is unbearable but I have no choice. I am in a vibrant, powerful, beautiful body - priestess, goddess, nun in one. Apparently, I have been beaten, dismembered, wounded very badly by those who banish me but there is no pain, I do not see the attackers. At the shore and out of the mist a boat arrives to rescue me, as if the oarsman anticipated my need. Beneath his dark cloak, the oarsman is X. I too am cloaked.

A few years previously I had in fact visited Iona and experienced a feeling of deja vue, of deep connection with the beauty of the place. The expulsion and hurt in the dream seemed to have been a necessity; I was being sent out into the world of human life. I was reminded of the story of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Symbolized throughout history and mythology as the expulsion from a beautiful watery place to a barren fiery land, this story may reflect a dim memory of human migration from a wetland 'paradise' and watery lifestyle to drier and less congenial conditions.

The Grail castle, described as being surrounded by water and invisible to all but the worthy, has been connected often with both Avalon and Iona. The devastating realization of paradise lost can also be equated in the Grail legend to the pain inflicted by a domineering king's men upon the devoted maidens who attended at the sacred wells - it is a deep wound.

When people struggling in our cultural wasteland first experience aquatic therapy, many wonder if they have touched paradise. They have a deep recollection of that paradise, but they also access the common grief of humanity. For some, the experience seems too much to handle and they never again surrender to the waters. Others set out to share the work as practitioners but do not delve into their own woundedness.

I have come to see aquatic bodywork as a kind of Holy Grail the essence of which will remain inaccessible to all, except the few, until the King (modern power-based culture) is healed.  

Although as far as we know the form of aquatic bodywork I practice was not part of the Asclepian tradition, the altered state many experience while being floated in warm water parallels the dream incubation practiced in the God's sanctuaries.

In an interview (2001) about his book on Asclepian-style dream healing, Edward Tick said of his work as a psychotherapist using psychospiritual traditions for over 20 years that:

'I have not only studied this ancient tradition, but I apply it in forms acceptable to modern people. Through these practices, people I know have healed from serious physiological ailments for which there is no known cure, from psychosomatic conditions in which the mind is speaking in very troubling ways through the body, and from psychological and interpersonal conditions that would not change by any other means. Through retreat, companionship, immersion in beauty and the arts, intensive personal attention, the interpretation of illnesses as metaphors of the health of the soul, the high valuing of dreams and the irrational as forms of communication, and the courage and guidance to turn to God for healing, these ancient healing techniques are available to us today. They can serve as the blueprint for a truly soul-based and holistic model of healing.'

Retreat, dreams and aquatic bodywork combine very powerfully.  The essential medium both metaphorically and literally is Water.

(PS  If you are working with social dreaming - I'd love to connect.)

Avon River near Bath

Belonging

the train slides

beside water

brown as stale coffee

flecked

with sour foam

backyard to Georgian grandeur

grim

rubble of modern living

sun breaking

through grey curtains

scribbled

with winter trees

landscape

the color of newsprint

gouged

by yellow-clawed monsters

it will give way

to flattened green

sea lapping

a crowded island

collapsing in on twisted wings

no more

smothered nightmares

only a dream

of a river flowing

clear

as light over shiny cobbles

and a steep rise

of trees and rock

thousands of miles

from belonging

For more of my poetry and creative writing on water, I invite you to subscribe to Diving Deeper: An Adventure Inspired by Water.  This is a site in progress (Nov. 08)

I'm also always interested to read poems and other forms of creative writing and to see artworks by others that have been inspired by water.

Please contact me on Gaia or comment below.

Grail Maiden

Last night I watched the Fisher King - a great film based on part of the Grail Legend - through a mixture of human drama and humor it addresses the question of wounding in love and loss. It reminded me about my own history with this legend. Back in 2001, I attended a seminar offered by The Center for Story and Symbol (it's still offered) entitled 'The Search for Meaning' which used quest stories as guides to finding a direct experience of belonging, drawing insights from the Legends of the Holy Grail and the archetypal theories of C. J. Jung. I had not long before 'fallen in love' (the soulful chaos that often begins a quest) - with a person and with water (specifically aquatic therapy).

The Grail Legend is a living legend capable of touching both imagination and spirit. It's a complex and rich story full of archetypal dream images of the ultimate quest for all and everything. Le Conte del Graal, written by Cretien de Troyes around the thirteenth century, described the realm of Logres, a paradise on earth. The original Celtic Logres was seen as the inner soul of the earthly Britain. The story takes place in an enchanted and otherworld, and simultaneously at real locations in historical time around the end of the fifth century after the Romans had abandoned Britannia.

Throughout the mythic and poetical land of Logres, maidens lived by sacred grottoes, wells and springs. To the Celtic mind the everyday world and the otherworld were twin universes running parallel to each other. It was at such sacred places as wells and springs that the two worlds were believed to come so near to one another that you could perhaps bridge the gap and cross over to the other side. I I love this idea and have come close to experiencing it in two places I've lived - one near Glastonbury in England and the other here in the Missouri Ozarks, especially beside a once-beloved place on Spring Creek near a beautiful spring.

I'm English but I've found it hard to stay in that country, except perhaps if I lived again near Glastonbury. Whenever I am there, I visit that town and climb the Tor alone to look out over the strange flat expanse that surrounds it - like a vast ocean of cloud. The novel Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (also made into a film) captures much of the magic that this kind of landscape has aroused in me. But it wasn't until I came to the Ozarks that I really discovered what belonging might mean (see poem in posting that follows this one). Here, I have not so much stood up on high places and surveyed the land, as gone down into it, into vast caverns holding ancient waters. It's a geographical bioregion characterized by Karst - limestone full of holes.

Back to the legend ... The Maidens of the Sacred Wells would feed wanderers and travelers from golden bowls and cups. Britain had hundreds of sacred wells and the Romans reverently maintained the ancient traditions of the occupied land, often building shrines around such waters (such as the extensive building over the healing springs at Bath where the twinned goddess Sulis-Minerva presided). These two goddesses are important archetypes for me - something I will be exploring further in my blog  ... In some ways they too bridge the gap between the everyday (Minerva) and other world (Sulis) universes. Last year I was able to work in Sulis's own pools doing my aquatic therapy - a magical experience.

The maidens served all wayfarers and the realm was at peace and fertile until one day an evil King Amangons ravished one of the maidens, held her in captivity and stole her sacred bowl. Amangons' male retainers enthusiastically followed their king's example with disastrous consequences and soon there were no maidens serving at the wells. From that time onwards the Realm of Logres changed into a barren wasteland - the wells and the waters dried up, animals became infertile, trees no longer bore fruit or leaf, flowers withered and the people left. The land of Logres, like much of modern culture, had "lost the Voices of the Wells." For me this underlines also what a precious thing water is.

The barren wasteland in this story is supposed to signify a loss of contact with the otherworld. In Holy Grail, Malcolm Godwin suggests that ' the Grail hero[ine], the one who is eventually to "free the waters" has to discover the meeting place between worlds where he or she can re-establish the precious links between the female sovereignty and the kingship of the realm'. The Grail legend is a wonderful guide for both personal and collective development. It shows us three unhealing wounds: the Wasteland (nature), the Wounded individual (soul/spirit), and Women (also the feminine aspect in men).

On a personal level, all three wounds opened up for me when I had to give up some strong attachments all at once just over a year ago - land, work and person - and with them (temporarily) my belonging.  This is the kind of blind-siding that happens when soul and ego don't agree. These wounds lie deep in our unconscious, and the process of healing them is extremely challenging, hence the heroic journey. In the film Fisher King, violent loss leads to the outward destruction of the lives of the two main characters - they fall into the abyss, the underworld, the karst caverns, and must find their way back again by seeking the holy grail. It's not a simple thing, not just a matter of paying your dues or soldiering on.

That film is set in New York City where nature is hard to find but the closing scene finds the two protagonists lying naked on their backs in Central Park watching clouds moving in a night sky. They are looking up (in all ways). And they have surrendered themselves to what is, to their wounds. I'd like to write my own film script for this story - probably from a more feminine point of view. Actually I began this back in 2001 on my way to the Ozarks, a fictionalized memoir called 'An African Avalon'. Water as medium of the unconscious may well be one of the best agents for bringing the the surface the hidden depths of these wounds and potentially facilitating healing.  My writing is always soaking in this element.

However, the caution is that such healing processes can appear destructive, you go mad or at least forget who you are for a while. Certainly, many who were part of your old life won't recognize you.  You can't cling onto the banks (places or people or ideas) when the river is flowing fast. Watery realms are emotional ones - they require a great deal of self-honesty if you are to avoid drowning. So many myths and legends include water as a metaphor for human behavior and for our place in nature. The three unhealing wounds washed clear in water.

I'd love to hear of others' associations with this legend ...