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As the aberrant cells in my breast coalesced into life-threatening tumors, the shamanic spirit bird sank her talons into my flesh and carried me off to the Place of Great Changes. Nothing in my life will ever be the same. My body has been deeply weakened by my cancer, and will be forever transformed by the fiery forces of chemotherapy, mastectomy and radiation. Although I have been blessed with access to the spiritual realms, I wrestle with fears about walking down this path of suffering. The day after my diagnosis, I was in a fragile emotional state, and I picked up some sticks of charcoal to try and express some of my dark feelings on paper. This is what I drew:
When my partner, Ken, saw it, he looked a little shocked and asked if I had drawn a picture of my tumor. I told him, no, that I had just opened a connection between my hand and my unconscious and had drawn an impression of my feelings. Then he got up, rummaged through some papers, and pulled out the page of my core biopsy report that showed a black and white picture of my tumor cells. My jaw dropped. It looked just like my drawing. During my core biopsy, I had avoided looking at the TV monitor that was displaying a picture of my tumor, and I hadn't even glanced at any of my medical papers. I just wasn't ready to deal with reality yet. But reality had excavated through the layers of my unconscious and emerged into plain sight through my own hand.
The archetypal realms permeate all levels of life, from the unconscious to the conscious, from energetic to cellular, from reality to the transcendent. When I picked up the piece of charcoal, I felt moved to draw a disorderly maze of tunnels that swirled chaotically around voids of white space. I was amazed to see how the impressions that surfaced from my unconscious fell into the same rhythm of my actual tumor cells, and as I paged through Joan Halifax's marvelous book on shamanism, I saw the same patterns in a drawing that was created by a Chuckchee Eskimo after emerging from a trance in which he had a vision of the Underworld.
I am so thankful for my ability to connect with the mysteries and gifts that are available to us from the psychospiritual realms. They offer us access to worlds that we have only begun to tap into, paths that will eventually lead us from the Place of Great Changes to the one Source of Consciousness.
When my partner, Ken, saw it, he looked a little shocked and asked if I had drawn a picture of my tumor. I told him, no, that I had just opened a connection between my hand and my unconscious and had drawn an impression of my feelings. Then he got up, rummaged through some papers, and pulled out the page of my core biopsy report that showed a black and white picture of my tumor cells. My jaw dropped. It looked just like my drawing. During my core biopsy, I had avoided looking at the TV monitor that was displaying a picture of my tumor, and I hadn't even glanced at any of my medical papers. I just wasn't ready to deal with reality yet. But reality had excavated through the layers of my unconscious and emerged into plain sight through my own hand.
The archetypal realms permeate all levels of life, from the unconscious to the conscious, from energetic to cellular, from reality to the transcendent. When I picked up the piece of charcoal, I felt moved to draw a disorderly maze of tunnels that swirled chaotically around voids of white space. I was amazed to see how the impressions that surfaced from my unconscious fell into the same rhythm of my actual tumor cells, and as I paged through Joan Halifax's marvelous book on shamanism, I saw the same patterns in a drawing that was created by a Chuckchee Eskimo after emerging from a trance in which he had a vision of the Underworld.
I am so thankful for my ability to connect with the mysteries and gifts that are available to us from the psychospiritual realms. They offer us access to worlds that we have only begun to tap into, paths that will eventually lead us from the Place of Great Changes to the one Source of Consciousness.
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