A Teaching

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

(As you might have guessed due to the gaps in the timeline of my postings, I have had to take some downtime during my months of chemo in which I felt like a zombie and my brain was too blank to focus on writing. So, I'm squeezing in my writing during periods of relative strength and lucidity, and I am referring to my diary in order to keep the postings in a continuous flow.)

I'd like to tell you about the work I've been doing in my therapy sessions. The inner work I do is not typical psychotherapy; my sessions are more like psychospiritual journeys. If you have been interested enough to follow my blog up until now, you probably resonate with the same things that I do. All the same, I do expect to lose readers along the way because this kind of shamanistic/mystical therapy challenges the dominant belief systems and can be very confronting. If your ways do not resonate with mine, I understand, and wish you well. I believe that there are many paths, but that they all lead to the same Source and we shall all come together in the end.

I had a session with Devi Records on January 23, 2009, two weeks after my diagnosis. She is a therapist who utilizes Hakomi and EMDR to contact and heal unconscious complexes, and she is very comfortable working within shamanistic and mystical levels of awareness. We work very compatibly, easing in and out of varying trance states. In body-centered psychotherapy, sessions usually begin with a check-in, when the client closes her eyes and feels into any physical sensations that are calling out for attention. On this day, I felt burning and stabbing pains in my wounded left breast, and in my heart, I felt a prickly ball of red energy that felt like anger.

As I explored the anger, it deepened into rage, and I was suddenly launched into a compelling journey. I consider experiences like the one I am about to describe as past life memories. But I hold that term loosely; they could also be visions from my soul to help me connect with certain patterns of consciousness that will have a healing effect on me.

In my first vision, I am a muscular man with blonde hair, engaged in hand-t0-hand combat in a very bloody battle. Adrenaline is rushing through my body, and I'm in a state of pure blood lust. I want to kill as many of these invaders of my homeland as I can, and I have no thought of my own safety. I realize that I will die, but I feel no fear. My self-preservation instinct is overpowered by my rage. When I finally do die, my anger carries over into my disembodied state, and I feel great regret that I can no longer kill more of my enemies.

At this point in the session, Devi calls in my guides and the guides of my disembodied past self. She helps me to break off my connection to my past self by watching him walk off into the spirit realms with his guides, who are different from mine, and by reassuring me that his guides will take him where he needs to go in order to heal from his ordeal. Then my guides surround me with healing love, and help me to clear my residual feelings caused by remembering this traumatic death.

Immediately after feeling a sense of completion with my warrior lifetime, I am drawn into another vision in which I am a woman on the prairies in the American West. My hands are being roughly pulled and bound behind my back, and my husband and son are also held captive about forty feet away from me, in front of our farmhouse. We are being attacked by Native Americans on the warpath.

Suddenly, my consciousness separates from my former self and I am more off to the side watching the event than I was in my previous vision as the enraged warrior. I observe as my husband and son are forced to watch my rape, and then one of my attackers rips open my dress and slices off my breasts. Although I feel horrified, I am protected from feeling any physical pain as I witness the events, and then I am suddenly flooded with understanding and compassion for my attackers. Just as I was protecting my homeland and way of life as the warrior fighting off invaders in my previous vision, these Indians were protecting their homeland and way of life by fighting off their invaders, who just happened to be me and my family. And by raping me and cutting off my breasts in particular, they were sending a symbolic message that this white woman will not be bearing any more children to populate land that does not belong to her.

These two lifetimes are like opposing bookends that offer me a great teaching. Good and evil are relative. How can I hold a grudge against my Indian attackers when I can remember feeling the same bloodlust and hatred as an enraged European warrior? By experiencing both sides of the attacker/victim polarity, the charge neutralizes, and by understanding the pain of my enemy, my own pain dissolves.

This planet is a place of great beauty but it also contains great violence, and in order to make peace with our time here, we must accept all of the qualities of life on earth. I admit that I have difficulty accepting violence. I sometimes become enraged by the tremendous amount of violence that takes place on our planet, especially by instances when the strong attack the weak. This deeply held rage has tangled roots that have burrowed into the unconscious complexes of my inner shadow, and I believe that it contributes to the patterns that have caused my cancer. I truly feel that the invasive tentacles of my cancer that lie right over my heart are related to my toxic rage that has led to the thwarting of my own life force. My great teaching from this shamanic session has to do with letting go. The dramas taking place within us and all around us are not simplistic battles between good and evil. The forces that weave our karmic interactions are very complex, and we must do our best to remain calm in the center of this grand opera.

At the end of the session, I checked in to the energy over my heart, and it had cooled down considerably. Instead of a fiery red ball, it felt like a warm sun, radiant with understanding and compassion.

Of course, there is always more work to do in the inner realms. Since this session with Devi, I have spent time in meditation clearing the samskaras that were created during my rape and mutilation that lifetime. Samskara is a Sanskrit word for the imprint or impression of an experience that remains with a soul throughout a lifetime or over the course of many lifetimes. A samskara functions like a seed for future actions or results. One of the seed patterns for my breast cancer is probably related to the mutilation of my breast in that lifetime, and by releasing my anger and hatred towards the man who mutilated me, I am helping to cleanse myself of one of the causes of my cancer on the subtle energy planes.

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