MUSING
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?'
'Supposing it didn't,' said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.” A.A.Milne
These days…. the list…. The list… these days… I’d like to try to describe something that came to me in a dream the other night. Not so much the dream but what remains of it, a single moment that left an impression - a kind of imprint. It feels like it is something that might be helpful if shared, and if not, it is is at least helpful to me to try to try to share it, so thank you.
These days… What I want to try to describe is a moment in a dream when something went from being one thing to something else. I don’t mean a shapeshifter, one character becoming another, it was a feeling. The thing that changed was a feeling; I felt one way and then I felt another way about the same thing. There was something occurring in front of me which I perceived as certain to be disastrous. It was certain. My eyes were wide in anticipation, my body was frozen in anticipation, my mind was wild in anticipation, ferociously flipping through ideas of what could be done or what shouldn’t be done so as to prevent what I did not want to occur. Skin pricked, quite literally at the edge of myself, searching for a solution, anything to slow down time, to divert momentum, to prevent what was certain, to prevent what was not wanted. The word we use for this feeling is anxiety. It might also be called the List. Devout attention so as to produce or prevent a result, an unwavering attachment to an outcome… We all know it well, very well. These days…
And as I sat watching the scene in front of me I realized - wait, let me slow for down for a moment before we reach that word: realized. Realized comes second, something happened before I realized. The thing that happened before realized occurred in my body: I sat. I was already sitting, I sat back. I was able to sit back. And then there was the seeing. They were very close together, and could not do without each other, but first, I’m quite sure, first there was an experience in my body. From somewhere, somehow, the me that I recognize was invited to take a seat. And my body became a place for this seat.
I sat back and saw that what was criss-crossing in front of me was doing so on its own. I was not going to prevent, delay or divert. What was occurring was part of me, but did not require more of me than I had to give - there was no tax being taken, nothing was required except my presence. My whole being relaxed in it's seat and I held out my hand. The chaos continued, but I was no longer disturbed. The wooden benches, like bleachers in an auditorium, filled in- we were waiting for the singer to come.
The message of the dream is not to remove oneself from action, or to step away from accountability - it is more a relocation of action. Sometimes the effort to avert disaster is the expression of disaster - things might be something other than they seem. What moves me is the invitation in the dream that I received from my body. Let go, come home. And there was a place to come home. Every day we are asked to merge into oncoming traffic, to prepare ourselves for something difficult… But what if we were able to sit or walk or talk from within our bodies, what if we had this as well. We do..
You see, one of the reasons I love Craniosacral therapy is this experience of embodiment. In a session we remember our bodies, my own body. We didn’t know that we had forgotten, there was not awareness that we’d forgotten, but there was a return to remembering. Sometimes this remembering is difficult. And sometimes it is not something that happened, but it is a coming into a knowing that knows me.
There was a sitting back, a resting and then the knowing, a seeing. The mystery, I think, lives in the sitting back; this is the imprint that changed the world.
Dreams are interesting places to receive messages - the dream body, the unseen world, helping spirits. The thing that changed after sitting back has continued through my days. These days... are also beautiful.