Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.
—Chuang Tzu, Burton Watson, translator,
Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings
Alchemy is the art of living in the daytime with your night eyes open. Once you enter the alchemical laboratory, the distinct delineation of the sunlit world begins to blur. Sleeping and waking are no longer opposites but rather exist on a spectrum of conscious and unconscious existence. Real and imaginal modify each other as you open to a twilight awareness quite different from the radical certainty of modern reason. To enter the laboratory, you must pass through a gate to a place you both know and have never known before. The simplest things—a cup of water, a star-shaped leaf, the scent of honeysuckle, a black crow pecking in the snow—take on meaning, become beacons, night lights, reminders of truths, and guides to next steps.
The work of modern-day alchemy is also the art of living in the night world with your daytime vision engaged. Unlike the trance states induced by a magical drumbeat, rhythmic incantation, and whirling dance of shamanic healing or the ego dissolution and spontaneously expanded states of hallucinogenic plant medicine, alchemical practices require conscious, engaged participation over time. The tools and practices of alchemy are meant to strengthen the relationship between your unbounded spiritual awareness and your unique, individuated self as well as between you and the living wisdom of the planets, plants, minerals, and beings of the world we inhabit.
In order to be effective in the alchemical laboratory and survive the disassembling challenges of transformational healing, you need to stay firmly in touch with your critical mind and capacity for rational evaluation as well as with your imagination, your body wisdom, and your heart. As an alchemist, rather than abandon the dream world to a busy morning, you steadfastly cultivate an ongoing practice of relating to your dreams. You use your conscious mind to initiate a pause. You take a few minutes to reflect. Why did my grandmother come last night covered in a blue veil, carrying a basket of starfish? Why did I dream about the old shingle house with the unhinged door banging in the wind? Why is there a kangaroo standing just outside my car window? Why do I keep coming across that same leather-bound notebook? What does it remind me of? Who gave it to me? What message do I need to write on its parchment pages?
The goal of alchemical work is not to split night and day apart or to fuse them together, but rather to resolve the paradox they present. Our work is to stay in relationship with the sun and the moon—to our thinking mind as well as our imaginal awareness—as they exist in us simultaneously. The resolution of this paradox allows you to perceive reality as it is—not a prison of matter devoid of meaning, endless bills, exhausting work, ten-second blips of disheartening media, and debilitating aches and pains, but equally not an idealistic spiritual fantasy that dead-ends in addictive numbing, fundamentalist repressive religious dogma, denial strategies, or dissociation.
In those rare moments when my day and night eyes see at the same time through the same window, time and eternity collide. When I no longer know if I am dreaming the world or the world is dreaming me, I wake up. I remember a world I knew before I had words to describe it, a world that waits just around the corner of morning and hides behind the curtain of the night. Remembering to remember all this is the gift of dream work.
According to the Zohar, the most famous Jewish alchemical text, “A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened.” Similarly, ancient Taoist alchemists viewed dreams as messages sent to us directly from heaven in order to help us fulfill our life mandate or destiny. C. G. Jung wrote, “Dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity.” For Jung, the unconscious psyche provided the clues to understanding our psychological impasses, our obsessions, and self-sabotaging tendencies as well as our greatest life accomplishments and personal contributions. Jung believed the unconscious is the source of our life force and our connecting conduit to the transpersonal wisdom of the cosmos. From this perspective, there is no better way to honor our dreams then to tap into the source wisdom that can help us recognize our souls and foster a meaningful life.
Having worked with my own dreams and the dreams of my patients for more than thirty years, I am convinced that dreams, no matter how strange or difficult they may at first appear, almost always come in service of our healing and our wholeness. They bring us information about what we actually need to do on a daily basis to fulfill our soul's purpose. They inform our desire to do our part to further health rather than increase suffering.
The capacity to engage with dreams has been a part of human culture since the earliest times. There are anthropological accounts of indigenous people holding council meetings in the morning to discuss their dreams and assess their relevance to past and future events. It was through dreams that Jacob discovered the angels who climb between Heaven and Earth on a towering ladder, and Abraham's wife, Sarah, was protected from harm in Abimelech's harem. From the perspective of Alchemical Healing, dream work is not a specialized practice reserved for a privileged few but rather the spiritual birthright of every person. It is an intrinsic part of a fulfilling life, one of the most reliable ways to communicate with the Self and to track the progress of your path through life.
Despite common belief, the first step in the process of relating to your dreams is not to correctly analyze the meaning of the dream, to tear it apart in order to extract its message, or to consult an authoritative text that can interpret the language of its symbols. Dream work begins by beginning to care about your dream. It begins when you take the time to reflect on its needs and desires, to feel into its atmosphere, to inhale its scent, and trace the edges of its skin. It begins when you wonder about its native terrain and the beings who inhabit its homeland. Jungian analyst James Hillman refers to this as “befriending” the dream:
Friendship wants to keep the connection open and flowing. . . . Befriending the dream begins with a plain attempt to listen to the dream, to set down on paper or in a dream diary in its own words just what it says. . . . Befriending is the feeling approach to the dream, and so one takes care receiving the dream's feelings, as with a living person with whom we begin a relationship.
The crucial question is not “What does this dream mean?” but “What does this dream want and need?” Caring deeply about that question is the first step in making friends with your dream.
When I work with my own dreams or the dreams of my students and patients, I always begin with the recognition that the dream may not share my conscious values or ideals, but it is unquestionably committed to my entelechy, the movement of my life toward the fulfillment of my end and the attainment of more wholeness. Even when the dream is disturbing, I always look for the edge that leads to something new, a piece I didn't know before that opens me to a larger view of myself and my life's possibilities.
In the midst of writing this book, I dreamt that Benjamin put his fist through one of my brother's paintings and punched a hole in the middle of the canvas. I woke up upset and concerned that my husband was trying to destroy my creativity. This dream came at a moment in our collaborative editorial process when Benjamin was leaning on me to step into my innate Martian Aries nature and take more risks in my writing. Over time, as I sat with the dream, I came to realize that the Benjamin of my dream, who was also a part of me, was telling me I needed to break through a self-imposed barrier to a new part of my creative process. By punching a hole in the canvas, Benjamin was trying to liberate me from the patriarchal attitudes of my artist father and brother as well as the academic constraints of the mainstream Chinese medical community, both of which I've internalized during my lifetime. As I continued to befriend this dream, I felt its life-affirming energy rush through my body, calling me to stretch beyond my own self-imposed limitations and to free up my aggression in service to my authentic voice and vision for my writing, my art, and my work as a healer.
The second thing I always try to remember when working with dreams is that only the dreamer can ultimately interpret the dream. Even the most brilliant analysis by the most seasoned expert pales in comparison to the felt sense of a shift in the dreamer's emotional body when she gets the gist of the dream. Whereas other people can offer useful insights or ask supportive leading questions, the “click” or “aha!” response in the dreamer is the most reliable indication that we've gotten the dream's most essential meaning.
When a patient dreamt she had inherited a dream home in Athens from a long-deceased great aunt and then realized that water was pouring through all the windows to form a deep turquoise pool across the entire ground floor, I was sure the dream was telling her that she needed to create a stronger boundary between herself and her extended family. There was no question in my mind that the “inheritance” she was due to receive from her wealthy parents would not be worth the invasive flooding of their emotional demands. I felt certain I had the right interpretation. Thankfully, I managed to stay quiet and curious while she worked with the dream images.
After a few minutes of silence, she spoke. “I love to swim,” she said, “and as I look at that house filling with water, I realize how amazing it is that my aunt has left this place to me, not only the home but a pool that I can dive down into, a place to meet my past and the gods and goddesses hiding there.” As she worked with the dream, she realized how critical it would be for her to stay in touch with the pleasure of her own body, her love of swimming, and memories of her ancestry if she were to transform the challenging aspects of her family inheritance into something that could truly support her. This experience affirmed what I already knew, and it comes back to me whenever I am tempted to rush in too quickly with a clever interpretation of another person's dream.
Another thing to remember is that a dream symbol is like a crystal with many facets. Just as a crystal offers multiple vantage points, a dream symbol allows us many approaches to an interpretation. Every viewpoint of a crystal reveals a different shape and yet each is related to the whole. Similarly, in dream work, there is no one right perspective, no one right answer. The association or interpretation that is “right” is the one that moves you, that quickens your breathing or elicits an emotion. In order to broaden the range of your associations and interpretations of dream symbols, familiarize yourself with myths, legends, and fairy tales and the universal archetypes that show up in stories told from around the world. Getting to know these ancient tales will help you recognize the beings that wander in and through your night world, making it easier for you to understand their language.
Keep your dream work manageable. Don't bite off more than you can chew. You can always come back to a powerful dream again later. I have dreams I worked with over decades and one I had as a child about a witch in a bakery that is still an active piece of my inner work. When you don't have time to work with an entire dream, don't feel pressured to rush through it. Instead, pick the part of the dream that calls to you and trust that, like a hologram, that single fragment or scene has value. It will tell you what you need to know now. “My ex-husband was taking care of three orphaned babies” or “I noticed that my silver wedding band was missing” or “I reach down into a stream of water and pull up a writhing, iridescent fish.” These pieces of dreams are all letters waiting to be opened, messages ready to be delivered. Any piece of a dream is linked by a fine silken thread to the archetypal information it contains and will open you to the wisdom of the dream's wholeness.
Care about the beings in your dreams. Relate to them as you would a friend. Pause as you would before a place of natural beauty. An apple tree. A small brown mouse. A bald eagle flying overhead. Your old high school principal. Having lunch with the president. An aging ballerina leaping over a fire. Ask questions. Converse with the people and creatures who show up. Take time to listen to their replies. Why have you come? What do you want me to know? What gift are you bringing? What gift are you asking me for?
When you listen to another person's dream, you do not need to fix anything, give advice, or help the dreamer unravel the dream. You are a witness creating a safe space for the work, supporting the process with your presence. Again, ask questions. Be with another person's dream as if it were your own but always remember that you are not that person. Your gift is simply caring enough to let the dream be told.
Last but not least, remember that like any authentic spiritual teacher, the unconscious has a sense of humor and loves to play tricks. Take time to catch the puns, appreciate the poetry, revel in the riddles and divine humor of the dream weaver. When you dream you are eating a bowl of green peas, consider whether you need to make someone a peace offering. And if you arrive at a friend's party wearing a black and white jumpsuit, you may need to take a leap into the shades of grey in your relationship. When you wake up thinking, “That was the craziest dream I ever had; just a bunch of nonsense,” you can be sure there is a bit of hidden gold that should not be thrown away.
Dreams benefit us even if we don't do anything with them. Simply having a dream benefits your body and your mind. Even when you don't remember a dream, the dream is restoring balance to your nervous system and helping your psyche integrate the events of the previous day. However, the practice of actively remembering your dreams greatly amplifies their benefit as it allows you to bring their messages to conscious awareness. Writing the dream down in a dream journal, recording a symbol or image in a drawing, or sharing the dream with another person imprints its message into a material form that allows you to effectively work with it.
The next step is connecting the dream to events in your current life. This act takes your dream work to another level and it is where the alchemy actually begins. There are three ways you can make this connection: The first is through feeling into the general atmosphere of the dream. The second is by making associations to its images. The third is through an alchemical practice called Active Imagination.
Feeling into the atmosphere of a dream is like sitting next to a friend without talking. You don't need words to know if your friend is happy, excited, or having a rough time. Because you care, you notice the cues—the way your friend is breathing, the expression on her face, how her fingers twist the hem of a sleeve.
To know how your dream is feeling, take time to pay attention. What happens in your body when you go back into the dream? What emotions come? Does your chest release or tighten? Do you feel drawn closer or pushed away? Does your breathing quicken or slow down? All this information will give you clues to how the dream is feeling and what it wants you to know about something happening in your life right now.
The next dream practice, working with associations, is like writing a poem or solving a jigsaw puzzle. Let all the thoughts and images that rise up in relationship to the dream float freely through your mind. Jot them down on paper and keep gathering associations until a picture begins to form.
In working with associations, you go back into the dream and once again notice how you feel. But this time ask into the feelings themselves. What does this emotion or body sensation remind me of? When did I last feel that way and with whom did I feel that way? Or take one of the significant images from the dream and consider what it relates to. There is no need to be rational or to force it to make sense. For example, the kangaroo outside my car window belongs in Australia, not Maine. I'm surprised that she has come here, this large furry beast carrying her baby in her pouch. The associative words that come are: mother, on the move, marsupial, magic. She surprises me. She makes me laugh. But she also makes me nervous. And then, click! I get what the dream is up to. I am thrilled that my daughter is going to have a baby. Something that once seemed so distant is now right here. Suddenly, I am going to be a grandmother! I'm happy and nervous at the same time. Along with my excitement, I am concerned about the responsibility, about being weighed down. Am I ready to take this on? Can I be there for my daughter and grandchild in the midst of my already full and busy life? The kangaroo has come to give me some new information, to show me something about being nurturing while maintaining my wildness.
Active Imagination is the most advanced of the three methods of alchemical dream work. In this practice, you use the tools of alchemy—imaginal sight, Inner Sensing, deep listening—to bring the images of your dream to life by relating to them. You can do this practice in an hour or over a period of days, months, or years, but to do it effectively you need to shut out the noise of the outer world and enter the meditation space of your inner laboratory. Once there, you need some way to record your conversation with your dream being, whether in writing, drawing, movement, or song.
Active Imagination is like transcribing an interview where both the questions and the answers matter. I ask the kangaroo, “Why are you standing there outside my car window?” And I hear her say, “Because I know something you need to know too.” I reply, “Okay, so what's that?” And then I hear, “I know how to be on the move and take care of a baby at the same time.” She winks at me and sticks her furry face through the open window. I smell her musky smell. I feel intimidated by her big, yellow teeth and shiny, sniffing nose. “I'm not sure I'm ready to take you on,” I say. “It's too late,” she replies. “It's happening. I'm here and I'm getting in your car!” Uh oh. I get it. She wants to be part of me. I ask her, “So how do I do this thing with the new baby?” And she says, “Easy! Keep your sense of humor. Don't look back. Stay easy on your feet with one hand in your pocket and you'll be fine. I can do it and so can you!” I get a feeling in my body that makes me laugh. I say, “I guess a dose of kangaroo medicine is just what I need!”
The last benefit of dreaming comes when you understand what the dream wants or needs from you and you respond by taking an action step or making a real change in your life. You can use Active Imagination to get at the particulars or you can watch where your feelings or associations lead you. What change of behavior, perception, or attitude is needed now? What new way of being? What new possibility is ready to emerge? Once the necessary change becomes clear to you, resolve to take an actual step in the direction of the dream's request by way of a small symbolic ritual or a major shift in behavior.
For me, it was the kangaroo's big yellow teeth in my Active Imagination process that stood out. Fierce, hungry, and scary, ready to bite even when she was smiling. Her teeth are not nice or pretty, but they get the job done. Those teeth are telling me to keep a grip on my life, not to get mired down in trying to be all-caring and motherly. I'm too old for that. My fur is too thick and dusty from travel. But I do have a job to support this courageous little human as she arrives at this uncertain, tumultuous time on the planet. As a grandmother, I will need to maintain my freedom, fierceness, and humor while helping her find her way and purpose. As a ritual, I'm going to find myself a furry sling to carry this new baby in. At the first opportunity, I'm taking her on a walkabout under the stars. Although so many of the animals of our day world are dying, the night world is still filled with wondrous, mysterious creatures that desperately need our care. Working with dreams will be part of the legacy I leave her.
Many of my patients and students tell me they can't do dream work because they don't dream. But the truth is that everyone dreams. Even dogs and cats dream, and so do whales, dolphins, elephants, and foxes. We don't know about snakes, stones, or trees, but if you ask me, I'd say yes, definitely, they dream in their own way.
Many people do not remember their dreams or remember so few that they forget about them completely. If this is the case for you, I encourage you to try the following suggestions. Most people I work with find that they start remembering their dreams quite readily once they implement these simple strategies.
Keep a dream journal and a pen right next to your bed. Or if you prefer using your phone or laptop, have it within reach. You can type your dreams right onto your device or record them vocally. Any way you can get your dreams down is fine. Just having something there, ready to write or record on, is a message to the dream weaver that you are really serious about staying in communication.
Set the intention to remember your dreams before you go to sleep. Sometimes, it can help to write a question on paper and put it under your pillow. In the morning, take a few minutes to wake up slowly. As soon as you move your physical body, the memory of your dream begins to dissipate, so stay as still as you can and ask, “What happened last night?” Then get something down in your journal. Don't be concerned if you only remember a word or a feeling or a single image. These bits are like fine silver hooks that can eventually link you to the larger net of your dream weavings.
The case I describe here is a composite of treatments that took place over the course of a decade. It shows how the alchemical tools I discuss in this and previous chapters work in actual practice, including elemental associations, imaginal sight, archetypes, Inner Sensing, flower essences, and dream work. It presents difficult, controversial, and potentially triggering issues that show up regularly in my practice and in our current culture, including infertility, infidelity, depression, addiction, and the destructive effects of the objectification of women on the feminine and masculine aspects of the soul.
There are practitioners who might have drawn back from working with this particular patient and I recognize there may be readers who find his story personally and politically objectionable. In fact, in the years we worked together, there were times when I was deeply troubled by the way my patient treated the women in his life.
I spoke openly to my patient about my feelings of discomfort and upset in response to his behavior and attitudes. I believe that our ongoing, radically honest, and mutually respectful dialogue were key components of the alchemy that took place between us and ultimately, to a significant piece of healing for him. In the end, I felt that our work together presented an opportunity that transcended both our personal identities. Together, we touched some of the deepest, most raw wounds of our time, including the denigration of the divine Feminine, the divorce between the principles of yin and yang, and the toxic masculinity that dominates our modern culture. Despite certain hesitations, I present this case as a reminder that in order to discover gold, we must begin with lead. Who we may become begins with who we are. The long, convoluted, and always surprising path between now and then is the journey of Alchemical Healing.
When this man arrived in my practice, he was already a senior executive at a top New York City advertising agency. Tall, gangly, hardworking, financially ruthless, and practical, he also had a quicksilver wit and wide-ranging curiosity about everything from fly fishing to French wine, basketball to Zen meditation. Yet underneath his charming warmth, self-assurance, and agile mind, I felt a hesitancy, a holding back at the edge of his easy masculinity.
During our initial interview, he revealed to me, as if in passing, that his mother had taken a poorly tested medication while she was pregnant with him. He was born with a kink in his genetic sequencing that resulted in complete sterility. By the time he entered puberty, he already understood that he would never be able to father a child of his own blood.
Along with this congenital reproductive issue, his long spine, low back pain, groaning voice, powerful ambition, and deeply hidden anxiety about his own potency reflected my patient's resonance with the Water Element. Related to the Season of Winter and the Emotion Fear, Water is also related to the quality and storage of our inner and outer resources. These resources include our ancestral life essences, which endow us with the capacity to pass on our genetic inheritance to future generations. Water regulates our most primal drives of reproduction and survival. It compels us to seek and bank away sufficient reserves to keep us going through lean, cold times and to gather strength and resilience from rest and gestation. I quickly recognized that my patient's deepest wounds resided at this level. As it turned out, he was very concerned about having enough—enough money in the bank, enough status in his firm, enough security for his retirement and, as was revealed over time, enough women to prove he was really a potent and legitimate man.
At first, I focused on his physical symptoms—the back pain, the knee pain, the restless leg that woke him in the night—symptoms that were all also related to Water in traditional Chinese medicine. But as I worked with Water Element acupuncture points to relieve his physical symptoms, the soul-level issues began to emerge from deeper levels. I became aware of a persistent Body Felt Sense that there was more hidden, a feeling of pressure when he spoke, of something waiting under the surface. There was the hesitancy, as if he was about to say something but then stopped. I was struck by the way he played with his keyring or looked out the window when I questioned him about his relationships. I was aware that pieces of the story weren't adding up.
I decided to introduce him to flower essences as a way to augment our work with needles. He was skeptical but said that because he found my various practices entertaining, he'd give the “fairy flowers” a try. The first flower essence I suggested was Rock Rose, my essence of choice for Water and one I often turn to for healing trauma and dredging up what has been buried beneath the surface. Although he had not made a big deal about it, I felt that he was carrying significant trauma from his mother's use of drugs during his gestation and his subsequent sterility. Then there was the feeling he was hiding things—secrets, emotions—below the surface of his self-assured persona. I thought of the seeds of the rock rose plant buried beneath the soil, surviving wildfires and floods, waiting to sprout again when the conditions were favorable. The flower fit, so I made it a part of the treatment. A few weeks later, the deeply buried seeds began to sprout.
The stories of the sexual encounters, love affairs, and romantic exploits came slowly. At first, drop by drop. Then, in increasing detail. In his cautious, calculating way, he was testing me. How deeply could his Water Element trust me? Would I judge or reject him?
As the state of his physical spine improved, the spine of his subtle body also strengthened. Gradually, it seemed he could stand up straighter in our conversations. He could show more of himself. He could take the risk of coming out of hiding and telling someone the whole truth of his situation. The stories came over months and years, threaded in with reports on business deals, Winter vacations, frequent urination, sciatica. Gradually, his desperate sexual exploits and their exhausting effects on his body and soul became the focus of our work.
There were stories of meetings, trysts, flirtations, and innuendo-laden conversations. The thrill of the hunt, the magical moment when he lured in his prey, the shameful inability to perform, and then the curt terminations of connection. He told me of women he picked up during happy hour cocktails, quick kisses under tiki bar palm trees, heart-to-hearts around pools, fire pits, or on flights to Los Angeles. I heard of further exploits while grabbing a sandwich on 57th Street, on the beach, the ski mountain, the safari. All the incredible happy endings after well-earned massages. Long distance cyber encounters. “Serious” relationships with executives from other firms, in other cities, other states, other countries. Arizona. Alaska. Boston. Miami. Canada. Switzerland. Brazil. The U. K.
Yet, there was never a final trophy. No woman was really “right,” the one to stay with, to commit to, to dive down deep with and truly know.
In the end, after the encounters, the affairs, the two marriages and divorces, he returned home to his solo life, his luxurious but empty midtown apartment, and his growing sense that he was missing out on some critically important aspect of life. It took time and patience on my part, but after many conversations, many dreams, many repeated explanations, my patient finally became curious about what (besides momentary sexual pleasure and brief ego gratification) might drive his compulsion. Eventually, he admitted, he was tiring of it. Despite his genuine enjoyment of women's company, the thrill of the sexual conquest was gone. The hunt was losing its “zing.” The adrenaline no longer rushed. The Viagra no longer did the trick. The whole thing had become predictable and tiring. The truth was that, like all addictions, his sex addiction was robbing him of exactly what it promised: the renewal, creativity, and healing of shared pleasure and the enlivening warmth and support of relatedness.
The realization that what we have been desperately searching for in the outer world may actually be a quest for something we have lost in our own being comes as a shock. Everything conscious in us at first rejects this idea. The “out there” is so infinitely seductive that it takes an act of enormous faith, will, or grace to tear our gaze away from the endless array of people and stuff, to bring focus to bear on the interior, to the realm of our own soul. And yet, from an alchemical perspective, inner work truly begins with this turning around of the light, this reversal of awareness, with asking the central question, “Who am I?” Once we recognize that the shimmering glamour and fascination of external phenomena are reflections of something necessary, something compelling, something divine that dwells within rather than without, nothing is ever quite the same.
For my patient, the moment of reversal came during a fishing trip in the wilderness of northern British Columbia. Although we had been discussing archetypes for some time in our sessions and he intellectually understood the concept, it wasn't until a chance meeting at the edge of a rushing river that he got an embodied understanding that the archetypes are real, that they live outside but also inside of him.
I could tell something had shifted as soon as I saw him in the waiting room after he got back from his trip. He seemed more present, sobered and yet, at the same time, vibrating with excitement.
“Do I have a story for you!” he exclaimed when we sat down face to face in the treatment room. “What a trip!“
I settled back in my chair, took a deep breath, sunk down into my body, and prepared to listen. Here is what he said:
“Picture this . . . nothing but forest, mountains, sky. Late September. Days growing shorter but still warm. Afternoon sunlight pouring down like honey. I'm standing in the river. Salmon everywhere. Some fighting their way upstream to spawn, some already done, losing strength, dying, floating belly up in the water or washed up on the bank. I'm standing there under this big blue arching sky. Looking up, I see the bald eagles circling, getting ready to dive for the fish. Life, death, sex, rebirth, it's all there, the smell of fresh spawn mixed with the stink of decaying fish flesh. The whole circle of life right in front of me, full circle. I can't believe I'm really there in the middle of it.
“That's when it happened. I hear something rustling in the brush behind me. I turn around. Twelve feet away from me. Maybe less. Standing straight up on her back legs. Three hundred pounds at least. Probably more. All white. No joke. An all-white she-bear! Looking right at me. I mean, eye to eye. She sees me. I see her. That's when I get it. It's her. It's the archetype, the Goddess herself. Coming out of the forest, coming down to the river. Coming to meet me.
“Right then. Everything stops. She can take me down with one blow. My life is in her hands. I feel something give way. I'm tunneling down her eyes. She's looking at me, in me, through me. I can die at any moment but I'm not afraid. I feel something like a creaking door in my chest. I'm all hers. I'm wide open. The ache is unbelievable, but I don't want it to stop.
“I get it. I'm completely okay. She won't do anything to hurt me. There's nothing I need. Nothing I don't have. Everything inside of me lets go. I'm safe. I'm cared for. I have enough. I feel a peace I've never felt before. And all I can feel is love.
“We stand there like that. Just looking at each other. I don't know how much time. Maybe thirty seconds. Maybe a hundred years. And then it's done. Over. I get the message. She knows it and so do I. I'm back in time. An eagle swoops down and grabs a fish. The world is breathing again. My legs feel like cooked noodles. She turns away. She's gone. Back into the forest. The guide boat drifts towards me. It's time to go.”
I looked at him and he looked back. No twiddling fingers. No averted gaze. For the first time, I felt he was seeing me as a whole person, seeing my feminine wisdom with affection, appreciation, and respect. Until his encounter with the bear, it had all been a game for him. It was as if he were humoring me rather than taking our work seriously. He hadn't really taken in that his compulsion to seduce, trap, and dominate women came from a feeling of his own powerlessness in the face of the Feminine, in the face of life and death. He hadn't yet taken in the destructive effects his behavior was having on his own well-being and the women he came in contact with. And it hadn't yet really sunken in that it was only through an embodied encounter with this other—this divine Feminine who was also a part of his own Self—that he could heal from the rage he felt toward his mother for her unwitting betrayal of his masculinity and his shame around the inability to father a child from his own seed.
“You got it,” I said. “That bear. She could have taken you down with one swipe of her paw and yet she showed you only love. All you needed to do was to really see her.”
When I needled the spirit point on the bottom of his feet that day, it was a way of celebrating and tattooing into his body the feeling of rootedness and stability that came from his encounter with the bear. Through this alchemical meeting, he had opened to the Bubbling Spring of his own spiritual resources and his own imaginal sight. After years of repeated suggestions on my part, he finally got it. The “she” he had been relentlessly pursuing in the outer world was the “she” inside of him—the fullness of his authentic emotions, his capacity for actual embodied eroticism, and his deep caring for the beauty of life.
Our work changed after that. There was a different quality to our conversations. I felt less seductiveness in the field between us, more warmth and easy affection. I felt I could let my guard down when we hugged at the end of a session. My patient became more interested in the needs of his own body. He started doing yoga, drinking less, eating differently. He was able to relax more deeply on the treatment table. He began talking about retiring from his job, not pushing so hard, doing things differently.
“I went out with a buddy last night. Had a couple of drinks. There were some women at the next table. One tall, nice, wearing tight jeans, with that kind of dark red hair I like. I knew I could have her. I knew just what to do to reel her in. But when I felt into my body the way you've showed me how to do, I felt the way it feels after a good rainstorm, calm and peaceful. None of that pressure inside, no need to chase her, catch her like a fish in a net. I didn't need to do anything. I could just sit back, enjoy the vibe, the conversation, the place. So that's what I did. It felt great. A real relief.
“When she got up to leave, she looked my way. I knew she would. She smiled at me and I smiled back. And it was right there. It was understood. That energy between us. We both knew. It felt good. And her smile. And knowing, knowing and feeling. It was enough.
“I'm beginning to get it. This isn't about some woman who is going to make it better, who is going to fix the part of me that was broken. It isn't about the chase, the hunt, the adrenaline rush that blots out the sadness and the pain. It's just about me being there, wherever I am, knowing I'm okay. Leaning back into my life and knowing I can let certain things take their own course.
“I guess I've been angry at her all this time, angry that she didn't listen to her body, that she took those drugs, that she didn't have the sense, the animal in her didn't question . . . well, whatever. It's done. And I can move on.”
A few months later, he came in excited. “You won't believe this dream,” he began. “No. Really. Sometimes, I am just blown away by this stuff. I was in a bordello in some town in Wyoming. You know the kind they have in old Western movies. Ornate furniture. Red velvet curtains. Whiskey. Cigars. Honkytonk music. Lots of pretty girls in see-through lingerie gliding in and out of open doorways. But instead of feeling good, turned on, excited, I feel something tight in the pit of my stomach. I know I'm not there for the pretty girls. I'm there for the Madame.
“I walk down a long hallway and then enter a room lit with lots of candles. There is a screen and behind it, I see a couch. Lots of pillows. Long legs. Big breasts. Lips. Silk and satin. Gorgeous. Lush. Big. She's it. The real deal. And not to be toyed with.
“She beckons me to come closer. I approach. And then I pause.
“This one . . . you don't mess with her. This woman I thought at first was a prostitute is the Goddess herself. She's the one you've been trying to talk to me about. And the real joke . . . I get it now . . . it was her all along. All those girls. All those women. Each one has a little bit of her in them. That's what I was chasing. But, me, I was prostituting my own soul. I wasn't paying attention to the ‘she’ inside me. She's the one I have to listen to. She's the one who has to come first. And here's the real news: I no longer have a choice. I'm her guy. She's the one I have to answer to. As far as other women, well, we'll see what happens with all that down the line.”
Not long after this dream, my patient began to talk about radically changing his life, retiring after forty years from his high-pressure job, selling his apartment and living somewhere closer to nature. He started taking his meditation practice more seriously and began reading some recent writing on the effects of early trauma on brain physiology and addiction. After many years, our work together began to wind down. We said our formal goodbye a few days before he celebrated his retirement and began packing up to move to a small place, somewhere north, on a river.
Like many of my patients who move on after long years of exploration, I have not heard from him since our last meeting. I do not know whether his inner alchemy continues or whether he has forgotten about his commitment to his marriage with the woman within. I do not know whether he lives alone, has found a partner or has picked up again on his compulsive sexual exploits and addiction.
When I think about him, I feel a sadness and also a deep gratitude. Through our work together, I was forced to accept my own powerlessness. I could not force him with my judgment, my will, or my needles to change his behavior. Instead, through a kind of fierce honesty and hard-won empathy, we gradually got to know each other as flawed and vulnerable human beings. I had to face the discomfort of my own shadowy feelings of contempt and superiority and continuously ask whether I was in integrity with my own values in continuing to work with him. He had to find the courage to come out of hiding and bear his soul to another. In the process, alchemy happened. Through the sacredness of the relationship that constellated between us, the seed of a new possibility was planted in the dark soil of the world soul.