I was driving up a long dirt road, heading home when I pictured myself as an actor in an apocalyptic film where I am trying to outrun a shock wave that is moving just a little faster than I can drive up the dirt road, about 60 miles and hour. I am looking in the rearview mirror, watching the trees being shredded behind me. Soon the shock wave will catch up to me and I and my car will be obliterated. Then something tells me to stop, just stop driving! Not to hasten my demise, but just stop fleeing. When I stop, the shock wave instantly subsides and the danger completely dissipates. I get out and look around as my racing heart slowly returns to normal. The "movie" ends there. (In case you didn't guess, the shock wave was my fear.)
The next day I decide to (shamanic) journey. We have a medicine circle in our back field. It is there I spread out a blanket on the grass, lie on my back and close my eyes. My practice for these journeys is to visit old-man-spider who lives in a grotto on a ridge. He is always home and whenever I show up it is dusk, he spins me into a kind of cocoon and hangs me upside down in a tree for the night. While I am hanging from the tree (which is not uncomfortable, but just part of journey), my dream-body drops to the ground and I find myself in a dream-dimension where I can expect something to happen that brings about some kind of awareness or healing.
This time I find myself in a canoe paddling up a wild lake. I see an island approaching. Then, I have landed on the island, but it isn't a normal island. I am in a classroom in the highschool where I worked as a special ed assistant for 6 years about 20 years ago.
In the classroom there are students and there is a video playing on the TV. The teacher is somewhere in the room. This development is a disappointment to me because I was very unhappy when I worked at the school. I felt undervalued (underpaid), unseen, overworked and unappreciated. In other words, I was miserable.
Next I am back in my body on the blanket, contemplating that miserable time when I spent most of every day in classrooms trying not to look at the clock on the wall that told me (almost sadistically) exactly how many hours until I could leave the building. (Don't get me wrong, I did a great job, but it felt like prison to me.) So now I am lying there wondering why my journey brought me back to this unhappy memory. Then, just like a wave flowing through my brain, I realized that this wasn't simply a memory. There was a part of me that was on that island, working in that high school. With this realization came another realization - that this was a soul retrieval. Then I imagined myself rising from my journey blanket and showing up at the school where I walk right through the entrance, down the stairs and into the classroom. I go up to my former self and say, "Come on, let's get out of here." With that, he and I (I and I) walk out of the school together. Nobody questions us, nobody stops us, The feeling was total relief and release. The feeling was, I was free,
How could it be that simple! I am used to soul-retrieval being a big deal, something a shaman (or another shamanic practitioner) has to do for us, but apparently not. There was no question that this was not just a memory, which incidentally, has come up randomly fairly often for me over the years. It is a version of the Bardo, where some part of us is stuck, reliving an unhappy time, something like Ground Hog Day.
As I lay on my blanket in the shade of a big maple, I started wondering, how many such "islands" are there for me to visit to retrieve other parts of myself?
With every soul retrieval we experience an influx of life-energy or chi, because there is always a certain charge of energy that is tied up in such such psychic backwaters, which we call bad-memories, that insinuate themselves into our waking life, when we find ourselves reliving moments in our lives that we would rather forget. But they are much more than memories. They are real psychic spaces where shadow-imprints of our personalities are stuck, unable to move on.
If we are lucky (like I am lucky), and we have moved on, with just a little training, we can perform soul retrievals on ourselves. What is required (if I may repeat myself) is understanding that unpleasant recurring memories are more than just memories. They are the Bardos, dead spots where nothing is happening, where, for example, the clock on the classroom wall was always telling me that I had 4 or 5 hours to go before I could leave the building. But I had the power to spring myself all along!!! Once I realized that, it was easy, just like stopping my car in the apocalyptic fantasy-film I was starring in.
When we are dealing with acute trauma, that is another story, but even then, with help, we can get free. Trauma and being stuck in bad memories ties up an enormous amount of energy that we need for life.
I think what I am saying is, if this speaks to you, learn from my experience. Memories can be psychic prisons, where the key is simply in realizing just that.
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