Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (138 page)

The answer that eventually came was, “Your periods are symbolic of the way you give yourself away too freely. The heavy bleeding rep resents your own life’s blood draining away. You do the same thing in your relationship with your boyfriend. This is related to your relationship with your father.”

Another former patient told me, “You asked me to have a dialogue with my cervix. [She had had an abnormal Pap smear.] It’s all about shame, it’s all about deprivation, it’s all about not being good enough. I think I need to listen some more.”

Many fine publications have been written, and workshops offered, on how to do journal work or other forms of introspective dialogue. I recommend Natalie Goldberg’s books on writing practice,
Writing Down the
Bones
(Shambhala, 1986) and
Wild Mind
(Bantam Books, 1990), as well as Anne Lamott’s
Bird by Bird
(Anchor Books, 1995).

Working with Dreams: A Dream Incubation

The night dreams speak Wild Woman’s Language. She is there
broadcasting. All we have to do is take dictation.

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

You can learn to work with your dreams actively and learn to con sult them about specific problems in your life. The process of asking for a dream for guidance is known as dream incubation.
¹²
To do this effec tively you must be willing to be 100 percent honest about the circumstances of your life. Here’s how to do it.

Choose a night when you have some energy and focus to devote to the process. Spend ten to twenty minutes writing in your journal concerning the particular issue you want to focus on. Address the following questions within yourself, and be open to other input from your inner guidance:

What is the root cause of my problem?

What possible solutions come to mind about my problem right now?

Why aren’t these solutions adequate?

How am I feeling right now as I work on this?

Does it feel safer to live with the problem than to resolve it?

What do I have to lose if I solve the problem now?

What do I have to gain if I solve the problem now?

Is there anything that my future self would like to tell me that could help?

Write down a one-line sentence or request that deals with the problem as directly and simply as possible, and keep your question gently in mind as you drift off to sleep. Have a paper, pen, and flashlight, or a tape recorder, handy at your bedside, and write down any dreams you remember. Sometimes insights will come to you at 3:00 a.m. or anytime you might awaken to go to the bathroom. If you don’t write down at least the pertinent details of your dream, you are likely to forget it by morning. This process may take several nights before a clarifying dream arises. Doris Cohen, Ph.D., author of
Repetition:
Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth
(Hay House, 2008), suggests that we approach our dreams the way a reporter would, giving them headlines like in a newspaper.

Here’s an example of a dream I had recently and how I was able to use Doris’s techniques to tap in to what it was trying to tell me. In the dream, I am at Regena Thomashauer’s apartment (Regena is also known as Mama Gena, founder and CEO of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts). A poster hangs on the wall from a lonely man who has written all about himself on it. I am
very
interested in him and I feel as though I have known him before. It’s late at night, and when I leave the building, I find that the man’s car is parked in a no-parking zone. I go up to him, and there is instant chemistry between us. He tells me he is sick and dying. We kiss. And then he simply leaves his car where it is and we walk back to Regena’s, where it turns out he has a bedroom. He tells me that he has always wanted to date me but “didn’t have the stones” to ask me. I am excited.

Then the dream changes. The next time I see him he is well and he feels great. He’s now in the kitchen of my childhood home. We flirt. The television is on, and some guy named Danny is selling his Lighten Up brand of weight-loss foods. I turn off the television and say that I almost never have it on. My guy now turns into Tom Selleck. I’m getting ready to leave to go to work. My guy is there with me. I am so happy. We are just at the beginning.

I called this dream “Love Brings Man Back from the Brink.” Doris teaches that everyone in a dream is an aspect of yourself, so when I looked at my dream, I could see that it was about befriending and falling in love with my inner male aspect (my animus), a task I’ve been actively engaged in for the last ten years. When I went through my divorce, my most fervent wish was to replace my husband with another man who would come and rescue me—financially, sexually, and socially. Little did I know that my soul had other plans—plans that first and foremost included developing the male skills of financial literacy and business savvy as well as learning how to become the kind of woman who would attract the kind of man who interested me (hence the dream’s setting at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts). In retrospect, I see that I had to make what Carl Jung called the
hieros gamos,
or sacred marriage between the inner masculine and inner feminine parts of the self. In short, I had to become the man I wanted to marry. This dream signified that I had made great progress in that area. I woke up very excited!

Betty, one of my friends, found herself in a painful social situation in which she felt that two of her colleagues were blaming her for the fact that they were being passed over for job promotions. Betty is very bright and creative and is always able to come up with new approaches to her work that are fun, innovative, and productive. Her colleagues through the years have often been jealous of these abilities. Because she loves working with people and has great difficulty with interpersonal conflict, this latest situation was very painful for Betty. She contemplated quitting her job and moving across the country, even though her work was very fulfilling. When she became aware of the hostility of her colleagues in this current situation, the feeling this evoked in her was old and all too familiar. She had been unfairly blackballed, picked on, and scapegoated similarly by others. It had happened over and over again at other jobs and in several other settings, both personal and professional. Completely fed up with being thus victimized by others, she wanted to choose another way to live with her gifts and talents. She decided to do a dream incubation to ask for guidance in changing whatever unconscious patterns kept attracting situations in which she ended up as the victim of other people’s inadequacies. After noting all the different situations in which she’d been victimized and allowing herself to feel fully how disgusted she was by the whole thing, she asked for a dream that would help her clarify her situation. She wrote, “Why do I keep re-creating situations in my life in which people pick on me?”

That night she had the following dream: A very good friend was seated to her left. The friend reached over to help a porcupine, and the porcupine shot its quills at her. Betty’s friend took the quills and embedded them in Betty’s arm—then looked in her face to see what her reaction would be. Betty simply sat there and allowed the quills to be painfully embedded in her arm. So the same friend took a handful of needles and pins and began sticking them in Betty’s arm. Meanwhile, Betty continued to say nothing—simply sitting there with the pain of this. Finally, Betty decided to do something about her pain. She began taking the needles out herself. When she did this, a great deal of blood started pouring out of all the needle holes in her arm. Overwhelmed with the pain and the extent of the bleeding, Betty then decided to complain to her friend, telling her it was not okay to stick quills and needles in her arm. Betty then looked to her right side and saw her mother, father, and sister all sitting there.

When Betty awakened, she realized that throughout her childhood, these family members had insulted and even physically beaten her. Betty had never com plained and had never said anything. Instead, she simply put up with the pain and allowed herself to bleed. (Remember, blood is symbolic of family.) As she reflected on her dream, Betty realized that she didn’t need to move or change jobs; she needed to change the way she responded when people expressed their resentment of her. She could no longer allow psychic, emotional, or other barbs to accumulate without saying any thing. She knew that she had come to the point of “bleeding to death” from the accumulation of a lifetime of hurts that she had never acknowledged or complained about. Because of her upbringing, she had been led to believe that if she complained, she’d simply get beaten more. Now Betty realized that she had to stand up for herself at the first sign of discomfort in her relationships. She saw how deeply the victim mentality had been drummed into her in childhood. She had used her considerable gifts and talents to escape her family of origin— only to have the original family pattern recur in all her later relationships. Having become very clear about her part in creating victim situations by refusing to defend herself, Betty now speaks up for herself at the first sign of discomfort. She also realizes that if a colleague has problems with her abilities, this is not something that she has to fix. The colleague herself must deal with her own inner sense of jealousy and inadequacy to see what it is teaching her. Betty cannot do this for another.

STEP EIGHT: GET HELP

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep in
side us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our
trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk
curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that re-
veals the human spirit.

—e. e. cummings

Setting aside the time and money to go and talk with a skilled listener can be invaluable. This person may be a therapist, a minister, a life coach, or other trustworthy individual. These sessions can be a way to stop, reassess your life, and give yourself a much-needed focus on a regular basis. Many therapists have helped people begin to look at their lives differently and effect change. A good therapist should be like a midwife, standing by while someone gives birth to what’s best in herself.

When I was about fourteen and upset about something that I can’t even remember now, my father told me how important it was to express what I was feeling and “get it off my chest.” (The phrase “get it off your chest” is an accurate anatomic description of dealing with fourth-chakra issues, such as sadness, which tend to affect the shoulders, breast, and heart.) He told me, “I notice a tendency in you to clam up and not say what’s going on. When you do this, you prevent others from helping you.” It was good advice. We all can use a reassessment of our lives and a skilled listener on a regular basis. Support of this nature should be built into the culture. Community has been largely lost since the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing split between work, home, private, and public. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be necessary for us to go to individual therapists or to create sep arate support groups for those with cancer, those suffering from loneliness, or even those who want to flourish.

My colleagues and I worked with a therapist regularly after starting our Women to Women health center to learn how to talk openly and honestly with one another—and to deal with emotions that women aren’t supposed to have, like anger. Our therapist never tried to change or “fix” us. He simply provided a safe place for us to say what we needed to say to one another— without our thinking we had to take care of the feelings of the person we were angry with at the same time. In the early years of our practice, we honestly didn’t know that we were capable of having a perfectly functional relationship with one another even if we expressed anger or disappointment. We had no skills for breaking through our old habits of “being nice.” After doing extensive codependency (relation ship addiction) recovery work, we saw that those early therapy sessions were crucial for our ability to be honest with one another and with ourselves. As our self-awareness skills increased, we required many fewer sessions. Our group “therapy” (now called “team building” in the ther apy profession) helped us create independence. We were able to take what we learned and internalize it, and we eventually learned to commu nicate among ourselves without an outside person assisting.

There are many different kinds of therapists. The entire field has been changing in response to evolving knowledge about addiction, recovery, and the influence of childhood trauma. Therapy is not something that should go on for years, in my view. When it does, it can become an addictive process in and of itself—not much different from the alcoholic-enabler duality. All relationships, therapeutic or otherwise, work best when the participants see each other as essentially whole beings with inner resources and strengths, though sometimes in temporary need of assistance.

Though individual therapy is often a first step for many women, group work of some kind, such as a twelve-step group or a skills training group, can be powerful in that this setting helps us see that our problems are shared by so many others. A member of Overeaters Anonymous once told me, “Addiction recovery is God’s answer to community.” Group work certainly is one answer that is helping millions. The practical wis dom contained in the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is a blue print for how to live a life based on inner guidance. Many other twelve-step fellowships use AA’s steps and simply take out the word
al cohol
or
alcoholic
if it’s not applicable, substituting something more relevant.

Groups help rid us of our “myth of terminal uniqueness,” as a therapist friend calls it, while individual therapy, especially for wounds such as in cest, can isolate a woman further because it “privatizes” what is in fact a cultural and even global problem. Part of the wounding power of addictions, in cest, or other sexual abuse is due to the secrecy with which we approach them. Imagine the relief of participating in a group of women in which all of them are saying, “That happened to you, too? I always thought I was the only one!”