The Honor of Being Treated Like a Puppy

We had a sweat lodge last evening and I left after three of the four rounds due to some exhaustion and beginning cramping.  Long experience has taught me that I would feel quite a bit worse as soon as I left the lodge.  I did.  One of the participants had brought their dog, a large female mastiff. When I left the lodge and began to lay down, she nudged and nosed me to check if I was alright, which she has done many times in the past.  On this occasion, she persisted in her nudging and then gently (for a large dog!) tried to get me to play.  She was treating me like one of her puppies - quite an honor!  It is quite an experience to connect with another animal the way I do with other people.  I finally covered myself with a blanket to stop her and she laid down next to me, pushing her body against mine and we both just laid there.

We Are Not in Control

It is certainly not unusual but I work with a person who seems to like to think he is in charge of maintaining order in his own personal life and with respect to events in his work life.  He seems most comfortable when things are going according to his plans and gets noticeably agitated when they do not.  I can certainly identify with his approach since I used to be that way.  Before recovery I was quite a bit more extreme in my desire to have events fit my plans.  During recovery I have experienced increasing faith and trust along with a decreasing desire for events to fit my plans.  At this point, I choose to believe that we are not in charge of much of anything.  That way I can live in the moment, without the stress of trying to control things and with maximal acceptance coupled with minimal expectations.  Desire to control still comes up periodically, which I find to be a somewhat amusing indication of my humanity.

Symbolic Resolution of my Alligator Dream

Without having made a conscious choice on my part, beyond getting in better shape, my spiritual alligators are now swimming around and I am feeding them and caring for them, without knowing what that means.  Faith??  Understanding is not required.

I was a bit surprised by the strength and intensity of the feeling of love and affection that I felt for the alligators/crocodiles as I cared for them during the meditation.  The feeling just washed over me and reminded me of the same feeling I get often during the day when interacting with someone, being hugged by a tree, embraced by sacred herbs or a variety of other things.  A magical feeling that I did not know about until my close connection with what I call God.  I have only felt that feeling before due to my interactions with God.

Symbolic, Spiritual Alligators

Last night I had another dream about my grandfather’s pond, a dream symbol for my spiritual condition.  In the dream the water was very clear and the pond was large and deep, suggesting that I am being very open and clear as a channel for the God power.  Unfortunately, there were also five alligators (I keep saying/thinking alligator, but they were slender, like crocodiles).  They were all suspended above the pond where the stone wall and big tree used to be, near the dam.  At any rate, I threw dirt wads at one of them in order to wake him up and he did.  He dropped into the pond, swam near me as I laid on the path on the house side of the dam and then I woke up.  There was a definite feeling of forbidding like with the snake vision. Between the rattlesnake and the alligator, I suspect I am doing something not healthy for my spirituality.  Perhaps becoming too comfortable and complacent.

Maria suggested that I actually needed to wake up all five alligators, that there is a lot of power there.  She is right, though I know little beyond that.  I am fearful of waking them up.  I have misused power in the past and I am wary of doing so again.  All I know at this point is that I need to be less passive and be more aggressive about getting in better shape, physically, which will have an impact spiritually/emotionally.  Also I need to look into the possibility of a reciprocal therapy license in MD.  Each is proactive and goes along with the possibility of relocating, instead of taking a purely passive role.  This puts me in a strange situation, since I am totally happy with my situation here!

The Importance of Sorting Time

A quiet day, no clients, I began by doing exercises, cleaning bathrooms, doing paperwork, in preparation for tomorrow and set up the splitter for the next lodge.  I “split wood and carried water” (Zen saying), a good, solid, grounding day.  As I generally do, I also spent a fair amount of time in quiet contemplation of my own process and the process of those lives I touch, what I call  sorting time , I find that a substantial portion of each day needs to be spent in the quiet solitude of sorting time.