Wild and Free

I went back to the shaman shortly before New Years. It had been a cool experience this summer and going again seemed a fine New Year’s-y kind of choice. I mostly went from a place of curiosity about the sacred technology and psychoneurobiology at work. A mere curiosity. I had no plan. During intake she asked what concerns I wanted to bring to the session, and without planning to, I brought up my back injury. It’s been a long time now, it feels a long time, and I have done So Many Things for it. Yet it remains chronic. Is there anything in it that her technology might be able to speak to, on a non-materials plane?

She scanned me, rattled, bird-whistled a bit. And she sat and thought, for what seemed a particularly long time, then surfaced and said: when you fell, the physical injury re-activated and connected to the deep emotional injury you were carrying under the surface, and they became enmeshed. That’s why it is persisting.

Also... it matters that you fell into a hole. You were in an emotional hole early in life. When you fell into the physical hole, you fell back into the emotional hole. Those two things connect. Also, it feels like there might be something here from a past life. In a past life you may have spent a long time in a dark hole. Maybe in a dungeon.

I just nodded. Like you do. So we began the session.

Singing, invoking, chanting, brushing, drumming. I was working hard to follow instructions on breathing. The brushing was so strong it almost hurt. The work part of the visit seemed to go on a long time. Eventually she had me stand and breathe in a different way, picture bringing the breath up from the Earth through my feet, then on the exhale breathe out what needs to be released into the stones she placed in my hands. Then back onto the table, and just about the time I was thinking nothing was really going to Happen in this session, thinking that the cool first session musta been some kinda fluke, I felt the breathing change.

It reversed.

You think you know how to breathe, you don’t think of it being possible it could REVERSE. But it did. I have asthma and am often congested. My experience of breathing is one of pulling the air in through my nose and mouth, sucking it in through a straw and working fairly hard to get it all the way down into the middle of my lungs. Getting it to the bottom of the lungs feels quite difficult. Guided meditation can get me there sort of but I didn’t feel altered and it wasn’t exactly relaxing; I was working. Exhaling also requires work, I am actively blowing out, squeezing the ribs together. Sometimes in opera lessons I have felt it be different and easy, I know it SHOULD be, but it isn’t.

But the breath reversed lying there on the table. Suddenly I wasn’t working, it just was welling up from my feet, filling my lower lungs first, inflating the rest of me, and when it was time to leave, it just kept going out of my mouth. In yoga we sometimes say: “allow yourself to be Breathe-ed”. But I’ve never felt this welling kind of breath before, just HAPPEN.

After only a breath or two of this different Being Breathed thing, an image popped into my head, and I had the thought: breathe that out. So I did. I breathed out the face of the first someone who traumatized me in childhood, made me feel hunted. I didn’t blow it out though. It was just a leaf I chose to release into the strong river of breath flowing through me, and it floated quickly away. Then another face came, the second one; I released him too onto the surface of the river and he was gone. Then the third one came, the one in adulthood, breathe him out. He was a big one. He needs two. Breathe him out again. Then they were gone and I melted into Being Breathed.

At which point the shaman who had said nothing to me for a while exclaimed: “Ah! There it goes!” And changed something what she was doing.

At the end of the session, we dreamed a dream, which is core to shamanism. The dream is even called The Medicine. As before, she invited me to a mountain meadow, Mother Earth beneath me, covered in sweet grass and wild flowers, embraced by Grandmother and Grandfather Mountain, and Father Sky above pouring down his sun. My image changed abruptly and the light from Father Sun was an arcing waterfall, like the arch of a rainbow and it was pouring into me, into my belly which pulled it all in, like a cup being filled with fountaining water. I’m lying in a mountain meadow and I’m the black pot of gold drinking in the gold shimmering rainbow.

The dream moved on. Go to sleep. Feel how Mother Earth embraces you as you fall into sleep. Now awake. You are on the Plain. You are a young. Male. Indian. This is your home. The herds of wild Horses are galloping across the Plain surrounded by the mountains. Feel how that feels. The sun. The shaking of the ground. The breeze as they pass. The sound of the breathing. Their animal smell. Now you are the young strong vibrant Indian man and you are riding with the herd, bareback. Feel the warmth, the connection to the wild animal beneath you, feel the movement in your body, feel being part of the herd. He-you carries the staff, with feather and streamer attached, all of this flying in the wind, flying across the Plain with the herd of wild Horses, joyous. Wild and Free. Feel how it feels in your body, to feel Wild and Free with it all.

Now the horses are gone. You lie down again in the grass, and go back to sleep, and then awake. And you bring the dream with you.

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Afterward, my middle aged shaman lady that you would walk right past in a grocery store without remark, said that she had cleared stubborn, crystallized darkness from my torso, especially the chest. She said:

Go be wild.

That’s the antidote for what was removed. Find wildness, put wildness in that place. Replace the feeling of darkness with feeling wild and free.

I walked out feeling high in a way I’m starting to associate with the shaman and nothing else. I bought some prayer flags in the shop that hosts her monthly sessions, cuz the flags in my garden are due for replacement. I noted that I have no idea at the moment how to be Wild in the middle of my mid-Atlantic megalopolis in the winter. It was sunny and warm so I left the shop and walked away, enjoying the feeling of sun on my face and feeling alive.

I didn’t notice I left my thin, ultralight, full length black raincoat behind. The one I bought in Maine with john last fall, that was a bargain and is so useful. It has been wearing thin with surprising speed.

I haven’t gone back to pick it up. I strangely feel that maybe it’s better, maybe it’s on some level Right, that I put it down with the shaman, and choose not to pick it back up.

I need a raincoat of course but I could get another one. Princess thinks maybe raspberry could be fun in the rain.