Dear Participants of the “Song for the Dreamer” Class:
Thank you for sharing your Beauty during the class on Saturday! We welcome you to share your experiences from the class, what you are singing as your daily practice, to yourself and/or with your group or witness, by posting here.
Here also as promised a link to an article from Wired Magazine where you will find the humpback whale sounds that helped us recognize Beauty in the class!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/humpback-whale-song-2/
and from Bernard inAustralia, sent in the “chat” contributions during the class—thank you Bernard!
http://www.coolmelbourne.org/articles/2011/04/whales%E2%80%99-grandeur-and-grace-up-close/
With vibrating tones of affection,
CleargreenDreaming and the Tensegrity Instructors
cleargreendreaming
From Bernard Rooney to Everyone (12:23:44 PM):
http://www.coolmelbourne.org/articles/2011/04/whales%E2%80%99-grandeur-and-grace-up-close/
I have found that since the class I have been singing the song whenever I feel overwhelmed by something. The singing calms me and I am able to get to a state of joy and balance. It’s okay…I say to myself…this is not so bad. I’m able to get through the day and get home with energy intact and happy to be alive. I also hum when I am around people and can’t break out into song and find that the humming works too.
The songs put me in touch with my spirit, my body, and my intent.
I really enjoyed the class last weekend and with tracking my self through song.
Very lovely!
The class last week was peculiarly sweet. I had just got back from a train journey, which was like travelling in a line like whales do along a dreaming track. Somehow I couldn’t hook in to the class for the first half an hour, but that gave me an intensity for what was happening. The first class hooked me into the motion of a sea being, whilst this second one helped me somehow to feel more of how whales feel – like when *reaching the hole above the head* I felt as if reaching a surface and drawing oxygen through a blowhole. Or after using the tennis ball on the feet and those other foot passes, the bottom end of me has flexibility and independance, like a big tail fin.
The decision passes as an aid to the song creation enables me to project my early morning throat discoveries into the day ahead, predicting and encouraging energy to flow in intended ways. I almost see a detail of the day that a modulation, note or phrase is going to be useful for. Its fun to play with, but also opens interesting inquiries into the nature of the self. I’m also exploring reverberations of sound in the skull, like whales. I’m looking forward to the next class.
Hello beings of infinite beauty!
While writing this i’m still under the enchantment of the timeless soft nostalgia of the song of our fellow navigators, i found it following the link from the Sound-Dream seminar announcement and it led me to this page: http://navigatorslog.com/my_little_love.shtml
This class made me realise and experience in the middle of my belly how whales are not only massive beings but also how HUGE and massive their joy is! When i was listening to their songs this triggered incredible tickling tremor in the midsection and produced laughter :)))) Their songs were so optimistic–all had ascending notes of melodies!! It was as if i felt firsthand those beings’ wild(complete joyful abandon) freedom and (surprised to feel this!) humour. The cool darkness of the ocean enveloped me, i felt them/me turning, playing, twisting, flying…
For the first time i felt on body level something that i had observed before only intellectually: the fact that these beings actually fly. They move in an environment that has a density which is close to the density of their bodies. This not only allows defying gravity but also provides great sense of interconnectivity–no empty spaces inbetween beings!
This sensation is precisely what i feel in the rare instances when i go out with the energy body. In my case it is like an amorphous, shapeless mass of relative viscous ‘densitiy’ which floats in a sea of energy that has very similar density.
Looking at this fact some time ago, the vision came to me that this may be one of the reasons why trees may resemble human beings more than animals do: trees have a vertical simetry as humans, and just as human beings the upper half is a dense body in much less dense environment (branches in air), while the lower half is dense body in a just as dense environment (roots in earth)–in human beings it is upper half of physical body in air and lower half is energy double in a sea of energy.
Since the previous class i was happy to reach twice the energy body durring sleep. It doesn’t happen too often for me. At one point in the past when i was emerging with the energy body in the world here i felt terrible barriere and preasure. It was as if one is suspended upside down and the head would explode, only the pressure was not in the head but in the heart/solar plexus area. Each time i was to “go out” there was this barriere and i just was afraid to cross it in the case that i die from the pressure. At one point i had enough and just said “GO go go!” and crossed out among sounds of terrible buzzing. Something let go and then the pressure was never so strong. It was a nice thing to see that in the last (very short) dreaming with the double this barriere was still opened–i could “cross” without getting the terrible “heart attack” feeling of earlier years. These classes motivate me to reestablish interest and intent in dreaming once again!
From the beginning of the class i felt sense of connectedness triggered by the “white noise” of the transatlantic computer static that sounded for sometime before there was speech. It reminded me both of how i grew up by the ocean, escaping regularly from school to walk along the beach of any season. There were the ships in the distance, the lost objects of all kinds washed ashore among smooth shells and branches. It always reminded me that–”oh what a joy! half of this world is the unknown open sea ready for journey!”. It also reminded me of the static noise of a short wave radio i had and listened to in the night–turning the dial one could hear the ships’ messages in morse code and stations from distant lands overseas.
The class gave great charge of lasting vitality. The decision element in the whole of passes gave liquid quality to this vitality opened the voice. Also i was pleased to notice that i can stay silent and attentive for most of the class length: something impossible for me years ago. Another curious thing in relation with this and the other classes is that durring the class i become incredibly HUNGRY :P! ..the way hiking in the pure air of a mountain makes you hungry.
Observing the etherial artistry of how the class is structured with lines of energy rhythmicly interwoven i am once again filled with gratitude and admiration for those who can see us, ALL seer-dream-practitioners, as specks of vision and can not only assemble a full picture out of it but also see what it means reading Spirit’s themes and designs this way–applying seeing, instead of acting on personal whims…for so many years!
thank you everyone for keeping this dream pure, awake and alive!!!
***hugs***
Thank You movaytine for this tail strike. I’ve searched for it.
A Story of Comparison
I felt ill at ease throughout the class. I was tense on arrival, and on seeing my own video image alongside the other practitioners I became stuck in self-reflection, in comparison – frozen like a rabbit in the glare of headlights, unable to free my gaze and move away. I stayed stuck even throughout the whale song and singing.
And yet, something was aware of a similarity between the whale and Nyei singing, which touched me, spoke to me.. it was the freedom from judgements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ singing, it was the free flowing expression, unencumbered by parameters of fitting into or living up to ideals and standards.
I had written on my list that I believed my voice to be ‘too weak’, that ‘real singers’ have loud knockout voices, and I am not a real singer. It was the first time I formulated this judgement.
I still felt crappy after class, but I had a date with friends to go dancing, celebrating Beltane, and resignedly I donned my sequined glitter-outfit.. on the way, moving now, I saw.. that my voice reflects my physical being and my essence- I’m rather slight, quick, light, gentle but penetrating, passionate yet sensitive and tender.. something in me began to smile with glee, as the song ‘my body (and my essence/voice!) is Beauty’ echoed within..
That night, I felt so at ease and at one with expressing my essence to music.. and more, I could see the beauty of all of the expressions around me, the other dancers. I let go of comparison, of ideas of good or bad dancing..and experienced the most divine freedom and joy. I was dancing, merging, perceiving the essence of the dancers with my own essence, expressing those perceptions in dance, gliding exquisitely in a sea of sublime energy..
When I woke this morning, the Story of Comparison filled my awareness, and I wrote it:
My grandmother’s childhood had been so devastated by trauma, catastrophe and trouble which also shamed, humiliated and destroyed her self-worth, that she became a fanatical, puritanical Dona Perfecta with her children, who were to be pure and untainted by trouble or problems. One of her three children fell from grace, was deemed to be ‘trouble’, and was vilified and persecuted throughout her childhood. She ceased to be a child to her mother, but became the personification, the living embodiment of the shaming, devastating catastrophe of her childhood, and as such, had all her mother’s loathing and hatred of that past heaped upon her. She was the Enemy, and the main weapon used against her was Comparison. It was not a war of bloodshed, but a Cold War, psychological war, aimed to wear the enemy down, day by day, year by year, grind her to dust. Comparison. Her mother openly compared this child to her siblings and judged them superior and worthy of rewards of kindness, approval, affection, while judging her inferior and worthless and deserving punishment, exclusion, contempt, and icy coldness. Day after day, year after year, she fought the enemy like her life depended on it- until she was defeated, her spirit broken, her true self buried forever in a tomb. This child is now 75 years old, and still buried in that tomb, the most alone and cold person imaginable. To this day she has no contact with her siblings, who are icy cold strangers.
This child is my mother. And she repeated all of this, with her children, to a T.
I was the Enemy, I was fought, I was defeated.
In fact, I became her double enemy. Not only was I ‘trouble and calamity’ personified (after repeated sexual abuse at age 3), but I also represented the ‘favouritised siblings’ of her childhood – because her own husband (my father) openly favoured me above his wife, comparing us constantly and declaring me his Nr.1, adulating me while rejecting his wife with ridicule, contempt and brutal insults. So as well as the loathing and hatred of ‘trouble and calamity’, her hatred and wrath towards the ‘favouritised siblings’ was also loaded onto me, as my tortured mother relived past hells and set out to destroy these two vile enemies rolled into one, using the deadliest weapon she knew- Comparison.
From the age of 3 onwards, she fought me, deliberately favouritising my sister, openly comparing, ridiculing and condemning me to her, excluding me from their gay rapport with back turned icy silence or lashing me with her tongue in wrath, always cold, always harsh, victoriously demonstrating my sister’s worthiness of kind, caring treatment and my worthlessness deserving only the worst. At the age of 15, at the very brink of extinction, I fought back – and in a mental hospital, one final terrible trauma hammered the nails into the coffin of my ‘worthlessness’. My spirit broke, left my body and this world, and my true self died. I was sealed and buried in a tomb, and that would have been the end of the story, had it not been for the Nagual Carlos Castaneda and the Warrior’s Path…
and for my spirit who never stopped calling me to her, who loves me so deeply and would do anything for us to be together..
Thanks to them, 32 years later and 6 weeks ago, the stone which sealed my tomb rolled aside, I rose from the dead and walked free. The weapons which destroyed me, comparison and judgements of worthlessness, have become mere shadows, without power, and those who wielded them, using my mother’s and my own mind as instruments, have given up in defeat.
I live to tell the tale, and tell it I shall, and dance, and sing and soar, celebrating every moment of my new life, my new freedom, my rebirth…
The class initiated a deep healing process. I saw the movie ‘The King’s Speech’, in which, like me, cruel comparison made a child feel that his self, his essence, was worthless, and crippled and silenced its expression- his voice. Healing took place when someone said “I see you, your essence, its Beauty, and I want to to hear you!“ and in time the silenced one saw his own worth and reclaimed his voice. The second part of this is the true healing. I saw that as a child, all my attention had become stuck on my mother, and later on others, like the rabbit transfixed by headlights, by danger.. and I believed that my deepest longing was (and is) for her to see the Beauty of my essence and choose ME to love. Now I see that this was a trick of the flyermind. What I have truly been longing and waiting for, above all else, is seeing and loving the Beauty of my own essence, and choosing my SELF to love, above all else. This awareness brought me exactly this.
My path deeper into freedom is now my fierce love of my essence and my passionate loyalty to its expression.
Two days ago, I went to a gathering of artists, to sing. After singing, two professional singers followed, unexpectedly. Comparison tried to transfix me and failed. I just said No to it, choosing to love and be loyal to my own essence and its expression, my voice. Then I got up again to sing this love, loyalty and Beauty which, having gone through hell and back to find, I am not about to relinquish without a fight :)
The freedom to choose to love my self, freeing my locked gaze from my mother as God with the power of life or death over me, has healed my bond with her. Our common bond of shared experience unites us, like sisters, one woman to another. I know what she went through, because I acknowledge what I went through, fully, and it is impossible to feel anything but compassion, equally, for us both.
The Beginning
Indigobloo, hello, Your story has great value to me, and will do for others for a long time to come as it evolves. I almost felt you were getting over-melodramatic at one point but realised that it was not the case. I find it difficult at times to hook in to the emotions of people who have had heavy trauma in childhood. My own childhood knew little of trauma at the level you kindly shared. But the story of comparison intrigued me the most.
I guess its a uniquely female way of destroying another – indeed I saw a movie just today where a woman basically said that to another (Roman Adventure 1962). I am in a circumstance now where my partner is executing similar behaviour toward my son (not hers) and has been doing so for some years. It really is a concerted campaign, yet she does exercise restraint and acknowledge his and my feelings. How quickly she alters from enemy to friend! So it is not nearly as toxic as your situation was, yet the continuing occurrence of it I find difficult to cope with at times – supporting him and her in working through it, and, most of all, understanding. She had difficulties in her childhood that I am still trying to fathom, difficulties related to separation and her step-father.
I’d would like to have read something in your account of lulls in your mother’s determined effort against you when she acted in a friendly or kind manner toward you. Surely they were there… ? Or were they so infrequent and ineffective so as not to be worth a mention?
Thanks again for this courageous post.
Thank you, Movaytine, for your warm support and honesty, I’m very touched. I didnt like to be asked those questions at the end as they messed with my cleancut version of the story, but then it got me thinking.. and Yes, there were lulls, and they were the best times when we laughed uproariously together, my parents both have a great sense of humour, and sometimes when things were more relaxed, we would crack up laughing and larking about.. it was our one means of communication- and it was a good one, I see now, and the one we still use together. Also makes me aware: no matter how trapped people’s spirits are- they always bust free in guffaws of laughter. Shine on, oh indomitable spirit of humankind!