The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (23 page)

“The memory of that feeling stayed with me in the morning, and resurfaced throughout the day. However, I noticed that whenever the love and light entered my heart, it would not enter completely — like it stopped in a certain place. That night after work, I reentered the dream to clear the energetic block and allow the love and light to fill my heart completely. I set as my intention the mission of finding the person attached to the other end of the heart cord I saw in my original dream. In this dream journey, I

held onto the cord and almost swam along following the cord as far as I could go.

“When I returned from the journey, I painted a picture of how my heart looked in my original dream. With each stroke I focused my attention on infusing the painting with the energy of the dream. I imagined myself dragging the cord from my dream and connecting it with the center of my painted heart.

“In waking life, I was introduced to a friend's friend, who was very much like men I had dated in the past. I carried the memory of that dream feeling with me and looked at my painting frequently. I quickly realized that the feeling I experienced with that man was not the feeling I had had in the dream, so I decided to break up with him.

“A few weeks later I met Sam Doctor, and knew instantly that this was the man at the end of the heart cord. As I approached the restaurant where Sam was waiting for me on the evening of our first date, he turned and smiled and opened his arms wide. In that first embrace I knew I had found the partner of my dreams.”

Sam and Marybeth were married fourteen months later. When Marybeth Doctor (as she now was) told me their story, she added, “We live very happily with Daffy, our dog, and Ladybug, our cat.”

Three Steps to Open the Way

To become Waymakers, in our own lives, we need to take three simple but vitally important steps.

First, we need to turn our minds, and our inner senses, in the direction of our true destination. We cannot do this if we operate only on the level of the little, everyday mind, the conscious ego. We need to reach deeper into ourselves, into our heart and gut, and ask for higher guidance.

Try this now: put your hand on your heart. Listen to your heartbeat for a moment; see how your heart is. Now move your hand to the center of your chest, to your heart center. This is the place of courage — courage is a quality of the heart, and we will only find it here — and the place of our deepest feelings and our personal truth. Ask yourself,
What is my heart's desire?
Let your heart answer. Let images and impressions stream from its core. These may involve finding creative fulfillment or your soulmate, release from illness or restriction, a life of abundance and joy, or remembering and accomplishing your sacred purpose in this life experience. You may find, like Marybeth and the Polynesian Waymaker, that when you find the place of your heart's desire, you will recognize it as a place that has already been opened to you in dreams.

Second, let your deepest yearnings take you into a scene in which you are enjoying the fulfillment of your heart's desires. Be there with all of your senses. Taste it, touch it, smell it — a baby's breath, sunlight on your lover's hair, the pages of a newly printed book you have published, wood smoke on a chilly evening, the roll of the surf. The more vividly you inhabit this scene, the closer you are to manifesting its key elements in your physical life. Grow this scene strong and deep enough, and you will find it has traction. On your darkest days, in the midst of the stress and clutter, this scene will be more than a place to escape; it will help to get you through.

Finally, hold this vision in your mind. Every day, take a break from your pressures and obligations and go back inside that scene. Enjoy it again, add to it, bring in whatever you need that is missing. You are growing the vision of an
attainable
future.

Hold the vision in your mind, and honor it every way you can. Place objects or pictures in your line of sight, at work and at home, to remind you of the vision. Paint your vision, if you are able, like Marybeth. Take at least one physical action every week to keep your body moving in the direction of your heart's desire and to reassure the universe you mean business.

4. THE BIG STORY IS HUNTING US

“I will not just be a tourist in the world of images,” proclaimed Anaïs Nin, with magnificent defiance.

We want to be
travelers
, not tourists who are pushed from one package deal and photo opportunity to the next, forever letting others tell us what to see and where to go.

We want to be more than characters in a prepared script. We want to live our own story — not just the daily dramas, but the Big Story, the one that is forever hunting us, even when we have no sense of it whatsoever.

And we want to learn to use the power of story to change things for the better.

“How Does One Learn to Tell Stories Which Please Kings?”

In her beautiful memoir of a harem girlhood in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi gives us a stunning education in the power of story. Her text is one that everyone — in the West and the East — knows something about. It is the collection of tales properly called
A Thousand and One Nights
. As Fatima explains what these stories meant to her, and what they mean for Muslim women in general, we become aware that in the West, we have almost no inkling of what they mean.

Scheherazade, the young bride of a savage ruler who has killed her many predecessors, must spin a captivating tale every night to make the king postpone his plan to have her beheaded at dawn. Her husband is a tyrant possessed by the spirit of revenge. He discovered his first wife in bed with another man — a slave — and killing her was not enough to dissipate his raging hatred and distrust of women. He ordered his vizier to fetch, one by one, every virgin girl in the kingdom. He spent one night with each, then killed her. Now there are only two virgins left: the vizier's own daughter, Scheherazade, and her little sister. Though her father wants her to escape, Scheherazade is willing to do her duty. She has a plan that will change everything.

As Fatima tells it: “She would cure the troubled King's soul simply by talking to him about things that had happened to others. She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself. She would help him to see his prison, his obsessive hatred of women. Scheherazade was sure that if she could bring the King to see himself, he would want to change and to love more.”

Scheherazade keeps the king spellbound through a thousand and one nights, and at the end he is changed. He loses his desire to murder women.

Fatima first heard of Scheherazade from her mother, in the closed world of a harem in Fez. The word
harem
here does not mean a stable of concubines and slave girls, but a closed male-dominated world in which women of all ages are kept under lock and key, forced at every turn to think about the
hudud
, the boundary enforced by religion, law, and custom. When little Fatima learned about Scheherazade, her first and eager question to her mother was: “How does one learn to tell stories which please kings?”

This, of course, is the question we all need to answer, to heal our relationships — within ourselves as well as with others — and our world.

Mernissi notes: “I was amazed to realize that for many Westerners, Scheherazade was considered a lovely but simple-minded entertainer, someone who relates innocuous tales and dresses fabulously. In our part of the world, Scheherazade is perceived as a courageous heroine and is one of our rare female mythological figures. Scheherazade is a strategist and a powerful thinker, who uses her psychological knowledge of human beings to get them to walk faster and leap higher. Like Saladin and Sinbad, she makes us bolder and more sure of ourselves and of our capacity to transform the world and its people.”

To save her life, and a man's soul, Scheherazade must create a new story — or at least a fresh episode in an ongoing tale — every night. Eventually this becomes a source of pure joy, and she is no longer improvising out of desperation, but from the pleasure of doing it.

Surely we can recognize ourselves — and our potential for healing and creativity — in her situation.

In the darkest passages of our lives, the power of story can get us through. We may recognize ourselves in the weave of a mythic tale or in something from folklore.

One of my favorite healing stories comes from Japan. It is a story of soul loss and soul recovery, and I have often wrapped its magic around women who are in need of healing from old shame and abuse. The Japanese story reminds us that even a goddess can be wounded, to the point where she loses the brightness of soul.

A Mirror for the Sun Goddess

The sun goddess Amaterasu is shamed and abused by a raging male, her stormy brother Susanowo, who is a hero when it comes to fighting monsters but is no hero in the family home. They have had children together, born magically from gifts they have given each other — three girls from Susanowo's sword and five boys from the jewels of Amaterasu. But Susanowo plays the spoiler, smearing excrement where Amaterasu makes fertile fields and crops, throwing a horse that is sacred to the goddess into the midst of her intimate weaving circle, and so on. The storm god's violence reaches the point where Amaterasu takes refuge in a rock cave. And the light goes from the world.

In her dark cavern the once-radiant goddess sits brooding on the past, sinking deeper and deeper into feelings of guilt and shame. Maybe she starts telling herself that what has happened is somehow her fault, that she failed her consort in some important way, that she failed to give what was needed. In the depths, she has lost her inner light, while the world has lost her radiance.

The myriad gods and goddesses are desperate to call the sun back. They try many ruses to lure Amaterasu out of the dark cave. They call on a wise god, whose name means Keeper of Thoughts, to advise them. He usually keeps his best ideas to himself, but the cold and darkness in the world worry him, too. So he counsels the gods to gather all the roosters that can be relied on to crow at dawn. He tells the gods to hang a mirror with strands of jewels on the branches of a tree at the entrance of Amaterasu's cave. The gods do this, decorating the tree with bright cloth banners, without fully understanding the plan.

The cocks crow, the gods whoop and howl. And the sun goddess stays in her cave.

Now one of her sister goddesses, Uzume, comes up with a plan of her own. Uzume is the goddess of mirth and revelry. She is also called the Great Persuader and the Heavenly Alarming Woman. Now we see why. Uzume overturns a tub near the mouth of the rock cave, strips off her clothes like a professional, and moves into a wild, sexy dance that has the gods laughing and bellowing with delight.

Amaterasu is curious. Why is everyone having so much fun? She approaches the mouth of her cave and demands to know what is going on.

Uzume calls back to her, “We've found you the perfect lover. Come and see.”

Suspicious but tempted, Amaterasu peeks around the edge of the boulder she placed at the cave mouth to shut out the world. And she is awed and fascinated to see a figure of radiant beauty looking back at her.

She is drawn, irresistibly, to this beauty, and comes up out of the darkness — to discover that the radiant being is her own beautiful self, reflected in the mirror the gods have hung in a tree near the cave.

Now the god of strength rushes out and holds Amaterasu, gently but firmly, to restrain her from going back into the dark. Another god places a magic rope across the entrance to the cave. Gods of passion and delight lead Amaterasu back into the assembly of the gods, and her light returns to the world.

In this marvelous collective dream, soul recovery and soul healing become possible when we help each other to look in the mirror of the greater Self. Mirrors hang in the temples of Amaterasu today, to remind us to look for the goddess or god in ourself. When we locate the drama of Amaterasu in our own lives, we begin to make a mirror for the radiance of the larger Self that can help to bring us, and those we love, up from the dark places.

Being Caught by Your Bigger Story

It's been said there are only seven basic plot themes in the stories of humankind, but some maintain there are thirty-six, or sixty-two, or only one (with many twists and bends). We've been offered nine personality types in the enneagram, six archetypes in another system, twenty-two major arcana and sixteen face cards in tarot, all of which may or may not mirror stories we live based on our characters.
Ethos anthropoi daimon
, say the Greeks. We translate this as “character is fate,” but it means something more, something slippery to our modern understanding but important to wrestle with. It means that character is the personal
daimon
— the demon or angel — that manifests and enforces the events we will live.

I don't know whether there are seven universal stories, or any other number, but I believe this: each of us is called to remember and live our personal and unique story, the story of our soul's purpose. That story may have its origin on another star, or in the depth of ocean, or in the meaty wisdom of earth. It may intersect with other stories — stories remembered in myth and folklore, stories dreamed by those we meet whom we have known somewhere before and with whom (if we are fortunate) we have cause to continue or to heal and resolve.

One such Big Story is the “dream of the forgotten contract”: A successful businessman dreams of a night visitor, a man with the qualities of a “simple Christian” who knocks on his door and announces, “I come from my father's house.” The visitor stuns the businessman by asking, “What is your contract with God?” The businessman wakes, shaken to his core. He knows, in his heart and his gut, that he must apply himself to remembering, and honoring, a sacred life contract that he has forgotten. He continues to make his way in the world, but he does so with the awareness of obligations to a deeper world, and he does much good in the lives of those around him.