Unearthing the embers of a dream

THE NATURE OF US

How do we find the courage to support our dreams, to express what is inside us? Sometimes life surprises us with a surprise encounter . . . and the new emerges.

Following my essay on returning to the west coast at the beginning of shelter in place, I began to review the last three years. While I felt stronger after I returned from Boulder, it was a very lonely time during the pandemic, more isolation than I had ever experienced. Living in a new town, I knew no one. Unable to work, learning zoom, communicating by mostly emails and texts, all of it was daunting.

To catch up on my year in Boulder following my divorce, here is the essay:

Rocks, Trees, and Flow

One day near the end of 2022, still regrouping from the years before, I was feeling listless and a bit depressed. Walking down the path along the ocean cliff leading to the bench at the point, I noticed a stranger sitting on the bench, facing towards the ocean. Not wanting to interrupt, I stood about 15 feet to his right, looking out to the sea. This is the place where the ocean meets the bay, and it’s always very compelling.

Are you my neighbor? I was surprised to hear the man’s voice. I pivoted to see his friendly smile, his whole body turned towards me in a welcoming way. We started talking. He ate his sandwich, offered me some, and invited me to join him on the bench. It was a great rambling conversation, and I learned he had written a novel, and was eventually going to retire here and write more, having purchased a nearby house. Eventually after a half hour or so, I went on with my walk, noticing my mood had substantially improved. For a few days I obsessed over that exchange, the excitement of meeting someone I could relate to, wishing it had developed into something more, curious if I would ever see him again - and wondering why this event had emerged in my life just then. It felt significant.

Soon, blessedly, my envy arose: I want to be a writer in a house with an ocean view. He’s going to live my dream. I had grown up thinking I would write. I remembered in high school on the school paper knowing I was going to be a writer. Starting out as an English major in college, after a few obstacles arose, I began to leave the dream behind. My desire wasn’t strong enough to survive the rigors of growing up. It became so buried I forgot about it.

Now I had met someone reminding me of my long ago dream! In the past, I was often attracted to men who were living the creativity I wish I had. This time, instead of projecting my creativity onto him, I was going to act. I began to pull out my old school papers and journals, revisiting all that I had written. I had been writing since my twenties in journals. I felt somewhat encouraged as I read. But yikes, I couldn’t see myself having the stamina and organizational skills to write a book. I met up with my disbelief that I could do it.

I also needed to earn a living, writing seemed both impractical and impossible. I tried to focus on creating and seeing clients. Yet the new platform Substack was growing in stature, attracting writers, and began to lure my attention. And the idea of essays wasn’t as daunting as writing a book. I plunged in, wrestled with learning a new format that didn’t come easy to me, and began to write in April 2023. You are reading this story as a result! My confidence and determination were tentative, however, still emerging and refining.

A few months later in early summer, I wake up feeling dark with a sense of dread. Walking around making my breakfast, I have this sense of deep aloneness. I question my ability to survive in this world, to support myself, to function. And, it is still foggy and gloomy outside. I realize my dread is all consuming, and climb under the covers in my bed again.

I know when my feelings are this strong. I have to be in silence and just feel. Years ago I developed a process of somatic inquiry that I use on myself, and with others, to get to the root of issues. Mostly it is about giving myself deep attention.

I begin with feeling my body, getting a felt sense of myself. I feel a deep ache on the left side of my spine near my heart area, and staying with it I start to sob. I let go into feeling the hopelessness, and how I have no sense of how to live. The ache in my heart continues to deepen, and I gently breathe with it. As I stay with the feeling, I realize it feels like I am being squeezed by an anaconda winding around my spine. It moves over to the right side of my body down by my lower back. I note two things: that I have a slight lifelong scoliosis, a twist in my spine, and that my right side of my sacrum can subluxate, the bones moving out of alignment.

I stay with the tightness and breathe, having done this process many times over the years. I just need to be with the sense of things arising and changing, breathing gently. After awhile I begin to notice the right side of my upper spine seems to have no breath, all the breath is on the left side. I then include the right side in my breathing, and slowly begin to feel a lightness. The two sides begin to balance out. Now there is a feeling of support down the sides of my spine, and the twisting tightness disappears.

The insight now arises that the vulnerability of the left side has been met by the support of the right side. There is a sense of vulnerability and strength coming together.

A while later, my felt sense of wholeness and strength has been restored. I can move forward in life. I come back to a bodily sense of the flow of undivided wholeness through this somatic process of discovery. Insight always arises last, after the process resolves. I know myself a little better now, I understand that my feeling of vulnerability needs to feel my supportive strength as well. Not feeling strong enough is a way I can get lost.

(You may have wondered about the anaconda, what an image! It likely arose because I had recently watched a Joe Rogan show on the rain forest, and had seen photos of these magnificent snakes).

What I feel is occurring in a process like this: nature is taking over, guiding my inner unfolding. The elemental forces of air and water, my breath and blood, slowly begin to open the knots of tissue inside, moving the cells and opening parts of myself. Attending closely to my process is the fuel, as energy precisely follows wherever attention focuses. The cellular earth of us is moved by our attention. The body opens.

This is a process I may use to work with a client, and also a practice you can use whenever it is needed. There is no doing, it is a being, a resting in silence and just noticing where your attention is drawn. The body knows what to do once it receives deep attention. There is no goal, it is an exploration of what is moving through me at any moment. This is a powerful way to receive information from my insides in an awake but dream-like state. And it is a way I access the unique perspective that my individual self is revealing.

This inquiry is an example of how the elemental forces of which your body is made connect you to your world. The air you are breathing comes from outside the body, yet stirs the inner fluids, the waters within. Your respiratory system and circulatory system work together. The heart nestles between the lungs and rides them like a pillow, supported by the breathing of the lungs as the blood circulates. Tracking these forces can release emotional blocks and bring new insights to the surface.

What I have realized over these last months of writing: my love of the process has been growing. I am fanning the embers of a dream, and the fire is growing. The fire is the dream of my heart, a longing for a place I can express my heart. And finding more support for my openness to express feelings is essential. I am realizing what writing can be for me: following the threads of my feelings inside, letting the various streams emerge, an improvisational unfolding in which more of what I feel and know is revealed.

I think the above events occurred for the creative fire within me to grow, for my vulnerability and strength to come together. Any creative endeavor requires taking a risk to reveal your insides, and the support to express it. I feel my passion growing, I feel more alive, as the result of this chance encounter on a bench, not even a year ago.

Through connecting to what we feel inside, resurrecting long forgotten dreams, and expressing through ourselves into the world, we interactively participate with the fertile circle of life, eloquently expressed by Stephen Harrod Buhner, in his book Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm:

Art - real art - connects artists and their art, and those who experience their art, to the metaphysical background of the world, to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical. That is, in part, its ecological function. . . . . For if we should recapture the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, go below the surface of sensory inputs to what is held inside them, touch again the ‘metaphysical background’ that expresses them, we would begin to experience, once more, the world as it really is: alive, aware, interactive, communicative, filled with soul, and very, very, intelligent — and we, only one part of that vast scenario.

Thank you for joining me here today!

Sabrina Page, MA in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness I work with individuals and groups, with a focus on somatic inquiry and embodiment, to support you in living life fully, freely, and fluidly, intertwined with nature. As well, I have studied movement, dance and astrology with some of the leading individuals in their fields. My private sessions are offered on zoom, phone, or in person in Bolinas, Ca.

More information is available on my website, sabrinapage.com

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