The Dreaming Fire


Tonight I saw Susan. She and I have been friends for many years, since the first time she came up my stairs in my old apartment near 21st and Valencia, in the Mission District. It looked like it was a hotel converted to mostly studio apartments. But the one I got hold of was the lobby I guess, because it had a big room with seven full-sized windows. I worked in that room, using a solid oak table so that I could jump up on it and do adjustments and stretches

There was a little girl who shared it with me sometimes. We played music and told stories and dive-bombed the Mickey Mouse bottom-weighted inflatable punching bag. We ordered pizza from the Pizza Pop downstairs and went up on the roof to look out over the city. It was the tallest building in it's vicinity.

Susan came up the stairs with her hair on fire. Then I realized it really was that red, and she really did have that much energy. She was like a match, so much fire.

I did some deep tissue work with her, and we realized we were both going through a divorce and suffering in the same way. We'd both fallen in love with somebody else and left for them, and now we were being emotionally roasted in hell for being the bad guys.

"You really know how to hurt a girl," she said. She liked the deep tissue work. I liked her sense of humor and that she knew her way around. She owned a night club South Of Market and buzzed around in a BMW convertible.

We were doing hypnosis and breath work, and keeping her energy going when she was having a hard time feeling anything, and I swear that the energy we moved on more than one occasion had so much fire in it that it began to materialize all around her.

Her scooter burned up. She arrived back home from a session to find the security police there. Her alarms had gone off, and she had the time when they went off. It was the same time she was in the session and she made contact with her animus figure in a trance. Then there was a fire at the night club and it caused a lot of damage. And all we could do was just look at each other and share the knowledge that there is a definite relationship between what happens in the psyche and what happens in the environment. It is what Jung called "synchronicity."

It is the Dreaming Fire. It is the strong emotion that somehow changes material reality. It is the source of extrasensory perception and special knowing. It is the key that unlocks another world, one which the contained and safe view as shadows on the cave wall.

Through the time we spent in intense bodywork therapy, she was dealing with fire. And a few years later, once she was in a new home and with some domesticity going again, I dreamed she walked across the kitchen and grabbed something with her foot and picked it up. Then, her feet as nimble as hands, she climbed up some hanging baskets of fruit and vegetables to pick out some food. We had a good laugh about that one. And it wasn't long afterward that she had a boyfriend and was cooking amazing meals again. "Well, I guess you're grounded again," I said, after telling her about it.

Analyzing dreams has, over time, become a part of my practice, and I have come to believe that if you can teach somebody to pay attention to their dreams and think from their point of view, they don't need anything else in the way of guidance. But you have to trust the dreams. Not trusting them causes chaos and divorce and estrangement from your own unconscious, and it will be reflected in your relations with the opposite sex. Whatever path we were on, Susan and I were on it together, and could understand each other's pain like we were Bill Clinton and Dr. Phil.

When Paul Simon wrote "Graceland," he got it right when he said, "Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody see's you're blown apart, everybody sees the wind blow." And then you find out that you thought you could leave somebody you had loved for a long time, but you can't. Oh, you can go away. But they're right there with you, because bodies don't just separate so easily as that. They love each other in a different way, and they are not as foolish as the mouths that speak lies. They tell the lies because they are the part that has to be sacrificed to grow up and be more mature. The body always knows. But it has no voice with which to speak the truth. The truth is silent until the voice learns to serve it instead of making it a slave to vanity.

That's why bodywork became such an important area of knowledge for me, and why I love to work with the physical person, and not just what they have to say. I can feel of someone and know a lot about them. If the toes are curled and the calves slender I can see they are trying to hold to the ground. I can see the puffed up chest and back of the aggressive, the exaggerated hips and upper thighs of the masochistic type, the anger stored between the shoulder blades, the energy blocking in the lower spine or the absence of energy in the feet, the tight neck and shoulders in the woman who is in animus possession, the hardness in the stomach of someone who cannot allow themselves to be vulnerable to feelings. Mostly I can begin to see the electrical grid in the trigger points, and where the energy is blocking, and then how the body image is emotional first, and physical afterward.

This is the reality of the person. It's different from the practiced stories or the lies they tell that they don't even know are lies. When I studied with Brugh Joy, he said, "The mouth lies. It doesn't know that it lies but it does lie." And I thought about that sometimes, and I listened to myself and I realized he is right. My wife is going to the initiation seminar with Brugh the first of May, and that is frightening and exciting. We would always come and go in each other's lives, but she said, "I always know that when you show up there's going to be change."

And I know that the times of change are both a dying and a new life. That sometimes I have to break the patterns that have formed around me and do something new, reach out toward new people who are on a great adventure, and to whom help appears when they need it. And I know sometimes I am that help for someone and sometimes they pass by and there is not real connection. It has to do with the energy that passes between us.

Once in awhile it bursts into flames, and lights up a particular day, and a particular person, and I wish I could paint "Susan Coming Up the Stairs" complete with the dreaming fire.

Posted: Wed - February 18, 2004 at 12:13 AM