Keeping Visions Alive with Sacred Imagery

Saturday, October 26th, 2013

 

 

Similar to psychotherapists, shamans believe that healing the past occurs through feeling in our hearts and bodies. Telling (and retelling) our recollection of the past or reliving our dreams in any given moment can connect us with the feeling. At deep levels of profound energetic collective experience, a faint thread of conscious awareness is held by being with the feeling. Following the feeling of energetic experience is the only means of connecting with the experience at a pre-conscious level. This is the because these states exist at a preverbal and pre-image level – and feeling states are the only channel available to us at deeper levels. Once an energetic experience can be felt, it can be recapitulated – and processed.

Inner symbols charged with psychic energy often become accessible in dreams, synchronistic events instilled with meaning, and through shamanic vision. The process of re-membering by circumambulating around a symbol or image is a top-down approach that often eventually becomes grounded in the body in an “a-ha” moment.  From this feeling state, symbolic imagery may emerge that provides structure that can contain the energetic experience.

After returning home after one trips to Peru, for a period I dreamt of snakes. I had dreams of snakes lying by my feet at my computer as I wrote and of carrying them around in my pockets. Snakes became my companions in the inner world. In one of my dreams, a powerful snake split the floor open beneath me. In another dream, I was taking energy from a large snake in the otherworld and giving it to baby snakes in this world that lived in caves. The snake dreams I experienced provided my psyche with a metaphor for working with and assimilating the powerful energy of Amaru associated with the numinous experience.

The length of time we carry the charge of the afterglow of numinous experience in our luminous body depends on our willingness to engage with our vision of the experience and to keep it alive in our minds, hearts, and bodies. Engaging in this way offers a means of entering a dialogue with non-ordinary reality. The constant element in each of these processes is that connection with the experience occurs and is maintained through the body, first somatically, then as emotional feeling, and then in the form of imagery. The sequence of steps involved in the recapitulation process corresponds to experiencing energy through the belly, the heart, and then through the mind.

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