Last night I was awaken at 3 AM by a nightmare that left me with heart-crushing anxiety. Racing mind. Overwhelming fear.
I have written about this before:
Jackie Dumaine wrote a very stark and raw blog about her own personal experience she titled “Breaking Open: A Melt-Down Story“. When I re-read her blog this morning, I was surprised it was almost identical to my experience today. I was reminded of how many other people in my life have been going through crisis lately. We are not alone.
DREAMS
What I do not normally write about is my dreams, that personal internal landscape of the mind.
Dreams have been a powerful force in my life. I have predicted deaths, had visions of my future, and been given glimpses of my next steps in life. I link dreams to my intuition, guiding me, or warning me, or helping me sort through the unconscious ‘dirt’ that lies on the floor of my soul.
After a traumatic experience during my fifth month of pregnancy, I stopped dreaming. For almost two years, my intuition shut down and instead shifted into daily fight or flight that I now recognize as serious anxiety. At the time I did not even notice, but when my life shifted and I found myself in a new home, safe and secure… dreams returned. That was when I realized they had stopped, and how important they had been to me.
REALITY
My current practice in life right now is ‘seeing things as they are’ and this dream challenged all the stability and strength I have built. Seeing this dream as an ‘illusion’ and my racing mind and thoughts as ‘illusions’ was more challenging then I ever imagined it could be.
I struggled to shake the anxiety and the overwhelming judgment I was placing on myself… I struggled to see this as just a dream, and not feed into the terror of what my intuition was telling me. From this brief dream, my mind went on a tangent of what it could mean, and made me feel foolish and doubtful about myself and my choices…
I was in crisis.
TRANSFORMATION
I tried breathing, counting, body awareness and going back to sleep… but my mind and emotions continued to consume me. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus on anything but the horrible feeling inside me. So I gave into it; I gave into the fear I was fighting and when it took over I cried and cried…
And as always, it moved on through and left me feeling relieved and clear headed.
I let another layer go.
The judgment is gone. The fear is gone. The anxiety is gone. For now, I am strong and stable again and have been humbly reminded of the power of ‘an edge’ and why instead of fighting it, we should allow movement for change and evolution both inside us, and outside of us.
Trust the powerful process of transformation.
Gentle Hatha Yoga | Jenni Burke 
His Holiness Chamunda Swami Healing Center from Hicksville, New York often posts a detailed explanation, description and picture on Facebook of one of the many Hindu Gods. They always represent qualities of life. Here is one that reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. “Never Not Broken” has become a mantra for me that reminds me to let go. I was reminded of it when I read yuour blog.
Goddess Akhilandeshvari means “Never Not Broken.” She embodies the power and opportunity of being broken into pieces by heartache, disaster, loss and other life changes and traumas.
However, She purposefully keeps Herself broken wide open, allowing Herself to ebb and flow with every current, creating and fragmenting; recreating Herself endlessly.
She adamantly refuses to put Herself together into a stable form, shunning the limitations that She’d have to abide by and the false identities that would hide Reality.
She rides on a crocodile. She is not controlled by the need to keep her identity consistent, or even alive. She dances and spins and breaks herself into shards of light, tossing out new possibilities for herself like flower petals from a cherry tree. Akhilandeshvari is the personification of destruction and rebirth.
She is the Goddess of Surrendering to change.
George that is amazing and beautiful and inspiring… thank you for sharing with me… now I want to paint a picture of this Goddess… or write/illustrate a children’s book about her…
Very nice personal essay. Your advice is solidly grounded in your own experience and practice and the historical experience and practice of others.
I write about dreams every morning that I can remember them. They are great clues about what’s going on inside me.
Alice
PS Thanks for the follow.
Your welcome for the follow; congratulations on being Freshly Pressed, and thank you for the kind comments!
Thanks for your kind words. I’m having fun with my moment. 🙂