Somatic Dreamwork

Ever since my first exposure to it in a class called Dreams & the Body taught by Karen Jaenke, somatic dreamwork has become one of my methods of choice, both when doing my own dreamwork and when working with others.

Somatic dreamwork involves listening to your body, and specifically finding where dream images live in your body. According to the somatic dream theorists, dreams live in our bodies in much the same way memory is stored in our bodies. The dreams stay in our bodies until we unearth and work with them.

How does one connect the body and the dream? A great technique is focusing, developed by Eugene Gendlin, who wrote one of my favorite dream books Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams. Basically, the dreamer closes her eyes and focuses on her body while holding the dream or a specific dream image in mind. Usually within a few moments a body sensation or felt sense appears. It can feel like a stabbing pain, a murky unpleasantness, a warmth, tingling in the thigh...any number of sensations can appear.

After finding the felt sense, the dreamer stays with it as long as comfortable and tries to see what the sensation has to say. This can involve asking it a question or merely staying with it to see what comes up. In my experience, what the felt sense has to say surprises the dreamer and leads to an "a ha." Other times, the felt sense moves around like a slippery fish, trying to escape detection. Usually though, if the dreamer stays with it, she will gain insight into what the dream had to say through the body sensation.

While working with Karen in a recent session, she asked me to feel a specific dream character in my body. Immediately I felt nauseous, one of my least-favorite sensations. However, I tried to stay with the nausea. As I watched it and allowed it to be present, it began dissolving and eventually morphed into relief. Instead of pushing against the nausea, which had a specific message, I allowed it to appear and held it gently, listening to its message. After I received the message, it did not need to remain and it disappeared. This is important: often body symptoms have a great deal to teach us if we are willing to listen to their messages rather than pushing or medicating them away.

Remember my friend with the house dream? I used somatic dreamwork with her, asking her to feel where the house lived in her body. It turned out that the house was her body. This caused her great surprise and gave her a valuable message.

I recommend trying this the next time you have a dream you can't figure out. Choose the most potent image from the dream. Close your eyes and ask the question, "Where does this live in my body." Give it time to appear. Follow your body sensations...do you have a crick in your neck? A warmth in your leg? Any sensation you have is valid. Then stay with the sensation. Arnold Mindell would recommend amplifying the sensation, making it more intense in order to get its message. Then ask the sensation what it wants to tell you. Listen. If it moves, allow it to move and simply follow it with your attention. Patience and an openness to your body's messages are key.

I've found that these methods get past all the complicated work with symbols and archetypes. Don't get me wrong: I love work with symbols and archetypes, but sometimes I want to find the message of the dream in its pure and immediate form. And this method can be incredibly and deeply healing.

Deep Listening

The weeks leading up to my surgery have coincided with a class I'm taking called Body Consciousness, Body Wisdom. It is an appropriate class, to say the least. I had a lot of resistance coming into the class at the beginning of the quarter, though. I avoided taking it last year because it did not sound like something I wanted to experience. Getting in touch with my body? No thanks.

As it happens, this class was just what I needed in many ways. The irony of the situation does not escape me -- I needed to be in a class about body consciousness during one of the most difficult body experiences of my life so I could gain tools for dealing with the situation.

One wonderful tool I have learned is listening to body parts. This happens in a few ways and they can work together. First, you can work with how the part feels in relation to the other parts of your body. During this exercise, I chose to listen to my left ovary and the cyst around it. I laid on my back and felt into the space the ovary and cyst occupy. I moved this way and that, sensing how the ovary and cyst felt differently when I moved. I discovered the ovary and cyst became aggravated when I laid on my left side. To me, this meant that they did not want to be covered up, they did not want to be under pressure, and they did not want to be pushed down. As soon as I rolled onto my back, they felt much better.

Of course, the messages the ovary and cyst sent were not trivial. I know now that my ovaries are precious. They are part of the physical and energetic center of my creativity and sexuality. Listening to them will mean a great shift in my life. Pushing them down, covering them up, and putting them under pressure to perform can no longer work.

Another exercise I found rewarding in the Body Consciousness class was creating a movement in response to listening to a body part. In this exercise I chose my throat, which represents my ability to speak my truth. First, we created a physical movement that represented how the part feels in present time. Then, we asked the part what it wanted to say, or how we could bring about change. For me, the movement included both strength and fluidity. The message? I can be strong in speaking my truth, but also gentle. Practicing this will be a challenge, but now I have a movement I can physically reproduce to remind myself that this is how my voice wants to express itself.

I recommend doing either of these exercises whenever you are curious about the messages your body is sending you. Find a quiet place, relax, center yourself, and then ask a body part to speak. If you are doing the first exercise, move in different ways to see how the body part feels in different positions. You may find one position is more comfortable than another. Get curious about this and ask the body part what it is telling you. Or, don't do any movements at all. Just listen to what the body part has to say. Either way can be powerful.

Of course, there is one caveat: these exercises can go deep quickly. Sometimes it is necessary to speak with a professional about what comes up, because the things our bodies want to tell us are sometimes shocking and difficult to hear. But this dialogue is always rewarding in the end.

Why It's Important to Listen to Your Body and Your Dreams

My body and my dreams are infinitely wise. They patiently send me signals that I mostly ignore, but sometimes, on my better days, I listen. Now I plan on making it a regular practice to humbly and respectfully listen to what they have to say.

I've had intense dreams, many of them including disintegration, dismemberment, bloody animals, knives, and things lurking in the shadows, since January. It was apparent these dreams were telling me something, but I wasn't sure what. And I never wanted to entertain the idea that they were about my health.

I've also had a twinge in the left side of my pelvis for probably two years. At first it was tiny and I dubbed it my intuitive twinge...many times when something was not quite right, this area would twinge and I'd thank it for its message, a message that usually saved me headache.

However, for about the last six months, that twinge morphed into pain. The pain became debilitating during my period, something that only a few people knew about, and only my husband had witnessed until last weekend. A friend came over on Sunday and saw me in my pitiful condition. I was weak, barely able to stand up to walk her to the door. When I saw her reaction to my state, I knew it was time to go to the doctor.

I'd recently been given the name of a gynecologist by another friend and on Monday, I made the call. They got me in yesterday.

I have to back up a moment and tell you that I've been avoiding gynecologists for years because of trauma suffered during previous gynecologist visits. I had a male gynecologist make derogatory comments about my body when I was a teenager and a female gynecologist do a rectal exam without telling me first. A third gynecologist failed to help me with recurring yeast infections. I gave up on Western doctors at that point. So, although this twinge became more and more persistent, I ignored it, hoping it would go away so I didn't have to deal with the gynecologist. Also, I didn't want to deal with bad news.

Back to yesterday. I visited the capable and friendly doctor. I explained my symptoms. She gave me a pelvic exam and then brought out the ultrasound machine. And that's when she found a 6" cyst attached to my left ovary.

I began to cry. I cried because I was scared, overwhelmed, upset, and I felt guilty for not coming in sooner. She told me I need surgery. It is a complex cyst, both fluid and solid, and although she thinks there is a tiny chance it is cancerous, she has to make sure. It has to come out or it will continue to grow and cause me more pain.

When I left the office, I called Lance in tears. I've moved past the guilt and the intense fear, and I've come to a better place thanks to many phone calls and conversations with friends. I know that I'm going to be okay. It's laparoscopic surgery so it's minor, outpatient, and minimally invasive. The recovery typically only takes a week. And after that, my greatest wish is that my periods will no longer cause me debilitating pain.

As part of my process, I've thought about this growth on a symbolic level. I believe, because it is a complex cyst made of fluid and solid mass, that it holds two things: my creative/feminine self and the trauma I've accumulated over the years. The fluid is the creativity, the solid mass the trauma. Once it is removed, I will have truly given birth to my beautiful creative feminine side and I will have removed the trauma holding me back.

I know it is important is to work with this on an energetic level as well. I plan on exploring therapy, dreamwork, psychic healing, and visualization techniques during the three weeks until I go to surgery. And I'm also going to hold a ritual for the energy of the cyst to honor the wisdom it is bringing me. Everything happens for a reason, and my body created this to send me a message. I plan to deeply explore what that is so I can learn from it and move on.

It's going to be quite a rebirth. And, like any rebirth, it is scary, dark, and risky. But once I come out the other side, I will have new gifts and wisdom to share.