A woman physician in Alaska dreamed that her two grandmothers, one Athapaskan Indian, the other Euro-American, paid her a visit in the same dream. They told her, "Go to Robert Moss. You need to meet the Bear."
At the time, the doctor had never heard of me. But she entered my name on an internet search engine, and immediately pulled up the details of a workshop I was leading in Oregon a few weeks later. The title of this program was: "Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dream Healing."
The physician did not hesitate. She booked a plane ticket, flew down the coast, drove in a rental car out to a small center near Bend, and was soon singing an indigenous song to call in the healing power of the Bear. In the first morning of the workshop, she joined in a group journey to go down into the Cave of the Bear and receive its gifts. She came back with tears of joy in her eyes. She told us, "I now know what is required for me to be a true healer as well as a physician. When my patients come to me, they will get the best that modern medicine has to offer. At the same time, they will receive the healing power of the Bear, because that is all around me."
She later reported that she felt the Bear paws over her hands, gently guiding her in her work.
This rich and beautiful experience was only the first of our encounters. The doctor from Alaska came to subsequent Active Dreaming workshops, and in a journey for spiritual guides during a week-long adventure at the Esalen Instiute, she met a radiant being whose body seemed composed of liquid gold, who wrapped his own energy and insight, and that of his serpent companion, around her. She had received a vision of Asklepios very much in the way that the ancients perceived this sacred guide, the god of dream healing. She promised that she would carry this transpersonal energy, also, into the consulting room, and would urge her patients to bring her their dreams as well as their symptoms, and to seek both diagnosis and keys to personal healing through the visions of the night.
In this way, a doctor became more than a provider of medicine. In a sense, she became medicine, carrying the power and the insight to operate in the transpersonal and spiritual realms where keys to understanding the sources of illness and of healing are to be found.
Art: Drumming Bear by Cristina Craciun
2 comments:
Thank you so much for sharing this. I hope more physicians are prodded (by whoever can best reach them) to embrace their roles in all dimensions of healing.
Hello Robert, Thanks for your blog! Coincidentally, I got the following email from my son on the same day of this blog. He had a dream one week before this blog. The dream was about a metallic star hitting a bear on his third eye area. I read on internet that the six-point star is called Star of Life and is seen on emergency vehicles and medical equipment. To help us understand his dream I wonder if you could share the story of the bear picture on this blog.
The following is from my son:
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Go read that blog post first, then look carefully at the image.
Now listen to a strange dream I had last week around the time I returned from Thailand.
I am out in a dry grassland wilderness; I am reminded of perhaps Utah or Western Colorado, after you've crossed the Rockies. I see a small metallic object flying through the air, and my awareness follows it through its trajectory. It's shaped like a star and is perhaps the size of a half-dollar coin. There are about 30-40 soldiers dressed as though they are from Ancient Greece marching in phalanx across the plain. Meanwhile, the metallic-star spins towards the first row and slices a little gash into the necks of the first 6 or 7 soldiers. My awareness zooms in and sees that the gash on each soldiers' neck (located around where you'd find the vocal chords) swells up and "blooms" into what look like lips. It's bizarre, but before I can think about it my awareness zooms out and I watch as the "wounded" soldiers fall to their knees, as if dying.
The metallic star has continued flying, however, and my awareness now catches up with it, leaving the soldiers behind. I see the star flying directly towards an animal off in the distance. Strangely, the star doesn't fly as it naturally would. Counter-intuitively, it flies through the air with one face forward and the other face backward (unlike a disk which flies with one face up and the other face down). As the star and my awareness approach the animal, I see it is a bear. Behind the bear are two bipedal beings in black cloaks wielding curved metallic sickles. I am wary of them.
The metallic star is flying rapidly and hits the bear on the forehead between the eyes. It presses itself deeply into the bear leaving a scar in the shape of a star where the bear's third eye would be located. The bear seems to be in pain and struggles to stay standing on all four paws. I wake up feeling disturbed.
Ok now go back and look at the picture of the bear in Robert Moss' blog entry. It has a star mark on its third eye.
Any ideas???
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