I was in a tunnel surrounded by nothing but darkness, when suddenly entering my sightline; I could make out an hourglass. When I questioned the moment and the meaning behind the symbol I felt it represent timing. As it left my sight I was immersed in darkness once again. I hear myself asked out to the darkness: “where is the light and how can I find it?”
The scene before me quickly shifted once again. This time I was slowly pulled backwards out of the tunnel. I could see my perspective changing again, I could see the tunnel I’d been in was actually the iris of an eye of a hawk.
A drawing from my journal entry. The eye of a hawk and the entry to the tunnel.
My focus narrowed in on a small reflection of the sun in the same eye. However, the instant I recognized the light’s reflective source, I was once again in the middle of the tunnel. This time felt different though. I could walk through the zigs and zags of the pathway and it seemed as though I could in fact see the light shine around each bend.
A new scene came.
This time I wasn’t alone any more. Now I find myself side by side with each member of my family. Each of us facing out, a very slow moving train car. The train was moving so slowly, in fact, that we could have easily walked off. There, looming over us was an overwhelming sense of urgency among my family members to rather speed the train up. All at once, the impression comes to me that in order to move the train we must first lighten our load.
Each of my family members, as if following instructions, begins to throw excess baggage off the train. Even my small son is standing with his hand holding the train and the other tossing bags. As more bags are thrown the train begins to pick up speed. It’s so easy, throw the bags, and speed up the train. A fear washes over me as I watch this scene unfold. It feels unfair to just toss our baggage without any regard for the earth, and yet as I think the thought, I see mother earth absorb our luggage and grow a tree in its place. Her message comes to me clearly, give me your baggage and I will create new life with it.
As each bag is released the train continues to increase in speed. As the speed is increasing, the train becomes our motorhome driving through a long tunnel. This time as we feel the motorhome start to slow a new impression comes. There was one bag left for us to leave behind. It’s not just my bag and it isn’t just theirs, it was ours. As we let this last bag go, two trees appear in its place. A pine tree and a willow tree, to forever continue to grow.
At last, the hourglass appears again and we fade into its golden light.
While laying on the massage table in my friend’s office, after making several serendipitous connections from my childhood to my current life, she gave me the gift of energy healing and meditation. During my time on the table, I had that vision depicted above.
After leaving her home, I took 15 minutes in my car to write this vision down. It felt like there were millions of parts I could dissect and investigate more. I love this sort of thing. It felt like a puzzle and I was in every single piece. I knew that if I could put it together, it would help me to understand why I was reliving all my past horrors, and by choice of all things.
On the surface,
I believed it to mean, that I had done so much of my spiritual healing that my body and soul were ready to toss out the baggage I had been holding onto. I was watching myself leave behind the attachments I had held so firmly to. I watched myself release the need for the white picket fence, in the perfect neighborhood, with a gorgeous kitchen. At first glance, I thought the vision meant confirmation of a job well done. I had done the hard work of looking into the not so pretty parts of myself and now my reward would be a lighter load to carry. I believed my motorhome would travel swiftly and safely as we’d left our crap behind.
We were only 16 days in at this point… and little did we know we’d eventually lose our refrigerator door just a few months after this session. We continued traveling and soon left our home state of California, it didn’t really seem to get any easier. In fact it was getting harder and harder. At 6 months in I am rewriting this vision down as it now has new meaning.
I had felt like it was a sign that I had accomplished my spiritual goals, but in fact, I had just started my hero’s journey to the heart of it.
The one thing that I knew for certain is that my new traveling experiences and their déjà vu like quality to my childhood memories, were no coincidence. I was being given an opportunity to face each of these moments, and the inevitable onslaught of memories, head on but this time with wiser eyes.
I quickly started to recognize when I was in just such a moment. I would start to get frustrated, feeling like I couldn’t get a grip on things. I am someone who can adapt to new situations, learn quickly and apply what I learn almost immediately. This time was not at all the case. Everywhere I turned it all just felt too hard. This became the sign. When I started to feel like it was just too damn hard, and it isn’t even possible to be this much of a hardship to seek freedom. In those moments, I started to look for similarities.
Those clues lead me to memories that had been stored and the stories that were created from those moments. I started to understand that somewhere inside me still lived every single traumatized age and moment of my 33 years. They lived as fragmented pieces of myself in my bones, in my ovaries, my kidneys and my heart.
It was like all the childhood fears of monsters under my bed were 100% true, only the real monsters were just younger versions of myself somehow trapped in each memory stored somewhere in my body. It’s no wonder I feel so achy.
I remember being in therapy at 18, after having suffered more than 3 panic attacks in a one-month period, my insurance finally allowed me to sit with someone to talk about why I thought I was having these panic attacks. I can vividly remember telling her that I would not talk about my life at all and how I simply wanted to move forward without ever having to open that box. As I write this now, it is dawning on me, that my vision of throwing out the baggage was not something I had done, but rather the thing I was journeying to do. I had opened the box.
