old enemies become friends

Dream this morning: ( The blog is really living up to its title, “Dreams and Awakening”)

I am in a big forest with some friends, looking for mushrooms. It is in Sweden. I find some huge blueberries and eat some – the feeling is like finding treasures. Suddenly we are at the border to China – and the border patrols are extremely strict and a bit menacing. They have opened my old red rucksack, and inside they find the middle of a huge flower – it looks like a sunflower, but could also be a lotus. It is still fresh, not dried. One of the guards thinks that this might conceal contraband, and smashes his hand inside it – for some reason I am not upset, I know I have more of these -.

I feel an awesome love for the guards. It does not matter at all that they seem strict, I know their hearts, it feels like they are  my old friends, just pretending to be guards and protecting a border. – One of the guards, who speak fluently American, shows me some wooden toys he has made for his child – and it is a holy moment, where enemies become friends – or rather, re-discover that they always were. I am included in his culture. It is an exquisite feeling of peace, joy and happiness.

Now our group wants to sing for the guards. I want to sing Christmas songs, but the rest of my group does not agree.

French installation visited

Going on the bus today, I said inside: “you are as God created you -light and love and peace abide in you” to the driver and passengers, and my heart turned so soft, so motherly. The driver started to talk to me after a few minutes – just small talk, but he wanted a connection, and that felt as a
confirmation of what I had just seen in him.
And from there my day went up. My doctor whom I love very much looked pained, and when I asked if he was in pain, he said his back was stiff and painful and he was restricted in moving. I got an impulse to do EFT with him, and he said yes(he really IS a special doctor ) and in one minute the pain and stiffness was gone.  He acted like a little boy, so happy! I then gave him a little clay-crazy-wise figure I had made – he looked at it and said: “it is GOOD. I must place it somewhere where it can look out for me.”
In the morning, I had a very intriguing and interesting dream – brilliantly clear and distinct in its visual and kinesthetic aspects. I was inside a H U G E complex- what a great metaphor – and it had to do with the French. The complex turned out to be a huge piece of art, an installation with hundreds of rooms, walking through them you could choose to interact with the various persons in the rooms (thought most of them seem to be asleep.) Every person was impeccably made up – but a little too refined, you know – a little TOO much makeup…
Audrey Hepburn was there, impeccable in her costume from the film “Breakfast at Tiffany”…and there were two nuns, also heavy made up, like in a theater-play – and they wore a mixture of nun-habits and folk-costumes. Very interesting mixture, seen from an old costume-designer’s view.
Very few people were awake – and the way they were placed in beds was so delicate, like they were placed in an exquisite painting/installation.Not a detail is left to coincidence. It is interesting, fascinating, decadent and intriguing – food for ego. None are real.
This is SO a script – a French script – and esthetically I am thrilled and enjoy it – I know everything is made up and fake, but it is brilliantly done. It is an installation for alienation: nobody is “at home” within themselves. Glamor.
It feels great to have no judgments at all in this fake-instillation-world, and enjoying the “show.” I still give this value, I see. Interesting. How fun it must have been to design this work – overdo each detail exactly as much as this.

I miss my old stage-design work right now.

stalker

The last nights have dished out nightmares after nightmares. At least three the same night and morning. I am starting to see it as a cleansing process – these are all themes from earlier in life that I have judged as bad or unjust.

The dream this morning was pointing to the separation – believing I lost my father’s love. In the dream, an earlier boyfriend, Bill, who was an alcoholic and very unpredictable, accused me of having stalked him for a long time. He told this at an expressive arts therapy-retreat where he now was a student, and he told it in front of all the students AND the person this life that really has loved me as a father – a male professor.

The professor believed him. I had lost my father’s love. The thought was completely unbearable. I woke up from it – this was the third nightmare in a row this morning – crying wildly. Remembering that this had happened in high school too, when a girl in my class had accused me of being a slut, and suddenly a lot of people believed her. I was horrified – I thought I was a virgin at that time, having repressed my childhood completely.

Now I allowed the feelings – the feeling of being an outcast from society – and in the last dream, being separated from my beloved professor: in his eyes I now was a cowardly lunatic, and there was nothing I could do to clean my reputation.

I am not a character in a victim story. Oh let me see this differently!I am willing to be healed from this!

In this moment I see how Bill recognized in me someone who sees as her inevitable role to be a receiver of others projections, and to suffer unjustly.Somehow it felt “known.” Right now the fear around it falls away: if it happened to me now, I could talk to Bill and ask him for proof, without being accusing at all. I would feel peace, doing it. I have stopped believing it – which makes it completely different.

Why would someone do such a thing?

Because he felt guilty, suffered from paranoia and needed to project his fear and guilt on someone who was used to being a victim. This is just part of my victim-story, the story that creates an I.It has come up for me to forgive and let go, and I am more than willing to do so.

loving the illusion

I am editing my book “When Fear comes Home to Love” and found this, and want to share it here.This happened almost 50 years ago. I was biking with a group of friends from school as we spotted an old barn. It looked deserted, forlorn and mysterious, a magnet for 13-year old kids.

We climbed a steep incline from the dirt road with our bikes, and passed the open field to the barn.

The big doors were bolted. But we noticed that the barn had no foundation wall: it was possible to crawl under the wall and up through the single floor beams.

I was the first to put my head up through the beams in the floor and report: «the coast is clear!» And in we went.

We had ended up in the storage-barn for The National Theater. It was filled with props and stage-design: painted enchanted cardboard-woods – a sledge formed as a big pink egg – and huge boulders turning out to be made from papmache. Oh, the first look on the others’ faces when I held it over my head! Here were mirrors painted as mirrors – you could not see yourself in them – the sets of a sorcerer’s castle – and sets I recognized from the classic Christmas Play «The Journey to the Christmas Star.» THEY WERE HERE! IN FRONT OF ME! Here was the heroines dresses too…

I was in heaven. I went bananas. It smelled from dust and dirt and mold and it was the most lovely smell I had ever smelled. I felt home in a huge way.

When I met my husband, a refugee from the communist invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, I was drawn to him as a magnet. It was not only because of his considerable charisma – it was our mutual love for the theater and illusion. He taught me to make stage-design which hinted more than explained: when we were able to help the audience make their own pictures inside their heads, we were the most happy. This resembles the way the little child makes her play-world: a match-box may one moment be a car, and the next moment it is a Troll or a Hero. We are always creating images within, and when we are given the chance to do that in the theater, the play has to do with us.

When I worked as a stage and costume-designer from 1968 to Karel’s death in 1988, I loved those moments when the actors put their costumes on for the first time: you saw how the role formed them. I loved going behind the curtain and sense and smell the magic sweaty dusty world there – see the nervous actors putting their make-up on, sense the wonderful atmosphere of this special illusion, this play.

And then step out on the other side, the audience’s, and sit there and enjoy.

The point is: I am enjoying this illusion so much because I know it is an illusion. I KNOW IT. THEN I CAN PLAY WITH IT. I don’t believe it is real: I recognize that these people on the stage are in disguise. The more they can forget their personality’s identity, the more they can lend themselves to the role they are playing. An actor, being interviewed in the paper, explained about his relationship to Peer Gynt: « I don’t know who he will be tonight. He changes, I just have to follow.»

In the world we believe we are living in, according to A Course in Miracles, we are all in disguise. And most of us are taken by the illusion – that we ARE these «identities», these roles. But they are costumes. Look at that grumpy man on the bus. He looks so convincing. Pray to see the beloved in him. Give him a smile, know he is only hiding – and often you will see him sort of shake off something, looking at you with clear eyes, astonished – and then smile. This is a wonderful practice: on the bus, look at each and everyone and pray to see the angel within. Ask yourself, how would they look if they were smiling and happy? Hold that image of them. See how powerful it is.

fear or Love

One of my main teachers in the Course is my best friend Kala, who does not study it, but demonstrates it  by her way of being. Today she told about a colleague in gestalt-therapy, who during a meeting had felt her buttons triggered and had reacted with becoming mean and bitchy. She found afterwards the place in her mind where she had been afraid of loosing and being less than, and had concluded that “this is always so – when we are bitchy or mean in any way whatsoever, it is always because on some level we feel vulnerable or crushed in some way.We are reaching out for help and understanding. There are no exceptions to this.”

Underneath any meanness at all lies the cry for love: patience – understanding – non judgment. Kala said that there was one other woman who said that there were exceptions to this – some people were just mean  all through.

And I recognized the need we/I have to blame and project.

But the beauty and peace that lies in knowing that there are no exceptions is awesomely beautiful

the next level…

dream this morning: there was a level just above this one…I was planning on going there with a girl I was responsible for.I climbed to the top of the ladder, and looked onto the floor of that plane – and a terror gripped me. I chose not to go there yet.

Oh Nina, you just forgot to go there WITH Jesus

Yes I know 🙂 nothing to forgive really, just looking at fear, how real it seems without  Jesus

The rest of the day…every person has been reflecting back to me the beauty of my  true Self. On the bus-stop a very old man came and said: “Here comes an oldie!” I was there with another old woman, and I said “then there are three of us” – he looked at me and told me I was not old at all ( he thought he was 96) and  I thought, age is just a number ..we talked about his life for a while in the bus, and the driver was listening, smiling so prettily – I told him when I left that he should smile a lot, he had such a pretty smile –

I sat in a move-theater which was filled with mothers and babies – when they cried I could look at it with Love, and remind the souls who they were, and most often the crying stopped – all kind of people smiled at me spontaneously (including the babies)

at one time, a lot of babies cried, and I heard it as music –

at the bus back. a young woman took my arm and asked me to take her seat

I was so filled with love that I could burst

a million times nothing is nothing

Review after session with Jamie Romkey:

If I can see one thought as nothing, then a million thoughts are a million times nothing = nothing

And this: (if strong negative feelings)

I see that I am not ready to let these feelings go – and therefore I must be very afraid if I am so strongly defended against Love. And if I am that afraid, then I must be in great need of my gentleness and compassion – and I will hold myself and give myself comfort – and maybe sing to myself.

 

the am-ness

Just listened to another coach-talk by Stephen and Ondrea Levine. I find it great that by listening to them I understand the Course better. I spot this ego who specializes  in being against Ken and any great teacher of ACIM – and allows Stephen and Ondrea who with a little different words says the same thing.

And today I want to share this, from Stephen:

I AM – this “I” is always changing. The “am-ness” is already always here, as our very essence.

a million years of suffering …( giggles)

Spotted a part of the split mind today, and not only smiled but burst into laughter by it. It manifested as tensions and big pains in the neck, and told me it had so much anger inside, since before the earth was made, and was afraid to have those thoughts because it would be punished and go to hell and all that – and millions of years of suffering was obviously not enough…

a burst of intense giggling started inside. Tears flowed down my cheeks -oh my what a freakin god that must be to not have enough suffering in a million years!!! it would not stop laughing and the sufferer listened, aghast first,but then it dawned on it that the laugherer was not stricken dead, so maybe – just m a y b e  – this image of God could be wrong: could there be another way?

a sweet red color rose in my chest and spread to the heart area. There a bird  is nesting now. The former sufferer is sitting, watching, and is being told that feeling hatred and anger is no biggie, just look at it with Jesus .

He is slowly melting now. The laugherer is seen as a huge angel with pondus, ah this must be Shenrezig, one of the great Buddhas.

He tells me my poem yesterday is very Buddhist and giggles some more – his big soft bully is rumbling

ahhh

wings beyond longing

dark stones dancing in water

loosing gravity is possible

– wings inside!

see       stones ascending

slowly     transparent

stone in my heart     are you really a bird