This is the story of the dreaming body. It was movie night at our house, and my wife, son and I were all ready to sit down and enjoy a newly rented DVD. As the DVD went into the player, we were immediately disappointed that there was no sound coming from the speaker system. This had happened occasionally in the past as a result of some of the newer complicated electronics embedded in the system. I discovered that similarly to my computer, the system required rebooting by first unplugging and then plugging back in the power cord, followed by pushing the reset button to allow the system to go back to factory default settings. In this instance, nothing changed. I repeated the procedure four times with no success. In the past, repeating this procedure once and sometimes twice always reset the system so that sound went back on. This time was different, and for a moment, I was stymied. On a practical level, there was nothing more that I knew to do to get this technology working again. At this point I had to become curious, and wonder about how this might be somehow related to the dreaming body.
I invited my son and my wife to begin speculating as did I. I started to wonder about variables that might have been influencing factors that very day. It occurred to me to begin muscle testing for possible links or correlations between variables and our sound system’s problem. I remembered that a few months back, we had this same problem that occurred on the same day that a workman had been in our house. This was a man we trusted but had mixed feelings about on a personal level. We always appreciated the repair work he did but none of us really liked him as a person, including our two dogs who do not like being around him. So I asked my son via muscle testing if any of us had solid energetic boundaries with him and the muscle testing indicated no. So we set a collective intention for all three of us to have 100% energetic boundaries with this repairman who’d occasionally be in our house.
As we went through the DEH protocol, it turned out that there was an objection that my wife was carrying. She had some personal reasons for carrying some anger at him. By stimulating the solar plexus chakra and the throat chakra, the objection was cleared. As we continued muscle testing, there emerged an inner conflict that both my wife and I were carrying. Essentially, neither one of us completely trusted him and felt that if we confronted him about the things that we were unhappy about, we would make him feel bad. After all, he always seemed to do extra work for us that he did not charge us for and no matter how much we insisted that we pay him for it, he would always refuse. Not only that, but he would frequently bring us freshly baked bread from the Great Harvest Bread Company and some of their wonderful muffins, just because he was being generous. It became quite evident to us all that these conflicting feelings prevented us from being more honest with him about how we felt. Frontal occipital holding was the intervention chosen and as we were working within a collective field, my son Jaime volunteered to sit down and be the client for the intervention.
As I moved into dreamtime, I began to see that there were pools of negative and toxic subtle energy left in various locations throughout the house. With the help of one of my power animals, I was a witness to where each pool of negative energy had been left in every location as my power animal absorbed and transmuted the goo. At the end of a couple of minutes, all the subtle negative energy that had been left throughout the house had been cleaned. I was also instructed to smudge the entire house with sage to cleanse any other negative energetic residue left by our repairman. When I next muscle tested Jaime, each of us had 100% energetic boundaries with the repairman. Naturally, we were a bit anxious as to whether or not our work was going to have a positive impact on the sound system. First I turned on the television (it too had no sound earlier), and then the sound system. Though it took about 15 seconds, the sound worked through the television. Next I turned on the DVD player and hit play. The sound came on immediately! Naturally, we were very proud of ourselves for having figured this out but how exactly does this all makes sense?
Analysis: In processwork terminology, we were able to access the dreaming body as the sound system going silent became our family’s secondary process. Through the process I just described, we were able to identify and acknowledge our negative feelings about our occasionally visiting repairman. None of us want to be around him when he’s working on our house, even Jaime, who goes into the computer room and stays there until he’s out of the house. We all occasionally acknowledge to each other the aspects about him that we don’t like. We complain and gossip to each other about his negative vibe but because relationships are inherently complex and frequently conflicted, neither Anita nor I have been willing to banish him from our house and find somebody else because we have always been satisfied with his work. Though there are things about him we do not like, he expresses his goodwill by often bringing us treats from the bakery, making it even more difficult to consider firing him. Anita feels sorry for him and so far is not willing to fire him. Part of the dreaming body is our silence. Since none of us are absolutely honest about how we feel about him to his face, the truth of the matter ends up becoming repressed and in this case, though it may be hard for you to understand and believe, manifested through the silence of our sound system. Because this is so energetically subtle, the dreaming body is a very difficult thing to articulate. You can consult my own book where I describe it in greater detail or read about it in Mindell’s books. The dreaming body is the stream of Process always in the background that we can move into when we open up to how we are really feeling about things. Each one of us learned something important about telling the truth and occupying relationships more completely. Once the truth in our collective field was able to be identified and acknowledged, the secondary process that had been repressed ( manifesting through the silence of our sound system) was released as the field became normalized or clean. For now, we have decided to keep him on as our occasional repairman, and confront our edges about being more honest to his face regarding things we don’t like about what he says or does. Until we all feel resolved about the relationship and are willing to be absolutely congruent and honest with him, we will continue to work on ourselves and smudge the house with sage after every time he’s been in our house. It was a powerful and amazing lesson about the need to be honest and stay current in our relationships.
Posted on January 8, 2009
Howard Brockman
Howard Brockman
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