Emergence

I dreamed the other night:

Some sort of commune—sort of like the old Columbia Park. People without much money, including me.

I have a daughter who has disappeared. A family has helped me—one reminds me of a woman, Courtney, at Scott’s school. She & her husband live close to the water supply where people fetch their water. My daughter disappeared long ago. One day I’m approached by a little girl who says she has something to tell me. I’m getting the water, talking with the man. So I ask the girl to wait. She begins to cry. I walk with the man and see that they live on the edges of a large park that I’d not known was there. Rather dry and sparse, but on a sort of hillside.

The girl turns out to be a daughter I lost, probably while getting water long ago. I hadn’t recognized her but now I do with joy. This man has something to do with it? Seems glad.

I had an image that Ego is like a shark: needs to keep swimming in order to survive. It needs to feel itself positively engaged, usually by pushing or pulling against something. And it's profoundly uneasy at stillness.

Self-accusation has been my method for "moving forward". It is my equivalent of pushing, or pulling against something. I've not realized in my soul that I can also rest on the surface of the water--I can spread myself over it and allow it to hold me up. This is the empty space between the spokes, the silence between the notes.

As Lori said in the comments of my last post, Ego has a positive intent--to protect me, to help me to get what I want.

She also sent me a link to a brief article by an author/parenting coach named Scott Noelle. He described a process by which a desire becomes a 'should'. This is because of the influence of 'dominator culture' which frames everything in terms of 'right' or 'wrong'. This is not necessarily a problem when 'shoulds' are in alignment with our own goals and values anyway. It becomes problematic because it robs us of our freedom of choice. We have left the realm of Choosing and entered the prison of Must (or Must Not). (Humankind seems susceptible to this culture, and unfortunately has the tendency to create one-upmanship--"I'm doing what I 'should' better than you"--which creates food, parenting, religion, breast-feeding nazis).

I'm reading one of Martha Beck's books, The Four Day Win (End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace). She explains how the traditional weight-reduction diet is doomed to fail because of the spiraling dynamic it sets up within a person. Prohibition ("should/should-not") creates desire/compulsion. A dictator is created, along with an insurgency. A lapse (which is inevitable) strengthens the prohibition (as well as shame and self-loathing), and the intensity of the rebellion. Many of us spend our lives this way, in parallel versions expanded beyond the theater of weight.

Exposing the role of accusation and trial in my life to the light of day seems to have unlocked the doors to allow her, the lost 'daughter', to emerge. How interesting that I didn't recognize her at first. She had been gone for so long, it seems, that I'd habituated to missing her, so I didn't even register her absence any more.

I wonder if her emergence has anything to do with having seen the lawyer on Friday; if the other insights were preparing the ground and seeing the lawyer was a sort of trigger?