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Carry the Fire... and Don’t Get Burned
"You must carry the fire and not get burned," said the small, wizened, African shaman as he placed a glowing red coal in the palm of each of my hands.
These words were spoken to me in a dream in the fall of 1983, nearly a year after I entered Jungian analysis, in deep despair, and with intense longing to experience my creative self, my true, essential Self. My analyst, Jake, called this a "big dream", an initiation dream that not only carried life-changing personal significance, but also contained a message and meaning for others, as well.
In dream-sharing societies, a dream like this is shared with the community and its message and gifts then belong to all who heard it. I invite you to be part of my community, the community of women who are seeking to wake up to the Truth of their own Being, and I offer this dream and its gift of Fire to you as a gateway, a threshold, to an amazing journey.
Imagine that this is your dream, that it is you who are the "I" telling the dream, having the experience, receiving your assignment. I tell the dream in the present tense because the dreamtime is always now. A dream is never past, it is always unfolding in the present, it's message is always current, and is a gateway to the Truth every moment.
Now, I invite you to enter the dreamtime with me:
I am in Africa with my beautiful son, Tim, who is a month away from being twelve years old, the age of initiation into manhood in many tribal societies. We are leisurely walking down a hill on a dirt path through the jungle to a village below, where, in a clearing, the dark-skinned people of the tribe are singing and drumming in celebration. They are dressed in feathers and furs, singing and dancing in a procession, two-by-two. A black dog and a white dog are leading them. Tim and I join the procession for a bit and sing and dance along with them. We then say our good-byes and continue on our journey. We stop at a way station where we ask for directions to a particular village, our destination.
Soon we arrive at the village where we are expected. I am taken into a thatched hut where beautiful, bare-breasted African women paint my upper body, wrap a flowered sarong around my hips, and decorate my hair with beads and flowers. We are all laughing and talking as women do when engaging is feminine rituals.
I walk out into the hot sun where I stand for a moment and see the people gathered. They are sitting on the dry brown earth looking at me. I see my son in the front row and he looks distressed, but I nod to him that everything is fine with me. I see the old shaman with gray hair. He wears necklaces of teeth and bones and beads, and I know that he is the presiding Elder. He stands waiting for me to approach. I walk slowly, barefoot, from the hut where the women are standing behind me, across the dry, sandy ground and step onto a bed of glowing coals. There is no pain. I am without fear and I walk to stand before the ancient one. We seem to be at eye level with each other. I extend my up-turned palms in a gesture to receive. His dark eyes are radiating light as he looks deeply into mine and places a glowing red ember in each of my hands. Still, I feel no fear and no pain. I stand steady, fully present. The Old One speaks to me: "You must carry the fire and not get burned."
Fire
A couple of weeks before this dream, I was sitting with a client in a session. We were talking about creativity, when, all of a sudden, the presence of Love filled the room. Love walked into the room, changed the whole vibration, and we both stopped speaking in recognition of it. It was profoundly moving, felt “big,” and was somewhat disturbing, as I had never had this experience in a session before then. I now know that this was Self emerging, making itSelf known to us, and, from that moment on, our lives were profoundly different.
Two weeks after the dream, more extraordinary things began to happen. I found a small lump in my left breast. I went to the doctor, who said I needed a biopsy. While waiting to see him one morning, a vision came to me spontaneously: I saw myself lying on a stone altar surrounded by trees. Two women came to me and stood to my left. One was an older woman with long silver hair; the other, her assistant, was in her thirties with dark hair. The older woman reached into my breast where the lump was and pulled out a large, silver, baroque pearl. She gave it to the other woman who fastened it to a necklace and put it around my neck.
The vision ended and I looked up to see that the nurse was telling me something. She said the doctor had an emergency and I was to come back the next Tuesday. When I got home, my friend called to invite me to attend a healing service conducted by the internationally known healer, Olga Worrell, whom I had never met. I was very scared about the lump in my breast and, for the first time, faced the possibility that I could actually die, that this body, this life, could really end. Mortality was not a myth.
That weekend, which was one week before Christmas, my children and I had been to the movies and arrived home at the same time my neighbors across the street were arriving home. We waved and said goodnight. My neighbor, Bill, lived alone with his daughter, who was a year younger than my daughter, Heather. As single parents, we exchanged baby-sitting, shared meals, and were good neighbors to each other.
My son, Tim, wasn’t feeling well and awakened me at two in the morning. After caring for him and getting him settled into his bed again, I was bothered by thoughts of fire. I looked around our house and in the basement and found everything to be in order. Still troubled by thoughts of fire, I finally fell back to sleep.
The phone woke me at six a.m. Our baby-sitter from around the corner was calling to tell me that Bill's house was on fire and she had called the fire department. I shot out of bed to the window to see flames leaping out of the two bedroom windows upstairs. I ran across the street and pounded on the locked doors, to no avail. Sirens heralded the arrival of fire trucks, ambulances, TV cameras, and many neighbors.
I called Richard, Bill's best friend, and he came over. We all watched in disbelief as the house continued to burn. It was Richard’s sad task to go to the home of Bill's mother to tell her that her son and granddaughter were dead. My son and I sat on our steps and watched in shock as firemen worked to put out the flames in the house that was a mirror image of ours, the house where my eight-year-old daughter, Heather, had slept just two nights before.
Later that morning, Bill and his seven-year-old daughter were carried from the smoking wreckage in plastic body bags. I was stunned when the fire marshal told me that the fire had started about two a.m. The night of the fire, after all of the people were gone and my children were in bed, I collapsed into my own bed, overwhelmed with the grief and horror of the day. Suddenly I became aware of a presence in the room and looked up to see Bill, with his twinkling Irish eyes and broad grin, looking at me. He communicated telepathically that he and his daughter were just fine and everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. A feeling of love and peace filled me, and my grief turned to gratitude. I did sleep, finally, and early the next morning, as soon as I awoke, I went to the window to see if I had been dreaming, or if the fire had really happened. In the deepest early morning stillness imaginable, a light snow was softly, silently covering the charred house--like a bandage covering a wound. I felt soothed by the silence and the softness of the snow covering the burnt wreckage.
For several days, I stood vigil over the ashes of the funeral pyre as people came to view the charred wreckage--neighbors, Bill's family and friends, the estranged, but grieving mother of the dead child. Bill's new love, Annette, arrived the evening of the fire expecting to have dinner with him and his daughter. It was up to me to tell her what happened.
Tuesday following the fire, my friend and I went to Olga Worrell’s healing service. I needed healing more than ever. When we entered the white wooden church, it was electric with visible sparkles, an energy that I had never experienced before. Clusters of beautiful red poinsettias adorned the altar. The assistant healers entered the sanctuary, stood along the altar rail, and then Olga appeared. I couldn't believe my eyes: this was the woman with silver hair in my vision!
Although there were half dozen healers, and people lined up and filled in whatever space was available in front of each healer, I knew that I was to kneel before Olga. When my turn came, the opening was right in front of her. She put her hands on my head, I felt the energy pour through me, and I knew I was healed. My fear was gone. When I returned to the doctor the following Tuesday, the lump was also gone. The doc couldn’t figure out what had happened, but I knew. The experience opened a depth of faith in me I had never before felt.
For about three months after the fire and the healing, I was still feeling uncontainable grief. I cried constantly and found it very difficult to work. I had strong energy releases in my body that frightened me because I didn't understand what was happening. The flesh on my face felt like it had been burned raw, and a fire constantly raged in my chest. At times I felt like I had no face, only a gaping hole into the universe. I did not know at this time that I was experiencing a full-fledged Kundalini awakening, a true spiritual emergence. I knew nothing. "Go find the face you had before you were born" is what Zen masters tell their students seeking enlightenment. I was truly seeking my face now, and it brought back the memory of a childhood experience, perhaps my first "big dream."
When I was eight years old, my aunt Madge told me that she was on her way to bed one night and saw me standing at my dressing table and mirror, touching the things on the top of thetable. She said my eyes were closed, and she realized that I was walking in my sleep. She asked me what I was looking for. I responded, "I am looking for my face."
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Film Still of Sheila Foster from Eve's Fire
Cinematography by Kirsten D'Andrea Hollander
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Looking for my True face, the face of the Essential Self, has been the central passion and guiding force of my life. Since the fire, I have seen, and fallen in love with, the face I had before I was born.
The same friend who took me to Olga Worrell offered to do a mask-making ritual for me. He covered my face with cold, wet plaster gauze that felt soothing to my burning face. With each strip of gauze, I felt entombed and a growing sense of relief. The energy that I had felt pouring out of my face was now becoming contained. I began to feel boundaries again, contained. I sat with the hardened mask on my face for awhile, then I wriggled, scrunched, and labored myself out of it, as a butterfly must wriggle and labor out of a cocoon. A new face was birthed. The mask was a gateway, a portal between worlds. I not only emerged from the mask, but I emerged from the underworld, also. The internal fire began to subside. The burning in my face and flesh stopped. The mask was a portal into the next phase of this initiation.
Throughout this time, I consistently felt a loving Presence with me. I felt more spiritually aware and tuned into synchronicities than ever. I meditated and prayed a lot. It was the only thing I could do to get through the bone-chilling terror I felt at times. I intuitively knew that I was getting what I had been longing and praying for, but I didn't understand why it was happening the way it was. I didn’t know then the ways of the Divine Mother, who often enters our lives through the tearing of the human veil and breakdown. There were times when I wanted to die, hoped I would die, and was scared to death that I really was dying. I felt dismembered, my sense of self was disintegrating. At the same time, I was aware of some dimension of me that was peaceful, silent, and much larger than the part that was suffering. This Presence seemed to be the lap in which the suffering me was held.
In the moments that I stopped resisting my pain and simply felt into what was happening, experienced things as they were, even if only for a moment, something opened and I was aware of the redemptive aspect of what I was going through. It was larger than my life, larger than “I.” That pain, the pain without the "no" or "why-me?" attached to it, was a pure river of energy that carried me into direct experience of Divine Presence, and it awakened my awareness of the larger, human story of which I was a part. Grace to bear the pain, and see through it to the larger, beautiful Reality, was one of the first gifts that came to me when I accepted what was happening, as it was.
The “me” that initially suffered because of all that was going on, was disappearing like a drop of water into the ocean. I often felt terrified, and, at the same time, deeply grateful and humbled by the awe-fullness of all that was happening. It felt like a great privilege to be learning all that I was learning. I increasingly felt a strong desire to be of service in the world and started to feel a level of compassion for suffering humanity that I had never felt before.
I painted the mask black and white, the colors of the dogs leading the procession in my dream. The left side was white, for the light that was entering my unawakened feminine consciousness, and the right side was black, as a reminder of my ego's encounter with darkness, death, and the unknown. Normally the right side, the masculine side, is associated with the light of the conscious mind and the left, feminine side is associated with darkness, the unconscious and the unknown. I had experienced a metanoia, a reversal, of my primary orientation to the world and to life. Nothing would ever be the same. I was never the same after all of this.
My initiatory experiences awakened me to the spiritual light found in my encounters with darkness. I found comfort in the darkness when I experienced my fear directly, and the fear dissolved. My attachment to solar consciousness, the rational mind, the ego as the center of my life, was falling away. Ego clearly wasn't in charge anymore, and I began to wonder then if it ever had been.
On the mask, a rainbow bridge connected the white and the black at the third eye, the eye that sees beyond the illusion of this physical world into other dimensions, the eye that sees the Truth. Fire rose up on the right cheek out of the blackness as a symbol of my initiation by fire and my willingness to carry the fire. The making of this mask was the beginning of my learning the conscious process and power of ritual, its use as a vehicle for the transmutation of energy and the shift from one state of consciousness, one dimension of reality, to another.
I had no idea what a Gift I was receiving when I extended my hands in the dream to receive the coals. In India, fire is a masculine energy, symbolized by a triangle pointing upward. The feminine principle is symbolized by the triangle pointing downward. Agni is the Indian god who embodies divine will and conscious sacrifice, and he is the consort of Kali, goddess of destruction and creation. Agni’s symbol is the sacrificial fire, and it is said that he ate the sacrifices burned in such fires. For me, the old shaman who handed me the hot coals was Agni, and the dismemberment that followed, I have realized since, was the work of the goddess, Kali. Kali presides at all initiations, as she is the goddess who rips the fragile, temporal, human veils apart, that we may see and directly experience the underlying unchanging Reality. Always, in my experience with initiation, a sacrifice of identity to the Holy Fire is required.
In ancient alchemy, fire was used in the transmutation of lead into gold--the dross of ego was/is transmuted into the golden philosopher’s stone of the Divine Self. The kundalini fire, the sacred feminine fire of spiritual initiation, which I will discuss later in detail, does this: it burns away identification with “I” and its old stories of suffering that obscure the Truth: that there is only Self/Divinity. It also transmutes shadow to light, shame to joy, and suffering to bliss, and it opens our hearts wide enough to see that Self is and does everything--there is only Self/Divinity happening, no matter what is happening. Carl Jung likened the process of individuation to alchemy, which he said began with most people around thirty-five years of age, which is close to how old I was when the fire first consumed me. Jung wrote that, with attention to one’s unconscious processes via dream work and active imagination, consciousness evolves to bring the realization that the Self, not the ego, is at the center of existence. Jung wrote that a victory for the Self was always a defeat for the ego.
Fire burns on the altars in Catholic churches to alert us to the fact that the body and blood of Christ, the Divinity, is present. And so it is, that fire, the fire of Self, the kundalini fire, burns in us, that we may realize that the Divinity is present here, also, in these human, female bodies. Fire changes what it touches completely. It destroys what is temporal, and allows us to recognize what is Real, what cannot be destroyed, what never changes. Fire swallowed the bodies of my friends, raged through my bodybeing, consumed my face, and through all of this, gave to me the recognition of my True Face, my Self.
Since this first major initiation, I have fallen, and keep falling, ever more deeply in love with the Holy Fire. There has been much to learn about what it means to carry the fire and not get burned, and I am still learning. It is a koan. For nearly twenty-two years, I have been deepening into the mystery of this koan, and see no end to it. A koan is a riddle that breaks open the mind to realization of Truth; it cannot be solved by the mind. I offer the hot coal of this koan to you now…and see what happens.
You must carry the fire…and not get burned.
© Sheila Foster 1999
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