Omega – The sweat lodge was a Native American way of initiation, and still is.
A time ago I visited Ireland and was privileged to be allowed to enter some of the ancient burial mounds thousands of years old. Inside them one is exposed to the same sort of deep silence, to the earth, and to the great rocks from which they are built. The silent darkness is like being in the womb. I had a great desire to press for governments to allow the use of the ancient tombs such as the one's I visited, for the sake of individual initiation. In this way one connects with the most basic aspects of oneself.
The young child in your dreams is the one who initiates you to greater awareness of what you hold within you the ancestral memories. It was she who opened you to hearing the trees. It seems you are regaining the inner realisations you had as a child. You can build on that by being the child. The child is in fact ‘running ahead of you’.
You have to get rid of – temporarily – your modern crutches aiding communication – the phone.
The girls and you then begin to re-enact old ways from the past – the ankle bells. Exploring them can lead you deep into memories. The same applies to the black garbed women full strong feelings. If you can be them and be an observer that allows the feelings but doesn’t get personally involved in them wonderful things can occur.
Here is an example that may show how it can be a real and wonderful experience.
“Then I had a very vague sense of approaching something. It was completely undefined at this point, and I turned to my partner to discover her response. I got the feeling from her that it was okay. Then slowly the intuition, sensation, however one might describe it, began to clarify. I had the distinct impression, even an image, of approaching an ancient tomb. The image I had of it was that we were walking in a big underground place. It was dimly lit as if we were now carrying some sort of light such as a flaming torch. From this we could see that the tomb was very old and slightly crumbled. Everything was dusty giving the impression of great age. And as we approached this tomb I could feel the sense that hidden within it was a great tragedy. I felt that if we opened this tomb we would come across, be witnesses to, a tragedy from the past. Even as I write this I feel again that sorrow and sadness one feels in such situations. It was and is very real.
Then I was living that tragedy. I can only say that I was/am that person whose tomb we had come across. I am a woman, and I am torn by emotions of immense loss. My body writhes with the pain of it. Again, as I write, I relive some of this. At the time my body twisted and I could hardly breathe. I cry out as this woman that I cannot bear any more. I cannot carry on with such misery. All my family are dead - why have I been left?
With each loss, I tried to bear it, by feeling this was God’s will and therefore had some purpose. But not any more. This is too much. I want to die. Please let me die!
The emotional pain of this was extreme, and although I have described it in a few words, it went on for perhaps twenty minutes or more of racking sobs. I really knew that woman’s misery, not as an outsider, but as her. In fact, I knew her then as myself in the past. Her life was one of my past dwelling places.
This was, and I still see it as, a most extraordinary experience. Even now the waves of what I experienced are still washing through me. I felt as I experienced this that I/she had died with that terrible loss still burning in her. That was why I, in my present life, needed to meet and heal her pain.
Gradually the sobbing reduced. This led into a changing situation. It was a very wonderful experience to meet and greet that woman. I could feel her becoming a part of my present self. This really was like resurrecting her from the dead. She was coming to life here and now in the present.
If one can imagine that somebody has died in great torment, and many, many years later, somebody enters their tomb and revives them from the dead, this was the magical feeling of it. I felt her come to life, and in doing so recognise that she/I had survived death and was alive again without the pain and without the loss. For in this present life none of my/her children had been taken. I was existing now in this strange present, and in the past, at one and the same time. Life was not a terrible trick, but the weaving in and out of experiences that in the end do not have the tragedy they appear to have seen only from the viewpoint of the one life, of the one body.”
Tony