Moving My Psychic Furniture

I’ve been trying to figure out why my internship with the horses at the Rescue Ranch has been so psychically and emotionally difficult and so exhausting, despite how much I love it.

I think it’s the rearrangement of my psychic furniture—things that have been in place for fifty or sixty years kind of get stuck where they are, and it takes tremendous energy to move them around, much less to contemplate getting rid of them.

I’m finding that a lot of things make sense these days that didn’t before. Some of this understanding started with the seminar on Jungian typology that psychologist Mary Ryan gave last month to our local Jung Society. Afterwards, I realized several things:

First, it’s no wonder that my Dad and I were at loggerheads all the time. Growing up, I was an INFJ; Dad was ESTJ. Not much in common, there! Mary explained that the “J” types meet the world with their rational function—the T or the F, Thinking or Feeling—and that becomes their dominant function. So Dad and I saw the world differently, and had totally opposite ways of making decisions. No wonder we had problems!

She also explained that the Auxiliary functions—for Dad and me, Intuition and Sensing—are both accessible to the individual, but one may be favored more than the other. Dad was a Sensation type—if you can’t see, feel, taste, smell, and touch it, it ain’t real. Intuition, which one supposes he had, was certainly downplayed. I had/have intuition in spades, but because of my Dad’s example (not to mention his demands), I learned to pretty much hide or ignore—and distrust—my intuitive knowing.

I already knew the what of all of this, but Mary Ryan helped explain the why. And now I can understand why my otherworldly Coaching Staff actually had to use a physical means of contacting me the first time: If I hadn’t heard their initial messages with my physical ears, I wouldn’t have/couldn’t have believed it, because I’ve shut down the intuitive part of my psyche over the years. It also explains why I have such a hard time cultivating my intuitive side—I’m still battling my internalized father figure, who doesn’t believe in such nonsense.

So. Back to the Ranch. The horses are challenging me to open up again to the non-verbal, non-rational side of things, and that’s the very part that I’ve spent nearly sixty years suppressing. There are times out there when I feel just raw—not with emotion so much as feeling—I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s still below conscious level, but it’s there, and becoming stronger. Sometimes I can feel what the horse is feeling before he reacts in a way that expresses it.

That happened the other day when we had Duffy out in the arena—we tried to get him into the trailer first, and when he was balky (though he got his front feet in without any resistance at all), Jay took him back over and through the “trailer tarp” system. As he came back through the second time, I said to Jay, “Oh, look—he says, ‘I remember this now!’ He just got the image.” Just as I said that, the horse dropped his head and snorted, obviously relaxing all of a sudden. So Jay could see it, too.

Anyway. There are days when I come home just shaking with fatigue. Yesterday I had to go back to bed, and once there, I slept for four hours without even moving.

This reminds me so much of the Pacifica experience—another time when my psychic furniture got radically rearranged. Well, onwards and upwards, I guess….

A Blessing

Wow. How’s this for synchronicity:

I just re-posted to my facebook page a link to a piece on my Alchemical Horse blog from last September. The article was on Mia, a little rescued filly who touched my heart. You can read that post here.

One friend responded right away, saying that it had left her in tears, and asking how Mia is doing now. (Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer to that.)

I had just finished posting a piece on that blog about how I’m glad to be able to contribute a little to world peace by doing a week’s worth of writing for and about the Rescue Ranch where I volunteer, because we’re getting the word out about our work with relational horsemanship—a way of working with horses that’s based on relationship, not on dominance.

As soon as I returned to my email, that very instant, a email was delivered from the Red Cross (to whom I have not donated this year, alas…):

Dear Kay,
Today, many hearts are happier and lives are better because you chose to put compassion into action. This Valentine's Day, may your heart be filled with joy by stories of lives changed and hope restored from around the world. From my heart to yours, thank you for making these stories possible.

Tears in my own eyes, now….

"Synchronicity"?

This life is a funny place. Saturday I took one of horses for a walk on the trails near the barn. The temperature was in the 40s, and for the most part there wasn't much snow left, just a little slush and lots of mud.

Horses, especially those wearing shoes, tend to get snow packed up into their hooves in the winter. These ice balls can be uncomfortable and dangerous--it's kind of like the horse is walking on hard, lumpy baseballs--so you have to stop frequently and chip them out.

The first time I took old Midnight out in the snow and he got ice balls on his feet, it took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong--why was he fighting me and stumbling on flat ground? I hopped off and saw that three of his four hooves were off the ground by a couple of inches. The packed ice was so hard that a stick wouldn't budge it. Instead, I had to search for a pointed rock and bash the ice out. You can imagine how much Midnight enjoyed that!

The tool of choice is a hoof pick, and most of us (including me, now) carry them in our pockets when we're on the trails. Saturday I thought about taking one, but decided there wasn't enough snow left to be a problem.

All was fine until we turned off the main trail and onto one that leads through a flat, open stretch between patches of trees. The sun doesn't reach that part of the path, and yes, it was still snow-covered and perfect for forming ice balls under a horse's hooves.

I started cussing myself out for not bringing the proper tool, and began to look for a suitable rock. But wait--what's that? Oh my goodness: a blue hoof pick, right there next to the trail, within easy reach.

I just stood there with my mouth open for a bit, thanked the Guides, or Providence, or Whoever placed it there for me, then picked it up and chipped the ice out of Midnight's hooves.

Yup. Life's a funny place.

[Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse.]

The Thin Time

A few weeks ago I woke from a dream:

An old boyfriend is getting ready to move into an apartment—he is going back to school. He calls me to meet him at a friend’s house, where there are several other people whom we know. I assume he is going to ask me to move in with him. In the bedroom he tells me that he doesn’t really love me as much as he let on, and that he’s sorry he led me on, but that he just didn’t know how to tell me. I am so angry—how dare he do that to me? It turns out that everyone in the house knew about this except me.

He is very surprised that I’m angry. He offers to make love to me but I don’t want him anywhere near me. I don’t want anyone touching me. Then I tell another friend that I need to go home now, because I have an early morning with the horses.

This seemed like such a strange dream to me. The sense of betrayal and disappointment didn’t fit with anything I was experiencing in my waking life, and I couldn’t make it fit with what I know of my psychic state; nothing resonated.

That morning, still puzzling over the dream, I went out to the barn where I had recently moved my horse Galahad. I had been unusually busy the week before and hadn’t been to see him in quite a while. In the meantime, I had let a couple of other people ride him, to give him some company.

Galahad’s new home seems perfect to me: fresh grass, a flowing creek, woods, plenty of space to run in, and all the hay he can eat, 24 hours a day. He’s in a herd of six in a pasture, instead of a small dry lot and 20 horses at the place he had been living.

Idyllic as the situation seemed to me, I knew that Galahad wasn’t settling in contentedly. He wasn’t his usual playful, happy, carefree self, and he always seemed distracted. Physically, he was doing fine; it was his emotional state that had me worried. There’s always an adjustment period, but even after two months, he hadn’t settled in well.

That day Galahad seemed especially listless and sulky, and I couldn’t get him interested in anything. When I took him back out to the pasture and turned him loose, he wandered dully off toward the round bale. I watched him for a long time.

The dream kept coming back to me, so I decided to work with it again, this time trying to break it down to its basic, archetypal elements:

There is someone to whom the dream ego has given its heart and its trust. This someone has another agenda of which the dream ego is not aware, and which runs counter to what the dream ego expects. The person keeps this other agenda hidden, then unexpectedly expresses it. The dream ego is shocked and disappointed, and feels betrayed and used.

Disappointment and betrayal—and abandonment, too. Hmm…. Is there humiliation, as well? Since apparently everyone but the dream ego knew about it? No, in the dream that’s not a factor. It’s all focused on the broken “promise.”

Since nothing in that resonates for me personally, is this even my dream? Is it maybe a dream sent to me by the horses? Or is this Galahad’s dream?

I decided to do some journeying, some active imagination, and ask the Horse Ancestors for help. Sitting on a log near the stream, I closed my eyes and waited for a vision:

My Guide, the Cloud-colored Horse, comes to me in the pasture. I climb on his back. He takes me to a vast meadow. Although it’s dark and I can’t see anything much, I can hear the whuffles and snorts of the horse herd. I jump down off the Cloud-colored Horse and stand there, waiting. Dimly, I can make out another light-colored horse in front of me. This horse gets closer, and though I can’t make out much, I realize he is painfully thin. He grazes hungrily on what little grass there seems to be. Then he moves closer and closer to me until I can reach out and touch his thin body. Without lifting his head all the way, he nuzzles me and presses close. Is this Galahad? It doesn’t look like him, but I can’t be sure. Everything is dim—it must be night.

So that’s it, I think. Galahad is a rescued horse: He was so thin when the Humane Society picked him up that they nearly euthanized him on the spot. This new living situation reminds my boy of the “thin time,” especially the nighttime hours now, as it gets colder and as the grass gets thinner and thinner. He misses me. He misses his stall and lots of grain, even though he gets grain in the mornings and has hay to eat whenever he wants it.

Add the dream to the picture, and it seems to spell out the fact that he feels betrayed and abandoned, and is terrified that we will leave him and let him starve again. After all, I hadn’t been coming, and other people had been riding him. Maybe I would just vanish, after all!

Poor Galahad! I took him back to the barn via a patch of green grass where he grazed for a few minutes. Then I put him in his stall, hung out with him while he ate some hay, and fed him a beet pulp mash—nice and warm. He ate with gusto while I brushed him again and talked to him. I tried to reassure him that we will never, ever let that happen to him again.

I don’t know how much he actually understood, but he seemed to get some of his sparkle back. When the time came to leave, I led him directly to the round bale and took his halter off there. Hope it helped….

(Cross-posted on The Alchemical Horse.)

Money....

Why, oh why is it so very hard to ask to be paid what your time is worth? Ouch, ouch, ouch. I just got paid for a very time-intensive workshop, and received less than half what I wanted for it. Why? Because I didn't ask for it. In fact, I asked for exactly what I got.

And I even had warning that this was likely. This morning's Horse Wisdom card was "The False Self," the card that speaks of all those old tapes that say, "I'm not worth that much," or "I didn't do all that much," or "I don't deserve to be paid much," and the like. Sheesh. Did the warning do me any good? Nope. Here's how it went down (my pay, that is):

My first mistake, when this whole thing was first talked about, was not to specify a price for my services. That's a whole 'nother story, but water under the bridge. So this morning I walked in to the office to talk to the manager. I wanted $XXX dollars, and I had told myself that over and over again. It was a fair price, or probably a bit lower than fair, but it's what I wanted.

I proceeded to tell the manager how I had ended up doing all the contact and up-front work, because my partner had been out with a death in the family and a family vacation and hadn't been in town. I was setting the stage, just as I had planned. Then, somehow, someone else took over my mouth and said, "...so just pay me what you paid her."

Where the heck did that come from? I was so shocked that I couldn't imagine a way to get out of it--and then my mouth froze up entirely. So the manager says, "We paid her $XX an hour for the six hours." Whoever it was took charge again and said, "That sounds fine."

Wow....

I got to the car and laughed and cried at the same time, all the way home. I knew exactly what had happened, and there was absolutely no one to blame but that False Self of mine, the one who, underneath it all and despite all my education, experience, and talent, still believes she doesn't deserve anything much at all.

I learned a valuable lesson this morning, or at least I hope I've learned it, and I'm trying hard not to beat myself up over it. But I sure could have used that extra money.

Don't make assumptions....

I got a call an hour or so ago from my beloved Aunt Margie. She's my mother's younger sister, and in the last ten or so years, she's become more like a mother to me than an aunt.

That said, I do not keep in touch as well as I would like to. I think about her almost daily, but almost never pick up the phone to call, and rarely write. And she doesn't do those things, either. It's like we have all these good intentions, but never seem to act on them.

I've never understood this behavior. My mom and I did it, too, and Mom and her sister, and probably on and on through the whole family. Not just Mom's family has this behavior pattern; my dad's family and I do the same dumb thing.

All my life I've felt guilty, like it's my personal failing that I don't keep in touch. Only recently has it become obvious even to me that phone lines work in both directions, that the mail delivers letters to and from people....

And once I realized this fact, I started wondering even harder why the gap between thinking of someone and acting on that thought exists, seemingly everywhere in life. How interesting.

No universal answers have appeared to me yet; if they do, I'll share them! But I have gotten some clarity about it in the last few days. And as usual, the process that led to that understanding is kind of interesting, at least to me.

I think that for my mother, Aunt Margie, and me, it boils down to insecurity. "If you really loved me, you'd ..." (fill in the blank). In this case, "you'd write or call more often." "If you really loved me, if I were really important to you, you would keep in touch." The fact that we don't do the writing or the dialing allows the other person (and ourselves) to reinforce the false belief that we really aren't important to the other one.

Interesting. I've been reading Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book lately. At first I got completely and utterly stuck on the First Agreement: "Be impeccable with your word." Well, of course! But as I read past the first couple of pages about how our word affects others, I came to the part where he asks that we love ourself.

Um, yeah.... And then I got stuck, realizing that for whatever reason deep in my psyche, I felt incapable of actually loving myself. Why on earth not? The myriad reasons I came up with are grist for innumerable future posts. I'm still not able to say it and mean it, but I'm at least able to entertain the concept. Progress, eh?

But then I started reading more. The Second Agreement is "Don't take anything personally." That one's helping--it allows some distance from the icky things that happen (real or imagined). The third one, "Don't Make Assumptions," is the one that really brought some insight into this business of "if you loved me, you'd ...." For example, here's what Don Miguel says:

In any kind of relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we don't have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they know us so well. If they don't do what we want, what we assume they should do, we feel hurt and think, "How could you do that? You should know." ... A whole drama is created because we make this assumption and then put more assumptions on top of it.

I haven't gotten to the Fourth Agreement yet. But just these first three have helped me make some changes in the way I think, the way I operate. I am not beating myself up about not calling Aunt Margie. I feel sad that this is the pattern we've been following, but I am able to see it as one that's profoundly human. And I can choose a different way.

Time for a funeral

I think maybe I’m getting closer to figuring out this latest dream series, or at least closer to peeling off the first layer of meaning. Here’s last night’s version:

I’m with a number of other people—family? friends?—getting ready for a funeral. I think it’s Dad’s funeral—it’s not very clear—or maybe it’s Gram’s funeral. It’s also not clear if they’re still alive or not. At any rate, Dad has been ill for a long time, and Gram is, of course, very old. I don’t remember any of this very clearly now, but there was more about traveling from home to wherever this was to take place, about packing, about trying to get everything done in time. Just a very busy dream. Not sad at all, just busy.

“Gram” is my father’s mother, Anna, whose ambition and drive were all projected onto her family, particularly onto her only son. Dad was always busy, always driven to do something, to keep moving. He, in turn, projected this need onto his own family, and we were brought up believing that sitting still, reading a book, or (worst of all!) daydreaming were signs of that cardinal sin, laziness.

This is the second time in the last few days that Dad and Gram have appeared in my dreams. The other night, in the dreamworld, we were traveling somewhere with lots of family and friends (of course). I was in our motel room, trying to pack up to leave. Somehow I’m the one who has to pack up the stuff that everyone else has left. All my things fit easily into my suitcase—I have packed very lightly for this trip—but there is a ton of food and dish soap and wet towels and odds and ends of clothing that still have to be jammed into my suitcase. I end up having to leave some of it behind.

So last night Dad and Anna show up during preparations for their funeral. Interesting. I think the message is that “Dad” and “Gram,” those two hard-driving, type-A personalities that I’ve internalized so thoroughly, need to go. I’m carrying all their baggage in addition to my own, and it doesn’t fit any more. Let’s get them properly buried so that I can move on.

This makes perfect sense. It’s that constantly moving, constantly judging part of me that makes me unable to meditate, to journey, to work properly with my dreams, to just be. Those things, to the Dad-and-Anna part of me, seem so worthless and—the perfect word just popped into my head—unproductive.

Sheesh. Those “activities,” those states of reverie, are the only thing that will help me move along my chosen path! None of this busy-ness that I so often get mired in will help in the least; it only distracts me from what I need and want to be doing. My soul-work gets neglected because it’s done in stillness and silence.

Well. That’s food for thought.