Healing (Don’t Pine For Me)

by Gloria | Mar 30, 2015 | Dreams

All your past, except its beauty, is gone and nothing remains but a blessing.

~A Course in Miracles

Healing is a wonderful Australian film based on a real life program in which prisoners in a minimum-security facility assist in the rehabilitation of injured raptors. The film is set at the time of the inception of the program, which coincides with the arrival of the main character, Viktor Khadem, at the prison farm. He is recruited for the construction of the facilities to house the birds and is thus involved in the program from the ground up, metaphorically creating a template for the fresh start he is preparing for in his own life. The theme of the injured birds being rehabilitated for release back into their natural environment is reflected in the lives of the inmates preparing for integration back into regular society. The contrast and similarities between those involved in the program and the injured birds is explored with sensitivity and empathy.

Wedge-tailed Eagle

The avian star of the movie is a magnificent Wedge-tailed Eagle named Yasmine and the close up opening scenes of her soaring through the air are breathtaking. Most of us only get to see these giants of the skies up close in captivity, or on road trips. The sight of Wedgies feeding on road kill is familiar to anyone who has spent time traversing the endless stretches of roadways that criss-cross this vast continent. The elegance they exhibit when fully airborne is in stark contrast to their clumsiness as they beat a hasty retreat from their meal and lift their massive bulk into the air when a vehicle approaches at high speed.

Part of the appeal of the film for me was that it resurrected the memory of a powerful healing dream I’d had 6 years after my husband’s death and after seeing the movie I felt inspired to share it.

This is the dream:

I’m walking alongside a road when I see some feathers on the ground. I look at them, wondering if they are from an eagle. I spot one that I know is an eagle’s feather. I show it to a man who appears nearby and as I do, it transforms into a giant feather that reaches right across the road and touches a pine tree on the opposite side.

At that moment a car comes along and I lift the feather like a boom gate to allow it to go by. Inside the car are three young men, all laughing as if enjoying a joke together. They look familiar but the car whizzes by too quickly for me to identify them. Just as they pass, the end of the feather breaks where I am holding it and I see that inside the shaft is a spiral structure, which I assume gives strength to the shaft.

I am awestruck trying to imagine the size of the bird that this feather must have come from. In my mind’s eye I see it flying over, slowly and silently observing all below.

I was quite perplexed by this dream as I couldn’t identify any of the characters and yet I felt I knew them. The man who materialized at the roadside with me I recognized as the same one who had been on the bus with me in my original vision and who showed up in just this same way in many dreams. Over time I came to regard him as a kind of companion/guide. He didn’t speak but it was as though the act of showing him the feather caused it to grow. I felt that it was a significant dream but didn’t know where to start, so posted it to the dream forum I was on at the time with the comment that I thought feathers might indicate a message from the spirit realm but didn’t know what the message was.

Later, I resumed the book I had been reading the night before I had the dream, Hello From Heaven, which was about after death communications – ADCs. There were some stories of unusual encounters with birds that bereaved persons felt were messengers from their deceased loved ones and as I was reading, my mind drifted onto the dream. Soon I was absorbed in a treasured memory of an encounter with a trio of Wedge-tailed Eagles, presumably a pair of adults and a juvenile, that my late husband and I had been privileged to share. The 16 acre property we lived on had panoramic views of the surrounding countryside and I had just come from the house when I spotted them spiralling slowly upwards out of a valley, one above the other, on a thermal. I called Roger over and we stood together watching them.

Initially we could see them clearly with our naked eyes but as they rose higher and higher they became harder to see, so I went to get the binoculars. We stood together silently, passing the binoculars back and forth and as we watched, the first one left the thermal and glided off in a straight line. It then began circling widely until the second one joined it and finally, when the third one reached them, they headed due east at a constant altitude. By this time they were barely visible even with the binoculars and we soon lost sight of them. With the spell broken, we went back to what we had been doing.

As that memory faded, another incident came to mind that occurred on this same property. We had a large shed we wanted to use to collect rainwater from but the three huge pine trees adjacent to it were constantly dropping pine needles into the gutters. They also posed a fire hazard to the shed and so on that basis and taking into account that they weren’t native to the area, we reluctantly decided to cut them down.

There is a bit of skill involved in tree felling but we had removed a few smaller pines by this time, so didn’t anticipate any problems. The first two fell without incident but the third one refused to topple. Eventually Roger decided to get the tractor out and pull it over using a very long rope and while he was organizing it, I went and got my camera. This was a pre-digital SLR with a mechanical lever to advance the film and as the tractor started to inch forward, I put my eye to the viewfinder to take a shot of the scene while the tree was still standing. It started to lean ever so slowly but took so long to fall that I was able to wind the film on and get another shot with it mid way before it finally crashed to the ground.

I took more shots of the whole scene. There was now light and space where previously there had been a great wall of dark green and the three majestic trees lay in a row amidst shattered branches and hundreds of scattered pinecones. By this time the noise from the chain saw and tractor and the sound of crashing trees had faded into silence and as I lowered the camera and surveyed the scene, tears began to roll down my face. Roger came over and said, “Did that make you feel sad?” I nodded my head and he said, “It did me too.”

Now a whole cascade of memories began crowding my mind, triggering an upwelling of grief but just as it threatened to overwhelm me, I heard a voice inside my head say, “Don’t pine for me!” I knew instantly that this was the message of the dream and it was coming from Roger. In a flash I also knew who the figures in the car were:  Roger was in the driver’s seat and with him in the front was my sister’s husband, Kim, who had died two years before him. Kim and Roger had worked together in their teens and Kim had introduced Roger and I. In the back of the dream car was my cousin, Ray, who had died the year before Kim. Three young men, all in their forties, dead within three years of each other but if the dream was anything to go by they were having a ball and right in that moment I envied them. It had been a very difficult 6 years since Roger’s passing and at the time I had the dream I was at my lowest point. I felt more like the felled trees than the soaring eagles.

I was a bit mystified by the message at first because although I knew I wasn’t fully over my grief, I wouldn’t have described it as pining. Then I remembered a quite dramatic incident from the night before I had the dream. In the book Hello From Heaven that I had been reading, there was a story of a young man who had been killed in a helicopter crash appearing to his mother, telling her he was happy and imploring her to let go of him. As I read the story, I began to wonder if there had been any resolution to the visitation I’d had from Roger 4 years earlier in which he had asked me to speak to his mother because she wasn’t letting go of him. I began mentally talking to him, asking if everything was O.K. now and if not to let me know if I could do anything to help.

As if on cue, there was a loud bang from the adjacent room. The cat that had been asleep on the bed in the room came flying out with her fur standing on end and I leaped up from my chair sending the cat on my lap flying for cover. I went into the room to investigate but couldn’t see anything amiss. It had sounded similar to a bird hitting the windowpane but besides being unlikely because it was nighttime, the shutters were down, so it didn’t make sense.

Needless to say I felt more than a little disturbed by this. Was Roger saying he is not at peace? The subject of his prior visitation had been dropped from any conversation with my mother in law soon after it happened and she had since moved interstate. I no longer had much contact with her and besides, spirit visits were a subject I was somewhat wary about myself at the time, so didn’t feel inclined to broach the subject with her again. I did the only thing I could think of and said a prayer for her to find peace and closure. That night I had the dream.

As I reviewed the whole unfolding saga from the pre-dream incident and the dream itself, to the memories it evoked and the message I received, it became clear that  ‘don’t pine for me’ was more like ‘stop worrying about me.’ The visitation I’d had previously from Roger was unmistakably real and had convinced me once and for all of the survival of consciousness but because it was a plea for help with no satisfactory resolution rather than a message of reassurance, it had raised more questions than it answered. My search for understanding is what had led me to reading Hello From Heaven .

Although the dream helped me let go of the concern and sense of responsibility I had been feeling on Roger’s behalf, I was still left wondering about how unfinished business for those who have passed on is dealt with. This had never been a concern when I believed that death was the end of the story. Eventually, I would make an in-depth study of a wide range of beliefs and viewpoints concerning what is generally referred to as the afterlife but in the meantime, I decided my main priority was to sort myself out. Regardless of what I learned about what happened after death, I didn’t want to be dealing with unfinished business on my deathbed or taking it with me if I was going somewhere else, nor did I want to leave any mess behind for anyone else to deal with if I could help it. I had an intuitive sense that it was best to deal with the problems I had while I was alive and I still hold that viewpoint.

One aspect of the dream I could never come to any definite conclusion about is whether or not I was seeing the spirits of the three males who’d died or whether they were regular dream figures. Was it a case of my dreaming mind giving me an image that would put my mind at rest? A psychoanalytic approach would certainly see it that way but it didn’t feel right to me at the time and still doesn’t and in the final analysis that is what counts. Dream interpretation is an art, not an exact science. One thing I can say is that the dream didn’t lend itself to the usual kind of psychological analysis of the characters. Even after I realized who the occupants of the car were, I couldn’t make that approach fit. I’ve had countless dreams of Roger over time but this one stands out in my mind as having a very different feel to it.

The presence of my ‘guide’ was an important clue that this was no ordinary dream but there were also the feathers, the pine tree and the spiral inside the feather. Feathers and birds are universal symbols of the connection between heaven and earth, as are trees with their roots in the ground and crowns in the air. Conifers have a special significance because they are evergreen and so are symbols of eternal life. The spiral, which was in the dream itself and repeated in the associated memories of the spiraling eagles and the patterning of the pine cones, is a universal pattern and also symbolic of the link between heaven and earth, as it is ubiquitous throughout nature and the cosmos.

As for what made the loud noise, I never did find out but it certainly got my attention and having had more of this type of incident than I can possibly count by now, I know better than to put it down to ‘just a coincidence.’

What Dreams May Come

by Gloria | Aug 29, 2014 | Dreams

I have been sitting on an article I began writing several months ago titled The World is Not Left by Death but by Truth. This is a line from A Course in Miracles which had a strong impact on me when I first encountered it, but each time I tried to tackle the subject, I would soon become dissatisfied with what I’d written, delete all except a few salvageable fragments and put it back once again in the too hard basket. That I had a lot of resistance to expressing my thoughts on the subject was obvious but I rationalised that nothing and nobody is compelling me to do it but myself. This is true and yet for some reason I still felt driven to collect and express my thoughts on the matter and it was blocking me from writing anything else, as none of the other dream stories would flow either.

When I read the reports of Robin Williams’ suicide, I was spurred once again into action and recognised it as a recurring pattern. Each time I would get motivated to write, it was in response to hearing about yet another suicide, either ‘accidental’ or intentional, a media report, or a personal story. The intensity of my reaction to his suicide surprised me, as it is a subject I have investigated thoroughly and contemplated deeply over many years and thought I had laid to rest. So, I thought I would get what Robin Williams’ death has stirred up off my chest before going on to what I originally planned.

Not having followed his off-screen life, I didn’t know about his history of depression and substance abuse, so that partly accounted for being surprised at the news but there was more to my reaction than that. As the stories of his life and the details of his struggles emerged, the conflicting emotions I was feeling increased and finally I had to admit to myself that it was touching a few still raw nerves. I know too well that we don’t react emotionally to anything unless it has some personal resonance within ourselves, so obviously there was something to explore.

Although I wouldn’t count myself a fan of Robin Williams, I had enjoyed several of his movies and respected both his acting ability and the calibre of the roles he played in the ones I had seen. Coincidentally, I had recently hired his movie What Dreams May Come because I wanted to have a fresh look at it from the broader perspective I have these days about the whole subject of life and death. I had initially seen it soon after my husband’s death 17 years ago, a time when I was going through a deep grieving process. My belief that life ends in peaceful oblivion was being challenged at the time by too many inexplicable happenings for me to dismiss them lightly and seeing this movie was part of the process of seeking answers.

It’s a visually striking movie and explores the effects of tragic loss on the lives of those left behind. Robin Williams plays a doctor who has everything he wants in life; a successful and fulfilling career, happily married to his soul mate, with two great kids, but tragedy strikes when the children are killed in a car accident. The story follows the couple as they struggle to come to terms with the loss, but just as they are beginning to recover he is killed, also in a car accident.

After his death, he is surprised to find he is still alive, albeit in a subtle body, and when his attempts to get through to his wife fail, he eventually moves on, ultimately finding himself in a heavenly realm, reunited with those who have gone before him. Meanwhile, on the physical plane, his wife spirals once again into depression and eventually kills herself. Contrary to his hope and expectations, she does not join him where he is; her destination is a realm that reflects her mode of death and mental state at the time. When he learns where she is, he sets out to try and reconnect with her, ultimately defying the odds to save her from her fate.

The movie explores the profound effects of grief and the hopelessness it can engender but ultimately affirms the redemptive power of love to heal and transcend all obstacles. It mixes conventional and unconventional beliefs about the afterlife and contrasts the consequences of death by suicide with non-volitional deaths. In doing so, it makes a commentary on what role the state of mind at the point of death has on the destination of the person, and makes for a poignant reflection on Robin Williams’ own death.

As an adjunct to watching the movie again, I reviewed the speech in Hamlet, from where it got its title. The whole speech is an eloquent and insightful account of the conflicted mind of someone contemplating suicide as a way out of a painful dilemma. Initially, Hamlet regards life and death as mutually exclusive states, comparing death to the deep sleep state; the state of oblivion, where we are effectively ‘dead to the world.’ In this viewpoint, the dilemma is purely a moral one:

To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them?

But then doubt creeps into his mind: ‘What if death is more like the dream state, than deep sleep?’  Our experience of a dream feels every bit as real as waking life reality when we are immersed in it, and nightmares have an intensity that can be hard to shake.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause…

Further along in the speech, he expresses his fear that those dreams may be worse than what he is facing in life:

But that the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of?

This ‘fate worse than death’ is what was depicted in the movie and had me cringing inwardly at the reinforcement of old stereotypes. To my mind, there are enough rational reasons for discouraging suicide and seeking alternative answers without using outmoded fear-based models of hellish afterlife consequences as a deterrent.

When I was 20 my father committed suicide. He had been an alcoholic and deserted the family about 16 years earlier. He chose to end his life when his whereabouts became known. When I heard the news, all the anger I’d held towards him for his abandonment and the ensuing hardship for the family, melted away. He had apparently left a note to say he couldn’t live with himself any longer. He had never overcome his alcoholism, and though on some level his death could be seen as taking the easy way out, it was obvious that he must have been suffering deeply. His death was the final factor in my rejection of the religion which at one time had sustained me but which I had become increasingly dissatisfied with. As much of a mess as my father had made of his life, I couldn’t agree with a belief system that consigned suicides to hell.

The threat of afterlife consequences no longer had such a grip on me, but the idea of suicide as a way out gradually began to take hold and it would be many years for it to be uprooted completely. On several occasions during my adult life when I had thought seriously about killing myself,  I sought therapeutic help instead. I didn’t seriously want to die at those times, I was just having a hard time coping for various reasons. When I was nearly 50, the visitation experience of my late husband, which came about a year after I originally saw What Dreams May Come, compelled me to accept that there was a continuity of life. It was a game changer, but the biggest incentive to weathering the storms was my moral conviction that it wasn’t the answer, not just for myself, but for the effect on others. After the break up of my second marriage, I hit a low point that made my previous lows look like a picnic, and was seriously considering putting an end to my misery. No fear-based beliefs or moral considerations were enough to calm my besieged psyche.

It was a dream that once and for all put my mind to rest. This dream was almost an exact replay of the meditation vision I had of my mother which I described in a previous post. As in the vision, I saw only an image of my mother’s face, but this time instead of looking sad, she was smiling and at the same time had a look of real tenderness and deep compassion on her face. She communicated telepathically, as in the vision: ‘It’s alright if you want to be here now, Gloria.’ When I woke from the dream, my first thought was that she was giving me permission to join her but when I mulled it over in the morning, I realized she was saying that it was entirely my decision whether to go on or put an end to it and that there would be no judgment and no repercussions.

This was a very powerful message that enabled me to let go of any beliefs I had taken on board and also relieved me of the persistent guilt I had always suffered from whenever I entertained the idea of suicide. Most importantly though, it had the effect of throwing me back entirely on myself. Yet, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, it felt like something other than my own little will to live that kept me going. Over time, the feeling that I am part of something much greater than my insignificant little ego increased, as did my understanding that doing my inner healing makes a positive contribution to the evolution of the collective consciousness. That is what now gives my life the meaning that makes me feel it is worth living.

Although I haven’t come up with any definitive understanding of the nature of spirit communication, and not for want of trying, my own experiences and the vast amount of data now documented on psychic activity prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is a genuine phenomenon. The only thing that makes sense to me is that consciousness is not confined to the body, that our physical reality is embedded in a field of consciousness and is constantly interacting with it, whether we are aware of it or not. This requires a shift in perception from viewing consciousness as being a product of the brain; the scientific materialist viewpoint, to seeing matter as the product of consciousness and integral with it; the spiritual point of view. If consciousness is primary, which I’m convinced it is, then death as we think of it is no different than birth – we emerge out of cosmic consciousness and merge back into it.

Perhaps learning to consciously engage with this field of consciousness is the key to no longer being afraid of the great unknown that death is but that would then also mean giving up any comforting ideas about it being the saviour of problems we have in this life. One of my guiding lights has been Jung’s brilliant insights into the nature of the unconscious, both personal and transpersonal, and its innate tendency toward self-healing and wholeness. Something in us, that is also beyond us, wants us to grow into the best we can be, but we have to participate in our healing and that means dealing with the dreams, good and bad, waking and sleeping, in our current life.

Sadly, Robin Williams got to the point where he saw no alternative but to end his life, and it is very painful for his family to have to live with the memory of him doing it in such a gruesome manner and in a mental state of intense suffering. Since his death, I have seen and read much about him and it is obvious he was struggling with a lot of inner conflict. He decided it was the best way out. To judge his actions is pointless. No one can know what it is like to live inside another’s mind and body, but hopefully much good will come of it.