You wake up tired. It wasn’t dark enough to fully rest last night.
You make your warm rich dark drink and watch the swirls in it as you add a little cream, to lighten things up.
You get the message to rest today.
Rest, how where when why?
But she calls to you. From the corners of your heart. The edges where you still get whispers of your true meaning, and what is really needed.
These gentle whispers always are speaking to you, sometimes you choose to listen and other times you choose not to. Sometimes just to see what happens.
Today you feel the beckoning of the dark edges of your soul and you listen. You rest.
While resting, doing nothing, laying on your couch, your eyes soften their focus, eyelids are heavy.
So you close them and enter into the darkness behind your eyelids. You sink from your eyes down into your chest. Your breathing softens and slows.
From this place you start to dream again. How long has it been since you gave yourself space to dream? You wonder as ideas and possibilities flash colorful images across your soul screen.
What if? You start asking yourself. What if you had enough time to start and finish that project that’s been beckoning you? What if you had enough resources to relax all day long? What if you really enjoyed and loved the company of those around you? What if you were connected within your community, being of joyful service? What if you really knew your neighbors and the names of all the trees in your area? What if you felt rooted in yourself and simultaneously free and wild?
You see an image of a mama bear retreating for the winter into her warm cave. Her coat and belly full. You follow her into her cave and you watch as she circles an area filled with cedar and twinkling lights. She puts up some logs around the entrance, so the light doesn’t get in and disturb the darkness where she is dreaming. You watch as she circles her evergreen bed to find the most restful position for dissolving into her dreams.
You sense a place for you to lay down and enter your dreams. Images of your life 5 years from now come flooding in. These are colorful dreams, dreams of possibility. Dreams of everything working out in the most supportive way, helping you to build the kind of life you’ve always longed for.
You feel pulled deeper into your body. Down into the base of your hips and you sense this rich dark pink and red color flooding your awareness. You feel warm and comfortable and relaxed here. You know you are in your womb, and simultaneously in the womb of the center of the earth, in the center of the cosmos. This cave is a womb. You rest here. You watch dreams wiz past you, other people’s dreams. You rest here for what seems like forever. It feels good to not be so busy doing, but rather to just be. To be here. Without feeling like you need to do or be anything different than you already are. You don’t need to change anything. In that moment of complete and total acceptance, a shiver of relaxing electricity courses through your body. Changing you. And suddenly, through the rest and the acceptance, you notice bubbles of dreams and visions start to make their way to you. You’re not doing anything but resting and feeling and breathing, and here these floating globes of iridescent possibility make their way to gather around you.
The rainbow orbs begin creating a beautiful circular formation around you, as if creating a mandala where you are the center. You notice as you think about your life going in one direction the colors and images change, and when you feel into another direction, everything changes again. You delight in this choice of yours to change the colors and images around you.
For Dreaming only happens in the darkness, when you’re relaxed and comfortable and accepting of everything as it is now. The dreaming of Mama Bear happens after she has retreated for the winter into hibernation, where she can really get her rest. You know that it’s just a moment of rest that is necessary, not an entire season, that begins sparking your dreams. So you take this one moment here, breathing in and breathing out through the soles of your feet, you let the earth support you, and then you begin to dream.
To explore and experience dreaming within the darkness, register for The Fertile Darkness: A Winter Womb Ritual for Women. Registration closes December 13th @ 12pm MST.
