Since I am still recovering from the busyness of planning, coordinating, and producing the Dreaming & Healing conference, I figure I might as well explore what happened to my brain in the process.
21 days after the conference has ended, I am still tired and my brain is still peculiarly touched by the sustained intensity—of logical, linear left-brain tasks, I suppose. Through and beyond the conference, it has been hard for me to abide in time, to locate myself in space, to be familiarly oriented, to remember names or follow trains of thought, and all I want to do is get lost in the experience of observing nature, exploring sensation, meandering through shifting perceptions, daydreaming, drowsing, sleeping, and dreaming.
Gradually throughout the past year, more intensely over the last four months, and most fiercely during the final weeks before its inauguration, I gave boundlessly my focus and energy to creating the container for everything that happened, emerged, and manifested at the conference.
While it was clear what the production of the conference required of me, I had no idea how raw and un-poised I would be come March 21st, when the pre-conference began.
It deserves to be mentioned that in 2017, at the peak of production for the first biennial conference, I was having nervous breakdowns and emotional meltdowns several times a week before the conference inaugurated. I was afraid, stressed, freaked out, worn out, irritable, terribly insecure, and often unable to keep it together. I felt alone and thoroughly overburdened. I did not count on the support of an executive team, although Jeremy Taylor and Arne Hook were my moral support, and Rebecca Peterson, Montse Brito, and Jeanne Busby stepped up to help in the final weeks.
Knowing that everything would work out as it did—despite my despair—in 2017, I could believe more readily while honoring my humanity, and the process in 2018-2019 was a very different experience. My path was sprinkled with miracles and magical incidents that encouraged me consistently. I felt supported; I made a practice of regularly surrendering. I faithfully trusted, and I more gracefully flowed with the process.
At 8:00AM on March 21st, 2019, I arrived at La Casona, our conference venue, joyfully sleep deprived, ecstatically in proximity to and in kinship with our Dreaming & Healing team—dear friends and colleagues from around the world—excited to discover what this container would reveal to be able to contain. Having completed every one of my production tasks, backed by the full moon and the Spring Equinox, I arrived that morning blissfully disarmed.
Even when it was I who tapped into the calling and idea for this conference, who took on the task and responsibility of making it happen, I was never keen on owning the title of founder. Well, apparently, I am that—the creator, the originator, the inceptor—and with that, quite refutably, apparently, I am also the face of Dreaming & Healing. And so, people came to me, requiring my attention, my recognition, my validation, my granting of their free pass, and some people expected of the conference founder a certain aspect and behavior.
I sluggishly turned in their direction, smiling and nodding, and feeling the compulsion to say “yes” to whatever they said. That is, until one of my colleagues noticed what was happening, and asked that I please step away and stay far from the conference welcome table. Other colleagues, noticing my dishevelment, stepped in regularly to urge me to go rest and try to sleep.
As the first hours went by, I noticed my great impulse to be in propinquity with only a handful of people, and my body’s growing need to be seated or reclined, or outright dozing off. People came to me, requiring my attention, my recognition, my validation, my comprehension, and I watched as their lips moved and heard as their voices made sounds. I found myself repeatedly responding, “could you please say that again?” Unable to really process what they were saying, my answer became, “I am not in charge of that; please talk to someone at the welcome desk.”
I was progressively startled and stupefied, unable to receive or decode messages, requests, or expectations; I lost any point of reference for my own experience, and I was progressively unable to estimate or assess other people’s responses, reactions, standards, and so on.
I was, however, fully able to hone in when people came to share with me some kind of vulnerability or heart-opening emotion. I was able to resonate and reverberate with the affective sensations emanating from others as they dared to share moving stories about dreaming, about losses, about end of life. I was able to feel and know things otherwise presumed impossible. I cried easily as I shared a deep sense of connection with friends and strangers alike and fell into meaningful hugs with them.
Something was off, yet the overpowering feeling of connection and oneness won me. Looking back now I wonder, was my left brain shutting down? (Please see Jill Bolte Taylor’s Powerful Stroke of Insight)
Objectively observing what transpired, I recognize that upon receiving in-person, active help and support from my dear friend and admired colleague, Karen Herold, and later the sweet company of other dear friends and colleagues, Ian McCartor, Sylvia Marroquín, Janosh Chassan, Sakura Nimura, Tariq Nasraldeen, and others, my body and mind inadvertently shut down, only to be present to sustaining the container in a collective rather than individual way.
With the arrival of that camaraderie and support, I was able to relax, surrender, and let go; my resistance lowered, my immune system became vulnerable—bronchitis and laryngitis symptoms moved through me; an accident threatened the fracture of bones in my right foot—and my presence was somewhere in between the worlds as my body awkwardly interacted with and in consensual reality.
On the other hand, I felt progressively more deeply connected to the atmosphere, inherently one with everything, but not in the form of concepts, ideas, or structures. I sensed and experienced feelings and emotions, not just my own, but everyone else’s. I sensed information that didn’t come in the form of words. I was profoundly moved by human interactions, by people’s involuntarily opening hearts, and by my own vulnerability.
My actions and omissions, my moving through emotions and sensations, was my navigating this all-encompassing unfamiliar experience. As much of a surprise to me as to anyone else, all my body felt it needed and could connect with was rest and energetic recharge in closeness with my beloveds old and new, and with a highly palpable energy that moved through the space as people surrendered to the transformative and healing process that was constantly facilitated throughout the conference.
Sleep deprivation comes with tending to new life, as I have mentioned before. In my recent experience, this resulted in a foreign trance state that would perhaps be best to keep from the public eye, and yet somehow I am grateful for this unapologetic transparency that was a little bit embarrassing for me. There was great beauty too in the exposed vulnerability and rawness of that state.
Overloaded and overwhelmed, moved and inspired, I discovered a marvelous capacity for channeling, containing and sustaining; I discovered my brain apparently wiring differently. Functioning differently, this is how it was happening for me and how my body was adapting on the fly to this unforeseen aspect of the work.
I am still coming out from that experience; I am learning about what my body is capable of sustaining, and contemplating how best to handle that in public. I am sure my public displays did not reflect the expectation and definition of a conference founder. I admit, I was not altogether graceful, even when inoffensively; I admit I felt self-conscious, mixed with embarrassment around how messy this was all manifesting in me and through me. In any case, I did the best I could with what I was only discovering about myself and what my body and mind are capable of as it was happening.
It is quite an adjustment to embrace all that is happening, emerging, shifting, moving—priorities are shifting, there is all this work with mortality and death, this constant exploration of loss and transformation, all this curiosity about the afterlife, all these extraordinary, if odd, experiences, all of this opening up to what life brings without questioning it, all this love, and this impulsive move toward what connects me to and nurtures all of this. And so, I move toward, choosing to live more and more consciously and intentionally in this cycle of life-death-life.
As my dear teacher Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés wisely states, “Perspective is holy practice.”
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