By heart, I’m a seeker by nature and an adventurer of inner and outer landscape by heart. All my life I have engaged in
practices that supported my quest for deeper experiential knowledge of life, the meaning
of it, and my particular role in its unfolding. Ever since my sixtieth birthday
two years ago I had a hunch that a new understanding was waiting for me,
somewhere.
And here I was on a vision quest in
the red rock country of Southern Utah, with a group of likeminded seekers,
eleven of us and a handful experienced guides. We spent a few days in the
basecamp in preparation for a four-day fast during which each one of us would
spend three days and three nights alone in the wilderness, following a
tradition of many indigenous cultures and world religions. I hoped that this
arduous ritual grant me a vision for a deeply connected life.
For my solitary time I chose a spot
on a narrow shelf high above the sandstone canyon floor, with a cave large
enough for my gear and for me to stretch out on the even, sandy grounds. This
was my first night out.
I woke up with a startle, suddenly
wide-awake, listening. Lying motionless on my back I tried to make out a very
subtle sound. It was pitch black around me. Turning my head to the opening of
the cave I could see a few stars between the clouds on a moonless sky. The
sound must be come from sand drizzling onto my sleeping bag. What could
possibly cause this, I wondered?
I rolled onto my belly, my hand
easily finding the headlamp nearby. Turning it on I let the light travel over the
ceiling three feet above me. And there it was: a single ant was crawling upside
down over me, releasing grains of sand. I felt my heart take a leap in awe of
such small feet breaking down rock and found myself smiling at the companion in
the night. How amazing to be in a place so quiet that drizzling sand would
wakes me up. Watching the ant diligently moving across the ceiling until
disappearing into a crevice, I was suddenly aware of my physical largeness, my
clumsiness in the ways I move across this earth. Will I ever be able to walk
again with ease, carefree?
I let the lamp’s light wander
around the cave some more. Just next to my face, I found another small, quiet
creature, a caterpillar shuffle over the edge of a big boulder near the
entrance. I wanted to touch its hairy body and extended a finger toward it,
expecting the animal to quickly withdraw from me. To my utter surprise, the
caterpillar arched its back into my finger. I held my breath not wanting to
disturb this delicate connection. Finally she lowed her back and moved on,
nonchalantly. Never would I have expected such a tender mutually desired
meeting and felt deeply moved.
The caterpillar disappeared and I
looked around some more. I noticed the large sandstone boulders that blocked
most of the entryway. Glancing up at the ceiling, I understood that these
boulders had dropped down from there. The cracks in the sandstone above gave me
an idea of the forms, shapes and sizes of the boulders that’d drop next.
Falling they would easily kill me, no doubt. Not a bad place to die, I thought,
for this Swiss woman so at home in this cozy cave in the astonishingly
beautiful desert of the American Southwest. Not a bad time to die after the
intimate meeting with an ant and a caterpillar.
Then I remembered that big boulders
split off from the mountains by the forces of water and ice. This was is a dry
spring night well above freezing. Feeling safe I turned off the light, tucked
myself tightly into my sleeping bag, ready for a few more hours of sleep.
Waking up I let myself linger in
the twilight zone between dream and wakefulness contemplating on the
visitations of the night. The encounters reminded me of the work I do:
Cranio-sacral therapy, the subtlest of hands-on healing work. When I lay my
hands on my client’s head and wait long enough, the walls and barriers that
have been created in the body as a result of trauma soften enough that I might
be able to listen with my hands and fingers to the different physical
structures in the head. I hear the stories of those structures and lean about
the relationship thy keep with each other. Marion Woodman, the famous Canadian
psychologist put it this way: “Once the body is listen to, it becomes eloquent.
It is like turning a fiddle into a Stradivarius.” Under my touch, when their
body learned to trust I can feel my client arches toward my contact, and how
this gentlest of hands breaks down defensive walls and allow the body to
experience a long forgotten physical freedom of pain and tension.
