Active Imagination and Breaking on through to the Other Side…

“Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (on Carl Jung’s technique)

I didn’t set out to actively use my imagination in order to bring about a major breakthrough in my life, I just stumbled on this technique quite accidentally! It wasn’t until a few days after my experience on September 26, 2016, that the term Active Imagination popped into my head and I realized that this is what I had just, indeed, experienced! I’d read a few Marie-Louise von Franz and Carl Jung books back in my early 30s so the term and technique was in there somewhere just waiting to be used. 🙂

So….where to start, where to start? It is quite a long, circuitous story. I hope I will be able to relay it in a coherent manner!

It all began mid-September, 2016 in Canada when, after having a bit of a health scare (reminiscent of my Barcelona Experience in September, 2015) my mom suggested we write down my health history starting back in 2009 when I first started to have some health issues, after moving to Mexico. The idea was to see if there were any clues as to what the real problem was…and there appeared to be some clues, yes! For the next week the issue of Rage kept popping up everywhere I looked…and, if you knew me, you’d never guess that Rage was at the bottom of what needed to be healed, nope! 

Preceding my first health issue I recalled a moment in 2008 when I flew off the handle in an absolute black rage at a friend (this was a first and so out of character!). That event seemed to set off a whole string of strange health issues (or did it? I needed to find out!). So far, that was the main clue after writing out my whole health history with my mom.

Then I recalled the next time I felt rage, back in 2011. (I’ve really only felt this emotion a few times in my life!) It was when I was stung across my eyelids by a jellyfish after doing a ceremony on my favourite beach on a Blue Solar Eagle day (which is, of course, about the Vision of the Eagle!) Perhaps my reaction was crazy, but, after two hours of extreme, acute pain, I felt soooooooo damn angry at the Universe!! Here I’d been doing a beautiful ceremony and meditation to help heal the world (Blue Eagle says: when you heal yourself you heal the world – that should have been my first clue!) and the jellyfish sting felt like a slap in the face by the Universe itself. I pretty much stopped doing ceremonies for several years after that, I was soooo damn angry! Isn’t that crazy?? I was thinking: “Whhhhhyyyy would you do this to me?? I’m a good person!!”

In response to my rage and feeling sorry for myself however, the very next day I was bit by a dog on my right calf! Seriously! I was in shock. I’d never been attacked by a dog before in my life and the dog just came out of the blue and sunk three of it’s teeth deep into my leg which made the blood gush out in a rather dramatic fashion. I still have the scars. What was the meaning of this!? The Universe is really socking it to me! Not letting up! The rage turned to disbelief. I felt beaten.

Then (you’re not going to believe this) three days later I was walking through the plaza and a little boy stepped out in front of me and pretended to be a monster. So, in the spirit of engaging with him, I pretended to be a monster back and then he sunk his teeth into my thigh!! I started to cry! What the hell…???  This was too weird.

Of course, the significance of these three intense experiences was not lost on me and I thought: OK, stings and bites….they must be Mars. Mars = anger….but I wasn’t feeling angry before these three experiences happened?! I didn’t have any major transit involving my Mars. Hmmm. I just couldn’t get it. (Much later I see that stings are really ruled by Pluto and Pluto = deep rage) 

Soooo, fast forward to September 2016 when mom and I are writing out my health history. Rage was on my mind as perhaps the possible culprit. Or the key to healing. And I was in the middle of my Chiron Return! Ahh-HA! It is no coincidence that Chiron, the wounded healer’s, symbol is a key!

In September I got a blood test done because I was concerned with my health and when I got the results back it showed that one of my liver counts (GT Gamma) was higher than it should be. Liver = anger and rage. So that was message #5 that points to Rage as something to explore. But the rage messages didn’t stop there, nooooooo!

The day before I was to fly back to Mexico I went to a bookstore because I thought maybe I could use a good book on being peri-menopausal since the doctor thought that that was my main problem. All two of the books on peri-menopause looked so lame, though, so I stood there for a few seconds thinking and then, totally out of the blue, a book called, “Women Who Run with the Wolves” popped into my head. I had heard about this book when I was in my early 30s but I was never interested it – having never identified with being a ‘woman’ very much. But, there the title was in my head saying, “Buy me, buy me!” soooooo…I listened to that intuition mainly because the year before I had had a very interesting dream where my friend and I were looking at our palms (a la Carlos Castaneda’s style – so you can ‘wake up’ in your dream) and there were very interesting images being depicted in each of our palms. My friend’s palm was very colourful with a lot of different action and images in it. The images that stayed with me from her palm were Samantha from Bewitched and the Good Witch of the North from The Wizard of Oz. Good witches, both! Nice symbols. I waited with anticipation to see what my palm would reveal and when I looked, I was quite disappointed! All I saw was a browny-grey wolf running on a browny-white background. That was it! That’s all! So dull, I thought! I don’t even have a connection with wolves! Huh? But…it was WILD, of course, which seemed significant. Sooooo when that book title popped into my head I recalled that dream and thought: OK that’s the book for me. There was one copy left in the bookstore and the back cover speaks of the Wild Woman inside of all of us and I liked the sound of that.

So then, a day later, I’m on the airplane to come back down to Mexico and I take the book out. I decide to open it to a random page (it’s a very thick book) to see if it has a message for me and I flip it open to the page with the title, “Rage as Teacher”! I am SERIOUS!!! Hahahaha. It was the first sub-chapter within the larger chapter on Rage. Nutso! Soooo I read it with fascination….and it was just what I needed to read…reeeeeally enlightening, I have to tell you!

Fast forward just three days to when I’m reading the other book I was reading about the Camino in Spain. It’s a very light book by a German comedian, Hape Kerkeling, called, I’m Off Then!, so I wasn’t expecting any insights, just an entertaining read. But, as fate would have it, his book actually held the Ah-HA moment for me! In the book he talks about meeting a Peruvian Shaman who seemed totally nuts and after walking some time together they were sitting down to a meal when the shaman said that he just loved German books and he listed his top three favourites. The first two books were ones that the German guy really liked, too, so he thought he had great taste. Then, the third book the shaman said was one of his favourites was “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler. Haaaaaa oh nooooo! The German guy loses it and rages at the shaman…then storms out and walks the Camino by himself. But, the next morning at the next hotel there was a note waiting for him from the shaman just saying how he hoped his journey was going well. The dude realizes in that moment that this shaman was actually helping him to RELEASE his rage or, at least, to SEE that it had been simmering beneath the surface for many weeks….just simmering away….without him even knowing it consciously.

That’s when the light truly went off for me….that’s why I’d had the jellyfish sting, the dog bite and the child bite all within a week! The Universe just wanted me to SEE my rage…see that it was actually there so that I could transform it! If I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t transform it!

So then I’m thinking that I’d better get to work transforming the Rage, right? But how?? 

So I go back to the verrrrrrry beginning of the Rage, which, through dreams over the years and a past life regression a year earlier, I’d discovered stemmed from my life as a man who had been put in jail by the church for no good reason and had been tortured and killed. During the regression I was so filled with rage and indignation at the injustice of being thrown in jail by those church assholes. “I am a GOOD person!”, I cried, “This isn’t fair!!!” Then I became very very very sad and hopeless…and in the end I just rotted away in a damp, dark cell until I expired.

It is no coincidence that the words out of my mouth after being stung by the jellyfish across the eyes were, “How can this be happening to me? I’m a good person!!” ???? (so very Pluto in Virgo – memories of lives where you just wanted to ‘serve’) So here we go – the pieces of the puzzle were coming together.

The Active Imagination Part of the Story 🙂

It was the morning of September 26, 2016 in my home in Mexico that I sat down to meditate with the intention of trying to heal this Rage that I came into the world with. I felt like I had accumulated a lot of intense, ugly, deep, unconscious stuff (Pluto) from mannnny past lives and that this was the life that I would be able to transform that darkness into light. Whether one believes in past lives and the accumulation of experiences or whether it’s just my task as Tracey to transform this energy from something that isn’t helping me (or the world, by extension) to something that is useful, isn’t important. What is important is to be a transducer! 

So there I sat…not knowing what I was really going to do to heal this rage…but then it all just happened. And what happened was this:

I closed my eyes and sat in the darkness of my mind for a while until it occurred to me that I could have a conversation with the rageful, unhappy man who had been jailed and tortured. I brought him up on my inner screen. I saw a dark cell. No windows. I could hardly see the figure sitting on the cold floor, because it was so dark. I started to talk to him, to question him. “Hi”, I said. “Do you have anything to say to me?” “I know you’re feeling hopeless and filled with anger, but can I help you, somehow?” I waited. And waited. Then, the figure picked up a stale piece of bread and started gnawing on it. I thought: hmmm, maybe he’s not in such a bad, hopeless state after all? His eating seemed like a good sign. More waiting and asking random questions, connecting with him, letting him know I’m there and would like to heal, too. When, all of a sudden a door opened in the dark cell….it opened to a beautifully, alive, earthly landscape….green grass sparkling and backlit by the sun and a blue blue cloudless sky. My man simply stood up and walked out of his cell. His wife and child were waiting for him and they all hugged. (The Trinity! Conscious, Subconscious, Superconscious) I was bewildered by these events and was sending out…..”Whaaat? I don’t understand….” vibes when he sent me a thought-feeling-understanding bomb that made me understand everything in one instant. All was absolutely clear, now.

Essentially, he told me that his experience in the jail…..all of it, the anguish and sadness and rage and fear and physical torture and the whole horrible situation…did NOT blacken his heart, his soul, his light. All it was, was an experience and it did not damage him irrevocably. These earthly experiences cannot damage one’s heart, cannot damage one’s light because one’s heart and one’s light are undamageable! Indestructable! So, despite his awful experience, he was whole, he was light, he was fine! This was what he transmitted to me. Wow. Tears trickled down my cheeks. I felt it. Undamageable! I was pure! I was light! I was fine!

It was a pretty profound experience for me and occurred during my Chiron Return. My Chiron happens to be in a key point in my chart – conjunct my Saturn in Pisces and opposite my Pluto, Uranus and Mars in Virgo. I have always felt that this challenging aspect in my chart shows (among a myriad of other things that are good, too, like: they are my day-dreamy visions that manifest dreams and my design and planning planets, too! ) that I was tortured and killed by a group (11th house placement of the Virgo planets), likely a religious group (Chiron/Saturn in Pisces). Soooo when Chiron came around for it’s return it activated all five of these planets annnnnnd it was a rough, emotional time but, wow, much healing was had!

I feel like quite the pro, now, having gone through my Chiron Return with such fine healing results that I’d love to support others going through their Chiron Returns! I couldn’t find much on real people going through their Chiron Returns so this is for you and I hope my experience will support your own healing!

Chiron is the ‘wounded healer’ and soooooo, the Return, which happens for a couple of years some time between the ages of 48 and 52 depending on when you were born, requires that you HEAL your Wound.

Interestingly a lot of women also go through menopause around this time and I was thinking that many women might be thinking that they feel so CRAZY and emotional and challenged because of hormones but noooooooooo it’s their Chiron @$!% Return and there is something that you can do about it – something you should do about it! Participating in your own emotional healing and finding out what that thing is that needs to be healed, is what you’re being urged to do during this time and if you do it, the next phase of your life will have a very good foundation on which you can build. 

I hope to hear from you!
Love,
Tracey