The Sun Dance

While I waited in the waiting area for Session 3 with Olympia, I perused my library book, Integrated Medicine for Neurologic Disorders. There was much said about the trigeminal nucleus and the occipital lobe. I almost understood.

“This indicated activation of the trigeminal neurons responsible for transmission of pain impulses from the meninges. In essence, an electrical event in the cortex resulted in changes in the meningeal blood vessels and activation of the neuronal system responsible for transmitting pain impulses from the meninges to the central nervous system.” (127)

I went into my session thinking about Re examining Life’s Purpose.

On the table I was sugar-cookie dough and she was rolling me out.

She worked on my foot and it was like flippers gently being made into feet.

Then she “rebounded me” which involves one lying limp like a rag doll and her shaking you out. But smoothly. I felt like a mermaid in the sea, washed in the waves. You can feel all your liquids move.

I began to think, ‘Ah, maybe today will be a session without pain.’

Nope.

Then she picked me up by the muscles in both sides of my neck.

Do you remember the Sun Dance the Native Americans do in the Great Plains and Prairie of the west, and how the American government outlawed it and tried to stop it because it is so very important, symbolic, and centering to the people? And how the First People fast and they prepare, and then they dance and pray and sing, and then in some tribes certain warriors cut their flesh open and they are raised and suspended on poles? It’s almost like crucifixion for the sun.

This is where I was transported in session Three with Olympia. My flesh flayed, my body hoisted on a pole, to spin and rotate in symbolic sympathetic magic with the earth, the sun boiling me. The pain a form of prayer.

And then I thought ‘Well perhaps the pain is partly good because it tells the body- You must make opiates. You must.’

I want to give the pain back to itself.

Then she moved my neck and head and I felt like an embryo, like that image of that human embryo when it is only part way grown, and it looks like a fetal seahorse with a strange eye.

In reality, 41 years ago I was crooked in the womb. I came out with a twisted left foot, like I had lain too long in one position, and I was made to wear a special shoe in my childhood.

I still need this special shoe but there it is, lost in childhood, outgrown.

So I have been wondering how one has trouble in the womb, and certainly my troubles were fewer than many. But while being twisted and untwisted in her hands, I felt very connected to beings who experience birth defects, who somehow start to grow wrong, way back in preconsciousness.

She began to reshape my neck and skull, as if before my mother birthed me, but after original conception, she stepped in and began smoothing me.

Then she worked on my fossil egg skull. There was crackling, like static and sparks.

She put her fingers in the back of my head and held my head like it was a bowling ball.

Then she held the top of my skull and I felt it was a turtle shell.

And I felt somewhat born again.

She is working the skeleton.

After these sessions I want to drink hot cocoa. Yesterday I did just that, and also ate a particularly lovely bear claw.

Outside, the purple crocuses have begun showing their color
And the pond is covered with sparkling light.