The following is one person's account of her experience in one of the Shamanic Dream Circles:

SHAMANIC DREAM CIRCLE 2012

I'm at a dream circle in Northern Chicago. The circle takes place bi-monthly, hosted by a wonderful shaman in an appropriately anachronistic house, a gingerbread cottage of sorts, set back and covered in ivy.

Come In.

I'm high and electrically charged after ringing in the New Year with a 6 hour Kundalini Yoga event the night before this. The theme tonight is what's in store for 2012 and I'm sharing in the expansive energy of at least thirty other dreamers. (Actually probably not quite that many. The average is about 15).

I choose a card from a deck that gets passed around. The card says Israel and something or other about duality. I've never gotten it before. It's meaning combined with the theme of the day will be part of my dream meditation.

While excited and clear on many intentions for the New Year, I still seek some clarity. Something is eluding me.

All I want, like anyone, is to walk my spirit path with each step being empowered but there is still a viscous, lava-like gap that I seem to sink in or get sucked into.

Just before the meditation begins John (the shaman) glances at my card.

"This is about the necessity of integrating your two sides, your selves."

Ok.

My breath is a tingle in my nose, a controlled flow of prana. I go inward.

The right side of my head, from eye socket to crown is aching rather profoundly and so, as I begin to meditate this is my involuntary point of focus, a looming thing for several moments. John always says to go deeper with whatever you've got.

Old Double Mint gum commercial, buzzing noises, blackness, smelling the pine from your grandmother's log cabin, an old scab - whatever.

I think about the several headaches I've had over the past couple of months while simultaneously feeling the non-feeling of the left side of my head; expansive and relaxed. The aching and tightness of the right illuminates an image of my brain. The left is filled with light, vibration and jumpy light-speed electrical action; a bright cloud of heat lightning over a tropical island. The right is thick and dark and heavily pulsing, the cloud before the storm. The hurricane.

It's asymmetrical, it's divided, it's out of balance. Israel. Two stories. Light and dark. Yin and yang. On and on.

What two sides? I had first thought.

A black butterfly shape shifting back and forth from itself into a sting ray as big as the moon flaps its wings over each lobe of my brain. I become it and quickly descend to the top of a grassy purple mountain in a mystical place I have never been. Dr. Seuss, memories of other planets and Alice in Wonderland have had some influence here. A king bedecked in all sorts of uncommon colors, jewels and ill-fitting clothing appears in front of me, glittery staff in hand.

A dramatic and lengthy throat clearing has commenced.

"You are afraid of your capacity for indecision, but what has that been but your intuition?"

He's raising his staff and gesturing behind us. A blood red path turns slowly into the yellow brick road extending all the way from the horizon. Memories, images, emotions and sensory experiences pop up at every twist and turn. Some are suspended in the air right above it like those point and power dispensing coins and question boxes from video games.

Of course it's my spirit's path . . . up to now.

I go with my intuition almost all of the time, knowing now more than ever that to follow it is to be in my truth. But there are also times when I can't locate it and I become indecisive and stuck in the lava.

"Intuition, go-into-it-and-shine!" the king bellows.

"Indecision is going 'in-the-incision' you see, this is part of it and thus must be. Go into the dark to get to the sun."

He does a little jig.

And then here I come riding down the path in my Arthurian lace up boots on my night-mare. Fear a cloud of dust in the distance and one with the power. Mountains and valleys crumble and a bruised incision emerges.

And this is where meditation comes in. What to mediate-on, going into the gap.

It seems like it's taking a long time.

Finally, finally, finally the incision fuses into a long line of tawny stitches in sand and everything swirls and rolls to the ocean.

I leap up and fly towards the seas, looking back just once. The zany king with his wisdomatic rhymes yells out, "And don't forget your mentors, me-to-ours."

They're all around me right now, rippling outwards from the very first circle, on new years eve 2012 in a gingerbread house in the heart of the heart land.

Dimensions. Integration. Receiving. Community . . . I am you and you are me.

Gliding high above the ocean, the sound of the crashing waves vibrates through my being, just like the gongs from Kundalini the night before.

Gong, go-on.

And this is where I go on to.

And then I think, what about now? New job? New place? New people, experiences . . ? Everything is a clean slate.

But I realize I've always been on the path, every twist and turn behind me was a now I didn't know at some point. To continue to glide along I need to continue to integrate and be one with my intuition. I only need to refrain from a tendency to separate.

Gong. Gong. Gong.

Oh.

It's John, bringing us back.

Ahoe,*,

Erin

* 'Ahoe' from 'ahoe me takweyasen' - Lakota for 'all my relations'.