Dream Your Self into Being. Bonnie Bahira Buckner
in my entire life did he tell me about a night dream, although I am sure I told him many of mine. But he understood many key principles to dreaming and he understood much about the power of the imagination. The seeds my father sowed provided foundation for me as a Dreamer.
My father’s experiencing of life was infinite. As a rancher, he spent his days riding horseback across unending plains in contemplative solitude, discovering surprising canyons and cottonwood-lined creeks that a glance across the flat land concealed. He drove miles across state lines to do business with other ranchers, and these long trips took many side roads that put him in contact with little-known people who possessed extraordinary skills or intriguing eccentricities—a silversmith in this small town, a leather-worker in a small house a hundred miles off the paved road—picking up from them bits of wisdom and perspectives of how a life can be lived. And he flew his own plane across the country, landing in places as different as little-used strips of asphalt surrounded by corn fields to San Francisco International. He was unbound by physical constraints.
My father seemed molded of the earth. He lived in the land, with the land and the plants and beings that populated it, and loved people and solitude equally. Most of all, he loved dreaming. His mind, thoughts, and ideas spanned the horizons. He lived both close to the planet and soared above it. Living with the seasons, the weather, and the rhythms of life, he observed miracles and lived the miraculous in nature and living.
Perhaps because of this, my father believed unequivocally in the infinite power of the mind and our imagination. As a child, if I would get sick my father would tell me to lie down in the sun. He would instruct me to feel the sunbeams on my body, warming me, and then slowly feel the beams coming into my body putting light on all the bad bacteria to banish them away. Other times he would tell me to lie down in the grass and imagine friendly ants coming up through my feet and marching all through my body, eating all the bad bacteria and viruses and then marching back out my feet once they had completed their task. He also told me that if I understood this I would never have to be sick—that my mind would always be able to heal my body if I allowed it to, and if I helped it to do so.
I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with my father, at his side as we burned miles across seemingly endless dirt roads, or trotting our horses shoulder to shoulder for long hours across pastures. During these times, he would point out what moved him, bring his thoughts to the surface for me to hear—all the while teaching me.
These experiences with my father, and his healing images, laid the foundation for the rich imagery I would learn and teach in the tradition of imagery and dreaming that I follow. My experiences with him grounded me in the physical understanding that we move with the seasons, and that we are inextricably in relationship to all the beings of the planet and even the planets and systems beyond it. It grounded me in my body, and my body to the earth, and taught me that in the expressing and unfolding of these relationships God is revealed.
The specific imagery exercises my father would instruct me in were more than simply healing a cold. These images introduced me more directly to a relationship with my body and my body’s landscape, and illustrated for me the interplay between the two.
How powerful it is to know that the mind and body are one, and that they are in dialogue with the physical world, instead of feeling vulnerable or victim to outside forces! This creates both agency as well as responsibility. If I want to feel better—from physical sickness or any emotional or circumstantial malady—I must choose to accept my role in the relationship and then respond to it in order to create the change I desire. There is no more waiting for someone else to save me—I have the ability to create change (agency) and therefore the responsibility to do so. It is about choice, not victimhood or powerlessness.
Lesson One:
The power of our mind is infinite, and our body is in direct relationship to our mind. This means that our physical world is also in direct relationship to our mind. This assumes individual responsibility.
Understanding choice banishes fear and creates a very different image for a worldview: rather than huddling inside the village walls afraid that the strange noises outside might be a werewolf, I could simply drop the walls, walk into the forest, and see whether the werewolf were there. If he was, he was tamable.
As a child, I understood my father’s imagery exercises to give me power over the physical as it relates to my body. Later, with Catherine, I would learn that this extends to responsibility over emotions and their stagnant residues: anger and fear, and their couplings—guilt, resentment, doubt, irritation, anxiety, and so forth. Imagery is the tool for choosing and taking responsibility for our part in the relationship of Self to world. It is also the means by which we can clear these stagnant residues and shift emotions into feelings of our choosing: creativity, compassion, lovingkindness, discernment, love, and etc.
Emotions and feelings express themselves through our physical bodies. Learning to map the body, and establishing a relationship with it, includes learning where and how emotions and feelings move within us. For example, for me anger is an explosive shooting out simultaneous with an ejecting up of myself out of my head and from my body; fear is a cold pulling back and crumpling in; while compassion is a grounded, warm, and golden pink expansion in all directions. Mapping emotions and feelings allows us to shift any emotions and their couplings that have become stagnant, and to choose to move into feeling.
I often explain this choosing using the two different expressions of comedy exemplified by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In Buster Keaton’s comedies, Buster is a completely sane, put-together, innocent, and “regular” guy whose environment is haywire. He might begin walking down the street on a calm and beautiful spring day, minding his own business, when all of a sudden and for no reason a boulder comes smashing down toward him, or a piano falls from a high window! As he leaps to avoid being smashed, he trips over a dog leash that is stretched tight by the lady who has stopped to peer in a window, which sends him teetering wildly to try to regain his balance and in the process sends him falling into a manhole that just opened as the workman crawled out.
Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand, enters a perfectly sane, put-together, innocent, and calm environment in which he creates havoc. Maybe he walks into a polite dinner, and winks and wiggles his eyebrows at the pretty lady whose mad husband glares, then drops a morsel on the powdered breasts of the lady of the house, and then swings his cane to make a point only to smash the ice sculpture, and so forth until everything is chaos.
Life is the Charlie Chaplin scenario. It is not the world that is doing things to us, but we who are creating our world. Once we realize we are the locus of instigation and that our actions directly create the environment in which we are interacting, we can begin to craft the environment of our choosing.
In my twenties and early thirties, I would mistake life for a Buster Keaton scenario. I would blink my eyes innocently like Keaton and wonder why there were so many yellers and screamers around me. Once, someone I was dating hit me during an argument, screaming that I was a mountain of anger and she had to express what I wasn’t expressing. This is a messed-up scenario for many reasons, but it was also a good lesson, because I had no idea I was angry. Because I was being hurt by her, and this was said as judgment, I dismissed any truth in her statement.
Years later, however, when I met Catherine, one of the first things she said to me was: “You’re very angry.” Because she was not hurting me and it was not said with judgment, I could hear it. I also remembered my ex’s accusation and considered the possibility more strongly because it was now a pattern.
Catherine continued for three years to say to me, “You’re very angry,” calmly, factually, and absolutely without judgment as if reading a dictionary entry. I finally got it—and I was, indeed, really angry!
No matter how supportive and loving a family might be, none is perfect. Each of us comes into this world to face challenges, disappointments, and other pains of being on this planet and encountering these imperfect families, relationships, and other limitations of living. These challenges are part of the necessary tension for development—a perfect world would be a complacent one. How we choose to react to these challenges is unique to us, which in turn becomes the doorway through