A dream:

- A friend is telling me about a wild, black cat he’s been feeding.  He also tells me a story about a similar cat, how it was lifted off its feet by an invisible force and when it landed after several feet onto it’s back, *poof*, it disappeared.

- I’m walking down a sidewalk.  It’s a pleasant summer day.  I observe the wild, black cat, and notice another, a twin, slink past as well.  I notice that the second cat has a collar around its neck.

- I hear bells ringing… and look down to notice a collar of bells around my right ankle.  Suddenly, a powerful force grabs the middle of my back, and pulls me off my feet.  As I fly through the air, I struggle, and hoarsely scream "NO!"

- I snap awake, terrified.

Interpretation:

A cat (feline) is related to the feminine.  It’s black, which represents shadow aspects.  There are two cats, which represent duality.  An animal often indicates unconscious material that’s ready to come up into consciousness.  The more ‘friendly’ the animal, the closer the information is to conscious recognition.  The collar indicates ownership.  On my ankle, the collar tells me that I’m like the cats – and that I need to pay attention to balancing masculine (right side of the body) and feminine (feline) aspects in myself.  Bells indicate spiritual growth.  The powerful force is behind me, so I can’t see it, and I don’t want to see it.  It’s a power within me that I’ve denied, pushed to the back of my consciousness, and am now terrified of facing.  I’m afraid to land and *poof* – disappear.  It’s this power that ‘owns’ me, as long as I keep trying to repress it.

I got my monthly ‘friend’ the other day (my period).  I always feel the same about it – disgusted, annoyed, dirty and ashamed.  It reminds me of abuse in my childhood.  It reminds me of how much I hate having been born a ‘powerless’ woman.  That’s right, I have very little appreciation for my feminine side.  I think it might be the ‘power’ that I’ve repressed and that’s showing up in my dream.

I also caught myself the other day, whining to someone (a man I barely know) about how horrible it was to get a period.  He, being a vet, suggested that I get pregnant.  EWWWWW!!!  GROSS!!!   An even more horrible idea!  My A Course in Miracles lesson this morning (Text pages 560-564) talked about ‘unfairness’ and how it’s always linked to attack.  So if I think it’s ‘unfair’ that I’m a woman and have to tolerate having a period once a month, then I’m bound to attack myself.  The lesson also mentioned blood a few times:  "The blood of hatred" and "The bloodied earth".  Ok, Ok, Jesus, I get it!  I have to pay attention to this.

I was also thinking last night about love.  I wonder if I’m afraid of love because I confuse love with sex?  I reject sex for many of the same reasons I reject my curse… I mean, my period.  For me, sex equals guilt.  In the past, I’ve tried to minimize the sex-guilt conundrum by choosing partners that I saw as somehow ‘innocent’.  Like blond men.  Or younger men.  In the past seven years that I’ve been single and celibate, I’ve only been attracted to men who are guaranteed not to be sexually attracted to me: gay men, celibate monks, eunuchs (Ok, I don’t actually know any eunuchs, but if I did, I’d be attracted to them too).   Anyway, my point here is that, if I reject sex, perhaps I also reject love with a man because I believe that kind of relationship must include obligatory (yuck!) sex.  Perhaps, and what concerns me more, is if the belief system extends to rejecting love from Source (God) as well.

Do I imagine that the innocence I ‘lost’ in my childhood can be recovered through the innocence of another? Do I think I can ‘steal’ it back from them?  The Course would say that I never lost my innocence at all. It’s still here, I just denied it. Perhaps it’s Innocence (with a capital I) that’s the ‘power’ that abducts me in my dream. In my upside-down mind, I’m afraid of this innocence that I threw away because accepting it means that the guilt-self concept of myself must then *poof* – disappear.

This makes me think of the movie, "Henry & June".  Anais says sex makes her feel "so innocent".  Why do I think sex has to equal losing innocence?  Like Anais, I could decide that it increases innocence.  Which doesn’t mean I have to get out there and start getting it on with people, it just means I can start seeing it differently.  In truth, whatever ideas people project upon it, sex is, just as much as the body is, ultimately, meaningless.  It’s a basic confusion of the body with the Self.

And that’s where it stands at this point.  I’m praying about it and surrendering it to spirit for correction.  See, and that’s where I’d really like to acknowledge and embrace the feminine – for its gifts of surrender, acceptance, and receiving.

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