#undlela

[returntotheway]

Transformations, part four

The night after a dream of reclaiming my power (see part three), a Zhouyi reading of mountain-under-water, Overcoming Obstructions (illustrated above; its lines below) advised me to stop pushing and I let go of any dream intentions.

I then had another dream which sounds horrific, but wasn’t.

I’m on my way to meet up with some friends in a town when I see a beautiful green dress on sale in a shop window. My friend encourages me to try it on so I do, in a changing room full of personal bits and pieces. 

I remember looking at myself in the mirror and being amused at how blubbery my lips are; like Mick Jagger’s, I thought.

Then the view shifts and I’m watching events unfold like a film. The next scene shows me, after I’d inexplicably been murdered in some bizarre way, strung up by a complex web of strings high against the ceiling. 

The style of the film is more of a classy thriller than a horror, though, so when the point of view changed and I saw my chopped-off head sitting on the floor, I just thought “Really, that’s totally over the top; they’re not staying true to the spirit of the film!”

I’m then back in my body - or my spirit, rather, as I’m now a ghost. I see the shop attendants come and see what had happened and exclaim over it, though very mildly - certainly not running off to call the police.

I don’t feel anything except slightly bored, and wander over to look in a display cabinet before going upstairs, where, in classic ghost style, the floorboards creak beneath me. 

I hear a girl in one of the bedrooms react fearfully, and wait ‘til she opened the door to ask her curiously “Can you see me?”

When I woke, I considered what I was being told. I’d been asking Undlela to guide me down the White Paths for a few nights now, and this was my response. My first reaction to becoming a spirit myself - a future ancestor - was to go window-shopping, which felt like clear counsel to purify myself and my intentions more deeply first.

The next night, I asked Undlela to ‘guide me down my path with a heart.’ This confirmed my feeling of being assessed as not yet ready to go further, when I found myself at a checkpoint with bowls of drugs lying around and police going through people’s papers and possessions at length. This sounds like a paranoical situation, but it wasn’t - what I most remember is feeling a loving union with a kitten I held.

As with my boat-crew/bodyboard dream, it’s the process of revisiting my dream images and descriptions in order to write this account which is revealing further insights - one reason that I believe journalling dreams both verbally and visually is so helpful. 

Though I saw the dream as ‘confirming my feeling of being assessed as not yet ready to go further’, I now see another reality: my attention is being drawn to the kitten, which, though I faithfully portrayed it in my image, I passed over because it was a kitten: no serious inner-quester is going to share a revelation that kittens are cuddly and adorable! 

But, using my feelings as a guide, I’m being shown that the outer checkpoint isn’t the point; my own, inner feelings of love and resonance are my path with a heart.

Part five here

[returntotheway]

transformations with Silene Capensis and the I Ching

As promised, here’s the first part of a little series excerpted from my article in the current issue of Caduceus, available here. 

Above is an image of the little Silene Capensis flower with the I Ching hexagram of wood/wind under fire, Transformation.

‘Becoming a person of the plants is not a learning process, it is a remembering process.Somewhere in our ancestral line, there was someone that lived deeply connected to the Earth, the Elements, the Sun, Moon and Stars. That ancestor lives inside our DNA, dormant, unexpressed, waiting to be remembered and brought back to life to show us the true nature of our indigenous soul.’ Sarah Popham

I have recently had an experience with the dream plant Silene Capensis/Silene Undulata that has been so profound and far-reaching I feel an account of it could help others with an interest in such things. 

I hope to give a sense of how this beneficent plant teacher worked with me by sharing the very specific details of our interaction.

I write as a Westerner with no previous experience with African traditions but as one who approached this sacred plant with great respect and a genuine desire to learn from her wisdom.

As well as having undertaken a 16-year creative exploration of the I Ching, or Zhouyi, I have been working with my dreams on and off for decades and virtually every day for the last few years.

The images in the following posts are my illustrations of I Ching ‘hexagrams’, six-line figures made up of two ‘trigrams’, out of eight alternatives: ‘Earth’, ‘Thunder’, ‘Water’, ‘Lake’, ‘Mountain’, ‘Fire’, ‘Wood/Wind’ and ‘Heaven’. 

When these eight energies interact to form each of the Zhouyi’s 64 hexagrams, an illuminating essence is transmitted that helps the reader align to the flow of their lives.

So, at the beginning last year, when my work on the Zhouyi was reaching a culmination point, I sought out a plant spirit to help me deepen the process.

I was led to Silene Capensis, otherwise known as African Dream Root, with the response of trigrams Wood/Wind under Fire, producing the hexagram Transformation (below).

I found out that this is known as an ubulawu, with the power to induce visionary and prophetic dreams and to communicate with ancestral spirits. It is sacred to the Xhosa people, who call her undlela ziimhlophe: ‘white ways’ or ‘white paths’. I’ll call her Undlela from now on.

I began on the first night of the Balsamic Moon, the three days prior to the New Moon, which are the most visionary and mystical of the month.

 Undlela is said to have little effect on waking consciousness, flowering instead in the sleeping mind...but as soon as I had absorbed the foam whipped up from her sweet, liquorice-like roots I felt a shift; a subtle but distinct feeling of expansive radiance.

Part two here