44. Spirituality

Spirit Emerging, Spirit Rising

Way back in 1994 a friend of ours interviewed us for a newsletter called VOICES on the topic of spirituality.

E:         What part does spirituality play in your healing process?

Us:       To us, spirituality is a sense of connecting with the rest of the world, to life itself. We look at it as the collective unconscious. It is making our healing process make sense; there is a beginning, middle, and end to the journey. It is like being out on a big ocean, having some kind of mark on the water, that gives us an idea of where we are going. We are using it with objects that symbolise something. We have a blue stone, and when we wear it, it is a reminder of how all the alters inside are connected. We also have a lot of imagery. Sometimes somebody inside will come out and ask where all of us are and a picture will come out, like forests or mountains.

E:         Are these places where you feel safe?

Us:       Yes, for the most part. [One image we have is of a] big city with four walls, that contains all the different landscapes we travel through. About a month ago, one of the alters started drawing a picture of our journey. It is framed by the four walls of the city, and within those walls, there are different images of places where we have been. In one corner of the city, she has drawn a phoenix rising from the ashes, whose mythical meaning is “Death and Rebirth.” We also did a soul retrieval [ceremony] with a shaman. He gave us Indian tobacco and cornmeal afterwards to be sprinkled on some special spot on the earth, to thank all the spirits that have helped us retrieve the lost parts of our soul. Trees are very important to [one of us]. We chose a spot on a friend’s piece of land that has thirteen different trees growing in one place.

E.         When did you connect with your spirituality?

Us:       A few months before knowing we were multiple or abused, we met three beings who were [seen as] Spirit guides and that is how we started our journey. We were seeing and feeling those spirit guides and the first one was telling us not to listen to anybody else but to what was inside us. The second one was a wolf, and we felt it was protecting us, but was also going to chew our inside out. That meant that he was really going to dig out what was hurting us. As for the third one, we had a very clear message from the Wolf that we must go get the Raven. So we went to the museum of Anthropology at UBC and we saw Bill Reid’s sculpture of the Raven. That is when we took in the Raven as the third Spirit Guide.

E.         Are they still with you?

Us:       The voice of the first one told us she died, but we like to think she is still in there, incorporated. At one of the soul retrievals we went to, we had a very clear picture that the Wolf had found its mate and that his work with us was done. But he is still inside us. And ...the Raven just became a part of us. We have always considered our body as a separate alter and at one point, our system decided to call [our] body “Raven”.

We also did Reiki [a form of healing using crystals] and in each session .. we had visual images that told a story of where we were at in the healing journey. We wrote them all down because they were really quite amazing. We read books about indigenous people and saw how connected they are to the land and spirit. We realized that we do not have a culture that provides us that kind of spirituality, so we had to provide it for ourselves by drawing, writing and meditating in order to keep the connection with our Mother Earth.