Excuse me, your chakra needs aligning

I think I am still absorbing my art therapy session. It was fun! (It was also nerve-racking. I had the biggest comfort eating session I have had for YEARS - or at least the biggest non-munchies-related one. On the way up the mountain - which is really a hill rather than a mountain - I had a double cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate thickshake even though I was hardly hungry at all, and then on the way down the mountain I had a Maxibon ice cream and a packet of cheese Twisties. Disgusting. It sat in my stomach like a stone and felt shite. I don't plan on doing that again anytime soon ... but gee, it was kinda fun at the time! It filled the empty nervous hole quite nicely, thank you very much.

I took along my collages and also some dreams I'd written down since I first spoke with Maggie last week. She is the most lovely, non-judgmental, accepting person, a real sweetheart. I felt immediately comfortable with her. She sealed the deal when, after hearing about my tree fetish, at the end of our session took me out into her backyard where she has a 200-year-old something-or-other-I-can't-remember which was sitting there reaching all his amazing spindles to the sky. I wanted to marry this tree. Is there something wrong with that? :) We are going to sit out there in one of our sessions, under this tree, with such a beautiful, commanding presence in her lovely garden.

Maggie saw linkages between my collages and my dreams, which I couldn't particularly see at all. My dreams seemed like so much gobbledegook, but after a few symbolic elements pointed out in one in particular, suddenly I realised how congruent this dream was, what a story it was telling me about myself, a story about self-nurture. I get the feeling I have quite a bit to tell myself if I'm willing to listen (I am; I love the sound of my own voice, even internally ;) This dream ended up including, surprise surprise, elements of creativity and, yes, sexuality :) Those damn phallic symbols - they're just everywhere.

Anyway, it seems that creativity and sexuality share the same chakra, and mine is out of whack :)

Now, see, this is where I would have balked 10 years ago and called this woman names in my head about how deceived she is and all that stuff and considered not returning. But you know what? I don't think, from observing where I am sitting at this juncture in my journey, having learned what I have learned over the past 10 years, that Western Christianity seems to have all that great a monopoly on the truth of reality. I am not talking here about the ultimate Truth of Jesus, who is a deliciously hidden treasure in the field of time, but about the propensity of Christendom to try to fit absolutely everything in the outer world into a paradigm taken from the Bible, to the extent of ignoring the facts in front of our noses if they don't fit into our sometimes narrow interpretations of a book that does, you have to admit, from our very limited perspective, contradict itself.

This is not to say that I don't hold the Bible in the highest regard. Indeed, I still give it a big capital buh. There is something magical about that collection of books. They are, however, not a science document. And when I look at the human body, it seems obvious to me that it is a body of energy. (It is also a body of water, and a body of clay, and all sorts of other wonderful things as well, all at the same time). It makes sense to me that if the body has some sort of energy thing going on in it, that it could have "centres" of energy in the body and those centres could get blockages in them. And if it's possible to get blockages in them then I imagine it's somehow possible to unblock them.

I don't know what it takes to realign an out of alignment chakra, but if I get that radar buzzing, that easy to ignore but nevertheless real constriction somewhere in my soul that tells me that Papa doesn't want me to go there - then I won't. But if I sense this is something that will be helpful to me physically/spiritually/emotionally then I will go with it. There have been so many things that I have discovered along my Christian journey that would be labelled as bad that have turned out to be either neutral or even good ... I'm not interested in hearing people who operate out of a system of fear to tell me what is right or wrong anymore.

See, this is the thing that annoys me about Christians too. We get into this paradigm of good and evil - even though Someone somewhere has told us that we don't have the ability to know what is good for us and what is bad for us - and we willy nilly throw things we have no understanding of into the "good" or the "bad" basket, creating barricades for ourselves. Not only that, but we often refuse to believe that anyone who is not a Christan could possibly have any kind of contact with the truth. Chakras? What a ridiculous concept, evil hocus pocus from Satan. We don't stop to think that perhaps a certain group of people in a different time or place to our own have been free to see certain realities because they have or haven't had a certain set of presumptions to blinker their view.

Even the way we read the Bible can endorse that kind of black and white thinking (but really, the Bible can endorse any kind of thinking we want, containing as it does some kind of strange spiritual mirror that reflects us back to ourselves). Then you can get all godhatesfags.com about everything, going around with the divine right bestowed by an angry God to root out the evil from amongst us to throw out of the camp so that Jehovah will deign to shine his face upon us and bless us, even though elsewhere it says he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike, and even though Jesus didn't see fit to rile with anger against anyone except those convinced of their own rightness and the blackness of others' hearts because they weren't walking the same way.

So anyway, may your chakras all be aligned. I watched Robin Hood (the British TV serialised version) the other day (I might watch it again; all those blokes getting around in jerkins with vast amounts of facial hair was edifying). There was a woman on there being drowned for being a witch, and I couldn't help feeling a certain kind of camaraderie :)