He sat on my knee and talked to me all night long -----every night, while I slept. His voice penetrating my dreams and the dark spaces between. Sometimes, in the lucid dreamstate he had taught me, I strained to listen.
“What was that you said?” I asked, but he seldom repeated anything, as though he must continue piling message upon message. Sometimes I just let him drone on in his stream of consciousness way. Sleeping through much of it, I didn't’t attempt to stay lucidly awake. It just wasn’t humanly possible. Yet, I knew every word was of utmost importance. After all these years, I thought it would sink in on its own volition. The sleeping brain being a sponge, and all.
In the beginning we did this only a little bit. But as time went by, and his appearance altered from one being to another, the messages became more detailed, more intense and instructive. It was very satisfying on one level and very startling on another, as the things I learned began to bleed through into my daily life. A subtle intimacy had developed between us. I hadn't realized until later.
It was the night he sat on my knee, like a little shaman when he nudged my mind with urgency, “Now, pay attention. You need to pay attention!”
“Okay, okay. I’m awake.” But, barely. I tried not to drowse but I couldn’t keep focused through the haziness of twilight sleep.
“I have to leave you,” he said. “You have one year to live,” he said.
That woke me up fast. I tried to sit up, but he gently laid me back down, relaxed.
“You must learn this!” He urged. My attention was focused deeply. “Good,” he intoned.
He led me through a new practice. Traveling through my body beginning at my feet and working upward, with specific instructions for breathing and tonal qualities. Fearful that I might miss something of his one-time-over instructions, I concentrated deeply, doing exactly as he said, observing each step of the way, experiencing, with as much clarity as I could muster, the newness of it all. Yet somehow this was familiar. Hadn’t we done this before? We left the solar plexus and rose up to heart. I opened to love and compassion and we floated there a moment. Suddenly he reached into my chest and pulled my ribcage apart yanking it wide open. The excruciating pain of it was more than anything I had ever experienced before; more severe than childbirth, more than bone cancer surgeries, more than falling in love, more than hating. That kind of pain was nothing I could escape. It woke me completely.
“Look!” he said.
I obeyed, looking down from a great distance into the gaping wound of my heart in total amazement. The pain disappeared, replaced by the magnificence of a brilliantly, pulsating spiral. The Universe alive before me, within me, all around me. Bliss..... Cool, deep, dark soothing velvet embrace of timelessness....
Just being.....in this all encompassing spaciousness beyond thinking...beyond words.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. So, eternity ended and I followed him back up to my throat where, surprisingly, he repeated the instructions precisely, without the spectacular accompanying visual effects until I was able to recall them verbatim.
“I have to go now,” he said. And was gone.
The pain in my chest was nothing compared to the resulting grief of losing my twenty-five year long relationship with my beloved teacher. I didn’t even know his name. Did he ever have one? Didn’t matter. The apparition that had become such a part of me no longer existed.
Copyright: Elizabeth Munroz
