Preparing for Journeys

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Mar 20, 2001

I've been taking journeys for as long as I can remember. It wasn't until around the time my mother died that I began to check into other paths of spiritual learning. Up until that point I hadn't thought journeying was unusual and, for some unknown reason, after she died, I suddenly felt the need to investigate what was going on. Something funny happens to you when you lose your parents. It's as if you suddenly have permission to do everything they ever told you not to do. No longer would your curiosity or different belief system insult or hurt their feelings. You were free of the imposed rules and able to go about deciding for yourself what was so and not so.

In my enthusiasm I investigated everything from booze to psychology to hauntings to energetic healing. During this time I kept a journal of dreams and journeys because those were two things that I had learned to trust and depend on. As I learned these other ways of expressing spirituality I began to lose touch with journeying. The dreams stayed on and, today I realize that the dreams were extensions of journeys or, journeys in another form. And the point of me telling you all that is this. You already journey whether you are aware of it or not.

Every night, when you go to bed, you move yourself through the steps of a journey in preparation for entering sleep. Shortly before bed you slow down, letting the day's stresses fall away one by one until you are relaxed enough to crawl into bed. Once you're in bed you allow your body to relax muscle by muscle without even thinking about it. Your breathing slows and deepens. And, for a few minutes - unless you're like my husband who nods off as soon as he closes his eyes - you stand in between the worlds of ordinary reality and the dreamtime. These are exactly the steps you take to enter a journey, the difference is that when you choose to consciously journey, you move yourself purposely through the steps.

Most of the books on journeying will tell you that you need to pick a time when you'll be undisturbed. There's nothing like the ring of a doorbell or the sudden playful shriek of the kids getting home from school to jar you rudely out of a journey. Well, if these things happened while you were taking a nap, you'd be jarred awake too, wouldn't you? Do you see the connection yet?

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