“What is bound to happen will happen.”~ Ramana Maharshi

The world cannot give you what you want. It can only give you what you think you want.

The two sentences above came to me as I sat in silence. Let them sink in. Let them apply to you and your wasted energy trying to get people to like, love or at least accept you. Did it ever work? You know the answer.

I am a perfectionist and a pessimist and that makes me pretty much of a mess. Even so, these are personality qualities. In my soul I am free, as someone once wrote.

I had a dream recently that pointed up in symbols what the two sentences mean. It was about my best friend Jeanne. In the dream I had come to visit her and she lived in India. She loved it there and took me to a cave-like structure where many people had set up different kinds of bazaars. We wandered around and I suggested we each buy something beautiful that we liked.

She immediately found a fat golden figure and said she had fallen in love with it. But then she disappeared and I was left to wander the caves.

Exhausted and alone, I was at some sort of strange place in the cave where a man befriended me. He could see I was lost and was at my wit’s end. He said this to me, “I can’t get rid of your fear, but I can show you how to float.”

And that part of the dream was over. Then someone was telling me that this was a place where people came to die. And I realized that Jeanne had done just that. And she had left me on purpose and that was her gift to me.

I puzzled over what the dream was saying to me. Jeanne had brought me to her favorite place and found what she wanted and she went home to die consciously and happily.

Now I was left to learn how to float, how to experience this world as a place where nothing is as it seems and yet the goldenness of the soul is all we need. This is how we survive terrible losses and trauma. We learn to float, to ride the waves of the world in an ever more conscious way.

Never give up on the journey back to yourself. Sure, there are hidden caves and mysterious events, but love is the guiding force. And you are never left without it.

Vicki Woodyard