by Bridget Thompson
This morning I woke up with the remnants of a dream flitting through my mind. My waking was slow and gentle. I felt good – rested and content.
But I wanted to remember the elusive details of my dream which were flitting and fluttering away. I was aware of frowning a little and tightening my mouth. My eyes felt dry and tired, and then, the familiar tension in my shoulder started up again. I could feel myself becoming more and more anxious and on the verge of irritability. What was the matter with me? I tossed over onto my side and curled up to keep warm for the last few seconds before dragging myself out of bed. What was the dream though? It certainly hadn’t done me any good – at least trying to remember it hadn’t done me any good! I found myself clutching my hands together and clenching my teeth.
Later on when I was at my studio, I still felt out of sorts. My client has pain on her right side as if a rib is poking into her; she feels contracted on her left side and her left leg feels longer than her right. She lay on her back on the table and we began to work. I was drawn to her head and face and began to gently touch her skull and neck. As I turned her head one way and then the other I talked about the 14 bones in her skull. I began with the hyoid bone, horseshoe shaped and non-articulating, resting on the thyroid cartilage, fairly deep in her throat but accessible. I talked about her tongue resting on the hyoid. Her jaw relaxed and then I noticed that mine did too. The discomfort in my shoulder was lessening, my breathing becoming freer.
I put my hand on her forehead and began to roll her head gently. I felt her smooth skin, and bone underneath it. An image of the sphenoid bone flashed into my mind and then I could see it under my hand: the beautiful and mysterious mask-like bone that sits above the cheekbones, behind the eyes and underneath the temporal bones. Beautiful because it’s shaped like a butterfly and mysterious because of the two slits in the front where nerves and channels and sinews pass through to the brain. My attention was open; I was observing myself as much as I was observing my client. My eyes softened and I was aware of seeing forward, what I was looking at, and also all around the periphery of my eye sockets. I could also sense myself filling out the space behind me. I could feel myself in three dimensions. As I suggested to my client to imagine her eyes like deep lakes, expanding up into her eyebrows, down into her cheekbones, out to her temples and in towards her nose, I did the same. We imagined the lakes of our eyes deepening backwards to the sea bed of our skull, and then forwards, as if taking in the sky.
We completed our session. My client sat on the edge of the table. Her eyes were clear and wide and her face soft and glowing. When she stood she felt stable and evenly balanced on both her feet. There was no compression on her left side and the pain on her right had gone. She commented that she felt more alive and was looking forward to her walk around Green Lake. ‘I feel light and free,’ she said, ‘I feel I could float out of here like a bubble…or a butterfly leaving streams of light behind me.’
After she left I walked out into the courtyard. It was a murky morning, fairly cold and wet, but I noticed sprinkles of light on the plants and sparkles playing on the water in the fountain. The colors were bright and deep at the same time and the range of shades and hues seemed infinite. I couldn’t stop seeing and looking for more. I sat down on the little stone wall in the front of the plant bed. Again the image of my sphenoid bone flashed through my mind. It turned into a gorgeous butterfly hovering behind my eyes.
And then I remembered my dream. It had been a brief shimmer of a moth gliding through the midnight dark, flashes of color on its wings in the faint moonlight, and a long sinuous tail floating behind it.
