The Centre for Dream Research and Imaginal Studies

A Path Written in Our Bones: aging as initiation
First published in Synchronicity Magazine

Written within the soul of each woman is her own rite of passage, a gift from an ancient cultural inheritance. She discovers these roots in dreams, the natural birthright that springs from her own divine source. Dreams reveal aging as an element in the soul’s journey and as a highly creative transformative process. This creative fire will inform the rest of her life with meaning and purpose.

Often our dreams precede us down the path, providing signposts for us to see our way more clearly. On a deeper level they present us with images and symbols that awaken memories from an ancestral past.

Our daily lives present us with heroic tasks that we often misinterpret as some kind of karma, fate, or fundamental mistake in our spiritual path. Aging is one of those heroic tasks. In some dreams, the transformation symbols for the aging self appear as the ancestor struggling to give birth to the future. One woman dreamed of an old woman thrusting her way up from the centre of the earth through the earth’s strata. Pushing head first towards the surface, she seemed to be creating her own birth canal.

Increasingly in my own journey, my dreams and art seemed to be maps charting a way. One dream fueled my work for years. I dreamed that I was digging under a foundation of a house where old women stayed. I dug up a sacred amulet - a doll fetish from an ancient civilization. This dream opened me to the wonder of being on a particular journey with an essential life of its own, connected to a past with a distinct and significant lineage. Now, for the first time, my paintings exploded in brilliant colour and form. This is the power of art and the creative force of the imagination to create a space for these powerful images.

During this period women will often dream of a wise old woman who appears as a guide or teacher. She is a woman’s natural mana. These numinous symbols are charged with energy. We embrace this creative fire when we work with the dream and its symbols. These dreams stir us and our imaginations of who we are and the possibilities inherent in our journey.

This path that is “written in our bones” awakens us to the fullness of our creative fire and our body’s wisdom. We are created for ecstasy. Now our body sensations are experienced as though we were connected to some huge system of energy exchange with the earth. Defying old definitions of who we are, we discover that aging is a highly transformative, sensuous journey.

A woman may find the tactile connection to the organic arts to be a way of expressing herself and the mystery that she is involved in. She may be drawn to work with clay or charcoal, fabric or stone. If her passage is especially difficult she may allow herself to go into her own interior wilderness and define this space as sacred. From that space her dreams will present healing symbols and to create a container for her transition.

With our senses fully engaged we can experience the subtle shifts of coming home to our own body. Our dreams will guide us through the transition, healing the fractured images we have of ourselves as aging women. The story that unfolds in our dreams gives us language to interpret our experience and give it meaning. This is our Homecoming, our natural inheritance. Each woman must make this journey. Each, in her own way.