I have had many visions representative of spiritual and psychological processes since my Awakening nearly eight years ago.  I have sailed vessels ranging from canoes to flying submarines, built dwellings for my broken inner children to live and heal in, and cultivated entire landscapes for me to escape to for solitude and healing.

One of my earliest visions, which actually first manifested as one of my very first pieces of art, was that of a beautiful deciduous, multicolored tree that lived in the center of a Forest Garden that was walled off from everything else.  Only I could enter it through a locked gate.  This Garden had been neglected for a very long time.  Everything was overgrown, and invasive plants had taken over in some areas.

I had to spend time doing the psychological and spiritual equivalent of tending to all of this growth by pruning it and taming it so that the different parts of my psyche that the different plants represented could function in a healthy manner.  Invasive plants had to be ripped out and burned, the metaphorical equivalent of metaphorically “rooting out” bad conditioning to allow for healthier thinking patterns.  Once that was done, I turned my attention to the Rainbow Tree growing in the center of the Garden.

The Tree was clearly in poor health, with rotting leaves all around its base and the remaining leaves on the Tree itself in a wilted state.  It was dying.  As a gardener, I know that the source of any ailing plant lies in its roots, so I started digging, gently of course.  The roots of a plant are like the internal organs of a person and must be treated very carefully if one doesn’t want to kill the patient.  I needed to use the utmost care and pay very close attention to my intuition.  This Tree represented the core of my spiritual and psychological Self: its survival was absolutely critical.

Like the Peter Gabriel song “Digging in the Dirt”, I had to dig in the soil surrounding and beneath the Tree in order to find out what was wrong with it.  I wrote about this process in a post named after the song.  This turned out to be a task exactly like an archeological dig, in which the most recent artifacts are in the upper layers, and older artifacts lie further down.  I had to first examine what was on the surface, which was my current life at the time.

Then it was time to dig, carefully.  In my visions, I saw myself slowly, over years, tunneling down one side of the Tree’s roots and examining them for disease, malnutrition, or rot, which represented baggage I needed to process and good feelings I needed to revive, if I ever had them.  Rot was cut out and burned in a pile at the end of each ‘working day’, whatever that was in my mind on any particular day of ‘digging’.  Some rot was infected with a kind of living, black ichor that required extra effort to get rid of, typically in the form of a blast of infinitely bright light.

Some of that black ichor also infested living roots.  Obviously I couldn’t cut them out, so I had to use the aforementioned bright light to burn it out without hurting the roots, and therefore the Tree.  I had to do this multiple times, whenever I dug down to another layer and revealed more infested roots, and each time, the Tree would flush with that healing light and get stronger.  New growth began to show at the tips of its branches.  I kept digging.

I am in my mid-50s and have had a tremendous amount of trauma throughout my life, both in childhood and adulthood, which meant I had a lot of excavating to do in this archaeology dig of the soul.  This has been my primary task for the last six years or so, perhaps longer (I’d have to check my journal entries), and I wondered if I would ever reach the bottom of this seemingly endless well of sorrow and fury.

I am not sure if I’ve reached the bottom yet, but I did reach an extremely crucial and very deep layer of baggage that lay beneath all of the others, one I could not reach to heal properly until I had processed everything above it.  That layer is where my childhood sexual trauma lived, and it has haunted me forever, infecting and poisoning every relationship, romantic and otherwise, I have ever had with both men and women.  Men for obvious reasons, and women because I was not protected by my mother the way I should have been.

The amount of disease and rot in the Tree’s roots that this layer of mental baggage represented was astonishing.  In my vision, the Tree’s main taproot was intertwined with invasive, pulsing vines, themselves covered in the same black ichor I had been purging from the rest of the root system.  They were squeezing the tap root and killing the side roots, preventing the Tree from getting any nutrients.  The primary nutrient for this psychospiritual Tree is Love, amongst related concepts such as kindness and compassion.

Shining that infinitely bright light on the vines came to the rescue again.  They screeched as the light forced them to release their grip on the roots.  Once they had, I grabbed them and hauled them to ground level to burn in a special holy fire they could not escape from.  I continued this process for an extended period of time, exactly how long I’ve now forgotten, one vine at a time, and there was quite a number of them.  It took a long time for them all to burn, which I watched with no small measure of satisfaction.

Finally, after years of work, the Rainbow Tree’s roots are about 95% purged of the infestation that was plaguing the entire organism.  What remains will naturally die off now, because the Tree is now so healthy that it can resist disease.  All of its tissues, both below and aboveground, are full of life.  With no weakened host to support it, the infectious infestation will have nothing to live on, and it will fade with each passing day, especially because its antithesis is the Tree’s main nutrient of Love.

Digging that far down to address such an old and such a painful piece of baggage has resulted in the healing of the corresponding wound in my spirit and psyche that created barriers to intimacy and even friendship over my entire life.  Like all of my major breakthroughs, it seems to have occurred almost without my noticing.  I just suddenly find myself being okay with intimacy, whereas before it made me cringe, much to the consternation of my incredibly patient and devoted husband.

Now that I’m done digging, the soil can be backfilled to cushion and protect the roots once again.  The rotting leaves were burned along with the rotting roots and poisonous vines.  I could not risk composting anything and leaving the possibility of any of the negative energy continuing in a new form.  Being able to compost something on the mental or spiritual level means there’s something worth transforming and keeping, and there wasn’t: it was pure garbage.

The Rainbow Tree itself is now bursting with life.  When I did my last big phase of digging at least a year ago, I had healed something else really major, and this sent a surge of light-filled energy through the entire root system and upward through the trunk, the branches, and out through the leaves, which began to shine iridescently with their individual colors.  Flowers were beginning to bloom on the Tree, also in a Rainbow of colors, and I knew that if I left it to continue healing, the next time I visited there would be fruit growing on it.

And there is.  Nowhere near ripe yet, these Rainbow fruits are still very small.  But they’re there, and I’m very curious to see how they taste after this latest surge of healing light for the Rainbow Tree.

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do [or be] anything.
Tyler Durden, Fight Club

“Nothing can stop me now.”
NIN (Ruiner) and Rush (Ghost Rider)