Everyone has their own bowl of sky.

I woke with this beautiful and mysterious line echoing in my mind. At first, I could remember nothing more from the dream that had delivered it. But as I lay in bed in the early dawn, an image came to me: a perfect blue sky with puffy clouds and a bowl floating in midair. Inside the bowl was the same blue sky and white clouds. It looked like something that might have been painted by Magritte.

I wrote down the phrase in my journal. I was in the midst of leading a weekend retreat where we had agreed to try out new methods of imaginal healing, a phrase I use to mean applying the power of true imagination, that great faculty of soul, to heal body, mind and spirit.  We had all agreed to approach sleep the previous night with the intention of bringing fresh imagery and insights to the group.

So I carried my one-liner into our morning session.

Everyone has their own bowl of sky. I proposed that we should make a group shamanic journey to explore what that would mean for each of us. This was received with high enthusiasm. We prepared for our group journey in the usual way. Our thirty active dreamers made themselves comfortable, many by stretching out on the floor on mats or blankets and covering their eyes.

While drumming for the group, I found myself floating in the midst of that perfect blue sky with puffy clouds. There was the bowl. I was seized with the desire to hold it, raise it to my lips, and see what it felt like to drink the sky. When I began to do this, I noticed something that I didn’t like on the inside edge of the bowl. It looked like a bug. I made it my intention to cleanse the bowl; the bug-like thing was immediately sucked away and drawn up into a sun that now appeared – and incinerated.

Now that the bowl had been cleansed, I could drink the sky. This tasted at first as fresh and good as drinking the rain. Then I saw something like an egg yolk, a gold-orange sphere. Raw eggs aren’t my favorite, but I decided to swallow this one. As I did so, I felt a sphere of golden light moving down through my body. More and more of the golden orbs appeared, passing into me through the bottomless bowl of sky. I took them in one by one. They settled, at first, into a vertical column inside me; I was now able to scan myself from the outside. Then the lights moved in all directions through my energy body, gently swirling, reaching the parts where I needed healing or new vitality. I realized that I had taken in a version of the 12 lights.

I came back from this journey feeling healthy, re-charged and blessed. “A breakfast of champions,” someone in our group quipped after describing her own rich experience. This is something you can try at home. What’s in your bowl of sky?