The Wool Ball, the Smelly Cat and the Cranky Corpse: Awakening to Coincidences.
By Manny Mak (Mantra Books )
I had a dream in which I carried a dead lamb under my arm. I was supposed to bring it to a peace offering ritual. I was bewildered by this bizarre dream, but the symbol of the sacrificial lamb gradually unfolded its meaning. A few months later, I was thrown into a big investment fraud, I feared that I was the scapegoat facing grave legal and financial consequences. At the same time, my daughter was suffering from a life-threatening eating disorder. She wrestled with her inner demons — a messy wool ball, a smelly cat and a cranky corpse, imagined and real, ethereal but deeply entwined with her life. My family was turned upside down. Amid the emotional turmoil came a series of coincidences, in dreams and in my waking life.
Spiritual experiences, like a strong sea, came to me without warning. I was struggling to stay afloat. To help myself and my daughter, I have learnt ways to cultivate resilience and inner peace. A practice that I have acquired is Focusing. It was initiated by the late Eugene Gendlin, a psychologist and philosopher from the University of Chicago. Focusing is a process in which you make contact with a special kind of internal bodily awareness called “felt-sense”. It has become a handy method for me to help myself and my distressed daughter Constance. In the healing process, there were three dreadful images in her mind that we had to deal with.
The first one was of a sick kitten, soaking wet, inside a dark and smelly sewage ditch. The feeble cat was hiding in the dark and afraid of light. Constance even had a sensation of being burnt when beams of light, in her mind, shone through the ditch.
The second image was a messy ball of wool in her chest, wet and sticky, with decaying pustules oozing blood, thick and dark. This image came up quite often when she was in suffocating mode. The foul ball was entangled with dead knots and sometimes it would swell up to the verge of bursting.
In the third scene, Constance fell off a crag and landed on a small rock platform where a corpse lay on a ledge. The corpse clutched her arm and talked to her in a squeaky voice. Constance could see and smell the decaying body, rotten to the bone. Despite her intense fear, she didn’t push him off the ledge. She felt sympathy for him.
These three scenes had stuck in both our minds, reminding us of the desperation of being inside the dark tunnel with the end nowhere in sight. When they emerged at different points over the past years, the images were accompanied by intense somatic reactions. I remember when the wool ball first appeared, Constance was short of breath as she uttered in pain that her chest was going to burst. As she had been recovering, these distressing images were dormant and no longer haunted her daily life. But they were still there. In the book, I have documented in detail the cleansing rituals and Focusing sessions on which these images were re-experienced and transformed so that Constance was freed from her psychological bondage.
Focusing is also a tool for interpreting dreams. For some years, I have been attending a monthly workshop with a group of Focusing friends to work on our dreams. Dreams are not self-contained – they are permeable, expansive and evolving, a source of energy to push us forward. After years of initiation, now I am more sensitive to dream symbols and capable of bringing them into my waking life. The sacrificial lamb appeared in one dream, and then came up time and again in another dream, in my meditations, as a tangible object and as an inspiration in my spiritual journey. Most importantly, it has become the symbol of a duty given to me, to be a messenger of peace, by living it out in my life.
As a social scientist, I was a skeptic on matters concerning spirituality. Before my retirement, I had taught qualitative research for PhD students for more than two decades. This time I turned my research lens onto my own predicaments: why were strange images flooded into my family? They were elusive but having big impacts on us. I wanted to make sense of the unlikely coincidences that happened so intensively in a short period of time. Among them was a divination given to me by using I Ching, or named the Book of Change, a Chinese classic. A learned scholar made me that divination, which said something specific about my situation not known to her. Step by step what was said in the reading turned out to be true, making me wonder how an ancient text could be so relevant to me in the present days.
I kept an eye on my new experiences as a researcher. I have come to the realization that empirically within my reach is an in-between space, where the physical and liminal worlds are synchronized, rendering time and space fluid and flexible. With practice, one can comprehend and actualize meanings of seemingly random coincidences embedded in this extended space beyond material existence.
This book is a diary of my endeavor to understand the coincidences I have experienced, to stay with my daughter on her long road of recovery, and to find a spiritual anchor for this earthly life. My family have sailed through challenges bigger than we thought we could handle. We survive. Peace is securely anchored in the here and now. Kindness is all around me, its sureness is embedded in Constance’s cheerful smile, the tenderness of my wife Teresa holding my hand, and the abundant grace given to me in times of trials.
***
A messy wool ball, a smelly sick cat, a cranky corpse – unrelated images coincide to bring the author’s family to a threshold of make or break. He faces the legal threat of colossal corporate fraud while his daughter wrestles with a life-threatening eating disorder. We walk with them to the edge of life’s mystery, where dreams and our living are interwoven in coincidences. We venture into a liminal realm where traumas are healed, sufferings are remade, and symbols sacred and profane are brought to their manifestation.
Social scientist and author Manny Mak explores spiritual experiences with an anthropological rigor rarely seen in spiritual books. Written with the sophistication of a veteran researcher and the naïve sensitivity of a spiritual seeker, this book offers a unique combination of first-hand testimony and a rigorous examination of dreams and meaningful coincidences. The captivating prose and paintings cultivate a sensibility in readers – one that is healing, dream-awakening, and spiritually enlightening.
The Wool Ball, the Smelly Cat and the Cranky Corpse: Awakening to Coincidences
by Manny Mak is available from Mantra Books and from wherever books are sold.
BOOK LINK: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/mantra-books/our-books/wool-ball-smelly-cat-cranky-corpse
