There was much more than artwork in the ‘Sacred Dreamscapes’ exhibit at the Old Schoolhouse Gallery in July. Both of the artists, Kira MacDuffee and Majie Lavergne, are psychotherapists who have described their work as depictions of their ‘inner worlds.’ I was off island at the time, but requested an interview. MacDuffee consented to describe her pilgrimage when I returned.
Her journeys into the Astral plane started when she was very little. Some of her earliest memories were ‘quite terrifying.’
“I was afraid to go to sleep a lot because of the different things that were happening,” explained MacDuffee. “I was experiencing and seeing things that were happening in real time while I was out of my body, in my sleep.”
In her early teenage years, MacDuffee started reading about Astral projection.
When she was about 18, she started dream therapy with a Jungian Therapist.
“Before I knew it I was deep in psychotherapy. It was the dreams that got me into it.”
In the podcast above she talks about experiencing ‘attacks,’ especially during spiritual retreats. One of her teachers gave MacDuffee a picture of Amma Ji, ‘the hugging saint,’ to put under her pillow.
“So if I got attacked, I could call on her and I did.”
Later, when MacDuffee was in her late twenties or early thirties, she met the Indian guru.
“Amma Ji came and blew all of the energies that were attacking away and my fear and everything was gone. Then I was just free and I was traveling through the stars and the galaxies and all the places and I had no fear. Since then, I’d never had an attack, so it was a really significant shift for that particular experience,” said MacDuffee.
“I’m now 52. I’ve been in this journey of trying to embody rather than trying to leave my body, but I’ve always been a dreamer. As I become more and more grounded, I can journey more in different ways. I can integrate things that I’ve learned. I’ve been healing and it turns out that the Astro projection at age five, et cetera, was related to some really deep childhood trauma that I had repressed.”
MacDuffee said her ‘biggest truth download’ was two days after an enlightenment intensive retreat based partially on the teachings of Ramana Maharishi. They had been focusing on the question ‘Who am I?“ for 16 hours a day, over the course of several days. The answer finally came in a dream, in which she asked ‘who is the dreamer?“
The answer, “Was everything. It was visual, it was audio, it was everything visceral. It was absolute pure union with all things, but it was very cosmic for me. I was in the kind of cosmic space of the galaxy and my arms just extended forever and my legs extended forever. Everything was coming into one circle, and coming back into me again. It was a beautiful almost angelic chorus of energy. There was love, there was bliss and there was pure and complete knowing of all things. I had no questions. I had all of the truth of all that was in this moment and I knew at that time that I was dreaming. I knew that I was in this state of consciousness that I could not experience in my body at the time. When I went back into my body, I wouldn’t be able to bring it with me. I had to choose, what am I going to take back?”
Her biggest fears at that time were death and the loss of the people she loved in her life.
In the dream, she realized there was no death and decided, “Okay, that’s what I’ll bring back. So I came back from that experience and woke up and I was really transformed from that experience. I was very different for a good few weeks or a month in this kind of real state of seeing transparency and seeing through and then the work started.”
MacDuffee described dreaming and the images that come through ‘dream painting’ as the same.
“Sometimes I go back to my dream journals that I’ve written and I see what came from what the dreams were before. I can do the same with painting,” she explained. “I’ve been painting dreams since forever, but in this art show that I put together recently, the pieces were all done in the last year. I’m just beginning a kind of new level of connecting and integrating. I guess I have more skill and technique now than I did before. I’m using that in a new way with this process and sometimes I know what it is that I’m wanting to honour, some particular dream or some particular experience like I had with this horse that I painted in this stream, in this last show.”
Just prior to the exhibition, one of the figures from her paintings came to MacDuffee in a dream. It was ‘the end times’ and MacDuffee was trying to get back to Cortes, but there were no ferries or boats.
“I saw this goddess coming. She was changing form from a horse, to a woman, to a dog. She kept changing form and she was coming across the water. She came as a goddess and said ‘I’ve come to take you home,’” stated MacDuffee.
“I felt so humbled because I had nothing, it was like this realization of I’d done nothing. I could give her nothing. I didn’t feel like I had earned it, and I said to her, ‘I know you because I painted you.’ She said ‘Yes.’ I don’t even remember what she said after that. She was more of an energetic transmission of love and pure feminine divinity. She took me back home.”
Cortes Currents asked, “Do you find sometimes that when you look at your journals, a lot of insignificant details turn out to be prophetic?”
“Absolutely,” she responded.
“I learned that the only way that we can receive the truth at these different ways is through metaphor and imagery. The reason I bring that up is because the dream has so many layers of meaning that apply to our physical, emotional, mental, and our spiritual life. One image can have multiple meanings for us. And that is very prophetic and it’s so intentional. Nothing is random. It’s mind blowing to me the intelligence that these dreams come from and how, I want say carefully, it’s given. It’s really not random.”
Cortes Currents asked, “How do you know that these things are real as opposed to what I’m going to call ‘just a dream?’”
MacDuffee replied, “That’s a great question — ‘what is real?’ — because first of all, I think that this realm is a dream. So let’s just start with that. This is a very dense dream. And what I find in the dream time is that there’s different levels of density, different dimensions, and different vibrations and frequencies.”
She added, “My experience is that there are many realms that are all relatively real and none are absolutely real.”
“I think dreams are always valuable on some level, but sometimes it’s just stuff that’s going out. Like my teacher says, ‘You don’t have to look at your garbage before you take it out to the curb.’”
Ths was MacDuffee’s first art exhibition.
She was amazed by the personal feelings this brought up:
“What am I doing? What am I asking of people to come and look at this? What’s the point of it anyway?”
She was amazed at how deeply people were impacted.
“I did include in my show very specifically carefully chosen quotes. Some of them, I wrote myself, most of them were poems like Rumi or different quotes from spiritual teachers that went with my paintings.”
Somebody said, ‘Every painting is a spiritual teaching.’
In the podcast, MacDuffee describes a workshop that she and Lavergne led during the exhibition.
“I want people to experience their own inner worlds through this universal language of imagery. I also teach on a side, but I also teach the Enneagram. It’s a very complex model of reality and has nine specific personalities or points that we can get stuck in and create a certain personality. My next show is going to be the Enneagram and I’m planning on doing a nine pieces for each point also as a course,” she said.
“For me, it’s about how my painting and my knowledge and my experience of dreamtime and inquiry have been coming together to teach as well as inform me. I’m no longer trying to hold or direct it. It’s just what’s coming through and I’m trying to be obedient to it.”
Links of Interest:
- Opening Works, Clinical Counselling & Transpersonal Psychotherapy
- Opening Works: Enneagram Videos
- Interactive Art by Majie Lavergne
Top photo credit: Sacred Harmony by Kira MacDuffee
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