Love Supreme

I dreamed that I am being told I need heart surgery. I am afraid. Heart surgery will touch the heart of me, the organ that keeps me alive , and so much more than that. The heart of me - my hurt, wounded, battered, aching, longing, caring, loving heart!  In waking life, my physical heart is strong. But emotionally and spiritually, my heart moves between joy, gratitude, weariness, despair, heaviness, fear, loneliness, laughter, and contentment daily. 

I trust the dream doctor in whose clinic I am sitting. I ask him for a musician who can provide the music needed for the surgery to go smoothly. In the dream, I feel this request emanate wordlessly from my heart to The Musician, a wise, caring, unseen presence whose music will touch my heart in a healing way. In response, I am holding a jazz album, a vinyl album in its cardboard sleeve. This album is simply and immediately given. On the album cover, I see a black and white photo of a black jazz artist looking to the left. I hear but do not see the musician telling me, “There is a track on this album that your heart needs to entrain to during the surgery.” The doctor agrees and begins wrapping the album in surgical padding, leaving the chosen rack open. He is going to affix this album directly onto my heart. I am scared but willing to be given this surgery.

  To continue accessing, in Natural Dreamwork fashion, the healing medicine that this dream offers, listening to jazz music meditatively feels like an obvious response. So, I went to Spotify and pulled up John Coltrain’s A Love Supreme. I am not an advanced connoisseur of jazz music. But this album by Coltrain was introduced to me decades ago by someone I loved, and whenever I listen to it, I feel immersed in musical ecstasy. It has been several years since I last returned to this particular music, which I used to listen to from an old CD with a nondescript cover. But nowadays I stream music from Spotify on my smart TV, enjoying music accompanied by appealing images from album covers projected on the large screen. To my surprise, as A Love Supreme arrived in my living room through this technology, I saw for the first time - saw with awe -  the original album cover for this particular Coltrain recording. It is a black and white photo of Coltrain, a black musician, looking to the left - the exact album cover image I saw in my dream. Goosebumps arrived, assuring me that The Musician was here to heal.

Since this discovery, I have listened to  A Love Supreme meditatively several days in a row. Today, instead of listening through my TV, I played it through my blue-tooth speaker and literally put this speaker on top of my chest, like the surgeon affixing the album to my heart, as I lay on the couch letting the music vibrate into my body.  I am absorbing the essence of this music, its spirit of collaboration and improvisation that moves toward spiritual ecstasy and expresses a connection to love that is wild, creative, alive, and immeasurable. That love is exactly what my heart, what every heart needs. I trust that by absorbing this music, the dream physician and dream musician are collaborative performing the prescribed surgery and that the healing dreams offer me is ongoing. By listening to A Love Supreme in waking life, I am collaborating with them. I am assisting their deep inner work, the profound musical improvisation of healing, that comes through sacred encounters in our dreams.