Brigit's Well: A Visualization
By David Sparenberg Guided visualization is a technique to get in touch with unconscious knowledge through the symbols coming through imagined scenarios in a meditative state. Find a comfortable place where you will not be disturbed, concentrate on your breathing or use any favorite technique for relaxation, and picture yourself in the following setting. See what details come to your mind. See yourself walking through a grove of densely shading trees. After strolling for a while, you come to a clearing. In it is an old fashion wellrock wall rim, with a winch and a bucket on the end of a rope. You approach the well and lower the bucket farther and farther until it splashes down and you hear it sink and fill with water. Then, you turn the handle on the winch until you have retrieved the now full container. You understand that it is important to do this work of lowering and raising in order to have water from this well. Here, with the bucket sitting on the rocky rim, you place your hands into the water and intensely feel this immersion in the liquid hoisted from its subterranean source. Next, you cup your hands full of water and splash it onto your face. You intensely feel this contact, as the well water spills and beads across your forehead, your cheeks and chin, your eyebrows and your eyelids, your nostrils and your lips. When you are satisfied with this experience, open your eyes in your visualization and once more place your hands into the bucket. This time, you draw your hands, cupping water, to your mouth. First, you look into the water you cup, then you drink. Drinking, you intensely feel the liquid, drawn through your labor from an underground source. You feel it slipping into your lips, washing through your mouth, spilling down your throat, entering your body. You did not know, you had not imagined, that you were so thirsty for the water from this well! Yet, because of your intense thirst, you have drunk until your hands are empty. Now your visualization ends, and you realize that the well you have visited is the deep well of your hidden emotional life. Ask yourself the following questions: How did the water feel when your hands were first immersed? How did the water feel when you splashed it over your face? Were you shocked by the sensation or relieved? Did you welcome the sensation or were you embarrassed by it? Most important: How did the well water taste? Even though you drank all that your cupped hands could hold, was the water sweet or bitter? Was your drinking quick or slow? Did it excite or calm you? Be honest and reflect on your answers to the questions. Do not permit yourself a single comforting falsehood, or the excitement of a touch of drama that the visualization did not truly yield. Honesty is the key to genuine self-knowledge and spiritual growth. If you can, share your experience with others. Repeat it often, as the thirst within you requires. In The Celtic Shaman (Element Books), John Matthews writes of Brigit, or Breeyid, as a Goddess of fosterage, learning, inspiration, smithcraft and healing, and one of the most ubiquitous deities of both Britain and Ireland, with many healing wells named for her. David Sparenberg is the current director of BoneRiver Poetry and Storyteller's Theater, and an internationally active author, poet, storyteller and ecosophic teacher. His literary work has appeared in over ninety periodicals. Among these publication credits are ongoing placements with such distinguished journals as Creation Spirituality, Storytelling Magazine, The Green Man, Green Egg, Mezlim, Obsidian, Talking Leaves and The Trumpeter. David has extensive teaching and workshop experiences, particularly in Native American spirituality, world mythologies, ethnic storytelling, ecological visualization and ritual drama. BoneRiver Poetry and Storyteller's Theater consists of poets, storytellers, teachers and actors: David Sparenberg, Kristina Bridget Bennett, Colleen Carey, David Ritchie, Pamela Ann McGarry and Laurel Levasheff. KRISTINA BRIDGET BENNETT, a native of Eugene, OR, graduated from the University of Colorado. An actor, with background in jazz and modern dance, she is enrolled in the Conservatory Program at the Northwest Actors Studio and has performed in several Seattle area plays. Kristina enjoys creative writing and also teaches religious education. COLLEEN CAREY, an actor and oral interpreter, began her professional career at age five. Colleen attended both Cornish and the North Carolina School for the Arts. She recently held the lead role in a play performed at New City Theater. DAVID RITCHIE, a poet with several years’ experience in live theater, teaches poetry, marketing and publishing at Discover U. at the International Trade Center. David's work has appeared in The Piedmont Literary Review, The Performance is: L P o e t s ...where poetry embraces anthropology and performance renews the power of ritual. BoneRiver offers varieties of performance poetry and storytelling programs highlighting multicultural sensibilities, ecological awareness, mythical and spiritual transports, and a deepened pathos touching the varieties of the human condition, suitable for any and all public venues. Employing a mullet-sensory approach to poetry and story in public forums, Bonaire scripts unique and exciting experiences of high quality, original literature, returning the written word to the power of oral interpretation, through the immediacy of living voices and embodied presence. BoneRiver also offers an ongoing series of workshops and seminars, including the following subjects: DRAMAS OF THE MASK - An introduction to the ritual/masked dramas of Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh theater and the Celtic Revival plays of Nobel Laureate, William Butler Yeats. Provides mythological backgrounds; explorations of the meaning of masks in ritual theater and dramas of public healing; plus opportunities to rehearse and recite scenes, dialogues and choruses. MASTERING VERBAL ARTISTRY - A real how to excursion for poets and performance arts aspirants. Learn how to use your voice as a dramatic, narrative and Lyrical instrument, how to create mood and stimulate emotions, how to script programs, employ dialects, color, symbolism, movement and music. AWAKENING YOUR INNER BEAUTY - This workshop will help you stimulate into active life the hidden, inner mystic, poet, earth philosopher and medicine helper waiting to be creatively set free. Employs a range of shamanic trance postures, totemic animal and elemental spirit meditation/visualization exercises; simple to use but profound in rewards; drawn from Celtic, Native American, neo-shamanic and ecological sources. Formatted for 6 hours, priced at 536 per course. Each workshop utilizes two or more instructors from the BoneRiver core group. Don't let this opportunity to learn about the BoneRiver Poetry and Storyteller's Theater slip out of mind! For performance and workshop scheduling, call (206) 32321 1 5. | 
