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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. January's Theme: "Path" The yeti: a large, shaggy, solitary creature said to wander the remote upper ranges of the snowy Himalayas — an area sometimes referred to as the rooftop of the world. Bordering countries of India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Bhutan offer an array of intriguing stories about this seldom seen, elusive being. Some report the yeti as being helpful and shy — for example, nursing sick, lost explorers back to health — while others portray a more intimidating version, and still others claim the hairy beast is actually a Tibetan bear. Expeditions to find the yeti have yielded no definitive evidence, save for a few footprints, blurry photos, and dubious artifacts, including scraps of reddish brown hairs, hand bones, and part of a scalp. Most of our knowledge of the yeti thus remains couched in legend, speculation, and the remote rooftop of our imagination.
In my early twenties, a yeti made a series of noteworthy appearances in my dreams. Unlike the traditional dark-haired yeti, mine had long, silky, white hair. He was most often silent and calm — a more kindly observer than threatening presence. In early dreams, I spied the yeti from a distance in the wild. Though as the dreams progressed, I came to sit beside him, often near a campfire under the twinkling black sky of a secluded region. It was there that he began sharing a story about yeti origins. There were no words exchanged between us. Rather, side by side, gazing into the small fire, I saw from the yeti's point of view. Not as if seeing through his eyes, but as if remembering — recalling a series of images from another time. It was like watching an old film, for these movies within the dreams had the feel of early black and white travel documentaries, complete with jerky movements and muffled sound.
The story the yeti shared was related to the monks who lived in the far, mountainous regions of Tibet. Tall snowy peaks and shaded valleys were the landscape of these dream-memories, with gatherings of squat, sturdy buildings set within the folds of the craggy mountains. The yeti's tale revealed that when the monks needed to leave on pilgrimage or other long journeys, they used their minds to create guardians. With the tremendous powers available to them through meditation and thought control, they harnessed their inner vision to imagine immense, imposing creatures to protect the temples. As if to emphasize this, the yeti replayed scenes of one or more monks fashioning a kind of holographic image that suddenly materialized as thought became form. The next step, the yeti showed, was for the monks to add weight or substance to the image — a third dimensional component that activated the thought-form and made it tangibly real. This "reality" could be turned on or off as the monks desired.
The guardian — the newly fashioned yeti — was placed at the entrance to the temple in its invisible form: as a contained, undetectable force field. But if someone came too close, the thought form would be activated and the yeti would appear. Once invoked by someone stepping past the invisible wall and activating the need for the guardian, the thought form — the yeti — became alive and acquired a life of its own.
The trouble, the yeti showed me, came many decades — or perhaps centuries — later, after the first yeti was created. For there was strife, confusion, war — a chaotic disorder in which the peace and balance of the monastery was disrupted. It was at this point in the dream documentary that the story inevitably broke down. Sometimes I would ask impatiently, "What happened to the yetis?" and the dream would abruptly end. Other times, the yeti reluctantly revealed a series of disconnected scenes. On waking, it was a frustrating yet compelling process to make sense of what had happened next. Eventually, however, I pieced together my understanding of the rest of the dream story as follows:
In one way or another, as the monks left (or were forced to leave) their monasteries, some essential link with the yetis was broken. Perhaps this was because the monks kept the yetis alive via their life force and use of extended meditative techniques. Perhaps with the monks unexpectedly gone, the yetis lost their sense of purpose. Whatever the reason, the abandoned yetis eventually wandered away from their respective birthplaces, roaming the mountains, sometimes visibly activated and other times not; sometimes helpful and sometimes not.
Although I did not know whether this tale was "true" in the conventional sense, the story was shared so many times within my dreams that it — just as the thought-created yeti — eventually acquired a life of its own. At times, I wondered whether I had read about this, forgotten it, and then refashioned it in my dreams. Research on the yeti, however, did not yield much in the way of a connection with the monks of Tibet. (Much later, while reading the books of adventurer and author Alexandra David-Neel, who lived in Tibet and studied with various monks, I read of the creation of tulpas — animal or human companions or helpers created by thought.) And so the yeti dream story remained an intriguing personal mythology for me — neither true nor untrue — until it, like the mysterious yeti, simply faded away.
For a long time, then, I forgot about such things. Other events were happening in my life and the yeti and his story no longer frequented my dreams or thoughts. He was gone entirely — off wandering in distant places, perhaps….
Until one day, decades later, when I was face down on a bodywork table, receiving massage. There was a hold in my back causing infrequent but painful spasms. I felt the knot coiled tightly just above the base of my spine, in the lumbar region. As the bodyworker focused on the spot, melting her fingertips deep into the tissue, I suddenly saw the yeti. He sprang into my consciousness fully formed and present, just as if he had never left. The only giveaway was his pensive, slightly perplexed expression, like a long lost friend who is surprised by meeting once again.
The image triggered a flood of memories that washed over me like a freak tsunami. For one shining moment, I saw myself — felt myself — in several realities simultaneously. It was just a taste, but in that moment I knew myself in other forms, as alternate selves; I felt myself as individual and also as an interconnected collection of beings. As quickly as that experience came, however, it was gone. My brain scrambled to hold on to fragments of memory. I was amazed and confused and overwhelmed all at once. It felt as if so much had come so quickly — and then suddenly was gone. Only the gentle-eyed yeti remained; a faint, questioning smile barely visible beneath all that hair.
Not Me, Yet I
Although I was happy to see the yeti once again, I was taken aback by having so easily forgotten him and his story. I felt the peculiar astonishment at how our memory faculties can simply let things slide away — So long, synaptic links! And, I was equally surprised by how little it takes — a glimpse, a word, a touch — the massage therapist's fingertips sinking into the muscles of my back — to trigger the fullness of a particular memory back to consciousness. Who's in charge of such comings and goings, anyway?
When something as unusual as a yeti shows up in our life, it's probably a good idea to pay attention. We might begin, for example, by asking: Who is this yeti? What does the yeti represent? What does my yeti show me about myself? In the larger collective view, it is easy to dismiss the yeti as merely a myth or legend, for we are often more comfortable distancing that with which we are unfamiliar as something out there, different from ourselves. However, creatures summoned from the depths of our psyches (Why a yeti, after all?) are valuable clues, calls from shadow selves as invitations to greater awareness. In this light, to recognize the yeti in relationship with ourselves — or perhaps to realize the yeti as a part of ourselves — means moving beyond the superficial façades of "just a coincidence" or "Isn't that weird?" Rather, it is to accept the challenge of the gift: to open ourselves to experience, to welcome the mystery of the yeti who is not me, and yet I.
For the next few months I had many dreams and adventures with the yeti. The more I opened to these explorations, the more I recalled details of those alternate I's with the different lives that had been ushered in by the sudden wave of memory. Some came in dream form, others as concurrent memories, and some as simultaneously evolving "past lives." My canine pal Barney reminded me of the "continual inspirations — synaptic bursts of opportunity — simultaneous happenings, and multileveled experiences which flow from spirit to body and back again." And I found, through direct experience, that this was so.
In fact, many shapeshifting ideas and concepts were becoming clearer — not just to my mind, but to the whole of my being. I recalled a Dream Guide's observation that "what all of this leads to is the ability to become more conscious of your multidimensional nature in any given moment." The Dream Guide spoke of co-existing realities in which selves of different times and places may meet, merge, or otherwise blend together. Sometimes in very amusing ways.
In one encounter, for example, I was surprised to see that the yeti's hair was no longer white and silky, but yellow-brown, like straw. "What happened?" I asked, holding out my hand with a desire to touch the hair. But the yeti backed away. Then, with an outstretched pinky finger, he raised his great furry hand in a deliberate manner, as if drinking an imaginary cup of tea. Perplexed, I shook my head, but the yeti only repeated the gesture. A flash of associations brought to mind the medicinal tea my acupuncturist had recently prescribed for my back. The Chinese herbs were dark and bitter, yet I steeped and sipped the pungent mixture every day. Was Yeti absorbing the tea as well? Was the nature of interconnected realities really so porous? That his lovely white hair would turn yellow struck me as visually funny, yet the act of connecting to me in such an intimate, personal way was so endearing that I felt even more affection for the good-natured yeti.
True to his tale, the yeti also proved to be an attentive guardian. For several years I continued to work with the alternate selves who presented themselves in the tsunami of consciousness. These memory fragments were like small, hard seeds, and I sensed the need to take gentle care for them to blossom fully into conscious recall. I often felt the yeti's presence while doing this, as if he were silently, carefully observing.
One of the memory seeds was particularly disturbing and significant to my back pain. I remembered it as a past-life scenario, as a baby who had been abandoned by her young mother in a forest cabin. Wrapped in blankets, the baby was placed alone in that cabin, on a hardwood board. Crying, screaming, wet and hungry, she was left to die. There were many details and layers to the story, and many impacted emotions that connected to the tight, impacted pain in my back. (As deep bodywork may reveal, pain in the back is often related to pain from our past — from what is "back there" in time. Further, as Barney noted, a hold in the back can also indicate a "holding back": a fear of opening to a truth that we continue to hide from ourselves.) Using shapeshifting techniques, I came to know and eventually share consciousness with not only the baby, but her mother and father. Intense emotions of betrayal, hurt, rejection and more were played out within each personality as we moved through healing in this linked energetic relationship. By engaging in a kind of temporal shapeshifting, we also experienced a variety of different "endings" to this life.
As we reached a sense of completion with the past-life scenario, feeling a healthy balance between mother, father, and baby (and, not surprisingly, significantly less pain in my back), the yeti appeared in a dream. He was different now, both his colouring and demeanor much lighter. Although he had the same general yeti shape, he floated like a puffy cloud in the bright blue sky of the mountainous area where we had once met. Sailing low, just over my head, he dropped down a group of small, furry, white yeti-dogs. And as he passed by, I heard the words, If you take care of them, they will be good to you.
Dawn Baumann Brunke is the author of Animal Voices; Animal Voices, Animal Guides; and Shapeshifting with our Animal Companions, from which this article has been partially excerpted.
All three books explore the deeper nature of our relationship with animals, nature, each other and ourselves. For more, see Dawn's website.
Be sure to read the reviews of her book "Awakening to Animal Voices" in our May 2005 Issue and her book "Animal Voices" January 2006 Issue.
Volume 9 Issue 2 ISSN# 1708-3265
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~ Embracing the Yeti (part 1) ~
with Dawn Baumann Brunke
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