We Recognized Each Other Through our Navels

He came silently in the night. The shaft-like space had only one way to go-upwards. I reached a level and stopped. Now I think about it, the space was very elevator-like. As if I, the witness, was looking at myself, the dreamer, through a cross-section of an elevator, or lift if you’re English, with many levels. Except the elevator was old and wooden, not shiny and metallic.

I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, although I didn’t look either. We connected like magnets through our umbilicuses. Funny word, isn’t it? I wanted to say belly button, but then I read that umbilicus is the correct anatomical term. It comes from “umbo” in Latin and means a knob or projection.

We recognized each other through our navels. This word flows off the tongue more easily than umbilicus, although it makes me think of a naval officer, not a stomach button. It comes from the word nafela in Old English, which means “hub” of the wheel.

It didn’t feel strange that the centre points of our physical bodies should be drawn to each other this way. There was no resistance. I let myself connect with the naturalness of it all. “Our umbilicals recognize each other from before,” I heard myself say. We knew each other, not with our minds, but with our connection to the mother.

My tummy button was as it is in normal waking life; white and nestled into a waist bulging with a little too much middle-aged fat. I was aware of this but not embarrassed. I knew this elusive “him”, younger than me with browner skin was Assamese like my great-great-grandmother, even though I couldn’t see his face clearly. His torso was naked and the lines of his muscles showed just enough not to be overwhelming. Next to his nabhi, which is Assamese for navel, my gaze fixed onto a small, perfectly inked black tattoo of a snake.

Even though I’d already had a “major” dream seven or eight years ago that changed my felt sense of who I am forever, I had no idea this dream was the culmination of what I’d been working towards for over ten years. In the previous dream, I faced what I believe was the rejected feminine in my maternal bloodline. My great-great-grandmother, a young Assamese woman who married a British man working in the tea gardens. When he unexpectedly died, the British took her three, young children away from her by force and put them in an orphanage a thousand miles away. This was common protocol to keep mixed-race children from their native mothers’ influence, so as not to embarrass the British. My great-great-grandmother was never mentioned again until I found documents about her a hundred and fifty years later. It wasn’t enough to find her on paper. Intellectual knowledge doesn’t heal the soul. I needed to unearth her in myself. Our psyches are like nature; nothing is ever lost, although it sometimes demands a lot of commitment and underworld navigation to find what we don’t even know we’re looking for.

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman talked about how women’s journeys to conscious femininity are inseparable from confronting and integrating the inner masculine. This is where this recent dream comes in. I’ve worked with women going through menopause and beyond for over a decade, exploring how our inner masculine is shaped and formed by the relationships that we, our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and so on had with men. Fathers, brothers, grandfathers, mentors, partners have all shaped, and been projections for our inner masculine.

I tracked all the relationships I could and identified the inherited programming passed down through my motherline. The message came through loud and clear: “Catherine, you will need a man to survive, but never trust a man.” I received the message and spent the first thirty years of my adulthood believing I needed a man I couldn’t trust. I found a handful of them and wondered why I kept having the same relationship with different men. Sorry, men.

One of the gifts of menopause was realizing I’d been looking outwards when the answers were inwards. The roadmaps and teachers, both alive and dead that I met along the way taught me the language I needed to navigate the underworld. Books, myths, nature, dreams, alchemy, scent, art, writing all held my hand as I took a labyrinthine adventure into the depths of my unknown self.

A lot happened, which I’ve written about in the many words I’ve published on Substack over the last year or so. Even though it’s cheesy to say, I came home to myself. I finally knew what it felt like to be embodied. I found my voice.

But there was one part of the journey I understood intellectually but began to think would never be healed on a deeper level: my relationship with the inner masculine. It’s complicated. The roadmaps are not just few and far between, they’re absent. We women today are, I believe, being asked to thrash out a new path. It’s more than clearing a path, I’m not sure a conscious path to our healthy inner masculine has ever existed.

The great-great-grandmother I mentioned who was married at fourteen to a thirty-seven-year-old Englishman, became the focus of my search for a key to my inner masculine.

When colonizers came to other people’s lands, they didn’t bring women. They took local women. The British had children with women from India, the West Indies, North America, Oceania, Asia and more. The Spanish had children with women from most of South America. The Portuguese had children with African, Asian and South American women. And the French.

Colonizers had colonizing minds. They told their mixed-race children they were Spanish, English, French or Portuguese, occluding the mother’s origins. Native women were useful because they were strong and adapted to the land. They knew the ropes. But those women, including my fourteen-year-old great-great-grandmother, had an inner masculine shaped by her father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on. For colonizers and the missionaries who often accompanied them, the native men were to be colonized, disempowered, converted. In the eyes of the colonizer, they were “primitive” and “uncivilized.” And so too, therefore, was the inner masculine of the women the colonizers partnered with. In mixed-race motherlines like my own, in order to survive, the foremother had to split from her inner masculine and bring only feminine attributes to the marriage.

I worked with the dream of the Assamese man and our navel connection and something in me clicked. Our belly buttons didn’t recognize each other romantically or socially, but in a soul-kin connection. We share the same ancient umbilical root, our motherline, our creative source. This younger, masculine dream figure represents the underground, ancestral, matrilineal energy that is part of me, that lives in my blood. This dream has healed a split that I’ve carried since I was born and that started when my great-grandmother and her siblings were wrenched from their mother and their maternal roots. The snake tattoo that I saw so clearly in the dream is, in true tattoo-fashion, imprinted permanently in my psyche. It is the healing, the transformation and the primal life force that is the gift of the inner masculine and feminine coming together.

Since this dream, I am much more whole. I hear and feel the support, the unconditional love of the lost (and now found) inner masculine. I don’t have to search for it outside myself any longer. I don’t have to outsource this desperate need to find the unknown missing piece of myself in other men. I don’t doubt myself anymore. I listen and, guess what, I trust. And it’s true, I can’t survive without a man. An inner man.