New Moon Blessings of the Last Stage of Endurance: The Wild Bride and Bridegroom

Please, join in where ever you are. Awake or asleep. Read this and reflect, or meditate. Thursday, October 23rd 2014 at 9pm EST.

Four months ago, we began a journey towards wholeness by diving deep into our psyches. Through calm reflection and/or meditation, we have explored the foolish “devil’s bargains” that we have made in our past, and what we have given up or what has been taken away from us. We have discovered and continue to discover the things and people which no longer serve us and have learned to healthily cut and break free from them. We have begun to learn to wander with instinct and eat that which feeds our minds, bodies, and souls. We have felt the longing loneliness and pain of the soul and have learned to seek out sanctuary. We have delved into the thick realm of the Wild, and now, we wed ourselves to it, to our own wild and free spirit.

At a fundamental level we all crave our true nature of unity and balance.

We know that if we look deep into ourselves that we will find this feeling inside of us, just as much as it is in our physical environment. We can take the various aspects of our personality and become whole. We can take off our many masks and finally shine our authenticity into the world. We can look up at the stars and know this in our bones. We can feel it in the grass under our feet, the wind in our hair, and the warm sun on our faces.  We can see it in the eyes of our kindred, the others who run with the wolves. Our brothers and sisters of the wild.

We have suffered much, but our suffering has not been in vain. We have learned a great deal about who we are as human beings, as mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We have learned to heal, and we have learned how to howl at the moon.

And we continue to learn incredible things about our selves, as we take these last steps on this 7-Part Healing Meditation practice based on Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ work in her soul-opening book Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the story of the Handless Maiden.

So, welcome again friends to this 7-Part Series of Deep Psyche Digging & Surgery.

Now begins Part-7, the Seventh Stage of Endurance –
The Wild Bride and Bridegroom.

If you havn’t already done so, or would like to refresh your memory, please read the full short story HERE: http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/07/21/new-moon-blessings-of-the-first-stage-of-endurance/

And if this is your first time with us, please take the time to look over the previous Stages:

• Part-1, the First Stage of Endurance – The Bargain Without Knowing http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/07/21/new-moon-blessings-of-the-first-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-2, the Second Stage of Endurance – The Dismemberment http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/08/04/full-moon-blessings-of-the-second-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-3, the Third Stage of Endurance – The Wandering http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/08/20/new-moon-blessings-of-the-third-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-4, the Fourth Stage of Endurance – Finding Love in the Underworld http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/09/03/full-moon-blessings-of-the-fourth-stage-of-endurance-finding-love-within/
• Part-5, the Fifth Stage of Endurance – The Harrowing of the Soul 
  http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/09/18/new-moon-blessings-of-the-fifth-stage-of-endurance-the-harrowing-of-the-soul/
• Part- 6, the Sixth Stage of Endurance – The Realm of the Wild Woman
  http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/10/02/full-moon-blessings-of-the-sixth-stage-of-endurance-the-realm-of-the-wild-woman/

IN THE STORY

While the Handless Maiden becomes no longer handless, her love, her archetypal King goes on his own initiation rite of passage for seven years.

He makes a vow of purification without eating or drinking for seven long years. Somehow something sustains him, a force much larger than himself. He, like the maiden, must learn the struggles and suffering of loss in life and undergo a primal metamorphosis in which he is given seven untold lessons.

Through him, we reach under our urges and appetites to some deeper meaning that stands behind and down. His initiation has to do with learning a kind of deepening with regard to understanding our personal appetites, sexual and otherwise. Through him, we learn the value and balance of cycles that sustain human hope and happiness. Through him as a metaphor for all of our masculine animus energy, we seek to find the fully imitated feminine energies that are within us, and we hold fast, not allowing anything to get in our way. We initiate into our masculine wild self, and do the real work in preparing for showing and acting the true soul-Self of the newly initiated woman in day-to-day life.

And so the animus in us wanders about in nature towards the forest.

Once his search and journey end with venturing into the deep woods where the maiden and his child are, he is taken in by the white spirit guardian of the inn, and a veil is placed over his face. Here he undergoes a deeper initiation, again like the maiden, so that they may both be on the same wavelength, and see with the same awareness and level of consciousness. When he awakens, he sees two beautiful Beings gazing down at him. They are his wife and child. They declare themselves, and he believes them with utter joy but does not understand how the maiden has hands. After explaining that with her many travails and care that they have grown back, and the inn-spirit retrieves her silver hands from the trunk. Now that they have found each other again, and apologies are exchanged, a great spiritual feast is had and the two have a second wedding.

Here, at the end, the woman has created and acquired deep spiritual archetypal powers:
the kingly animus, the childSelf, the old Wild Mother, and the initiated maiden. She has been washed and purified many times. Her ego’s desire for the safe life is no longer lead dog. Now these powers lead her pscyhe.

And so has the king because when one force of the psyche changes, the others must shift as well.

At this stage, we are no longer the frail wandering soul. Now we have been initiated, now we know our ways in all matters. Now we are wizened with the stories and counsel ways of the Wild Mother. Now, we have hands.

This seven year period in the story represents the empathic reorganization shifts our way of being in the world. We have reoriented the animus in this manner and initiated it into our “female” personal work. Our inner energies have been given time to find harmony. Our “male” and “female” energy have danced their dance inside of our psyches and the energy is now becoming whole and united. Suffering through the same seven-years-long initiation is the common ground between feminine and masculine. It gives us a strong idea that instead of antagonism between these two forces, there can be profound love, especially if it is rooted int eh seeking of one’s own self.

It is important here to understand that both the maiden and king are caused to walk psychic lands where such processes take place, but they can only be learned in the wildish nature, only next to the skin of Wild Woman. It is usual so one so initiated should find their underworld love of the wild nature surfacing in the topside-world life. Psychically she has the fragrance of wood fire about her. It is usual and normal that she begin to act here what she has learned there.

This is one of the most amazing things about this long journey: we do continue to do all the regular topside life living: loving lovers; birthing babies; chasing children; chasing art; chasing words; carrying food, paints, skeins; fighting for this and the other; burying the dead; doing all the workaday tasks as well as this deep, faraway journey.

At this time, we are often torn in two directions, for there comes over us an urge to just wade into the forest as though it is a river and to swim in teh green, to climb to the top of a crag and sit face into the wind. It is a time when an inner clock strikes an hour that forces us to have a sudden need of a sky to call our own, a tree to throw our arms around, a rock to press our cheek against. Yet we MUST live our topside life as well.

It is to our extreme credit that even though we want to, we don’t go driving off into the sunset. Or, at least not permanently. Because we need our outer life to exert the right amount of pressure in order to complete this journey. It is way better to stay in the world during this time rather than leaving it entirely, because the tension is better and tension makes a precious and deeply turned life that can be made no other way.

So now, we see the animus inside of us go through its own transformation, and readying itself to be an equal partner to the maiden and childSelf. At last they have finished their work (for now), at last they are reunited and there is return to the old mother, the wise mother, the mother who can bear it all, who helps with her wit and wisdom… and they are all united and have love of one another.

Beloveds, the endurance of our souls has been tested and met. And we go through this cycle every seven years, the first time very faintly, and usually, one time at least, very hard, and there after in a rather memorial or renewing sort of manner. Here at last, let us rest now and look over this lush panorama of initiation and its tasks. Once we have been through the cycle, we can choose any or all tasks to renew our lives again at any time we wish for any reason. Here are some to pick from:

1. to leave the old parents of the psyche, descend to the psychic land unknown, while depending on the goodwill of whomever we meet along the way
2. to bind the wounds inflicted by the poor bargain we made somewhere in our lives
3. to wander psychically hungry and trust nature to feed us
4. to find the Wild Mother and her succor
5. to make contact with the sheltering animus of the underworld
6. to converse with the psychopomp (the magician)
7. to behold the ancient orchards (energy forms) of the feminine
8. to incubate and give birth to the spiritual childSelf
9. to bear being misunderstood, to be severed again and again from love
10. to be made sooty, muddy, dirty
11. to stay in the realm of the woodspeople for seven years till the child is the age of reason
12. to wait
13. to regenerate the inner sight, inner knowing, inner healing of the hands
14. to continue onward even though one has lost all, save the spiritual child
15. to re-trace and grasp our childhood, girl/boyhood, and woman/manhood
16. to re-form our animus as a wild and native man; to love him; and he, her
17. to consummate the wild marriage in the presence of the old Wild Mother and the new childSelf

“The Handless Maiden” is a real-life story about us as real women and men. It is not about one part of our lives, but about our entire lifetime. It teaches in essence that for us the work is to wander into the forest over and over again. Our psyches and souls are specifically suited to this so that we can traverse the psychic underland, stopping here and here and here, listening to the voice of the old Wild Mother, being fed by the fruits of spirit, and being reunited with everything and everyone beloved to us.

Yes, the time with Wild Woman is hard at first.

To repair injured instinct, banish naivete, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of pscyhe and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for… all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance.

When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.

MEDITATION

So now, let’s consider our centering thought,  “I embrace my true nature.”

Consider listening to the following music during the meditation:

Now, let’s prepare to meditate.  Make yourself comfortable and close your eyes.  Become aware of your breath and breathe slowly and deeply.  With each breath, allow yourself to become more relaxed.  You may wish to use a mantra with this meditation like “Om Satyam,” I express my pure awareness into the world.” 

Repeat it silently to yourself.  “Om Satyam” 

With each repetition, feel your body, mind and spirit open and receive just a little bit more of this nurturing and innate ability that is within you. With each repetition, imagine yourself walking along the path towards your soul’s home.

Connect with it. Allow the stars to pull it out from your depths, and OWN it! Feel the warmth return to your hands. Feel the warmth return to your heart. Feel your entire being warm with the power and strength that is inside of you.

Visualize yourself in an enchanted forest. Your inner child is with you as a guardian and so is the white spirit innskeeper. Walk around, feel the leaves crunch under your toes. Dig them in and feel the cool earth beneath the soles of your feet. Take a deep breath and smell the forest: the leaves, the earth, the cool crisp air. Watch your breath rise up in front of your face dancing in front of you in a beautiful piece of artwork.

Then, along your path you start to notice a figure walking briskly towards you, but you are not afraid. The figure begins to run faster and calls out your name with his or her arms stretched out, this is your animus.

Run towards your animus with an open heart and stretch out your own arms in tandem and embrace. When you feel the warmth of the hug, feel your skin, the hairs all over your body stand on end. You can feel energy from the forest rising all around you. Your energy fields fuse together in a ball of divine universal life force energy. Your inner child and innkeeper spirit join you, and then even the spirit of the forest rises and mixes until you are all one surging ball of light.

Bask in this fluid energy, relish what feelings and emotions you are experiencing. You are light, you have no form but this one, and with your awareness look out and see that you have become a shining sun… a a single star in the milky-way. You are floating in the expanse of space and are loved and filled with joy and peace and harmony. You are one with the Universe. You are whole. You are the purest expression of the Wild.

In this space you may wish to ask your guides and the cosmos some questions. Be patient. Listen for you answers. They may come in the form of visions, words, or feelings.

When you feel you have received what you need, know you can always come back to this space, and ask what you can do to show your gratitude for your answers.

When you are ready come back down to the realm of the forest and walk hand-in-hand with your animus and your inner child, and notice the innkeeper spirit floating around and dancing happily at your return.

Open your eyes and write down any impressions in your journal. Know that wherever you go from here you carry them always in your heart and psyche.

SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOUR JOURNAL:

• What sensations did you experience?
• What do you remember?
• Did you get glimpses of a past life?
• What were the answers to your questions you have been asking?
• Was there a renewed connection to your path?
• A reclaimed strength inside of you you have long lost?
• A passion you have long ago walked away from?
• What have you learned thus far?
• What are you feeling right this moment in your depths?
• Want to howl at the stars with me?

Be sure to journal your impressions in your journal, and pay especial attention to your dreams the night of the meditation.

Feel free to comment below your experience.

NAMASTE BELOVEDS and thank-you for journeying with us on this deeply personal inner quest!

Join us, where ever you are. Awake or asleep. Read this and reflect. Thursday, October 23rd 2014 at 9pm EST.

REFERENCES

• Gratitude to Creative Commons Photographers Garret Ward, Brendan T Lynch, Christian Ronnel, Cloudtail, and Garret Ward
• Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes pp. 450-455

New Moon Blessings of the Fifth Stage of Endurance: The Harrowing of the Soul

Please, join in where ever you are. Awake or asleep. Read this and reflect, and meditate. Wednesday, September 24th 2014 at 8pm EST.

Three months ago, we began a journey towards wholeness by diving deep into our psyches. Through calm reflection and/or meditation, we have explored the foolish “devil’s bargains” that we have made in our past, and what we have given up or what has been taken away from us. We have discovered and continue to discover the things and people which no longer serve us and have learned to healthily cut and break free from them. We have begun to learn to wander with instinct and eat that which feeds our minds, bodies, and souls, and now we delve into what the Sufies call “The Longing, in the wilderness of loneliness” or the pain of the soul.

(I shared and wrote a brief article yesterday on the subject of The Longing: http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/09/17/the-longing/)

At a fundamental level we all crave Mystical Union along our path as the Beloved.

In the light of our awakening, we begin to sense both the Universe and ourselves as “Beloved.” Love for this remote, glorious, and supreme level of Being draws on this arduous journey. Love is the energy that fuels the mystical journey, and without love the seeker cannot sustain the demands and hardships of the journey. Which is why in the previous meditation we focused so much on Self-Love and finding it Within. Sometimes however, our journey towards Wholeness and Unity, or towards this higher level of consciousness, we feel it is at times unattainable. That it is too far from and away from our immediate grasp. In this mindset we deeply feel “the Longing.” And of course we should. It is only human. We crave instant gratification, but we all know that the mystical path is a life-long journey; one in which we must foster incredible patience with ourselves and guides.

Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, a tenth-century Sufi author, whose The topic of Scintillating Lights (Kitab al-luma’) is one of the earliest compilations of Sufi lore, cites the following dicta: “Longing is the state of the worshipper for whom, due to his yearning to meet his beloved, existence has become loathsome. One of the Sufis was asked: what is longing? He said: the agitation of the heart when it remembers its beloved. Another Sufi said: Longing is a fire that God ignites within the hearts of His friends in order that it burn up in them all thought, all desire, all obstruction and all neediness.”

Many have been named “martyrs of love,” a title that highlights the uncompromising nature of their longing. To describe the intensity of such longing, al-Hallaj tells the story of the moth who, in its desire to experience the essence of fire at first hand, throws itself into it until completely consumed: “The moth hovers round the lamp. The light of the lamp is the knowledge of truth, its warmth is the truth of truth, arriving at it is the truth of all truths. The moth is not contented with the light and warmth of the lamp. It throws its whole being into it. Its fellow-kind moths wait for the moth to return, for they want it to convey to them the knowledge it had gained from first sight; but the moth has become a no-thing, it has dispersed in all directions, it now exists formless, bodiless, nameless, featureless—in what sense, then, or in what mode can it return to its fellow kind?” (Husain 1994)

As alluded to in the Parable of the Moth, the ultimate goal of the Sufi lover’s journey is annihilation in God/Creation/The Source. This mystical state seldom signifies physical death but rather the death of the ego—the lower-self (nafs)— and the merging of the heart, which has become devoid of all desires and wants, with the divine Beloved. Longing, therefore, is one of the mystical states on the Sufi path that herald the unio mystica, the mystical union with God.

“An aspect of longing is the surfacing to memory of a primordial event experienced, according to the Sufi tradition, by the human soul in the proximity of God before it came into being in the physical world” when we were still mere atoms. In this covenant a relationship based on two principles was established between Source and humankind: The universal  the witnessing of God’s innate nearness to the human soul. It is this state of primordial nearness that the awakened hearts of men and women desire to relive and for which, vis-a-vis their isolated and desolate existence in this world, they long.

This Sufi myth echoes the notion, prevalent in many ancient systems—as in Platonism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism—of the soul’s exile from its heavenly abode and its descent into this lower world. Consequently, it echoes also the desire of a few awakened souls to take the upward journey back and to ascend, via states and stages (like we are doing here with these meditations), to the primordial home in the vicinity of God/Goddess/Source/The Universe/Unity/Wholeness.

WE HAVE COME THIS FAR.

Now, we strive to experience something a bit more, something a bit more deep and personal. A new layer to our psyches and consciousness.

We have learned and continue to learn incredible things about our selves, as we take the steps on this 7-Part Healing Meditation practice based on Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ work in her soul-opening book Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the story of the Handless Maiden.

So, welcome again friends to this 7-Part Series of Deep Psyche Digging & Surgery.

Now begins Part-5, the Fifth Stage of Endurance –
The Harrowing of the Soul. (The Longing Pain of the Soul.)

If you havn’t already done so, or would like to refresh your memory, please read the full short story HERE: http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/07/21/new-moon-blessings-of-the-first-stage-of-endurance/

And if this is your first time with us, please take the time to look over the previous Stages:

• Part-1, the First Stage of Endurance – The Bargain Without Knowing
  http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/07/21/new-moon-blessings-of-the-first-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-2, the Second Stage of Endurance – The Dismemberment
  http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/08/04/full-moon-blessings-of-the-second-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-3, the Third Stage of Endurance – The Wandering
  http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/08/20/new-moon-blessings-of-the-third-stage-of-endurance/
• Part-4, the Fourth Stage of Endurance – Finding Love in the Underworld http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/09/03/full-moon-blessings-of-the-fourth-stage-of-endurance-finding-love-within/

IN THE STORY

After the Handless Maiden and King marry, the King goes off to war in a faraway kingdom, asking his mother to care for his young queen and requests that a message be sent to him if she should have a child. And so the story goes that she does indeed, and a joyful message is sent for the king. However, deep psyche struggles will soon begin.

The messenger falls asleep at a river, and the Devil steps out and changes the message to say “The queen has given birth to a child who is half-dog.” The king is horrified, yet sends a reply stating to love the queen and care for her in this horrible time. The messenger again falls asleep at the river, and the Devil changes the message to say “Kill the queen and her child.” The king’s old mother who is charged with her safety sends a message to confirm and back and forth the messages continue, getting worse and worse, until the wise and compassionate mother helps the young queen and her child escape.

“Like Bluebeard, Jason of the golden fleece fame, the hidalgo in “La Llorona,” and other fairytale mythological husbands/lovers, the king marries and is then called away.

Why are these mytho-husbands always trotting off so soon after the wedding night?

The reason is different in each tale, but the essential psychic fact remains:

the kingly energy of the psyche falls back and recedes (for now) so that the next step in the process can occur, as well as the testing of our newly found psychic stance. In the story, the king has not completely abandoned her, for his mother watches over her in his absence.

THE NEXT STEP is the formation of the our relationship to the old Wild Mother and to birthing. The testing is of the love bonds between maiden and king, and the maiden and the old mother. One has to do with love between opposites, the other has to do with love of the deep female Self.

The departure of the king is a universal leitmotif in fairy tales. When we feel, not a withdrawal of support but a lessening of the nearness of the support, we can be sure that a testing period is about to begin, when we will be required to nourish ourselves on soul memory alone until the loved one returns. Then our night dreams, particularly the most striking, penetrating ones, are the only love we shall have for a time.”

PREPARE YOURSELF FOR DREAMS

“Dreams are experiences of the wild feminine nature.”  (Regardless of whether you are male or female. This energy is termed “feminine” by our modern society and limited view/understanding of duality.)

Begin a dream-journal if you have not already begun one.The more you journal even if you only remember feelings, the more you will remember details and the more and more insights into them you will glean.

“Emotionally, and often physically profound, they are feeling states that are like a food cache. We can draw from them when spiritual sustenance is spare. As the king trots off on some adventure, his psychic contribution to the descent is held in place by love and memory. The maiden understands that the kingly principle of the underworld is committed to her and will not forsake her, as he promised before they married. Often at this time a person is “full of her/himSelf.” We are pregnant, meaning filled with a nascent idea about what our life can become if we will only pursue our work. It is a magical and frustrating time, as we shall see, for this is a cycle of descents, so there is another around the bend.”

“It is because of the burst of new life that our life may seem again to stumble too near the edge, and jump right into the abyss again. But this time, the love of the inner masculine and the old Wild Self will sustain us as never before.”

“The union of the energy between the king and queen of the underworld produces a child. A child made in the underworld is a magic child who has all the potential associated with the underworld, such as acute hearing and innate sensing, but here it is in its anlage, or “that which shall become,” stage. It is at this time that we on the journey have startling ideas, some might call them grandiose, that are the result of having new and youthful eyes and expectations. This may be as finding new interests and new friends. For it can mean an entire tragicomedic epiphany of divorce, reconstitution, and a customized happily-ever-after.”

The spirit-baby sets sedentary men and women off climbing the Alps at age forty-five.

(Think “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”)

The spirit-baby causes us to throw over our life of floor wax fixation and sign up for university instead. It is the spirit-babe that causes us who are diddling around doing the safe thing to take to the open road bent under their tinker’s pack.

To give birth is the psychic equivalent of becoming oneself, one self, meaning an undivided psyche.

Before this birth of new life in the underworld, are likely to think all parts and personalities within us are rather like a hodgepodge of vagrants who wander in and out of our life. In the underworld birth, we learn that anything that brushes by us is a part of us. Sometimes this differentiation of all the aspects of psyche is hard to do, especially with the tendencies and urges we find repulsive.

The challenge of loving unappealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any hero/heroine has ever tried.

Beloveds, sometimes we are afraid that to “identify more than one self within the psyche might mean that we are psychotic. While it is true that people with a psychotic disorder also experience many selves, identifying with or against them quite vividly, a person with no psychotic disorder holds all the inner selves in an orderly and rational manner. They are put to good use; the person grows and thrives. For the majority of men and women, mothering, and raising the internal selves is a creative work, a way of knowledge, not a reason for becoming unnerved.”

So, we as the handless maiden the young queen of the underworld, are waiting to have a child, a new little wild self. The body of pregnancy does what it wants to do. The new life latches on, divides, and swells. A person at this stage of the psychic process may enter another encantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable anymore, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings for odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavors.

For instance, for some people, to be married was once the end-all and be-all. But in an encantiodromia, they want to be cut loose: marriage is bad, marriage is blah, marriage is unecstatic scheisse, shit.

Exchange the word marriage for the words, lover, job, body, art, life, and choices and you see the exact mind-set of this time.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE CRAVINGS. OH, LA!

You may crave to be near water, or be belly down, face in the earth, smelling that wild smell. You might have to drive into the wind. You may have to plant something, weed something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. You may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to your elbows.

You may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out your voice against the mountain. You may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. You may feel you will die if you don’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.

A NEW SELF IS ON THE WAY. (Along with this New Moon)

Our inner lives, as we have known them, are about to change. While this does not mean we should throw away the decent and especially the supportive aspects of our lives in some kind of demented housecleaning, it does mean that in the descent the topside world and ideals pale, and for a time we shall be restless and unsatisfied, for the satisfaction, the fulfillment, is in the process of being born in the inner reality.

Beloveds, what it is we are hungering for can never be fulfilled by a mate, a job, money, a new this or that. What we hunger for is of the other world, (of the Universe, of the Unity-That-Is), the world that truly sustains our lives. And this childSelf we are awaiting is brought forth by just that means – by waiting. As time passes in our life and our work in the underworld, the child develops and will be born. In most cases, nightdreams will presage the birth; and you may literally dream of a new baby, a new home, a new life.

But with this new life comes indeed more challenges and tests to overcome and more lessons to learn.

In the Greek mythos, in the underworld there is a river called Lethe, and if you drink from it you will forget all things said and done.

This means all of the previous challenges meant and conquered. This means every lesson thus far you have learned from tears and sweat and blood. Would you now forget all the previous experience and wisdom? NO! You should and shall not.

You will not fall asleep to your actual life. In the story though, the runner does fall asleep at the river. The messenger of our psyches represents this connection and communication between our innerSelves. But here we see that he cannot yet hold his own against the destructive/seductive force of the ego, our nafs, of the psyche. The communicating function falls asleep and forgets. And who in the psyche is always on the out and about waiting to take advantage of our tiredness and exasperation? Why, the old tracker of maidens, the hungry Devil.

This is the pattern we see time and time again. We have a history of terrible chores behind us. We have seen Death’s steamy breath. We have braved the clutching forests, the marching trees, the roots that trip, the fog that blinds. We are psychic heroes and heras, with a valise full of medals. And who can blame us now? We want to rest.

We deserve to rest for we have been through a lot. And so we lie down. Next to a lovely stream. The sacred process is not forgotten, just…just…just…well, we would like to take a break, just for a while you know, just going to close out eyes for a minute…

And before you know it, the Devil hops in on all four feet and changes the message meant to convey love and celebration into one of disgust. The Devil represents the psychic aggravation that bedevils us as it sneers, “Have you gone back to your old ways of innocence and naivete now that you are loved? Now that you gave birth? Do you think it is all over, you foolish foolish person?” And because we are near Lethe, we snore on.

This is the error all people make- not once, but many times. We forget to remember the Devil. The message is changed from a triumph to a slur.

Here, the Handless Maiden tale reveals to us how the predator has the ability to twist human perceptions and the vital comprehensions we need to develop moral dignity, visionary scope, and responsive action in our lives and in the world. The Devil here allows life to happen, but attempts to prevent our reconnection with the deep knowledge of the Wild Woman, that instinctual nature that contains an automatic rightness of perception and action.

While it is true that the predator has a taste for prey that is in some way soul-hungry, soul-lonely, or in some other way disempowered, fairy tales show us that the predator is also drawn to consciousness, reform, release, and new freedom. As soon as it becomes aware of such, it is on the spot. The devices used are denigration of the protagonist’s purpose, disparaging language used to describe the prey, blind judgements, proscriptions, and unwarranted punishments. These are the means by which the predator changes the life-giving messages between soul and spirit into death-dealing messages that cut our hearts, cause shame, and eve more importantly inhibit us from taking further and rightful action.

Here we then must and have to USE CUNNING INSIGHT, read between the lines, hold our place, so as not to be swept away by the outrageous but exciting claims of the predator (much like the king’s mother.)

She risks retribution to follow what she knows to be the wisest course. She outsmarts the predator instead of colluding. She doesn’t give in. The Wild Woman knows what is integral, knows what will help a person thrive, knows a predator when she sees one, and knows what to do about it. Even when pressured by the most distorted cultural or psychic messages, even with a predator loose int eh culture or in the personal psyche, we can ALL still hear her original wild instructions, and FOLLOW them.

This is how we learn to dig down to the wild and instinctive nature, when we do the work of deep initiation and development of consciousness.

We take it on in a massive enabling through the development of wild sight, hearing, being, and doing. We learn to look for the predator instead of trying to shoo it away, ignore it, or be nice to it. We learn the tricks, disguises, and the ways the predator thinks. We learn to read between the lines in messages, injunctions, expectations, or customs that have been perverted from the truthful into the manipulative. Then, whether the predator is emanating from within one’s own psychic milieu or from the culture outside of oneself, or even both, we will be shrewd and able to meet it head-on and do what needs to be done.

When we create something beautiful, something else and ugly is also, even if only momentary, jealous, lacking understanding, or showing disdain.

This in Jungian terms this destructive force is called a complex, or an organized set of feelings and ideas in the psyche that is unconscious to the ego and therefore more or less can have its way with us. But the antidote is consciousness of one’s foibles and gifts, so that the complex is unable to act on its own. In Freudian terms, this destructive force is said to emanate from the id, a dark, indefinite, but infinite psychic land where, scattered like wreckage and made blind from lack of light, live all forgotten, repressed, and revulsive ideas, urges, wishes, and actions. Resolution is brought about by remembering base thoughts and urges, bringing them to consciousness, describing, naming, and cataloging them, in order to leach their potency.

This demon complex, uses the voice of the ego to attack our creativity and progress.

It is a psychic ambush meant to loosen our faith not only in ourselves but in the very careful and delicate work we are doing in the unconscious. It takes goodly amounts of faith to continue at this time, but we must, and we do. Our inner kings, queens, king mothers, and all other elements of our psyche are pulling in one single direction: in our direction, and so must we persevere with them. This is the homestretch. It would be so wasteful and even more painful to abandon and give up now.

This is only a test of our inner certainty.

If you feel you have lost your mission, your oomph, if you feel confused, slightly off, then look for the Devil, the ambusher of the soul within your own psyche. If you cannot see, hear, catch it in the act, assume it is at work, and above all stay away- no matter how tired you become, no matter how sleepy, no matter how much you want to shut your eyes to your true work. Because this destructive force in our psyche is hoping we will kill ourselves off and reject this path.

If you are brave enough, and I know you are Beloved, now you know where to go. You know what to do. You continue. You go, to flee from the predators of the pscyhe and your community. You see sanctuary in another area, away from this force. You set out on another initiation, another rite of passage: into the woods. In some cases and rites it was in a cave, under a mountain, but in the underworld, where tree symbolism abounds, it is most often a forest.

We go and with much blessing. We rise up from the underworld birthing chair where we have given birth to new ideas, a new life view. We are veiled by the king’s mother, and we take our child with us. The old Wild Mother binds the infant to the maiden’s breast so the childSelf can be nourished no matter what happens next. Then, in the tradition of the old Goddess rites, she wraps the maiden in veils as she travels on sacred pilgrimage so we are not diverted from our intention.

This symbol of veiling marks the difference between hiding and disguising. This is about keeping private, keeping to oneself, not giving one’s mysterious nature away. it is about preserving the eros and mysterium of the wild nature. Sometimes we have difficulty keeping our new life energy in the transformative pot long enough for something to accrue to us. We must keep it to ourselves without giving this energy all away to whomever asks, or to whichever stealthy inspiration suddenly happens upon us, telling us it would be good to tip the pot and empty our finest soulfulness out into eh mouths of others or onto the ground.

Putting a veil over something increases its action or feeling. And so we must too. We must increase our action and feeling. This doesn’t mean we should start wearing a veil, but I think you get my meaning.

We are beginning a powerful fermenting of the soul.

After all of the invasiveness of the Devil, we are once again protected. When you reach the veiled state (or you perhaps are already there) you are sensible to know better than to allow others to invade your psychic space. You have now learned boundaries. You have now developed the sense enough to keep your wholeSelf protected from all sorts of things.

We are protected here by some superior wisening, some sumptuous and nourishing solitude that originated in our relationship with the old Wild Mother. We are on the road again, but safeguarded. By wearing the veil, we are designated as one who belongs to Wild Woman. We are hers, and though not unreachable, in some ways we are held away from total immersion in mundane life.

The amusements of the upper world do not dazzle us. We are wandering in order to find the place, the homeland in the unconscious. As fruit trees in blossom are referred to as wearing beautiful veils, we and the maiden are now flowering apple trees on the move, loosing for the forest to which we belong.

This is a period when we are charged to remember.

To persist in spiritual nourishment even though we are separated from those forces that have sustained us in the past. We cannot stay in the ecstasy of perfect union forever. For most of us, it is not out path to do so. Our work is rather to be weaned at some point from these most exciting forces, yet remain in conscious connection to them and go on to the next task.

It is a fact that we can become fixated on  a particularly lovely aspect of psychic union and stay there forever, sucking at the sacred tit. This does not mean nurture is destructive. Quite the contrary, nurture is absolutely essential to the journey, and in substantial amounts. In fact, if it is not present in adequate amounts, the seeker will lose energy, fall into depression, and fade to a whisper. But if we stay at a favourite place in the psyche, such as only in beauty, only in rapture, individuation slows to a slog. the naked truth is that those sacred forces we find within our own psyches someday must be left, at least temporarily, so that the nest stage of the process can occur.

As in the tale, where the two women tearfully bid each other good-bye, we must say good-bye to precious internal forces that have helped immeasurably. Then, with our new childSelf held to our heart and breast, we step onto the road. The maiden is on her way again, wandering toward a great woods in all great faith that something will come from that great hall of trees, something soul-making.

MEDITATION

So now, let’s consider our centering thought,  “There is connection and Unity within.”

Now, let’s prepare to meditate.  Make yourself comfortable and close your eyes.  Become aware of your breath and breathe slowly and deeply.  With each breath, allow yourself to become more relaxed.  You may wish to use a mantra with this meditation like “I remember.” 

Repeat it silently to yourself.  “I. Remember.” 

With each repetition, feel your body, mind and spirit open and receive just a little bit more of this nurturing and innate ability that is within you. With each repetition, imagine yourself walking along the path towards your soul’s home.

Connect with it. Allow the stars to pull it out from your depths, and OWN it! Allow your longing to guide you to the Source of All-That-Is.

Continue to meditate for as long as you can or until you feel like you have grasped something.

• What sensations did you experience?
• What do you remember?
• Did you get glimpses of a past life?
• An answer to a question you have been asking?
• A renewed connection to your path?
• What is it your soul is craving for?
• Are you being tested?
• What can you do about this test?
• What have you learned thus far?

Be sure to journal your impressions in your journal, and pay especial attention to your dreams.

Feel free to comment below your experience.

NAMASTE BELOVEDS

Join us, where ever you are. Awake or asleep. Read this and reflect. Wednesday, September 24th 2014 at 8pm EST.

REFERENCES

• Photography courtesy of John Fowler, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
  halfrain, Jody Roberts, Pinterest, and Nicholas A. Tonelli
• Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes pp. 429-444
• http://what-when-how.com/love-in-world-religions/longing-in-sufism/

New Moon Blessings of the Third Stage of Endurance

A month ago, we began a journey towards wholeness by confronting the depths of their psyches. Through calm reflection and meditation, we have explored the Bargains-we-have-made-Without-Knowing, the “devil’s bargains” of both the physical and mental abusive predators in our lives. The people who have misused and taken advantage of our time, energy, and love. We then descended further on our journey, following in the steps of the Handless Maiden, and realized what we have cut from our lives, and also what needed to be cut in the Stage of Dismemberment.

At a fundamental level we all crave connection and healing.

We all have been through incredible trauma, no matter how old or young we all are, we are connected by our human suffering of the heart, mind, and soul. We all make mistakes Beloveds, and we all must learn from them. We all fall victim as prey for selfish people who will take advantage of us, no matter how wise we may be, we all still sometimes fall for their charm. But we don’t have to be victims forever, we have found that we are not only our dis-ease, we are not only the memory of the pain we have suffered; but we are the summation of all our experiences, the “good” and the “bad”, and like the “good,” the unpleasant happens for a reason. Now though, we strive to experience something a bit more, something a bit more deep and personal.

We learned incredible things about our selves, and we made the first steps on a 7-Part Healing Meditation practice based on Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ work in her soul-opening book Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the story of the Handless Maiden.

And now, we begin the next step.

So, welcome to Part-3, the Third Stage of Endurance –
The Wandering.

If you havn’t already done so, or would  like to refresh your memory, please read the full short story HERE: http://completehealthcircle.com/2014/07/21/new-moon-blessings-of-the-first-stage-of-endurance/

In the story, after the Handless Maiden loses her hands, much against her father’s hopes, she leaves home to go forth and depend on fate. At daybreak, with her arms wrapped in clean gauze, she walks away from the home she has only known- she walks away from her life as she once knew it. 

Along her way she becomes disheveled and animal-like again. Late at night, starving, she comes to an orchard in which all the pears are numbered. A spirit drains the moat around the orchard, and while the mystified gardener watches, she eats the pear that offers itself to her.

“Initiation is the process by which we turn from our natural inclination to remain unconscious and decide that, whatever it takes- suffering, striving, enduring- we will pursue conscious union with the deeper mind, the wild Self. In the tale, the mother and father attempt to draw the maiden back into an unconscious state: “Ah, stay here with us, you are injured, but we can make you forget.” Will she, now that she has defeated the Devil, rest on her laurels so to speak? Will she retire, handless, injured, to the recesses of the psyche where she can be taken care of for the rest of her life by just drifting along and doing what she is told?”

Would you and Will you? I hope not…

I hope that you would do what the Maiden does, and begins to wander. To begin to wander into your deeper realms of spirit, and “not withdraw like an acid-scarred beauty into a dim room forever.” The maiden said to herself, “I will dress, psychically medicate myself as best I can, and descend another stone staircase to an even deeper realm of the psyche.” The maiden’s instinctual nature says no to the old dominant part of the psyche that offers to keep her safe and hidden. She says no, and decides that she must strive to live fully awake no matter what!”

 This is where the maiden becomes a wanderer, and this in and of itself is a resurrection into a new life, and a death in the old. To wander is a very good choice.

“[People] in this stage often begin to feel both desperate and adamant to go on this inward journey, no matter what. And so they do, as they leave one life for another, or one stage of life for another, or sometimes even one lover for no lover than themselves. Progressing from adolescence to young adulthood, or from married to spinster, or from mid-age to older, crossing over the crone line, setting out wounded but with one’s own new value system- that is death and resurgence. Leaving a relationship or the home of one’s parents, leaving behind outmoded values, becoming one’s own person, and sometimes, driving deep into the wildlands because one just must, all these are the fortune of the descent.”

Does this sound familiar? Are you or another loved one doing just this? Are they embracing the power of their own spirit and leaving? To find something? To wander and discover the things about themselves that will change their life path forever? If so, do not try to stop them. If so, do not try to stop yourself. Don’t come up with reasons to not go and discover. You owe yourself at least that.

“So off we go down into a different light, under a different sky, with unfamiliar ground beneath our boots. And yet we go vulnerably, for we have no grasping, no holding on to, no clinging to, no knowing- for we have no hands. The mother and father- the collective and ego aspects of the psyche- no longer have the power they once had.”

 

They have tried to keep their little girl safe and hidden, to hide her: the physical manifestation of their mistakes, to keep her away from the knowing, to keep up their appearances, to save face, to not have her acknowledge what truly has happened: that she was to blame, that she followed what they said and did not flee before it was too late, that she failed. But how could she not? She didn’t know any better. We cannot blame ourselves, or the Maiden, for this. How could we? But we also can’t deny that it happened. Because it did. We cannot embrace the appearance, mask, or guise that we are okay, that everything is alright, that nothing happened… Because we aren’t okay. We aren’t alright. Because something did happen! And we cannot allow ourselves to wall up our hearts, our minds, or our bodies to hide from it. 

“Destiny draws her (and us) to live as a wanderer. In this sense, her mother and father die, and her new parents are the wind and the road. The archetype of the wanderer cause another to emerge: the lone wolf, or the outsider. She, or He, is outside the seemingly happy families of the villages, outside the warm room and out in the cold; that is her life now. This becomes the living metaphor for women and men on the journey. We begin somehow not to feel a part of the life that carnivals about us. The calliope seems far away, the barkers, the hucksters, the whole magnificent circus of outer life wobbles and then falls to dust as we descend farther into the underworld. Here, the old night religion again comes up from the road to meet us. While the old tale of Hades grabbing off Persephone to the underworld is a fine drama, far older stories from the matria-centered religions, such as those about Ishtar and Inanna, point toward a definite “yearning to love” bond between the maiden and the king in the underworld. In these old relgious versions, the maiden need not be seized and dragged into the underworld by some dark God. The maiden knows she must go, know it is part of divine rite. Although she may be fearful, she wants to go meet her king, her bridegroom in the underworld, from the beginning. Making her descent in her own way, she is transformed there, learns deep knowing there, and ascends again to the outer world.”

And this is what will do in meditation. We will descend into our underworlds, our inner depths of our psyche and discover our own pear orchard and eat. We will eat of the fruit of knowledge. We will eat of the fruit of our own labour and suffering. We will taste the sweet victory of finding what we have always been looking for. We will then go out and LIVE OUR LIVES. We will wander yes, but we will not me AIMLESS. We will find trust and faith again in the Universe to guide us. We will find trust and faith in our own core power of intuition to guide us. We may be different now. We may look different. Our energy has changed. We may not “care so much for things of the world” any longer. Our thirst for materialism has waned. We have found that pretty things tend to come with a much higher price. Sometimes too high a price. We may seem unkempt and wildly, but our “beauty shines regardless. We have renewed and begun a new relationship with the Self. We have gone through incredible alchemy: the stages of nigredo, rubedo, and albedo. The black and dark dissolving stage, the red and sacrificial stage, and the white and resurgent stage. Our old self is gone, and the deep self, the naked self, is the powerful wanderer.” 

“Now, we like the maiden, are not only taggard, but hungry. We kneel before an orchard as though it is an altar- and it is- the altar of the wild underground Gods. As we descend to the primary nature, the old, automatic ways of nourishing ourselves are eliminated. Things of the world that used to be food for us lose their taste. Our goals no longer excite us. Our achievements no longer hold interest. Everywhere we look in the topside world, there is no food for us. So, it is one of the purest miracles of the psyche that when we are so defenseless help comes, and right on time.

The maiden is visited by an emissary of the soul, the spirit in white,” and so shall we in our own time. This spirit, be it an actual spirit guide or a physical person, place, or perhaps even just an idea; “removes the barriers to her being nourished. It empties the moat and leads us and the maiden, to true real soul food. This spirit has good sense, and assists the maiden so she does not “fall into the phantasmagoria of the unconscious, so that she does not lose herself.”

This orchard, this place of adventure of the soul, is a double of the topside world. “Difficult things may occur here, but their meaning and the learning they provide are different from those in the topside world. In the topside, all is interpreted in the light of simple gains and losses. In the underworld, in this orchard, all is interpreted in the light of the mysteries of true sight, right action, and the development of becoming a person of intense inner strength and knowing.” This is the path we are leading with this 7-Part Healing meditation. But we simply cannot just meditate, no. We must do the work. We must experience life. We must go through all the steps and processes in our own good time, but we mustn’t be lazy or put it off because we become comfortable in any given stage. You shouldn’t hit the pause button on your life just because it becomes more tolerable or convenient. You have to want it. You have to have the guts to do it. We must have the patience and the endurance to “go on toward our knowing destiny.” 

Here is a promise: “the descent will nourish even though it is dark, even though one feels one has lost one’s way.

Even in the midst of not knowing, not seeing, “wandering blind,” there is a “Something,” an inordinately present “Someone” who keeps pace. We go left, it goes left. We go right, it follows close behind, bearing us up, making a way for us.”

Now we are in another nigredo of wandering, another black or dark dissolving stage of not knowing what will become of us, and yet in this very raggedy condition we are brought to sup on the Tree of Life. To eat of the Tree in the land of the dead is an ancient impregnation metaphor. In the land of the dead, it was believed a soul could invest itself in a fruit, or any edible thing, so that its future mother would eat it, and the soul hidden within the fruit would begin its regeneration in her flesh. So here, at the almost midway point, through the pear, we are being given the body of the Wild Mother, we are eating that which we will ourselves become.”

I know this sounds a tad morbid or weird, but it is a beautiful metaphor. The underworld may be dark, but it does not have to be scary. The underworld is only a metaphor for the beautiful depths our psyches. And you know what beloveds, our depths may be dark, but they are filled with stars. We have been taught since we were children to ignore our wildish natures and spirits. We have been taught to be silent and hidden. We have been systematically told to not look within, to keep things hidden there and to never let them out. I say, “no more.” Because we are what we eat, and if we eat from the fruit spirit of knowledge and self power, then soon, we will become a powerful and strong and beautiful source for healing, growth, and transformation that we never thought in our wildest dreams would be a reality. We are reclaiming ourselves Beloveds. We are on the descent journey into a world where we have been cut off from since birth. We are on the journey towards home, towards the home of our power, our light, and our peace. 

So let us meditate, and begin this next step towards a more whole, and healthy, and healing, and conscious, and aware, divine human being. 

Join us, where ever you are. Awake or asleep. Read this and reflect. Monday, August 25th 2014 at 11pm EST. 

Namaste

Photography courtesy of: Scott Cresswell, Vjeran Pavic, Paul Kline, Graeme Law, and Quaveda. 

 

 

 

 

 

New Moon Blessings of The First Stage of Endurance

Welcome friends to a 7-Part Series of Deep Psyche Digging & Surgery.

In her book, Women Who Run With Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, writes about the Initiation into the Underground Forest, the underworld of intuitive knowing, through the story of the Handless Maiden.

“It is a wild world that lives under this one. Were we are infused with instinctive language and knowledge.” And from this “vantage point we understand what cannot be so easily understood from the point of view of the topside world.”

Through what Jungians, Freudians, call, “participation mystique” and “projective identification,” we story tellers know as “sympathetic magic”: the ability of the mind to step away from its ego for a time and merge with another reality, experiencing and learning ideas there it can learn in no other form of consciousness and bringing these back to consensual reality.

Basically, I am going to share a story with you, so that you may identify with, let go of past trauma, rebuild your power and then heal from through the rite of endurance.

Yes, Endurance means, “to continue without cessation,” but it also means “to harden, to make sturdy, to make robust, to strengthen.” We just don’t keep going on and on because Endurance means we are making something.

“The teaching of endurance occurs all throughout nature. The pads of wolf pups’ paws are soft as clay when the pups are born. It is only the ranging, the roaming, the treks on which their parents take them that toughen them up. Then they can climb and bound over sharp gravel, over stinging nettle, even over broken glass, without being hurt.”

The story of the Handless Maiden has many names all over the world. Some call her the “Silver Hands,” the “Handless Bride,” and the “The Orchard.” In this story you will learn something about yourself, I promise you that. You will learn, and heal, and grow on. You will surely taste the Blessing that is Endurance. So, without further ado, here is the story of “The Handless Maiden.” After you read, there will be a brief talk about the story, and how we may use it to meditate and descend into the psyche and find strength and be initiated into the renewal of the wild….

“ONCE UPON A TIME A FEW DAYS AGO,

the man down the road still owned a large stone that ground the villager’s grain to flour. The miller had fallen on hard times and had nothing left but the great rough millstone in a shed, and the large flowering apple tree behind it.

One day, a she carried his silver-lipped ax into the forest to cut deadwood, a strange old man stepped from behind a tree. “There’s no need for you to torture yourself by cleaving wood,” wheedled the old man. “I shall dress you in riches if you will but give me what stands behind your mill.”
“What is there behind my mill but the flowering apple tree?” thought the miller, and agreed to the old man’s bargain.
“In three years’ time, I’ll come take what is mine,” chortled the stranger, and he limped away, disappearing between the staves of the trees.

The miller met his wife on the path. She had run from their house, apron flying, hair askew. “Husband, husband, at the stroke of the hour, into our house came a finer clock upon the wall, our rustic chairs were replaced by those hung in velvet, and the paltry cupboard abounds now with game, our trunks and boxes are overflowing. Pray tell, how has this happened?” And even at that moment, golden rings appeared on her fingers and her hair was drawn up with a golden circlet.

“Ah,” said the miller, looking in awe as his own doublet turned to satin. Before his eyes his wooden shoes with the heels worn to nothing so he walked tilted backward, they too turned into fine shoes. “Well, it is from a stranger,” he gasped. “I came upon an odd man in a dark frock coat in the forest and he promised great wealth if I gave him what is behind our mill. Surely, wife, we can plant another apple tree.”

“Oh, my husband!” wailed the woman, and she looked as though she has been struck dead. “The man in the black coat was the Devil, and what stands behind the mill is the tree, yes, but our daughter is also there sweeping the yard with a willow broom.”

And so the parents stumbled home, weeping tears on all their finery. Their daughter stayed without husband for three years and has a temperament like the first sweet apples of spring. The day the Devil came to fetch her, she bathed and put on a white gown and stood in a circle of chalk she’d drawn around herself. When the Devil reached out to grab her, an unseen force threw him across the yard.

The Devil screamed, “She must not bathe any more else I cannot come near her.” The parents were terrified and so some weeks went by and she did not bathe until her hair was matted, her fingernails like black crescents, her skin gray, her clothes darkened and stiff with dirt.

Then, with the maiden every day more resembling a beast, the Devil came again. But the girl wept and her tears ran through her palms and down her arms. Now her hands and arms were pure white and clean. The Devil was enraged. “Chop off her hands, otherwise I cannot come near her.” The father was horrified. “You want me to sever the hands of my own child?” The Devil bellowed, “Everything here will die, including you, your wife, and all the fields for as far as you can see.”

The father was so frightened he obeyed, and begging his daughter’s forgiveness he began to sharpen his silver-lipped ax. The daughter submitted, saying “I am your child, do as you must.”

And this he did, and in the end no one cold say who cried out the louder, the daughter or the father. Thus ended the girl’s life as she had known it.

When the Devil came again, the girl had cried so much the stumps that were left of her limbs were again clean, and the Devil, was again thrown across the yard when attempted to seize her. Cursing in words that set small fires in the forest, he disappeared forever, for he had lost all claim to her.

The father had aged one hundred years, and his wife also. Like true people of the forest, they continued as best they could. The old fathered offered to keep his daughter in a castle in great beauty and riches for life, but the daughter said she felt it more fitting she become a beggar girl and depend on the goodness of others for sustenance. And so she had her arms bound in clean gauze, and at daybreak she walked away from her life as she had known it.

She walked and walked. High noon caused her sweat to streak the dirt on her face. The wind disheveled her hair until it was like a stork’s nest of twigs all tangled this way and that. In the midst of the night she came to a royal orchard where the moon had put a gleam on the fruit that hung from the trees.

She could not enter because the orchard was surrounded by a moat. She fell to her knees, for she was starved. A ghostly spirit in white appeared and shut the sluice gate so the moat was emptied.

The maiden walked among the pear trees and somehow she knew that each perfect pear had been counted and numbered, and that they were guarded as well. Nevertheless, a bough bent itself low so she could reach it, its branch creaking. She put her lips to the golden skin of a pear and ate while standing there in the moonlight, her arms bound in gauze, her hair afright, appearing like a mud woman, the handless maiden.

The gardener saw it all, but recognized the magic of the spirit who guarded the maiden, and did not interfere. After the girl finished eating the single pear, she withdrew across the moat and slept in the shelter of the wood.

The next morning the king came to count his pears. He found one missing, and looking high and looking low, he could not find the vanished fruit. When asked, the gardener explained: “Last night two spirits drained the moat, entered the garden at high moon, and one without hands ate the pear that offered itself to her.”

The king said he would keep watch that night. At dark he came with his gardener and his magician, who knew how to speak with spirits. The three sat beneath a tree and watched. At midnight, the maiden came floating through the forest, her clothes dirty rags, her hair awry, her face streaked, her arms without hands, and the spirit in white beside her.

They entered the orchard the same way as before. Again, a tree gracefully bent itself to her reach and she supped on the pear at its bough’s end.

The magician came close, but not too close, to them and asked, “Are you of this world or not of this world?” And the girl answered, “I was once of the world, and yet I am not of this world.”

The king questioned the magician. “is she human or spirit?” The magician answered that she was both. The king’s heart leapt and he rushed to her and cried, “I shall not forsake you. From this day forward, I shall care for you.” At his castle he had made for her a pair of silver hands, which were fastened to her arms. And so it was that the king married the handless maiden.

In time, the king had to wage war in a far-off kingdom, and he asked his mother to care for his young queen, for he loved her with all his heart. “If she gives birth to a child, send me a message right away.”

The young queen gave birth to a happy babe and the king’s mother sent a messenger to the king telling him the good news. But on the way the messenger tired, and coming to a river, felt sleepier and sleepier and finally fell entirely asleep by the river’s edge. The Devil came from behind a tree and switched the message to say the queen had given birth to a child that was half-dog.

The king was horrified at the message, yet sent back a message saying to love the queen and care for her in this terrible time. The lad who ran with the message again came to the river, and feeling heavy as though he had eaten a feast, soon fell asleep by the side of the water. Whereupon the Devil again stepped out and changed the message to “Kill the queen and her child.”

The old mother was shaken by this request and sent a messenger to confirm. Back an d forth the messengers ran, each one falling asleep at the river and the Devil changing the messages that became increasingly terrible, the last being “Keep the tongue and eyes of the queen to prove she has been killed.”

The old mother could not stand to kill the sweet young queen. Instead she sacrificed a doe, took its tongue and eyes, and hid them away. Then she helped the young queen bind her infant to her breast, and veiling her, said she must flee for her life. The women wept and kissed each other good-bye.

The young queen wandered till she came to largest, wildest forest she had ever seen. She picked her way over and through and around trying to find a path. Near dark, the same spirit in white as before appeared and guided her to a poor inn run by kindly woodspeople. Another maiden in a white gown took the queen inside and knew her by name. The child was laid down.

“How do you know I am a queen?” asked the maiden.

“We who are of the forest follow these matters, my queen. Rest now.”

So the queen stayed seven years at the inn and was happy with her child and her life. Her hands gradually grew back, first as little baby hands, pink as pearl, and then as little girl hands, and then finally as woman’s hands.

During this time the king returned from the war, and his old mother wept to him, “Why would you have me kill two innocents?” and displayed to him the eyes and the tongue.

hearing the terrible story, the king staggered and wept inconsolably. His mother saw his grief and told him these were the eyes and tongue of a doe and that she had sent the queen and her child off into the forest.

The king vowed to go without eating or drinking and to travel far as the sky is blue in order to find them. He searched for seven years. His hands became black, his beard moldy brown like moss, his eyes red-rimmed and parched. During this time he neither ate nor drank, but a force greater than he helped him live.

At last he came to the inn kept by the woodspeople. The woman in white bade him enter, and he laid down, so tired. The woman placed a veil over his face and he slept. As he breathed the breath of deepest sleep, the veil billowed and gradually slipped from his face. He awakened to find a lovely woman and a beautiful child gazing down at him.

“I am your wife and this is your child.” The king was willing to believe but saw that the maiden had hands. “Through my travails and yet  my good care, my hands have grown back,” said the maiden. And the woman in white brought the silver hands from a trunk where they’d been treasured. The king rose and embraced his queen and his child and there was great joy in the forest that day.

All the spirits and the dwellers of the inn had a fine repast. Afterward, the king and queen and baby returned to the old mother, held a second wedding, and had many more children, all of whom told this story to a hundred others, who told this story to a hundred others, just as you are one of the hundred others I am telling it to.”

The First Stage of Endurance

In the first stage of the story, the vulnerable and materialistic miller makes a very poor bargain with the Devil. He hoped to become rich and live forever, but the price of that bargain was very very steep.

We all make horrible bargains sometimes. We give up something in hopes of a better future. And that image of greener grasses is not actually what will bring us True happiness. That something turns out to be the very thing that we most cherish about ourselves. Through life we constantly give up dreams, or parts of our personality to fit in or to “compromise” with a loved one. However, in the end, the only one who is compromised is our selves.

“Though we hate to admit it, over and over again the poorest bargain of our lives is the one we make when we forfeit our deep knowing life for one that is far more frail; when we give up our teeth, our claws, our sense, our scent; when we surrender our wilder natures for a promise of something that seems rich but turns out to be hollow. Like the father in the tale, we make this bargain without realizing the sorrow, the pain, and the dislocation it will cause us.”

But within making these awful bargains there lays an incredible paradox: although poor pathological choices of self-destruction are traumatic, they also offer us vast opportunity to “redevelop the power of the instinctive nature. Though there is loss and sadness, the poor bargain, like birth and death, constitutes a rather utilitarian step off the cliff planned by the Self in order to bring a person deep into their wildness.”

This is where the initiation begins.

By choosing what appealed to us at the time, without knowing we surrendered “dominion over some and often every part of our passionate, creative, and instinctive life. This choice causes us to then sleepwalk through life. During this stage, we “walk, we talk, yet we are asleep. We love, we work, but our choices tell the truth about our condition; the voluptuous, the inquiring, the good, and incendiary sides of our natures” are not fully awake.

In the beginning of the tale, the maiden is in a daze, forever sweeping with her willow broom, never learning anything. “Her metamorphosis has no metabolism.” So in order to wake her up, the all knowing Self concocts an acute betrayal. And with the father part of our psyches, who is supposed to “guide us in the outer world, is , in fact, very ignorant about how the world and inner world truly works, something just must be done to teach us. Because when the fathering function of the psyche fails to have knowing about issues of soul, we are easily led by fake promises of others and are only asking to be betrayed.Innocent naivete has its pros and cons, but here you can see that someday if we are not prepared and pay attention, our hands- our personal power- will get cut off.

And this betrayal, this trauma of the severing of our sovereignty, this horrible moment in our lives that has done this to us and our psyche, “marks a dramatic beginning for us; a forthcoming consciousness shift and shrewdness.”

Beloveds, “no sentient being in this world is allowed to remain innocent forever. In order for us to thrive, our own instinctive nature drives us to face the fact that things are not as they first seem. The wild creative function pushes us to learn about the many states of being, perception, and knowing. These are the many conduits through which the Wild Woman speaks to us. So this loss and the betrayal are the first slippery steps of a long initiatory process that pitches us into la selva subterranea, the underground forest. There, sometimes for the first time in our lives, we have a chance to cease walking into walls of our making and learn to pass through them instead.”

Living through the demise of our own innocence, we are given a hidden blessing of “working hard to understand, to peel back the layers of our perceptions and our defenses to see what lies underneath.”

This is a fucking rite of passage, and is to be applauded.

Because we have endured and must continue to endure and continue to learn and process.

This rite of passage “takes raw material, in the form of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, and breaks them open in a way that makes them usable for our nourishment. When we process, we sort through all the raw material of our psyche, all the things we’ve learned, heard, longed for, and felt during a period of time. We break these down into parts, asking “How shall I use this best?” We use these processed ideas and energies to implement our most soulful tasks and to fund our various creative endeavors. This is how we stay sturdy and lively.”

But to get there to this, we must ask ourselves, “when did we become zombies?”

“There appears to be a natural slumber that comes upon humans at a certain time in their lives. Usually it descends  upon children at age eleven or thereabouts. When they begin to take acute measurements about how they compare with others.” Eyes once clear become cloudy and hooded. Instead of our lives being filled with the possibility of enlightenment, we are covered over with a kind of “endarkenment” instead. Our outer ability to see into the nature of things and our inner seeing are both snoring away so that when the devil comes a-knocking, we sleepwalk over to the door and let him in.”

And boy do we let the “Devil” in, over and over again, until we learn our lesson. Until we wake up. Until we know we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there. 

It is normal to not want to do the hard work. There is another part of us that is desirous of languor, desirous of relaxing, of lounging, of taking the bargain of staying on the couch and watching TV, instead of exercising our minds, bodies, and souls. We give in to the Devil, we give in to Resistence that natural force that tries to keep us like zombies still asleep and barely conscious of our days and lives.

But when we shun our work, our art, our passion, our power, our sovereignty; “when we shun the chopping of woods, the hands of the psyche will be chopped off instead…for without the psychic work,” the deep work of figuring who we really are again, without this, we and the very things that we need to defend ourselves from the world, wither down and die.

Why is it that a woman or man “marries for the wrong reasons and cuts off his/her creative life?
Why is it when a person has one sexual preference, but forces themselves to another?
Why is it when we want to be, go do a big something, yet we stay home and count paper clips instead?
Why is it that when we want to live life, but we save little shreds of life as though they are string?
Why is it that even though a woman or man is their own person, they give an arm, a leg, or an eyeball away to every lover who comes down the pike?
Why do we flow with radiant creativity, and invite our vampirish friends to a group siphon?
Why is it that when we need to go on with our lives, something in us says, “No, being snared is being safe.?”

This is what is called a “devil’s bargain.”

Now, I do not believe in thee Devil, but I think you can relate to what I am saying here. There are people who do not always have the best of intentions our there. And sometimes they don’t even know that they don’t. You can’t help it. It is a force of nature. It is what Steven Pressfield writes about Resistance in his book The War of Art.The Devil of the psyche is nothing but Self-loathing.

It is selling ourselves out. It is forfeiting our potential. And we are all guilty of doing this at one time or another in our lives.

“Yes, you have suffered for it, no doubt. And you may have given it away for years, even for decades. But there is hope.”

The mother in the fairy tale announces to the entire psyche, “Wake up! See what you have done!”

And then you wake up. And it hurts. But it is still good news.

Because you have awakening from the bargain.

You are becoming conscious.

And over the long term there will be even more good news.

“That which can be given away can be reclaimed. it can be restored to its proper place in the psyche.”

You will see.

So Beloved, meditate. Meditate with the New Moon.

What bargains have you taken in this lifetime or in past lifetimes? And what can you learn?
And what New beginnings can you begin now that you’re awake?

Creative Commons Photography courtesy of: Nikola Ostrun, William Ellison, Kaoru, Moyan Brenn.