Reclaiming our Wildness is our Metamorphosis

Dear Sister,

This is a prayer for me, for you, and for her. It is a prayer for all the women we have ever been and will ever be. It is a prayer for all women everywhere. 

I sit below a fir tree this morning, as I have every morning for the last two weeks. Grief fills my entire heart space. The pain feels too big this time. I truly don’t know if I can handle the fear and the grief that is engulfing me. Every day for two weeks, I have awoken with layers of grief, sadness and fear that surround my heart like painful armour. And every day I am called to go outside and sit below the same Fir tree. There, I connect to Mother Earth and allow myself to feel what is happening within me. Every day she shows me what is beneath the armour, and every day I leave, reclaiming a piece of myself. 

Today, the pain feels bigger than it ever has, and I am scared. However, I sit and connect my body to the body of Mother Earth. Immediately, I surrender, remembering that she is holding me and I will be okay. Inside the pain, I see a giant black hole that goes underground. It goes so deep that I cannot see where it goes. I just feel that it is really deep. From inside the hole, I hear a woman’s voice cry out, wondering if anyone can hear her. I feel that she is cold, dirty and alone. I feel that she is from another time, and someone has locked her beneath the Earth. I tell her that I am there. I tell her I hear her and I will not ignore her cries. My whole body alights with shivers. She knows she is not alone.

There are a thousand graves of women who live within our bodies. They are often unmarked and unremembered. Within them are the abandoned parts of ourselves from this lifetime and others. They contain the versions of ourselves who have been shut up and shut down. They hold the parts of ourselves that have been raped, abused, demeaned, devalued and criticized. They hold the versions of ourselves we have tried to forget and the women we were, whose names we can’t remember. However, WE remember them. OUR BODIES remember them. 

Their cries are manifesting as pain within us. However, they are simply calling out to us to be remembered. When we experience difficult emotions or painful sensations in our bodies, this is them trying to communicate to us. They are saying, “Hey, what you are doing is denying me!”. “Stop! I need you to see, hear and listen to me!”. However, no one has ever told us about these women, and no one ever taught us how to hear their voices. And so, instead of listening to them, we go through our life trying to suppress them through control, rigidity, busyness, addictions and stimulants. We cover them up with botox, makeup, fancy clothing and by being tame. When we go too long without listening to them, they manifest within us as chronic pain, anxiety, depression and illness. And in our culture, we are taught to suppress the pain, and so we continue to suppress their voices.

We don’t need to be scared of the pain. Beneath the pain are the parts of us that long to be re(membered) and brought home. 

A flower only supports a caterpillar to eat her leaves, because she knows one day that this same caterpillar will become a butterfly and this butterfly will spread her flower’s seeds. The process of becoming a caterpillar is suspected to be extremely painful. Inside their cocoon, their body turns to a liquid goop before their cells reformulate into that of a butterfly. 

It is not common knowledge that we humans are supposed to go through a metamorphosis, too. The Earth only supports us being caterpillars, greedily over-extracting resources, because she knows our destiny is to become butterflies one day. However, we live in a culture and a time where we have forgotten our collective destiny. We have forgotten that we are meant to become butterflies. And so, we hide from our pain.

I imagine some caterpillars forget or resist the process, too. As a result, they die not knowing what it is like to live in true reciprocity with life. They don’t see the meadow through the leaves. Rather, they remain trudging on the Earth, over-consuming and being scared of predators. Does this sound familiar to our collective state of consciousness? 

The process of becoming a human butterfly can seem obscure at best. The reformulation of our cells is often invisible to the outside world and sometimes even to ourselves. However, our metamorphosis comes from reclaiming the parts of ourselves that have been hidden, forgotten and abandoned. It comes from reclaiming our original instructions and the WILDNESS of who we are. This work begins in this lifetime, going back to our childhood and reclaiming the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, abandoned, denied and ignored. It then extends to us learning and acknowledging the oppressive history of women everywhere. It necessitates us returning to our Earth Mother. 

In Hinduism, there is a dormant serpent known as Kundalini that lives at the base of our spines. This serpent is the feminine life force energy that is awakened through meditation, yoga, tantra and challenging and transformative life experiences. The awakening of this serpent is the awakening of the butterfly within us. The awakening of the serpent is connecting to our pain rather than fearing it.

It is interesting that for thousands of years before Christianity, cultures all over the world honoured and revered the serpent. The serpent was not only a symbol of human awakening, but also of wisdom, transformation and fertility. The serpent was thought to represent the life force energy of the universe. The serpent was a symbol of the Goddess and the feminine life force energy. The serpent cyclically sheds its skin just as a woman's body sheds her endometrium lining during her menstruation, representing a ritual cleansing process. Therefore, the serpent and feminine life force energy were seen as deeply interconnected and transformational.

The ouroboros, represented by a circular image of a serpent eating its own tail, symbolizes the never-ending life, death and rebirth nature of the universe. The serpent symbolically eats the parts of itself that no longer serve to rebirth a more whole version of itself. The serpent eats its pain and rebirths into greater amounts of love.

However, with Christianity, the serpent was no longer seen as a symbol of awakening, transformation and wisdom, but an emblem of fear, cunningness and deceit. So, the serpent was not something to awaken, but suppress.

God cursed the serpent below all other creatures.
He cursed the relationship between women and the serpent for all eternity.
He cursed the womb of women.
And he cursed the ground beneath the serpent.

In short, God damned the wisdom of the serpent, women and Mother Earth. 

For thousands of years, the serpent was seen on the headdresses of Goddesses and adorned around their bodies as a symbol of power and protection. However, with Christianity, the serpent moved from a crown to a curse. Artists began to create paintings of saints stomping and crushing the serpent, who was now a symbol of Satan and a force to be oppressed, dominated and feared. 

So is the serpent lying at the base of our spine dormant, or being oppressed and crushed from thousands of years of Christianity? Is our culture living as caterpillars because the feminine life force energy that exists within all of us has been crushed beneath the foot of saints?

The Truth needs to be shared and not brushed over. 

Hundreds of thousands of women were killed during the Inquisition for connecting to the wisdom of their feminine lifeforce energy. And many more women have been killed in the name of God. However, it is not only Christianity that has oppressed women and suppressed the serpent’s feminine lifeforce energy that is ready to be awakened within us. It is millennia-old patriarchal cultures and monotheistic religions. These cultures have bound women’s feet, mutilated their genitals, murdered their baby daughters, killed their medicine women, institutionalized their seers and raped and murdered our sisters.

These stories are so important to remember because they live as unmarked graves within our own bodies. We have been these women.

Many of us shame ourselves because we can’t fully inhabit our bodies, don’t know what we want and feel like we can’t hear our intuition. However, it is because for thousands of years damage and wreckage have been done to the bodies of women and the body of Mother Earth. We have internalized that it is NOT SAFE to trust the knowing of our bodies and the wisdom of Mother Earth.

Our current patriarchal culture taught us how we should be as little girls and who we should become as women. We internalized what was appropriate to say, what was okay to do and how we should act. Many of our voices, desires and dreams were oppressed. We were told that our value comes from our niceness and beauty, and that we should hide our anger and ugliness. Our cyclical nature was denied, and our discontentment medicated. Our sexuality has been monitored, and our sensuality has been exploited. We are valued for our youthfulness and disregarded in our old age. And so, the authentic girl within us has been fragmented, wounded, oppressed and broken down to a diluted and culturally approved woman. The fragmented, abandoned and denied parts of ourselves are also in the unmarked graves within our bodies. 

However, the serpent is awakening within us and she is asking us to re(member) these women’s stories and our own. We can do so not only through feeling the difficult emotions and sensations that arise in our bodies, but also through paying attention to our hopes, desires, longings and dreams. In looking at the painful and the longed for, the serpent will rise within us, and we will find our wings. 

So I finish where I began. This is my prayer for me, for you and for her. A prayer for us to sit with what arises within us, to reclaim our wildness and awaken our divinity. This is my prayer for all women everywhere.

With love,
Laurel

(Translator of the Earth)