Hello dear friends,
Today’s post is a weaving together of strands that have been stirring in my mind and dreams, beginning with a poem:
wild self
loves to walk free
undisturbed
unanchored by time
she sings, dances & explores
she rests when she feels like it
in rhythm with heart & land
she listens to the moon
to the tides in her body
to forests, planets & seascapes within
she remembers she is
a being of light
her breath brings her home
she knows the language of birds
& weeps for the suffering of the world
she worships the mountain
sings with the rivers & blesses the trees
she dances with wind & plants her feet in the mud
She feels the blessing of being alive
and when it is time
she lies down to die
with blessing on her lips
I’ve been contemplating the idea of sanctuary, a place of stillness, space, solitude, and serenity. Sanctuary used to be a place of safety in a holy space such as temple or church. A place to rest and recover from hardship or threat. ‘Holy’ in its deepest meaning refers to wholeness, and it’s in this sense that I use it: the peaceful and numinous sense of feeling whole and at home in ourselves, living from our deepest Soul space rather than pulled here and there by the artificial externals that clamour for our ever-fragmenting attention. When we discover that we ourselves are a holy place, we experience this nourishing and inspirational wholeness more often, as we become one with our world, within and without. As we accept, embrace and surrender to ourselves and our world as it is we open to life. We are life.
Sanctuary offers the idea of retreat from the hustle and bustle. Yet perhaps retreat is not a retreat from, but rather a retreat into - we can can retreat towards something that is necessary to connect with our depths.
In a recent moment of retreat into the space and stillness necessary for me to connect deeply with life, I found myself gazing at a gorgeous full moon surrounded by layers of scudding clouds which gathered around the moon so she became the brooding eye of a sky dragon. Such alive intensity in that dragon moon eye! I felt myself gazed upon by this vast airy creature I’m not usually aware of, and the awestruck sense that the universe is sentient and returns my gaze.
Depth psychologist Christine Downing echoes my thoughts when she writes 'I have come to see journeys into dark places in a different way’. One of the ways I find retreat (or retreat finds me) is when I wake early (sometimes around 4, but usually around 5am) and be present to my rested relaxed body in the stillness of the dark. I lie listening to my heartbeat, and feel my body like a boat drifting in and out of that peaceful darkness. This is a liminal place, drifting on currents, at ease with the images and sensations that arise and fall away without my thinking or having to DO. I treasure it greatly.
I experience this same deep relaxation cuddling with my dog on a serene hilltop over the estuary where I live. We lie watching birds and clouds, feeling the air, the slightly damp ground and the connection of body to body. It’s another liminal space between sky, sea and earth that holds me while I drift and merge with all of life. Places and moments of rest are a sanctuary of peace. Inviting my awareness to fully notice and experience these retreats enables me to soak in all the nourishment and goodness that is always available, and brings a feeling of deep peace, balance and wholeness as well as wonder and reverence for this beautiful world.
Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson teaches a process called HEAL that is designed to help us soak in these good experiences to balance the brain’s negativity (survival) bias that keeps us in constant stress. He maintains we can balance our neurobiology and hardwire ourselves for greater resilience and happiness by:
Having an experience
Enriching it by sustaining it for a breath or more
Absorbing it by feeling it soaking into you and focusing on what is pleasurable or meaningful about it.
Linking positive and negative experience (off to the side of awareness) so that we restore an underlying sense of okness even when there are negatives present.
This method develops psychological resources that increase resilience and wellbeing. The examples given above are a natural version of this method.
In the peaceful dark I’ve been dreaming of dream of dancing - square dancing, circle dancing, line dancing - all the shapes of dancing. Recalling the times I dance and I become a prayer, I become sacred, a place for prayer to be uttered and received, for the temple to be swept clean, sanctified. For holy ground to be prepared and for Soul to call and be answered. This flow, this sacred aliveness is how we were meant to live in our bodies. Not in hunched tight, hunkered down, congested bodies, with eyes and minds like searchlights fixated on tasks or cravings. Body can be a river, a poem, a prayer, a hymn to aliveness. Body wants free range movement and expression in which river may flow. And then, too, feelings flow free and creativity and inspiration loosen up their iceberg moorings in the frozen sea. Things with wings rise up and fly in a bright sky. When things loosen their moorings it’s both exhilarating, cleansing, and sometimes unnerving. Fixed positions dissolve into a sea-sky-scape, an endless horizon. Grounding with the earth element helps to stay balanced and centred as things start to swirl. I see, with compassion, how easy it is to get stuck in a life of responsibilities, duties, repetitions and tiredness. Mud cogs the wheel and it gets harder to turn. It’s like focusing on the needle of a compass for orientation instead of looking to the wheeling stars in the fathomless dark.
If we want to live a life of balance and inspiration we need a way to move from depth to surface - from the interior to the exterior - and back again. This is the constant practice of creative expression, the transformation from dark to light on the endless loom of what we call life. Making Soul from the daily and nightly images and somas that embed us in our lives. There is no linear path, but an ongoing practice of making and unmaking - the immersion and emergence of what we make of our daily lives and hidden experiences. Repetition is essential to Soul making. On a mythic level, where Sisyphus feels tortured by repetition, by the doing and undoing of his task of pushing a boulder uphill only for it to roll to the bottom again, for the goddess Athene there is method and Soul development in the practice of weaving and unweaving. This is an invitation to practice, patience and perseverance and letting go of any perfectionism. Happiness doesn’t lie with achieving some outcome or acquiring a possession. It lies in the pleasure and challenge of process. Soul making is process-oriented, not content-focused. Being on the path deepens and ripens us as we look back and find ourselves changed in perspective, in capacity, and in depth by our experiences.
Sisyphus’s task describes a torture imposed by the gods of constantly returning to what, for Sisyphus is a meaningless and unending task. This lack of meaning or purpose, or connection to something greater than ourselves, leads to the despair we’re more and more familiar with in current times. As the world goes through transformation that seems to tighten the noose on our options, we easily slip into this hopelessness and depression that can lead to suicide, or to trudging through life as if already dead, giving up, not caring. This is the energy of the Death Mother archetype at work. She sucks the life and vitality out of everything and leaves us walking through a wasteland. Which is why sanctuary and the experiences I’ve presented earlier are so valuable. They bring us out of monotony of repetition into a connectedness that kindles aliveness and compassion.
Speaking of the Death Mother archetype, my colleague Dr Brooke Laufer and I will be co-presenting an online workshop in August on difficult choices of motherhood, bringing together our research and experience to discuss abortion, abandonment, adoption and infanticide within a social, historical, political and depth-psychological context that will include understanding the split view of motherhood in patriarchal consciousness, and the reality of experiences of the interrupted mother-child line for both mothers and children. Although it’s about mothers, I’ll be talking about the effects on the child, based on my book and PhD research. Brooke’s excellent book on maternal infanticide will be available in Sept/Oct this year.
Here’s the workshop link.
Alchemical journalling
Contemplate how you create and/or experience sanctuary in your life.
What makes life meaningful for you? And if it’s not, how could you experiment with finding meaning in everyday life?
How is your journal a sanctuary and how might you make it a sacred container for the meaning you make of your self and your experiences?
With you on the journey, Violet
Rick Hanson (2020). Neurodharma: 7 steps to highest happiness. (Penguin/Random House).
Christine Downing.(1987). The Goddess: mythological images of the feminine. (Crossroad).
Albert Camus: (2005). The myth of Sisyphus (Penguin).
Brooke Laufer (2024) Uncovering the act of maternal infanticide from a psychological, political, and Jungian perspective.(Routledge). Available Sept/Oct.
Violet Sherwood (2021). Haunted: The death mother archetype (Chiron).