Repairing the Rupture with Soul
A subtle and significant sensation has been present in my noticing lately - an old friend who hasn’t been to visit for sometime. I’ve come to understand it as a particular whisper from within, from the wild and deep waters of soul, letting me know that change is afoot.
It reminds me of my dog, Bodhi, picking up a scent and following it with a focused clarity, while I’m left with my less developed olfactory senses, wondering what it is…a jackrabbit, a coyote, a roadrunner?
Whatever it is, it’s palpably present to him. So too for me with this old-friend sensation: a kind of gentle gripping around the shoulders, pivoting me in a direction I’m not yet fully aware of. As I yield, the grip relaxes. And what I find, being revealed through a smoky foreground is deeper layers of soul, ready to be called back in through the body, by the body. Fragments of Self needing the space to return and recalibrate.
I know that change is afoot because this re-membering will inevitably sweep away any dusty layers of inauthenticity that have gathered, any energies that are not resonant with the essence of (my) soul.
As I yield, my skin feels evermore like home. There’s a curiosity of what version of Life I’m helping to midwife into the world, for this next new cycle of Being.
There are phases and stages to these ongoing cycles of retrieval, ones that I have become seasoned in. And the more I collaborate with the body in the process, the more the process itself becomes the embodied creation: the spiral-dance of the infinite playing through these finite animal bodies.
This collaboration with the body in the re-membering of soul has more depth than simply thinking and speaking words and concepts, and spreading them onto the upper layers of mind.
This collaboration with the soil of the body is a somatic soul retrieval: a reminder that we have skin in the game.
In somatics, Life’s natural rhythms and cycles of rupture and repair are worked with as portals into re-membering deeper aspects of Self: the mythic journey of leaving and returning home.
Here, there’s no fixing to be done, because nothing is broken. Simply more dimensions of the Mystery to reunite with.
And Life in turn reflects back the re-membered gifts in myriad ways (gifts that were always already here, but hidden/forgotten).
As I’ve been allowing the turning towards this particular cycle of reclamation, in partnership with skin, blood and bones, the archetype that I’ve been guided to revisit is the Selkie, the part-human, part-seal mythical being from the depths of the ocean.
There are many forms and variations of the Selkie archetype emerging from the Indigenous peoples of the colder regions in the north, from the Celts and Scots, to the Icelandic, Siberian and Native American tribes of the north-west.
This winter in Root + Rise, we’re going to meet this archetype of the deep waters through storyteller and Jungian analyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estès' transformative rendering of the Selkie story: Sealskin, Soulskin.
Our work and practices in collaboration with this myth will be a guided somatic soul retrieval: wintering into the depths of Self to emerge in spring with the embodied reclamation of more of what we are, (and less of what we’re not), to begin a new cycle of authentic creation in our lives - and in the world.
Winter enrollment to Root + Rise is currently closed. Sign up for the waitlist here.