“Today, practitioners of integrated medicine believe the body wants to heal, and the patient needs the time, encouragement, support and space to be able to get well. In many instances the time, encouragement, and support can be found, but wild spaces are lacking. Silvia [the Handless Maiden] was able to travel deep into a wild place. Where do we go? Where do the wild things go (including human beings) when no wild remains?”*
http://www.terriwindling.com/blog/on-illness-and-healing/
Stories heal – are you listening?
“There is a crisis point for us … This causes us, like the maiden, to cock our ears towards a faraway voice coming from ancestral time, a voice that tells us how to stay strong, how to keep spirit simple and pure.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, WWRWTW Ch. 14
“To follow the example of the armless maiden,” Midori concludes, “is an invitation to sever old identities and crippling habits by journeying again and again into the forest. There we may once more encounter emergent selves waiting for us. In the narrative, the Armless Maiden sits on the bank of a rejuvenating lake and learns to caress and care for her child, the physical manifestation of her creative power. Each time we follow the Armless Maiden she brings us face to face with our own creative selves.”
“That means stepping outside our suffering and seeing what it means, how it goes, what pattern it is following, studying others with the same pattern who have come through it all, and imitating what makes sense to us.”
The trials these wounded young heroes encounter illustrate the process of transformation: from youth to adulthood, from victim to hero, from a maimed state to wholeness, from passivity to action. Fairy tales are, as Ellen says, maps through the woods, trails of stones to mark the path, marks carved into trees to let us know that other women and men have been this way before.
We’re meant to come out of sweatlodge, down from the Vision Quest hill, home from the Moon Hut, back from the sacred hunt, bringing with us new knowledge, new dreams, a new status, a new name or role to play….intended not just for the sake of personal growth but in service to the whole tribe or community. Likewise, we’re not meant to remain in the circle of enchantment deep in the fairy tale forest — we’re meant to come back out again, bringing our hard-won knowledge and fortune with us…in service to the family (old or new), the realm, the community; to children and the future.
It has occurred to me that I keep waiting: I keep waiting until I have better figured things out, learned more, surrounded myself with people who really get me, etc. etc … but really, the time is Now, isn’t it?
There is no ‘arrival’; there is just the journey.
A short eight minute meditation done for tonight’s Moon Lodge reminding us.
The above quotes are taken from the below sources:
Ch. 14 Initiation Into the Underground Forest of Women Who Run with the Wolves
http://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2013/05/into-the-woods-forest-sanctuary.html
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