Hecate's Daughter: Listening for the Call of the World

Hecate, goddess of thresholds, mystery, magic, and the moon, via Jean Bakula, www.jeanbakula@exemplore.com

Silence. 

Beautiful, deep, alive silence.

Outside, rattle and roar of wind against windows. Inside, the quiet of a hundred people sitting in meditation, inhaling, exhaling the peace of this space. Dozens of small story fires radiate through candle flames; a carved wooden statue of Avalokitashvara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, stands on the altar, as loose and graceful as an unfurling wave. 

It's New Year's Eve. Twenty blocks north is Times Square, with its screaming millions. Here, a different plane, one that I've been craving. I have chosen to welcome my new year at the annual New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care sit with other like-minded, softhearted New Yorkers trying to get through these noisy and scary times with equanimity. 

Why here? I have been following Zencare's Facebook posts (https://www.facebook.com/nyzencenter/)  and am attracted to its mission of offering solace and companionship to suffering people, including those at the end of their lives, as well as training those who want to do this kind of work.

During their dharma talks, the two guiding teachers, Robert Chodo Cambell and Koshin Paley Ellison, invite us to lay aside resolutions, which we'd be sure to fall away from by mid-January. Instead, they ask us to consider a quality we want to embody and nourish in our world in 2018. They suggest that embodying is an expression of giving birth, bringing a gift from within ourselves, is a Divine Feminine way of stepping into the new year rather than the conventional patriarchal notion of reaching out or making something happen in the material world.
 

Ahhh…. I exhale. This is an easy one for me. 

Listening. 

It is what I do, have always done, since I was a pesky little girl tugging on my father’s shirt: “Tell me a story, Daddy.” I have been saying virtually the same thing – tell me a story – ever since, as a comparative literature student, a reporter, and since 1994, a healing story counselor. “Tell me your story.”  

Given this luscious time to remember and visualize listening, I know with certainty that in 2018  I want to be able to listen more deeply to the stories life is telling through clients, places I walk through, environments in which I live, friends, family memories, new adventures, and through through my pen on the page. To listen more deeply to whatever is calling.

 

What quality are you embodying this year? Is there a visual metaphor you can use to hold the energy of your quality and to remind yourself to connect with it? 

 

Mine is Hecate, goddess of thresholds, magic, mystery, and the moon, the one who lives at a crossroads outside of town, listening for the cries of lost souls.

When I first started my Living Story practice in the world's most lost and forgotten places such as prisons and homeless shelters, I read a lot about myth and fairy tale, because ordinary language was inadequate to contain and express that experience. Two goddesses especially resonated with me, both of them transformational: Aphrodite and Hecate. Transformation through love, and transformation through deep listening and intuition. Lighthearted listening through delight, love, and playfulness, and deep listening to the call of the world's suffering.


Through the years, as I have listened to more stories, and especially in the last year, as I have faced personal challenges and my country has slid into a sorrowful place, Hecate is the spirit and the energy that most guides my practice. A mature female goddess whose wisdom comes from lived experience, Hecate is the goddess who hears the cries of lost souls and guides them home. 

I found the image at the top of this post on google and followed it to the website that houses writer-astrologer Jean Bakula’s blog, jeanbakula@exemplore.com. Briefly, Bakula notes that Hecate’s three-headed dog represents her ability to see past, present, and future. In my practice, Hecate’s way of knowing comes through story, which creates coherence between the present moment, the past that has led us to this place, and the future possibilities latent in any situation. From my own reading, I know that serpents represent higher consciousness and broomsticks represent the sweeping away of threshold hindrances. 

Most important to me about the energy of Hecate is that she brings the quality of listening to the world. It was Hecate who could not see but who heard Persephone’s cries from the underworld to which she had been abducted by Hades. It was Hecate who called upon an army of other gods to rescue the buried child, and it was Hecate who remained Persephone’s companion throughout her life, even when she returned every six months to take up her role as Queen of the Underworld, guiding those who had fallen there back to the light. 


I want to manifest Hecate's energy ever more fully this year. 

Back to the zen present: the evening concludes with the ringing of a huge bell 108 times for the 108 gates of liberation and the 108 hindrances, which in Buddhist thought are the same. Reverberating with the deep clear tones of the bell, I walk out into the night both grounded and lifted. Struggling against the frigid winds to the subway, past other stragglers going to their midnight destinations, filled with new energy, knowing that my path this year is about bringing forth more deeply the quality of listening – for the story beneath the story, the story that wants to emerge – in my life, yours, my world, yours, ours. 

Are you listening to the story your life is telling you?

In every moment we’re at a crossroads: past and future are right here with us in the present. We’re always being asked to let go of the past by telling its story, and to choose a direction forward. The fact is that we’re given difficult situations to help us grow — not to overcome its problems, but to ripen in it and blossom through it, to look and listen more deeply into ourselves and our experience to discover strengths, gifts, and a degree of commitment to life that demands more than we knew we possessed. 

Do you feel lost and stuck? Or do you simply want to listen more deeply, as I do?

Your personal world and its mood. The environments in which we find ourselves or choose to live often mirror our internal landscape. What does your world look and feel like? What features stand out for you? In my own recent life, I’ve lived in a series of rooms that aren’t my home. They reflect the major life transition I’ve been traveling through since my mother’s death four years ago. When I understand my experience this way, I feel not homeless and anxious, but calm and focused on listening for what is trying to come forth and what is being asked of me now.

 
Your supporting cast. Who's with you and who matters? I’m sure you’ve heard it said that everyone we meet is a teacher. This is true. The characters who populate our lives affirm and lift us, or denigrate and deplete us. Remembering that all the world’s a stage, and that the people whom we meet outside are often reflections of characters in ourselves, who uplifts and energizes you? Who sabotages you? Understand that we are all made up of light and shadow energy; your hero and your "villain" can be the same person. I have met both companions and adversaries during my life, and I am careful now, as I grow older and want my time to be spent more meaningfully, to identify and travel with the light-bearers who energize and inspire me.
 

What perplexing situations or yearnings are calling for your attention now? 
What are they asking of you?   
What are you not hearing?

Would you like to learn more about listening to the story that is unfolding right now in your life? I invite you to visit my website: julietbruce.com. If you would like to explore your experience as an unfolding story, please write me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com to set up a free story session. You can sign up for my periodic newsletter, which announces upcoming Story Sanctuaries on selected topics.

NEXT FREE ONLINE STORY SANCTUARY: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 8-9 PM EASTERN. WRITE ME AT THE ABOVE ADDRESS TO REGISTER!

Changing the Conversation about Depression

painting by Zoltan Gabor
http://z-gabor.dk/

…The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. -
Rumi, "The Guest House "

Many people are coping with depression and anxiety these days. How painful! And what an opportunity for personal and collective transformation! This month I want to share some ideas with you for changing the conversation about depression.

This approach -- an ancient one -- looks at these painful states as “emergence” experiences rather than disorders. In the words of teacher and author Jean Houston in her book A Mythic Life, ancestral healers mythologized rather than pathologize depression, as we do. Rather than a state of deficiency, depression becomes in mythic story the ground of noble quest, a dignified and difficult journey toward healing and wholeness. No accident that emergence is the root word of emergency, for these crises in our personal and collective lives are calls to awakening to the fact that something new wants to come forth.

In story language, the dull pain in the gut, the spinning thoughts, inertia, and intense emotional anguish of depression are viewed as signs that we are at the threshold of becoming more fully who we are, if we are able to friend and not fight the beast we call depression. The creative images and language of myth, parable, and story enable us to safely contain, express, explore, and dissolve depression. Through these archetypal story forms, we can step outside of our biography, outside of ordinary and inadequate rational expression, and into a space of epic understanding and transformation.

A Caveat  

The creative approach I describe here served as my own path to recovery many years ago and has helped others as well. However, in no way do I suggest that it replace traditional forms of treatment, if they help. Working with metaphor gives access to the deepest places in our being, which can be out of reach to more cognitively-based approaches, and it provides a structure for remaking ourselves. But to be protected from inner overwhelm, I highly recommend an external integrating container, as in the safe structure provided by the ongoing relationship with a trusted psychotherapist or healer, 12 Step group, or formal meditation practice -- in other words, a compassionate, engaged witness, mentor, and story listener.

 

Depression as Call to Awakening

Jean Houston observes in A Mythic Life that the Arthurian legend of Parsifal is an appropriate metaphor for our difficult times, which she describes as the phase of necessary breakdown before breakthrough. 

 

Parsifal was a young and untested knight (the name Parsifal can be translated as fool or innocent) who finds himself in a wasteland where everything was crumbling and all living things were dying -- flowers no longer bloomed, the rivers had dried up, the animals and people were sick in body and spirit. This was the kingdom of the Fisher King, a monarch who suffered from an unknown illness caused by a wound in his leg; his illness had infected the land and no one knew how to cure it. 

 

Directed by an ailing man to a castle that suddenly manifested within a mist, that night Parsifal sees a magnificent chalice, glowing brighter than all the candles in the hall, being carried back and forth by a beautiful young woman. This chalice was the Holy Grail -- the vessel that had collected Christ's blood as it dripped from his wounds on the cross and that was found in his empty tomb three days later. Throughout the ages, the Grail became known as the container of the life force that healed all wounds. Parsifal vowed to find out the secret of the Grail the next day. But when he woke up the following morning, the castle was empty; there was not a soul around to ask. Seized with fear, Parsifal jumped on this horse and rode back across the drawbridge just as it was rising and the castle was becoming enshrouded in mist.

 

For many years after that, Parsifal wandered in a dark forest, trying to find his way back to the Grail castle by sorting through the tangled roots. During this time, he had many adventures, but he lived without passion, longing for the joy he had felt for one night, in what seemed to be a dream. But these years were not really about loss; they forced the knight to go on an inner journey as well as an outer one. What he lost was his innocence, naivete, and his unconsciousness. What he gained was simplicity, clarity, and maturity. Like a blade, he was sharpened in the fire of adversity. 

 

Finally, one day he asked a simple question: “Where is the grail? Whom should it serve?” With that question, life opened: the earth turned green, waters flowed, the drawbridge to the Grail Castle lowered, the ailing Fisher King was healed, and the kingdom too was restored to health. The Grail was brought out of the castle to serve the world.

Story -- especially the universal story plot that runs through all times, cultures, and places -- begins in wounding, confusion, despair, imbalance, loss of vitality. A land has been overtaken by darkness and from the sovereign to the people to the earth herself, there is withering, exhaustion, contraction, and spiritual death. In this archetypal plot, someone steps forth to do battle with this dark force and to claim the healing object or secret knowledge that will restore the kingdom. This protagonist struggles mightily with external and internal antagonists who guard the grail until he/she asks a question that opens the door, regenerates, and heals the land. In the process, the seeker has become someone new who is now capable of using this magical formula for the good of the whole kingdom. Heroes change the story.

Seen through a mythic lens, depression announces the beginning of a new story, a Call to the great adventure of change. Yet we are afraid; we resist; we grasp more tightly what we already know. Resistance in the face of the unknown is natural; we resist until the pain becomes worse than the fear of going forth. That resistance manifests in our life as depression, inertia, anxiety, and in somatic pain.

If we can stop running away from pain, put forth the simple question, "What is life asking of me now?" -- and pay attention to what shows up -- we too may find our world becoming green. “And this is why it is so important to be attentive when one is lonely, sad, or afraid," wrote the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, "because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us on the outside.” (Eighth letter, Letters to a Young Poet).

Working Creatively with Depression

1. How does the Parsifal myth translate in your experience? Rewrite the myth from the different perspectives of Parsifal, the ailing king, the Grail itself, and the land -- both in its dying time and in its rebirth. 

2. What does the question, ""Where is the grail?" sound like in your voice? In other words, what's the question you need to ask? Try a few and see where they lead.

3. Try writing it in first person, past tense. Or third person, present tense. Play!

4. Share it with someone who cares.

5. What do you take from this exercise? What is the Grail in your life? What is depression a metaphor for in your inner life? What needs to happen? What's the smallest, least difficult step you can take into the larger life?


All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2012


Reference
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