THE GRAIL IN YOUR LIFE

Image found on Age-of-America

A young man was married to a woman struggling with drug addiction. She was unable to care for their infant son, he worked on a construction site all day, and his family was in another state. One night in the midst of a terrible fight, he looked in his son's crib and saw that the baby was shaking. In desperation, carrying his child, the following night he went to a support group for people living with a family member's addiction. Beyond all rational explanation, he began to feel hope, and even more surprising, he got the idea to take his baby to work. The foreman's wife set up a tiny nursery in the management shed and other women came in to help. The young man began to experience kindness in people he had never before known.

A woman with Stage IV cancer diagnosis walked along a beach contemplating suicide. When a starfish with a broken point scurried up the sand to catch a wave, she recognized the presence of the grail. She chose to live, and to live well. To her his meant taking the necessary care of herself and sharing her journey with others. She bought a starfish pin and wore it near her heart to remind herself that she had learned the lesson of love from a starfish.

A community was bereft when a beloved neighbor, a firefighter, died on 9/11. One night at a community meeting, the discussion inspired a novel idea: he was a gardener and to memorialize him, they would build a community in their small park. Today, "Pete's Garden" blooms with annuals and perennials in the summer and is stays green with pines in the winter; people relax on the benches, and strangers became forever friends. 

These are the grail moments--the small or huge insights, ideas, and openings that shift our reality, heal our suffering, and transform our lives. The grail is life itself.

THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL

The Holy Grail was the chalice use to collect Christ's blood from where he hung on the cross, and it was buried with him. When his tomb was opened three days later, both the living Christ and the grail were gone.

Over the centuries, the grail has come to symbolize that which heals all wounds. Less an object than a shift of mind, the grail represents the moment when a small life opens up to a greater reality in which we live but rarely see. These are the moments when we receive help from a more than human source, when we feel fully alive and flowing with life, and as a result are enabled to take inspired, life-generating action. You don't have to believe in a god to experience these transcendent moments; the imagination will do.

I have found that the old stories passed down among generations contain the healing we so long for now in our personal and collective lives. The great teacher Jean Houston observes in A Mythic Life that the Arthurian legend of Parsifal can show us how to transform modern breakdown into breakthrough.  

Found on DeviantArt

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, rivers had dried up, 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 to a castle that suddenly manifested within a mist, that night Parsifal saw 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. 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.

The message of the grail legend is that healing is possible. We heal as we serve. 

One path to our own Grail is to discover our deep story and share it with caring others. At the same time, as the myth tells us, we begin the healing of our broken land.

Ask Yourself:

1. How does the Parsifal myth translate into your experience? Write yourself into the myth to find your own grail path. Play with it: 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 is the question you need to ask? Try a few on the page and see where they lead.

3. A story isn't over until it is told. Share your transforming insight, if you have one, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem, with someone who cares.

4. What do you take from this exercise? What needs to happen? And what is the smallest, least difficult step you can take into a larger life? 

A new path beckons. One in which you are not alone, but now part of a life-giving grid of fellow seekers of their own Grails.



All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2018. Excerpt from book in progress.

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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