The Mythopoetic Language of Healing
“Every morning, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There I greet God and my own disorder. I say hello to chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble.”
I have been studying a new language since 2019, when the boundaries of my consciousness were blown to smithereens and I lost access to my capacity to read.
As a little girl, I was a bit like Hermoine Grainger from the Harry Potter universe. Nerdy, precocious, know it all, book-worm. There was a time in my childhood where I was reading almost one novel per day. Reading was a lifesaver to me in my childhood and adolescence, and I have long relied on it as a stabilising force, as a comfort, as a kind of security blanket.
In 2019, my brain, nervous-system and body conspired together to bring about a series of crises and as I struggled to maintain daily tasks like showering, meals and school run, my brain slowly shut down my prefrontal cortex to support my survival and I became like an animal on the run from a vicious predator. Several senses heightened, the ones I would need to survive alone in a forest, and some shut down.
Including my capacity to read.
This was awkward, as I was teaching in the tertiary sector at the time, and struggling to read my student’s work. I definitely couldn’t read the texts I was assigning them, and I stopped being able to escape into fiction or into intellectual enrichment that comes from private study.
As the year unfolded, all the identity markers I had been tethered to unravelled. I lost my job, my vocation, my community, many of my closest friends, an opportunity to complete a PhD, the support of mother who turned her back on me, choosing instead to support my husband as our marriage collapsed. I lost my home and full time care of my children.
In the brutal evenings of that year, and the one that followed, not being able to read - I would lie underneath the stars on the driveway of my rental and watch them slowly whirl above me.
I would greet the moon like I used to greet my mother.
Some deeply trusting part of me wondered if perhaps my brain had shut down my ability to read because I was being invited into a deeper kind of communication, but I did not know how to recognise it, as ancient and alien as it was to me then.
This language, which I now call the ‘mythopoetic archetypal’ language has unlocked the most powerful and transformational mysteries which were encoded with the exact soul medicine my consciousness craved. It is the medicine I now offer to others who come to see me on their healing journeys. It is the language alluded to in esoteric spiritual literature, it underpins the very fabric of reality and it is as wordless and expansive as the universe itself.
“Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.”
This mythopoetic, archetypal language expresses itself through the metaphor of phenomena like synchronicities, soul contracts and cycles which appear to unfold exactly according to the laws of quantum physics. It is possible to ‘learn’ this language, however it is most easily entered into through the experience of either great suffering and grief, great love and desire, or all of these together. In 2019, I was in the grip of all 4 of these humanly expressed cosmic forces which conspired to throw me into the great River in which I thought I might drown.
I used to baptise people, back when I thought the best way to express the mythopoetic language of healing was through an ecclesiastical modality. We used to explain to people getting baptised that it was a ritualistic re-enactment of the death and resurrection of Christ and that the sacrament was a gateway into embodied union with the Godself. I look back now and realise we were grasping the edges of a profound mystery but telling it slant, making it violent, applying the human tendency to power and control to something utterly wild + sacred.
It all felt a bit mysterious to me, until I was properly baptised into the Christological mystery, lying on my driveway smoking cigarettes and watching the Pleiades dance their starry steps across the southern hemisphere.
I get it now.
We drown in the River. We do actually die. The parts of ourselves which live in perpetual resistance to Love.
The River becomes the cosmic primordial womb of decreation, a healing pool where all can be unmade and remade again, and we are raised as a new being.
Re-birthed.
Re-woven.
Resurrected.
Glory be.
This is an excellent image to illustrate the kind of river I found myself being baptised into. Lol.
I have included the word ‘healing’ in the title to this piece, however the truth is that learning this language is not a road map to healing. It is, however, a roadmap to the deepest kind of acceptance of the nature of reality that there is, which to a soul suffering from having been divided against itself, is absolutely ‘healing’.
To understand that there is a cosmic web of belonging held together by Love which every creature is invited to participate in, which even death itself cannot interrupt, is to understand one’s place in the world is no more and no less significant than the place of a starfish. Or a wild raspberry bush. Or a bear cub. This itself, brings a huge amount of healing to the soul, and is the place I return to over and over again when serving my clients who are coming to see me for soul-retrieval medicine.
To begin to understand one’s role in this cosmic web is another level deeper, and is to step into deep bliss.
All of us have different archetypal threads we are weaving our lives with, and absolute free will about how we weave - but not about the threads themselves. There are limits and boundaries in this time-space reality which one must adhere to, they are like the coding rules in a video game. Flying in the face of our own deepest coding will bring about various states of dis-ease. For example, the artist trying to live their life as an engineer, will develop soul-sickness. This may express itself in the form of illness, or emotional malaise, or even psychosis in extreme cases. A mystic attempting to live life as an entrepreneur will tire quickly and suffer burnout several times a year. A prophet attempting to be a warrior and fight in a war will very quickly develop PTSD and acute mental illness and distress. Those who have soul contracts which involve the dissolution of separation consciousness and the union of opposites (yin / yang, dark / light, masculine, feminine) will feel split from themselves until they surrender to Love, and to being loved deeply.
I have had the uncomfortable experience of attempting to reject all of my own archetypal threads, and can confirm that the rejection of them almost drove me to psychosis.
Here is how the Fibonacci sequence works when it comes to this mythopoetic language of healing. Each time we dive deeper into our own role in the cosmic web, each step toward our most authentic expression raises equal and opposite resistance from our human conditioning. This is profoundly disconcerting, because we tend to think in linear terms as humans in the post-enlightenment age. Each time Love beckons me deeper, it is met with an answering backlash from my nervous system conditioning which is calibrated to resist Love. Every ounce of shame, abandonment, terror and rage still lurking in my unconscious shadow comes swinging up like a drunk boxer from the depths of my psyche and attempts to sabotage that which I know I yearn to give, and receive. This is both horrifying, but also now, a bit predictable. I have tried to run from Love so many times, it is now almost comical. I have so much empathy for why others do it too, because Love is the water droplets which form the River which we die in. Love brings us down to the River’s edge. Love beckons us in, Love takes us under (if we dare) and love utterly transforms and heals us at a soul level in such profound and instinctual ways, that we will later find it difficult to explain to others how we are now different.
The River is pure Consciousness, and it has a cosmic intelligence that is both deeply mysterious, and utterly knowable. It can be understood intuitively, experientially and mapped using story, song, myth, dance, ecstatic movement, erotic energy, symbols, plant medicine, poetry and art of all kinds. It cannot be described or quantified using doctrine or dogma, which is why we are experiencing such a mass exodus from organised religion and a mass explosion of experiential spirituality. People are hungry for consciousness, for union with the Source of all, and are no longer really satisfied with trite, violent, exclusionary, performative or deceptive formats for engaging with it.
Once we have been baptised and resurrected by this sacred River, which is a metaphor for god-consciousness which is the geometric shape formed by love which holds all the universes in coherence: it is possible to be re-shaped back into a new format of wholeness, where our higher order functioning capacity will eventually return once our limbic system has decided we are now ‘safe’ again. It took three years for me to do this the first time, between unravelling and being re-woven.
In the winter of 2022, I lay by the fire in a rammed earth cabin deep in the heart of an ancient forest with my head in my love’s lap. Up until this point, I had still not been able to read, but this particular evening we were deep enough into our connection and into the love that was there between us that I felt safe enough to try again. I opened a book, one filled to the brim with esoteric wisdom the likes of which I am attempting to sketch tonight. I had only been able to read a couple sentences or maybe a paragraph at a time of this book for the previous year. As I lay there with him slowly stroking my hair absentmindedly while he also read in the deepening dusk, my nervous system began to entwine itself around his. Solid, true, unyielding. I saw his nervous system like an ancient Karri tree, and mine like a newly sprouted vine. As the hours wound slowly by, I turned page after page, chapter after chapter, I started to weep with relief. It had been three years with no words, while Love had held me in the River and washed away all my intellectual conditioning, to crack my consciousness open to more expansive mysteries that I would have utterly rejected had I not experienced them directly.
“Why are you crying love?” He pulled me tenderly into his arms.
I sank into his embrace, face against his sold chest, I opened my mouth and the mysteries of the Pleiades came forward. Starry. Stunning. Ethereal. Mixed together with my own heartache and healing and together we wove deep into the evening a Brand New Story.