It Begins with a Call - Part 9

I had a session with my friend, a medium who channels.  We hadn’t done this in a long time.  What emerged was that I was the same age when my health problems began six years or so ago that my grandmother was when all her trials (death of her husband and oldest son and the ensuing shock therapy that followed) happened.  Interesting.  The theory is that I took on some of her fear.  Not that I don’t have plenty of my own, but not all of what I carry is mine.

Something moved me to go back to the Psyche story.  My version. 

Another Psyche Story

Here is what I know:

Persephone’s path is

a downward spiral into

the core of my heart.

She took me in hand

when I was just a child,

led me to the darkest remote

chamber contained therein

where I interred the box

of grief and shame I bore,

the one bestowed on me

by a loving mother

who wished only for me to thrive,

who constructed the cask

with hands of humiliation.

All these years

Persephone has kept it for me,

tended it, aware that

I would need to claim it one day,

that one day I would recognize it

as treasure and be astonished

by its beauty.

What I know:

The underworld is in

the core of my heart.

I must believe

that what led me in

will also guide me out,

that love and a certain tender kindness

will revive me when

I open that box.

 Suddenly, I was struck with insight about my last SoulCollage® card (the one with a tower on it).  

As is often the case with making cards, I had no conscious understanding of why that tower had to be in the background.  Aha!  Psyche’s last task, to go down to the underworld and retrieve the box of beauty from Persephone, involved her ascending a tower; she had decided to throw herself off in order to die and so to get to the underworld.  But the tower gave her instructions that helped her descend without dying.  

So, I had a little conversation with the tower in my card.  One of the ensuing revelations was that my fear began even earlier than the incidents with my grandmother; it started in utero.  My mother had had several miscarriages and one infant death from hyaline membrane disease before I came along.  She must have been terrified throughout my pregnancy, and her fear ran through the umbilical cord along with blood and nourishment.  I was grown on fear.

Everyone insightful that I have consulted, including the gastroenterologist, has told me not to worry about the enlarged pancreatic bile duct; no one is seeing red flags.  I, however, am in constant fear.

I thought to look up the symbolic significance of the pancreas.  Get this (from the website humanityhealing.net):  “The pancreas is the main organic structure that processes the emotion of fear because its function is to maintain the stability of the organism and any threat at the emotional or physical level can cause a structural imbalance to the entire system.”  This is all starting to make a certain amount of sense – my blood sugar issues, this duct problem, my fear….  Truly, I do feel I could be getting to the crux, the hub, the core. 

My dangerous, beautiful assignment.  Beauty?  That’s what was supposedly in the box for Psyche, right? Right now my assignment seems to be waiting, sitting with the unpleasant sensations in my body, and attending to the fear.  Dangerous, I get.  Beauty, not so much.

The other curious aspect of that tower card is the fire being, hand on heart like the figure I associate with myself.  Another mystery.  But the subsequent card I made also has a fire spirit on it.  I made it in a session focused on shadows and light.  I had had a dream in which my man chose me over another woman.  This woman wore a horned headdress and was young and beautiful.  She looked down on us from the roof of a tall building.  She looked powerful and clearly did not mean me well.  I found an eerie picture of a horned woman and one of a woman with an owl on her shoulder, looking concerned – the chosen one.  But behind the horned woman was a third figure, a powerful fire spirit, with flames emerging from her outstretched hands.

So, somehow I am back - or still - in the realm of fire.  It is quite mysterious to me why these figures came to be on my cards.  But they are protective, strong, empowering.  What exactly they mean or bode for me I do not know.