The Bear and the Tortoise
Hello again. You thought I was out, didn’t you? It’s been a long time since I’ve been to my blog site – and so in effect I was ‘out’. Or rather I was ‘In’!
Have you heard the saying ‘Life Happens’? I use it a lot. It is when somehow, despite your best efforts, using all the tricks of our trade, visualisations and happy, positive thoughts, your goals don’t seem to come to pass!
I’ve just been through a few weeks during which ‘life happened’ where it wasn’t always possible for me to see the good in all happenings. This is hard going when, not only is it what I teach, but it is what I live, on a daily basis too. I tried various ways to turn my thoughts this way and that, but they kept on slipping back into ‘nothing much’ – and this is how I went about my days: thinking and doing, nothing much.
But I have at last found a way. I decided to consider the past weeks a bit like an emotional ‘hibernation’. I always think of bears and tortoises going into hibernation in winter. They eat themselves silly at the end of summer and in autumn (I’ve already started that!) and then they find somewhere nice ‘n’ dry to roll up into a ball and sleep until spring. The tortoise, of course, withdraws entirely into his own shell. (It seemed as if I was doing this.) It seems to me that, possibly, bears and tortoises are the most sensible creatures on the planet!
The Bear in the Medicine Card pack is about introspection. “Bear…. Invite me into the cave where silence surrounds, the answers you gave.” The ancient Egyptians and the American Indians would go through something similar to hibernation, called Initiation. It is a process where they rake up the past, sorting through the jetsam and flotsam of their life, looking for the sparkling gems and pearls, of wisdom that are lying waiting to be collected. These gems and beautiful pearls which come from the irritations of life, are in us all. And in the same way that winter eats through the excessive body fat of the bear, we too are able to get rid of our unwanted emotional baggage that we have hauled around for years. When spring comes, we have our beautiful treasured gems and pearls, parts of our soul that got separated from us over the years.
You can turn your ‘down times’ into a treasure hunt, if you follow the lead of the bear and the tortoise.
(PS Oh, I’d like to mention, that there is no race. We each get there in our own unique way, in our own time.)
