Tag: scorpions

by Kathleen Calder

This is the second entry in the Life As An Initiate At SoulFullHeart Sanctuary Blog Series. Go here to read the first one.

 

The day of my arrival, I stepped off the bus in Tomatlán, greeted by the warm embraces of Raphael and Sequoia. Raphael was the first to offer me a hug of welcome. Instinctually I placed my third eye chakra directly onto his heart chakra, and sobbed many tired, worn-out, and backed-up tears as I and parts of me let in that we had finally arrived home and that the process we had been holding around the life we were collapsing in order to return to our sanctuary, was complete at last. The drive home to the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary itself felt long and short at the same time as I held relief, heartbreak, and excitement in every breath.

It is no small thing to let go of a life you have created. In SoulFullHeart we talk about parts of us engaging in and helping to create and hold different chapters of our lives. I have had many chapters in and out of SoulFullHeart in the last four years, some of which I have digested on this blog. This time was very different as I deliberately invested so much more of myself than I ever had before. I believe this ¨going in¨ experience is actually what eventually led me out of this last chapter and back into SoulFullHeart…which I never really left, it feels like. This return feels so palpably different for me too, as this time around I truly feel I am looking for deeper transformation and deeper answers. My ¨seeking journey¨ is officially over and I feel like retiring from it. I have found my vocation and what I really need to keep healing and returning more and more to myself and who I was born to be. It does feel like I am meant to help others eventually as well.

The morning after my arrival, I woke up feeling a happiness in my heart, though still feeling waves of mourning looming in the background. Jelayan checked in with me during breakfast, asking me if I felt ready to start working in the gardens with her again or if I needed some time. I felt like parts of me were eager to get back to work, as it were, and dive back into life here, probably to help ease the transition a bit more. So, after breakfast we readied our buckets with harvesting and planting tools and changed into our work clothes.

Jelayan offered that I could wear a pair of her shoes that were still in pretty good shape while the pair I was intending to work in were falling apart (I didn’t have all of my footwear or my things, since it would all be coming back with a couple also living on our sanctuary when they returned from Puerto Vallarta in their truck later that week). I put the shoes on my feet and we started off down the path away from the house.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp stinging in my middle toe on my left foot and, as I paused to respond to the pain, Jelayan and I spotted a big scorpion scurrying away. Evidently he had been hiding in the toe of the shoe I was wearing on that foot…and I had neglected to even think to check them before putting them on! We were only steps from the house (thank god), so we both calmly made our way to the kitchen to prepare the natural remedies we have learned to deal with in responding to such incidents. Jelayan herself had been stung last year, so she remembered what worked for her and different ways to stay calm. I was so surprised to feel myself as calm as I was.

Jelayan chopped up about six cloves of garlic and put them all in a bowl with some honey and gave me some hibiscus water, very heavy on lime juice, to drink while I swallowed the chopped garlic. The honey wasn’t so much for a medicinal purpose as for the purpose of helping me get the garlic down, though I’m sure its medicinal properties as an antibiotic helped me out too. Then she placed some lime and a slightly chopped clove of garlic on the area where the scorpion stung me. The pain ebbed and flowed during this first hour as I took in the medicine and also Jelayan’s healing touch on my now traumatized foot. Her presence alone helped to keep me calm, and we both feel that the most critical thing you can do is keep calm in a circumstance like this one.

Eventually she helped me to my room where I put a woolly sock on my foot and obviously was now resigned to stay in bed for the day.

The worst symptom I had was the throbbing pain in my toe that overwhelmed my entire foot at times in intense waves that had me clutching at my mattress and bed linens. It took about a week for my foot and leg to feel normal again and now, two and a half weeks later, my toe is finally starting to feel back to normal. Wow. What a process.

Digesting the experience SoulFullHeart style means looking at what ¨scorpion medicine¨ offered me through this incident, and all the different reasons why it happened. Yes, it was partly a careless move on my part to slip on a shoe without inspecting it first, so there was a wake-up call in that. Yet, the fact that it laid me up in bed for about three to four days since I couldn’t walk well enough to work, was an indication that something in me needed that time to just ¨be¨ after making such a big move. I needed that time to rest and digest what I had just dismantled in my life a bit more, and also, I feel like the movement of the toxins through my bloodstream may have helped me detox from some of the energies I took during the last nine months.

In Ted Andrews´ book, Animal Speak, he offers that the scorpion represents transformation and that it tells us that transformative changes can either be chaotic or calm. When I think back on this last chapter away from SoulFullHeart, but also on many of the major beginnings and endings in my life, I see a pattern of mostly chaos without a lot of surrender. It is possible that without the physical need to just be with myself for my first few days back here, I would have restarted my life here in a much less calm, maybe even chaotic way, in terms of my emotional body. It could be that the scorpion helped me find another layer of me – one that really can handle such intense circumstances and still hold it with as much grace as possible, addressing my physical and emotional needs instead of burying them, which really just tends to lead to more trouble, maybe even chaos, later.

There’s undoubtedly so much in life to be careful of, and so much that can cause us pain, and yet all of it seems to offer a message of transformation being possible if we can surrender to it in the right moment. It feels like surrendering to the circumstance while holding our parts and our spine is step one,  as demonstrated by the calm urgency Jelayan and I somehow embodied, and diving into our physical and emotional needs around the circumstance is step two. Each and every major event is another opportunity to go inside yourself and it is my sense that we draw these occurrences because of our need to do just that – go IN. Feel what’s at stake. Feel what it is you want and need.

I sincerely hope I don’t have to draw another scorpion sting, especially as this rounds up all of the intense things I have been through in this last life chapter, which I will share about eventually as they become relevant.

I appreciate you reading and taking this in! If you feel moved to contact me directly, based on this or any of my other blogs, my email is kathleen.m.calder@gmail.com.

Kathleen Calder is an initiate at the SoulFullHeart Sanctuary and you can read more of her writing here on this blog. Please visit SoulFullHeart Sanctuary for more information about staying with us and virtual sessions.