Welcome to Monday Mycelium, where I offer a mycelial thread of thought for you to connect to, comment on, offer your own thoughts and create conversation together.
I love the comments and conversations had here, and I love trying to create a space where we can connect around a theme, BUT, you don’t have to comment if you don’t wish to, you can also just witness, listen, read or ignore, whatever wis right for you.
Mycelial Thread -
I want to take the threads from Sundays connection letter into this Mondays post and explore together that of our animal bodies and psyche.
Our animal body and psyche, or, our wild, is for me, our instinct, our feelings, our physical body, our sensory perception, our sensuousness, our belonging with the earth.
All of which, are often the parts of ourselves we learn to suppress, tame, control, change or hide.
Yet if we look at all of these aspects of self, they are precious tools that help guide us, keep us safe and facilitate full our participation in the world.
Many of us also learn within our culture, that we as humans are some other more superior mental matter than our wild community, some sort of unearthly being created from angelic materials, and many people can be rather insulted at the idea of being animal, or being wild, for they see that as less than.
I recently watched the new series of ‘Watership Down’ with my boy, in it one of the rabbits said to another rabbit who was acting like a bully, something like- You have lost your animality, and become like humans, animals would never treat the earth this way, or be cruel to each other in this way, this is the way of the modern human, it does not serve us or nature to lose our animality”
How do you understand your animality? Is it something you hide, find it hard to connect with? Have you learnt to tame yourself, make civilised and more pleasing these aspects of you so natural and innate. What is your relationship to the body? To your senses? Do you listen to your intuition, are you able to follow its way? Are you scared to go inwards? Scared of your body, your sensuousness and your the feelings you will find there?
In the last few years I've been in an initiatory process full of complexity. However, it's also a stripping back of things which don't serve me, which is scary as it is so much. So, in some respects, it's simplifying my life. The things that are going are the masking of my feelings, the conforming to the norm, the ignoring my needs and they are slowly (through a difficult dance) being replaced with listening to my intuition, following my own way, leaning in to whether something is a 'yes' or 'no'. My life is getting richer for it but it's lonely process.
I really resonate with what you've shared here Brigit, I'd love to share my thoughts on the resistance of really feeling the discomfort that can arise when we commit to being in the body in the form of an excerpt of the memoir I finished writing last year...
"I have also been thinking about both pain and shame in a wider sense: considering not only the pain we humans sustain throughout a lifetime, but also the many ways we contract to evade the sensations of it. We shrink and contort thinking that ought to solve the problem. Only our pain is not a problem to be solved. It is an invitation to meet ourselves at some primal level, an opportunity for liberation in the truest sense of the word. I’ve heard it said many times that pain is a trick of the mind, but I am coming to know my body as the living, breathing map of my experience. Some scars are visible on the surface of my skin. Others are locked beneath knotted muscle; memories that my mind has left behind, perhaps even willingly buried. Maybe I’ll be able to tease these ones out if I can tend to my body with gentle hands and a loving heart: kneading, listening, waiting."