This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a small group workshop run by a shaman. Yep. I lost half of you right there. No matter. The other half are leaning forward and curious. Hey, friends. :-)
The participants had been invited to bring a “relationship partner” (not a person, but an issue that they wanted to work on). I "brought" my habitual impulse to try to control the unfolding of events in certain areas of my life – the corollary of which is my lack of trust in the Universe. At some level, I had recently worked out that this was a key issue (if not the primary one) that feeds my sleepwalking, and it seemed like a good choice.
In an exercise early in the day, we drew random picture cards from a deck, and had to write about our “partner” issue in a “once upon a time” narrative style, using the imagery from the card. My card showed the sun, and I wrote the tale of a man who, everywhere he went, was blinded by the sun, and spent his time fearful of injury from running into obstacles.
We then took turns telling our stories to the group, and working through a process of acting them out, with various attendees being drafted by the facilitator to assist. As I was walked through my own story, a bright light was shone from the far side of the room, and as I tried to walk toward it, I was repeatedly pushed into obstacles (people!) by the facilitator. I was getting nowhere. Finally, she stopped me and asked-
“So, what is the Gift of being blind? What’s absolutely perfect about this?”
What a ridiculous question.
So ridiculous, that I was surprised to find my eyes filled with tears as I blurted out, “I go slow. The gift is that I go slow.”
And that was it. Without rehashing the entire 12-hour odyssey of the workshop, it all came down to that. My “issue” was, in fact, pushing me toward a simple realization, that I needed to simply embrace. I go slow.
In short order, a number of other “dots” from my learnings in the last few years self-connected, and I was left with a clear sense of the things I needed to start doing differently. It’s going to be a lot of work. I have caught and redirected my thinking in this new way a dozen times today, already.
Not surprisingly, I’m sleeping better.
I explained this to a friend, who, knowing me rather well, just chuckled and emailed me a picture of a turtle. Yesterday, I made it my desktop wallpaper at work. A poem from a favourite novel ran through my mind all day:
"See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn't aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me."
And suddenly, this morning, a realization surfaced that had somehow escaped detection to this point.
The imagery of the turtle, and quite explicitly the concept of the turtle as a kind of spiritual “guide”, has come up at a number of key points in the course of the last decade. It’s been a clear enough pattern that today, when it finally struck me, I smacked my forehead in wonder and laughed at how stealthily the archtype had cornered me, yet again. This time, however, I’m actually hearing the message.
I’ve been pursued by turtles for years. Finally, I’ve seen the wisdom of allowing them to catch me.
