Being Consumed

Enjoy this 9-minute read and/or let me read it to you via the recording at the beginning of this post!

Several years ago, I was living in an intentional spiritual community. I was blessed with the opportunity to develop workshops and classes on the unconventional topics that inspired me. Over time, however, the leadership team began encouraging me to incorporate more of the guru’s teachings, which did not fully resonate with me. I shared my struggle with the spiritual director one afternoon as we were walking along a warm sunlit path flanked by fragrant trees. I will never forget what he said when he turned to me: “Nancy. Everything would be so much easier if you would just surrender.”

On that beautiful summer day, a chill went through my heart – a chill that turned to fiery anger several months later in a weeklong women’s shadow workshop with Robert Augustus Masters. “Just surrender,” he goaded me mockingly in full roleplay. “Surrender!” All the ferocity of my wildness erupted from my throat and from my body in defense of the inner knowing, the intuition, that I had been tempted to forget all those long months trying my very best, and ultimately failing, to be a good devotee.

What I have learned from my experiences and the transformational teachings of Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Francis Weller, is that sometimes in the course of our daily lives we are confronted with some person, some situation, some belief within ourselves that threatens what we hold dear. And in the moment we face this Predator, we either fight, we negotiate, we surrender, or we give away a part of ourselves without even noticing. Much of the healing work I have done has been a way for me to recognize the Predator more clearly, see what is being threatened, and do whatever I can to protect it.

As my stay in the spiritual community was coming to a close, I felt such torturous waves of grief that I would find myself on all fours gagging, as though something poisonous was stuck in my throat and I was trying to expel it. For nearly one and a half years, anytime I let too much of my grief or fear surface, that same sense of nausea would arise. The desperation to be rid of it sent me into dry heaves and spasms, but instead of being freed, I felt as though I were being torn apart from the inside out.

One night, I remembered what Francis Weller had said about the need to have a container for grief – to be sure there is a top, bottom, and sides – so we do not become overwhelmed by the enormity of it. I realized that by facing the full force of the Predator, as I understood Robert Masters to be encouraging me to do, I was at its mercy. What was needed was for me to take a stand. I recall a visceral sensation of gathering myself up, pulling myself inward, creating a hardening between myself and this sensation, and I felt it sink away underneath me. I have had many full-bodied donkey cries since that day, but the tearing spasms have never returned. I had banished the Predator. And now I walk, even in my moments of fear and uncertainty, with a greater sense of dignity and agency.

Then last month, I hosted a Hearth Gathering on the Predator and shared what I had learned from the various myths about darkness so participants could decide for themselves what story to tell. Is the Predator a legitimate external force, an aspect of our own psyches to integrate, the archetype of death that makes us fight for our lives, as I had, or something else? It was a lively discussion, which continued in the Facebook group after the session. One participant who was particularly drawn to encountering the Predator in her own life told me in confidence that she spent the whole live session wanting to jump out of her skin. I was missing a huge potential benefit of encountering the Predator: being consumed.

I immediately thought back to the lecture series I attended with Francis Weller last year and how I had raised my determined, trembling hand with exactly the same question. He called on me reluctantly, knowing after the past few weeks that he was going to have a field another doozy. “I have been on shamanic journeys where I am consumed by a giant snake,” I said. “If the Predator always inspires a fight for our lives, what about the teachings that speak of surrender as a process of transformation, even initiation?” I wasn’t satisfied with his answer because I don’t remember what he said.

And now, like the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, I was right back at the beginning – a snake swallowing my own tail. When confronted with the Predator, are we supposed to surrender or set a boundary? Are we supposed to assert what we love and know to be true in ourselves and our world or are we to allow ourselves to be dismantled, disintegrated, digested? When faced with questions like these, which can set my mind spinning for lifetimes with fascinating theories that have no relevance to my life, I did what I am learning to do. I looked to nature, to the patterns and cycles of living things.

What I found is that aside from animals that consume parts of themselves as a process of transforming from one stage to another, snakes are the only things have that literally died in the process of swallowing themselves. Perhaps that is why the Ouroboros has come to symbolize the entirety of nature. And because in nature, there’s a huge amount of eating. Everything eats and is eaten by other things, and the bigger you are, the more you’ve eaten and the more you must eat to stay alive. Some things eat members of their own species, or even their own young, which lands on our human psyche as the worst sort of moral abomination. Into my imagination came the idea of a fish whose only source of nourishment was its own eggs. It could theoretically get enough nutrients from its own eggs to make more eggs. But this struck me as absurd, as an utterly pointless feedback loop.

In a harmonious world, doesn’t everything exist to participate, to be in relationship with everything else? Don’t I eat leaves and roots and chickens so that I can ponder these ideas and share them with you? Many, many things must die so that more complex forms of life can live. There is far more death in this world than there is life. And death and sex are said to be the two most intimate experiences two separate beings can share with another.

So, when we encounter the Predator, and it is pacing and breathing on our neck, perhaps its not just an invitation to fight. Perhaps the Predator is genuinely hungry for something contained within us. And what if that thing, or even our entire being, is something that no longer serves us or the world? Would you offer yourself as food? What would it take to allow yourself to be transformed into something new, just as you yourself have done so, so many times with the things we have eaten?

No one but you can decide, in the deepest crevices of your knowing, what to do when those claws and fangs appear. But I invite you to ask the Predator what it wants. And then I invite you to reflect on how sacred that thing is to you. It may be a confrontation to defend what must live on. Or it may be an opportunity to surrender what is no longer needed and by so doing, become part of something infinitely grander.

Nancy