Whale

Dive into this lyrical exploration of reclaiming one’s voice and finding ‘Whale medicine’ amidst the depths of burnout and transition, reminding us how to navigate the darkest waters with grace and endurance.

Read this 7-minute piece or let me read it to you here. 

I’m sitting in a circle with eight women, ringing an octagonal building with vaulted ceiling, watching the dim lights reflecting off folds of fabric, strands of hair, chins and cheeks, some streaked with tears. We’ve been drawn together to reclaim our voices, but all for different reasons. Some need permission to speak. Some left church choirs because the lyrics burned their throats, and some were told not to sing at all. Two carry the grief of infertility. All of us want to know our deeper truth and show it to the world.

“As I sang more this week,” one woman shared, “I’ve noticed an opening in my uterus.”

“There’s a strong connection between the belly and the throat,” our leader affirmed. “That’s why during labor, you’re encouraged to shout. Opening one channel, opens the other.”

Healers for years have noticed the block in my throat, called it my weakest energy center. That’s why when the Guardians first took their places along my spine, I thought Whale lived in my throat. She has the expansiveness I need, and she certainly knows how to sing, but I’ve always felt her deeper down, her fluid weight anchoring my belly.

I’ve always had an affinity for dolphins, plastering the walls of my room with aquatic centerfolds from National Geographic. A documentary about their deaths in tuna nets launched my first activism as a pre-teen, which led to my first experience of deep helplessness and despair over how cruel and blind we can be to the sentience of other beings. I wore a silver whale tail on a chain around my neck for years, symbolizing water to balance my earth; water, which has been both a place of near-death from drownings and of liberation from bodyboarding waves.

My personal relationship with Whale paralleled the COVID pandemic. I was deep in the practice of nature-based visualizations, and was one day pulled into vivid, visceral encounter with a humpback. Her great eye appeared to me out of the dark water and I was flooded by the suffering and heartache of her and her kin –  intimately connected across the vast oceans – starving in the warming seas.

After that, she began trailing my evening walks, her vast body swimming serenely above, filling the width of the street, as the other Guardians trotted daintily alongside me. When I began training in psychopomp, Whale was the one who appeared to carry me to the suffering souls stuck between worlds and lead them to safety. I felt utterly safe, perched cross-legged on her back, as we visited the darkest, seediest corners of the city.

Over the past few years, it’s been the earth and fire of other Guardians that I’ve needed most. But recently, I’ve noticed the teachers entering my life are all large women. The somatic work I’ve done has opened a spaciousness down to my pelvic floor and I’ve started putting on weight – a common phenomenon for peri-menopausal women across the world as the body induces weight-bearing exercise to protect aging bones from osteoporosis. I feel myself pulled into a phase of greater intellectual challenge and responsibility, which craves the balance of murky, mysterious realms beyond conscious language and rational thought.

Bill Plotkin in his map of the Wild Mind places Soul in the west. It’s the birthplace of the most inspired art and ideas, of dreams and eroticism, of adolescent broodings and longings. It’s vast, deep, watery, untamed. Undeveloped, it leads to melancholy and depression. Opposite – in the east – lies the sharper, transcendent crackle of Spirit, whose shadow tendency is delusion and addiction.

As I feel myself both inspired and overwhelmed by possibilities, I notice a familiar tendency toward unbridled fantasy and over-planning, a familiar rapid dash towards the burnout that leaves me desperate to abandon my visions. I’m stretched beyond my capacity to tolerate one more experience, conversation, or idea, and I withdraw.

Whale is my medicine. She rises up from the depths below my aching, constricted, straining mind, and suddenly I’m weightless. I’m floating supported by a vast sea. And I see all the people, projects, and ideas crowding my life also suspended, effortlessly cocooned by this same substance. My body melts in deep release and the fatigue my adrenalized system has masked floods in, preparing me for rest.

Whale teaches me that everything – me, you, and all creation – is held by the same substance. She shows me how to feel and trust the truth of that in my body and let go into the tides, the heat and chill of the waters that move us beyond our control. When I feel her weight moving through the sea, I know what it takes to move something massive – with a patient, firm, and steady touch. When she rises to the surface, I know what it means to release it all in an explosive exhale and then how to inhale deep into my core, conserving my oxygen and energy for the long dive under. She shows me the value of a body that is vast, buoyant, and insulated; a body built for the uncertainty of cold, dark places one must navigate for sustenance, for waiting out storms. And when she feels most lost and alone, she sings her heart out – trusting her voice as both connection and navigation, as I know I also must.

Whale is ready whenever I call her to remind and instruct me – not with words or visions, but with an embodied sense of grace and temperance, of fluid surrender, of the measured endurance that outlasts raging storms and glittering shoals. She shows me that a song or a speech is not a pretty thing – it is a thing fierce and necessary for survival. And for me to give it life, for it to come to our aid, I must plunge deep into the truth beyond my understanding.

May you make space in your belly to encounter what ferries your dreams and longings from dark and mysterious waters. May it teach you to move with grace through the shadow and weight of the world on a single breath. And may it infuse your voice with the gravity and certainty that there is wonder here in the dark, and we will find our way.

Nancy