At the Solstice, Seal Woman reminds us that there are thresholds and there are yearnings deeper than habit, older than memory. Sometimes all it takes is a drop of seal oil to awaken us to a Great Life.
Liam Ó Maonlaí
With good reason, some of us settle for a little life. Never do we cross a channel at ebbtide. Never do we run the risk of being cut off from an acquired but fixed sense of who we are. Never coming up out of our culture, do we drop our conditioning, all of it, leaving it behind us on the rocks.
John Moriarty — Slí na Fírinne
Today is also the mighty summer solstice — let nature bring its boundless light to fill you up and warm any parts left in the cold.
Donna Ashworth
In Celtic folklore, the Summer Solstice — just like the other three related celestial markers; autumn equinox, winter solstice, and vernal equinox — is portrayed as a threshold moment.
On Midsummer’s Eve, when daylight lingers well past 10pm and the world seems suspended between the boundless sea and the endless dappled sky, the selkies — the seal people — are said to come ashore. Shedding their sealskins, they dance and sway in human form in the twilight beneath the stars.
One of the most enigmatic of these North Atlantic tales is that of the „Seal Woman“ — a story John Moriarty loved to tell and write about. It is one of my favourites among the hauntingly beautiful stories related to me in childhood.
At dusk, a local fisherman stumbles upon a group of selkies coming ashore on the stretch of sandy beach near his isolated cottage. Incredulous of his apparent good luck, he spots a nymph whose beauty overwhelms him. Being a rather guile lad, he purloins her sealskin so he can lay claim upon her for his own happiness, to enliven and invigorate his rather dreary existence.
Thus prevented from returning to the sea, and seeing no other options, she becomes his wife. In time she forgets the ocean depths from which she came. Days, months, and eventually, years pass.
Then one day, while baking bread, a drop of seal oil falls onto the kitchen table. Licking the surface clean with her long lithe tongue, the taste awakens something in her and, in an instant, memory of her life in the great ocean returns.
Suddenly remembering who she is, she follows her intuition, climbs to the loft, retrieves her hidden sealskin from under the thatch, descends into the garden, and puts it on. She then leaves everything as it is, and returns to the ocean that has never ceased calling her home.
With respect to this story, John Moriarty commented: „With good reason, some of us settle for a little life. Never do we cross a channel at ebbtide. Never do we run the risk of being cut off from an acquired but fixed sense of who we are. Never coming up out of our culture, do we drop our conditioning, all of it, leaving it behind us on the rocks.“
Indeed! In the wonderfully powerful interactions at our Men’s Emotional Sobriety Retreat last week, we encountered this theme — again and again.
With good reason. The „little life“ originates in a web of fear-based patterns of thinking, feeling, and action. These are the patterns many of us adopted in order to deal with — and indeed survive — the adversity of our childhood years.
Whether the „Pleaser“, who learns, upon entering a room, to read — in milliseconds — what each of the others wishes to see or hear, or the „Victim“, who learns to attract at least a few crumbs of attention in the belief that crumbs are better than no attention at all, or the „Controller“, who believes that only two options are available, — either to be in control or out of control — each of these Saboteurs, as with all the Saboteurs, become so ingrained in our coping strategy that, while acting them out each hour of every day, we are totally unaware of their hold on our lives.
Other Saboteurs identified in the PQ (Positive Intelligence) Mental Fitness Programme include the „Judge“ (Über-Saboteur, which we all have in common), „Avoider“, „Hyper-Achiever“, „Hyper-Rational“, „Hyper-Vigilant“, „Restless“, and „Stickler“.
These Saboteurs are outgrowths of very useful human attributes (for example, discernment/Judge, exactitude/Stickler, caring/Pleaser, self-awareness/Victim, etc.) but, since they are propelled by fear, they have become runaway trains which prevent us from crossing the channel at ebbtide, to return to who we really are, to the „True Self“.
It is usually only when the frustration and desperation of living the „False Self“ become sufficiently discomforting or even unbearable that we surrender to the necessity of embarking on our Inner Work. Like the selkie woman baking in her kitchen, it is often a seemingly harmless event, a dream, a kind smile, or an old familiar fragrance, that sets the ball rolling.
We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean.
This encounter with the „wildness without“ is conducive to our opening up to the „wildness within“, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society.
It may take two or three days by the river, in a new daily routine, for the heart to begin to open to the possibilities of the life we seem to have lost along the way, the destiny of the True Self.
By means of communal morning meditation, soul food before breakfast, sessions of sharing where we exchanged snapshots of our inner reality, chair work drawn from the school of Gestalt Therapy, cooking and eating together, hiking and swimming, laughing and weeping, by these means we create a sanctuary in which it becomes safe to drop the armour and dare to don the seal skin which had become mislaid so many years ago.
Why is it that we so seldom run the risk of being cut off from an acquired but fixed sense of who we are?
Never coming up out of our culture, do we drop our conditioning. Why is it seemingly so difficult to drop it?
The first obstacle is a total lack of awareness of this conditioning. Like the two fish asked by the third swimming by: „How is the water?“, we ask incredulously: „Water?“.
Secondly, the conditioning is far more than a mental phenomenon. It is a stance anchored in every muscle and cell or our bodies. „The issue is in the tissue“, as the saying goes. Until we begin to engage with ourselves in the somatic domain — through any of the array of body-work modalities now available to us — nothing much will change.
Finally, the commencement of the Inner Work — the work with the Inner Child — is tantamount to admitting that all was not fair in love and war in the original childhood experience. Denial often holds us back for many a solar cycle. When it finally crumbles, the path ahead inevitably leads to a renewed encounter with the pain of the original setting.
For very understandable reasons, nobody likes to voluntarily experience pain. Experience shows, however, that the transcending of pain is possible only by moving through it. The way out of hell leads through hell, so to say.
This is where many people shrink back, deciding it is better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Nothing changes if nothing changes, however. The loop of stuckness — with all the attributes of distraction, numbing, and zoning out — reemerges once again as the default mode. That is, until the pressure of frustration or despondency increases sufficiently to awaken us once again from our torpor.
That is when miracles can happen. As Marianne Williamson reminds us: „A miracle is a shift from fear to love“. We learn to shift from the energy of the Saboteurs to that of our Sage Powers, namely: Compassion (Empathy), Explore, Navigate, Innovate, and Activate.
Once even a modicum of Mental Fitness has been attained, any time we find the Saboteurs coming over the horizon to hijack us, we can intercept them in real time, regulate ourselves using very basic body-based exercises (the Mind Command muscle) and shift to Sage. In Sage, we then apply one or more of the Sage Powers to generate a conscious response to whatever stimulus got the Saboteurs moving in the first place.
The cultivation of the Sage Powers happens within the „Sage Perspective“ which states that: Every situation encompasses gifts and opportunities.
The simplicity and practicality of the PQ modality are what make it so powerful. We need train only three muscles: The „Saboteur Interceptor“, the „Mind Command“, and the „Sage Enhancer“ muscles.
Cognizant of the fact that any transformation process, to be successful, is made up roughly of 20% insights, and 80% practice, we practice in brief (2 minute) sessions at intervals throughout the day, every day. Like physical fitness, Mental Fitness becomes a way of life, an integral part of our daily routine. If we let up in our practice, we will fall back. With daily practice, a major shift occurs. The quality of living vastly improves. This is because we are now responding to life rather than reacting.
It is only when the mind is quietened that we can discover the gap between stimulus and response. As we grow and maintain our new-found clarity and congruence between values and actions, as we learn to lead the dance with each of our wayward, stubborn Saboteurs, we become increasingly „response-able“ adults.
Another key element in this evolution is „re-parenting“, or „repair-enting,“ as my brother Chris coined it. We now take responsibility for providing the child within with all the elements vital for growth and thriving, which were withheld or in short supply first time round.
This shift became very evident during our chair work.
Oftentimes the adult man sat across from his seven-(could be any age)-year old self and engaged in conscious dialogue for the very first time. This is often a place of great healing, sometimes also a place of great pain. The pain needs to be grieved. The circle of participants provides the safe space for the healing and grieving, the wonderment, excitement, and laughter.
At the end of this remarkable week, we are all a little closer to donning our newfound sealskins and returning to the endless ocean of the True Self.
