When We Dare to Read the Symbols, Not Just the Words
Jen Murphy & a Story About Weaving the Wisdom Across Traditions
He drew a shape on the white board that looked like this:
I must have had a funny look on my face, because the whole class turned to me and asked, “Marisa, what do you see?”
On Sunday, I was sitting in the circle at the Sacred Center Mystery School, the place where I have been learning energy healing (and so much more) for the last fifteen years.
Our advanced class is a tight knit group of spiritual siblings, led by the Sacred Center founder Eleanora Amendolara. Though my spiritual source is in Ireland, my mystical training is all rooted in what I’ve learned from Eleanora. I’ve co-authored two of her books about her pioneering approach to energy healing, Chumpi Illumination.
We land together once each season and step into a shared field that is profoundly spiritual and deeply practical–addressing physical issues as well as the legacy of personal, familial, and collective trauma. (And oh, how we laugh together in the midst of it all.)
At the Sacred Center, we learn by doing.
Each member of the class takes a turn in the nest of pillows and blankets, often covered by a blanket handwoven by the Q’ero people of Peru. Peruvian wisdom is at the core of Eleanora’s work. The Chumpi stones themselves were originally found in ancient sites around Cusco and the Sacred Valley.
A healing involves lying in a form created by the Chumpi stones. This is sacred geometry in action. The Sacred Center is full of drums and rattles, bells and gongs. Each healing involves the profound shamanic practices of deep visioning facilitated by the transcendent power of sound.
When it’s complete, we share what we’ve seen. So often the images overlap and blend together. It feels like the collective mystical mind in action.
And this time, when my friend and classmate Matteo drew what he saw on the white board we use to track the Chumpi forms we use in each healing, he replicated the exact image I had been working on for weeks in my mythic work.
The day before, I had sat in circle with a vibrant group of witches and wise women. I had been invited to share a Samhain story at Moss and Moonlight Sancutary in Hopewell Junction, NY, and I told them a version of the Mongfind tale, the Irish sovereignty goddess, turned queen, turned witch.
At the very beginning of the KnotWork Storytelling adventure, I told the story of Mongfind. Over the last couple of years, I have learned so much about shaping the mythic vision, particularly from two of my three-time guests, Laura Murphy and Jen Murphy (no relation!). I realized it was time to imagine myself even more deeply into the story of Mongfind.
And so, greatly inspired by Laura’s recent KnotWork story, Danu: Rise of the Mother, I set out to craft the story of Mongfind’s birth.
As you’ll hear next week, I picture Mongfind emerging from a great womb cave between the Paps of Anu, the twin mountains that look like great breasts, and that are associated with the Mother Goddess of Ireland, Danu.
And suddenly, in the shared healing space of the Sacred Center Mystery School, which is rooted in the energy of the apus, the sacred mountains of the Andes rather than the sacred mountains of County Kerry, here was a drawing of exactly what I had been envisioning.
(Though wow… even as we seek the magic held by symbols, it’s pretty magical the way those words feel the same in the mouth those words - paps, Anu, apu, Chumpi.)
The space of the symbolic realm and the field of the collective unconscious: an endless well of synchronicity and items for the “you can’t make this shit up” files.
And, for a wordy woman like me, an amazing space of freedom and possibility that takes us beyond the gorgeous confines of written and spoken language.
The Power of Symbol and the Weaving of Wisdom Traditions
There’s so much to say in response to Jen Murphy’s latest KnotWork Story, Fite Fuaite: Interwoven, Weaving the Bones, it seems a little strange to introduce this story, speaking of my own weekend of magical circles.
But it’s also the perfect way to introduce a story and a conversation that are all about the way the disparate seeming threads of wisdom create one great sacred cloak.
When you listen to the episode, you’ll soon realize it’s another that cannot be absorbed with your “NPR ears.” And by that I mean that it’s more transmission and prose poetry than it is straightforward narrative.
You need to call on the full intelligence of your being, not just your linguistic intelligence.
Every time I listen back, I hear something new. And, in a story that uses the bones of the Cailleach lore (Ireland’s holy hag) as its structure and then weaves in well over a dozen other facets of the divine feminine.
Here’s how Jen recommends you listen to Fite Fuaite:
To really absorb and let the story move through the body, listen to the story and respond through image. Take out a pen and let the hand do what it wants. Draw the image, and then keep working with it. Tend to it. Keep adding to it or making it in other forms, or watching for it to come back to you in your daily life.
Also in the conversation that follows, we talk about what it means to balance scholarship with intuition, and how can contribute to the “cultural dreamtime” without sliding into cultural appropriation.
A deep and profound story telling yet again!