Tag: creativity

The Little Match Girl

EleanorLeave a comment
A sad little girl with black hair holding matches out in the snow

Journal Date: November 28, 2020

This morning, I was trying to keep reading. I didn’t know what else to do.

So I picked up Women who Run with the Wolves again, and opened it where I’d left off at Chapter 10.

This turned out to be a chapter that had more than one story in it.

So I finished the first part, with the story of “La Llorona,” and kept reading into the next one.

This one was called “The Little Match Girl.”

It was not what I expected it would be.

I’d heard of it, and even read it once before (as part of an assignment Mama Gena had included as part of our homework in GPS).

But this time, it shocked me. Because I saw that this story was about me.

It told of a poor little girl who lived alone in a dark forest. She had no mother and no father. She had no money or possessions, either, except for a few matches that she bought for half a penny and sold for one.

Winter came, and the cold weather, and she tried to go sell the matches in the nearby town. 

“She wandered the streets and begged strangers, would they please buy matches from her? But no one stopped and paid her any attention.”

One night, suffering from the cold, she decided to light her matches to warm herself, though she had no wood and no kindling.

Every time she lit a match, she found herself immersed in some fantasy, only to awaken again colder than ever.

She struck the third and final match, and in her fantasy her grandmother appeared, “so warm and so kind, and the child felt so happy to see her…” But then the grandmother began to fade, as the little match girl felt herself rise up into heaven.

The story ends sadly, with the little match girl found cold and dead between the houses the next morning.

It wasn’t this telling of the story that resonated with me so much as the commentary that followed.

Here is the first paragraph of interpretation after the story:

“This chid lives in an environ where people do not care. If you are in one of these, get out.”

Hm. Well, that was pretty direct. 

She continues: “This child is in a milieu where what she has, little fires on sticks–the beginnings of all creative possibilities–are not valued. If you are in this predicament, turn your back and walk away.”

Estes seems to feel pretty strongly about this. She goes on to say, “This child is in a psychic situation in which there are few options. She has resigned herself to her ‘place’ in life. If this has happened to you, unresign yourself and come out kicking ass.”

I feel that this has been where I have been most of my life. I had resigned myself to place for so long. I had come to believe that there was no other way for me.

“She cannot awaken to a life with a future because her wretched life is like a hook upon which she hangs daily. In initiations, spending a significant amount of time under difficult conditions is part of a dismemberment that severs one from ease and complacency. As an initiatory passage, it will come to a conclusion, and the newly ‘sanded down’ woman will commence a refreshed and enwisened spiritual and creative life. 

However, women in the Match Girl condition could be said to be involved in an initiation that has gone awry. The hostile conditions do not serve to deepen, only to decimate. Another venue, another environ, with different supports and guides, must be chosen.”

I think this is why I have been so focused on wanting to move to Mexico City. I have intuited the fact that this is not an environment where I will ever be able to grow. I’m 32, and it still seems impossible. I don’t think the conditions around me will ever change. So I’ve decided I must go somewhere else.

“The Match Girl wanders the streets and she begs strangers to buy matches from her. This scene shows one of the most disconcerting things about injured instinct in women, the giving of light for little price… Bad lovers, rotten bosses, exploitative situations, wily complexes of all sorts tempt a woman to these choices.”

This has been true about me. It has been the saddest thing about me, about my life: my willingness to lower the price, to just give myself away to anyone, to beg them to accept me. 

But how was I supposed to know better? I was always taught (by words and by force) that this was the only way.

“The Match Girl lights more matches. Each fantasy burns out, and again the child is in the snow and freezing. When the psyche freezes, a woman is turned toward herself and no one else.”

And it was all for no use. Every shitty boss, emotionally abusive partner, it all ended the same. With me left even more out in the cold, again. Everything I did to hold on to the fantasy ensured my own future end.

“It is a psychic fact that when libido or energy wanes to the point where its breath no longer shows on the mirror, some representation of the Life/Death/Life nature shows up, here portrayed by the grandmother. It is her work to arrive at the death of something, to incubate the soul that has left its husk behind, and to care for the soul till it can be born anew.”

I’m at that point now. I’ve spent this past year in surrender, dying to everything I’ve ever known or believed to be true. 

I’m ready to move forward. I’m dying to be reborn.

A sad little girl with black hair out in the snow

“And that is the blessedness of everyone’s psyche. Even in the event of such a painful ending as the Match Girl’s, there is a ray of light. When enough time, discontent, and pressure have been brought to bear, the Wild Woman of the psyche will hurl new life into a woman’s mind, giving her opportunity to act in her own behalf once more. As we can see from the suffering involved, it is far better to heal one’s addiction to fantasy than wait around wishing and hoping to be raised from the dead.”

Personality : Projector :: Environment : Screen

EleanorLeave a comment

Journal Date: November 28, 2020

I’m still thinking about everything I learned last night.

It’s nothing new (I first read these lessons in 2014), but it feels like I’m seeing them with new eyes. 

I feel more capable of comprehending it

I guess it’s supposed to be that way.

The last lesson I read (Lesson 2 of “Tarot Interpretation”) said about as much. 

It said that as we “ripen”, we’ll come to even deeper and deeper levels of understanding. We’re never truly “finished”. The earlier understandings, while perhaps incomplete, were still important: they were exactly what we needed at that stage of our development.

I’m glad that I’ve finally taken up my BOTA studies again after so long (it’s been years).

This is the perfect time to come back to them.

I’d kind of wondered why I resisted for so long, but maybe it was just that the time wasn’t right. 

I wasn’t yet ready, but now I am.

I’m amazed by how many synchronicities I’ve experienced since coming back to it.

It’s been very magical. 

I think this means I’m on the right track.

The reading, and especially the passages I quoted yesterday, raised so many important questions.

Last time, I tried to answer what it was inside that I was projecting out, the effects on me and my environment, and finally, how all those ideas about who I was in relation to my world even got there in the first place.

Now, I’d like to address the following questions: if it is true that our personality is like a projector, and our environment is the screen… then what do I want to do with this knowledge?

What kind of life do I want?

What kind of thoughts and visualizations do I need to hold in my inner world?

How can I use speech, or my own mental definitions of myself and my relationship to my circumstances, to create the life I want to live?

Obviously, that’s a question that can’t be answered all at once–I’m just setting out the terms of what I’ll be inquiring into.

These are good questions though, and I think they’ll help me get better answers.

Here are some more questions I wrote to help in my exploration. I encourage you to take a moment to pull out a pen and paper and jot down some notes on whatever comes up for you. 

  • Write a list of some of you beliefs about yourself and about the world (both positive and negative). 
    • How did you come to develop these beliefs?
    • What outcomes did having these beliefs have on your experiences after?
  • Examine how your inner world creates your experience. Match thoughts to things. 
    • Can you find evidence to the contrary which might disprove some of your beliefs about yourself?
    • What do you usually do with such evidence when confronted with it?
  • Consider the following: “If our definitions be wrong, because we are deluded by appearances, the appearances grow worse and worse.” 
    • How has this played out in your own life? Give specific examples.

Feel free to share in the comments what resonated most, I’d love to hear what is on your mind.

The Tower of Babel

EleanorLeave a comment

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” –John 1:1

For most of my life, my greatest passion has been the search for knowledge.

A lonely child, I found refuge in books: in fiction, tales about foreign lands and fantastic creatures; in practical books about science, the earth, and life processes; in languages, philosophy, religion; in the paranormal, occult, and mysterious. You name it, I had to know about it.

I often felt like everyone else had gotten the instruction manual on this thing called Life, and I was the only one left empty-handed.

And so I took this business very seriously. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. Somewhere out there was the answer, one day I would find the truth behind it all, and everything would make sense.

In college, I studied literature and languages, and later went to graduate school for a master’s degree in Rhetoric & Composition. I developed an obsession with epistemology, the study of truth, language, and what we can know.

Eventually I started to think that maybe Socrates had it right all along, and the answer was that we truly can know nothing;  but my obsession now had a life of its own, and the demon inside me demanding answers ate every piece of text and trivia in its path, never satisfied, always hungry for more.

I was building my very own Tower of Babel, and it was destroying me. Every Word was another brick in this tower, growing higher and higher into the sky, and I thought that in this way I would one day touch God.

This tower was not built of truth, but of ego. It was a fortress meant to protect me from this reality: that I was terrified, confused, lost and alone.

As all I had built crumbled in a flash, I saw that each little piece of knowledge, each little fact, each bit of data was a line of defense against the world, against chaos, and against life.

It was awareness that I was seeking, and consciousness that I needed.

Words can be a useful tool in directing thought, in guiding the mind to greater consciousness. The word is creative, it is generative, it directs the manifestation of life, but it is not life itself.

Encountering the Animus

EleanorLeave a comment

Journal Date: November 25, 2020

I decided to do some reading for fun, for myself, so I picked up Women who Run with the Wolves again. 

I’m picking up where I left off, in the chapter on nurturing the creative life.

And once again, I’m finding that it’s exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.

As I picked up where I’d left off, the theme of the chapter turned to the nature of the animus in a woman’s psyche.

This is something that has long interested me. I knew my inner masculine was far from healthy, but I was lost as to what to do about it. I think here, I have found a way to start.

“Animus can best be understood as a force that assists women in acting on their own behalf in the outer world. Animus helps a woman put forth specific and feminine inner thoughts and feelings in concrete ways.”

“He brings ideas from ‘out there’ back into her, and he carries ideas from her soul-self across the bridge to fruition and ‘to market’. Without the builder and maintainer of this land bridge, a woman’s inner life cannot be manifested with intent in the outer world.” 

Furthermore, Estes speaks of the distrust many women feel for the masculine, even within themselves.

“Generally, this wariness comes from barely beginning to be healed traumas from family and culture during times previous, times when women were treated as serfs, not as selfs.”

And it is not even “previous times” for all. Not for me. This treatment was for me, in my time.

I think that’s the core of the issue: I was denied the right to have a self. 

I was forbidden from myself.

I felt I existed only as a reflection, as a means to another’s end.

“It is still fresh in wild woman’s memory that there was a time when gifted women were tossed away as refuse, when a woman could not have an idea unless she secretly embedded and fertilized it in a man who then carried it out into the world under his own name.”

This has been the most painful part of it all: my alienation from self. My disconnection from my own body, mind, heart and soul. My self-betrayal and self-abandonment, based only on the assumption that I had less of a right (to think, to act, to be) than anyone else.

“The key aspect to a positive animus development is actual manifestation of cohesive inner thoughts, impulses and ideas.” 

The positive animus appears to be action oriented, concerned with bringing form to the ideal. It is practical, not simply theoretical.

“Archetypally, the King [representing the Animus] symbolizes a force that is meant to work in a woman’s behalf and for her well-being, governing what she and soul assign to him, ruling over what psychic forces are granted to him.”

Unfortunately, the masculine as I have come to know it is not this way.

I have experienced the masculine not as protector, but as perpetrator. As the source of violence and fear. As that which seeks to control, and to silence me. 

Even if only my own inner masculine, the animus which rules my terrorized interior world with an iron fist.

“But what if something takes over the creative flow, making it muddier and muddier? What if we become trapped by that, what if we somehow perversely begin to derive issue from it, to not only like it but rely on it, make a living by it, feel alive through it? What if we use it to get us out of bed in the morning, to take us somewhere, to make us a somebody in our own minds? Those are the traps that wait for all of us.” –Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It is definitely a trap that I have fallen into. 

And haven’t really gotten out of.

Honestly, I’m still here, wallowing in it as we speak.

I think it’s a great question to ask: What purpose is your illness/inferiority complex/lack of creativity serving for you?

Because it does serve some purpose at this point.

First, it’s a great excuse.

It gives me all the reasons I could ever need for why I can’t do x, y or z.

It allows me to tell myself, “Well, my unhappiness/lack of success/whatever is because I’m not really trying. If it weren’t for this, it would all be different…”

It allows me to avoid taking responsibility for my own life.

I can keep blaming it all on someone else, and keep away from the recognition of how I continually give away my power.

Because yes, I do have power. Even now.

I don’t have to wait until everything is “perfect,” until I’m “fully healed” or have gained approval or validation or whatever it is I’ve been waiting for.

I could start now if I wanted to. If I chose to. 

I’m starting to suspect that I’ve always had more power than I think I do.

I must stop assuming otherwise. 

It’s not just out of fear, but laziness, that I do this.

Because assuming I am powerless amounts to an act of surrender.

By refusing to look at all the options I have to create and influence change, it is as if I were just handing over my life and my self to whatever it is outside of me that would have me in subservience.

It’s time for me to remember: I don’t have to do that anymore.

Akashic Records Reading

EleanorLeave a comment

Journal Date: October 29, 2020

Today I had a phone consultation with Leah Garza of Crystals of Altamira for an Akashic Records reading. 

My question to Leah was, “How can I heal after a lifetime of trauma? Is it even possible for me?”

Here is what she told me according to what she saw in the Akashic Records.

She told me that I have indeed had a difficult life, but it was the exact right situation for me to understand my power. There was an intentional reason for what I have experienced in this life, and knowing this and shifting my perspective toward it can change how I relate to it.

Leah told me that in some way, I am always on the path. I am never not heading toward my destiny. What I can do is to focus on coming into greater resonance and alignment. 

She said that it’s true, I am meant to be a healer and to be of service to others in this life. That is my path, but I am going about it the wrong way. 

The way that I have been approaching it has been with the attitude that, “If I’m doing it just for me, then it’s self-centered and selfish.” 

I have been trying to help others from a self-sacrificial, even codependent stance. Being of service with “please accept me” as the hidden, underlying motive is the wrong way to go about this.

I understand exactly what she means by this. I grew up with these ideas crushed into my psyche through intense shame, punishment, violence and rejection. The only way that I could be “good” and worthy of existence was if I disregarded my own needs entirely and focused exclusively on meeting the needs of others. Then, if their needs were met, I might someday be rewarded with whatever was left.

What I needed to do  was “put pleasure first. You can be of service, but it should be from a place where it fills you up,” she said. “You should be asking yourself, ‘How can I give myself permission to enjoy life? Choose pleasure, all the time. You have the right. Just claim it.”

Leah said I had to be willing to turn my back on societal pressures to be endlessly self-sacrificing in order to live up to their ideas of what a “good” woman was.

“There is this fear that you have that, in breaking from the norm, you’ll draw attention to yourself, and it could lead to violence.”

I know that this is true, especially in what I believe may have happened in some of my past lives.

“You should sit with this question: ‘How can I love and accept myself if I’m cast out? If I’m not accepted?

“If you entertain this thought, it doesn’t mean that it will happen. Just consider it.

“Meet your body where it’s at. Ask yourself, “If this happens, how can I be okay with that?”

With that, she finished with the guidance the records had for me on what I had asked. But she told me my guides had another message for me: 

“You need to make art. You are an artist.You need to make and build for yourself, not for anyone else’s consumption. You can think about sharing with others later, but create first.”

It was something I had not really considered before. I had always wanted to be a writer, and had always felt I had a poetic sensibility and approach to life. 

But there I think there was something in me that felt it was selfish to pursue that. I had always been so focused on meeting the needs of others that that thought of creating for myself first had seemed impossible. 

Now I’m starting to consider that there is, in fact, an inherent value in what I create and do for myself that is intrinsic and needs not involve anyone else. 

And perhaps they are not mutually exclusive. Maybe through my work people will be able to find some of the healing that I have worked so hard to cultivate for myself.