hiding

THERE IS NO MONSTER INSIDE OF YOU

Fall in love with the darkness.

With the piss and the shit of life.

The shadows, the hidden parts.

The bits we hide out of shame.

Fall in love with the innocence.

Our childhood fears of the dark.

Of being exposed. Of showing ourselves,

being seen, coming into the light.

The doubts, the secret pains,

our strange fantasies, feelings we

just don't know what to do with.

Terrors of the night-time.

The rage that bubbles just under the surface.

The fear that we are not loveable.

The feelings and thoughts we conceal

to maintain the image of 'me'.

To be good, to be nice, to be spiritual.

To be 'the one who can hold it all together'.

Fall in love with this secret humanity.

Know that darkness is NOT darkness,

only scared fragments longing to come into the light,

beings who want love, and attention,

and breath, and inclusion in the larger picture of Self.

Do not seek the light, friend.

Simply be the light. Be what you are.

The light of life.

And have the courage to shine fully

on the sore places, the tender places.

Illuminate. Radiate.

Make it safe for the little monsters

to come out of hiding.

Let them know they are beautiful.

And worthy.

And not monsters at all.

- Jeff Foster

Notes on St. Johns Wort by ANA

St John’s wort acts as an extension of sunlight, capturing solar rays and turning them into the deep, red medicinal constituent called Hypericum

If you’ve ever crushed these flowers or leaves between your fingers, you’ve seen the burgundy color stain left behind.

When captured in oil or alcohol, that color is deep red.

I’m using in the form of oiling more and more. Herbal oiling is a powerful way to get nutrients from herbs into your body and it’s one of the best way to nourish actual nerve cells, which are very close to the surface of the skin.

Fat from oils help move the body from a stressful, sympathetic state into a restorative, parasympathetic state.

Infused herbal oils are easy to make and such a lovely way to get herbal medicine into your system. The act of slowing down to oil your body in itself is powerfully healing.

St John’s Wort is a beautiful plant ally to oil with because she’s known as a healer of wounds and nerve pain.

Medicinally, she’s used for an array of ailments connected to nerve pain, including sciatica, neuralgia and rheumatic pain.

But you may know her better for her antidepressant and anti-anxiety properties, providing the body with constituents that soothe and calm the mind by helping to regulate neurotransmitters.

Traditionally, her flowers were harvested to make tea, which is another favorite way to work with her.

She’s also great as a tincture, if you need her in a stronger dose.

HIDING

Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Even hiding the truth from ourselves can be a way to come to what we need in our own necessary time. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.

Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.

We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

~David Whyte