Leaning Into the Journey of Self-Transformation

Musings On Control, Trust and Surrender to the Process

Befriending the Serpent

Life is asking me to give up control.

To trust.

I have spoken of these oppositional forces before:

Control and Trust. Forgetting and Remembering.

Cut off from remembrance, the mind seeks to control.

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I am going on a journey. The journey is taking me deep within the sanctum of my being, down into my body; it is taking me to a raw place beneath the mind, where grief lives, where the core wound throbs and stings. But the mind, untrained, cannot bear the rawness of what the body holds. So it loops, circles, plans—anything to escape the core wound—the sensation of separation—and its transformative promise. Anything to avoid descent. But descent is where the medicine lies.

In the descent, I meet the Serpent.

I have been told to befriend her, to trust in her.

She is calling me to shed my old skins.

I am going on a journey and the old skins must be left behind.

But the mind resists. The mind says, I can manage this. But it can’t. It just goes on looping and looping, resisting what’s underneath, resisting the grief that lives inside the body.

The body is the site of transformation. It holds the wound, where shadow and light dance.

So to befriend the Serpent is to befriend the body, to sink beneath the control mechanisms of the mind into the wild raw vitality of the flesh and its untamable feelings.

In a previous post, I discussed insights I received in my last plant medicine ceremony. For those unfamiliar, in these ceremonies it is common to receive information from the plant spirits themselves. They speak, sometimes through images, sometimes through words and feelings.

They said to me, You are not your mind.

They tore the mind from my face like an old mask and held it out before me.

They said, this is not who you are; this is a tool. Your mind works for you. Use the tool rightly.

But in the wake of that experience—having been dropped from the sky back to the earth and the depths of the forest—the path is not so clear. There are fallen trees, overgrown bushes. A fog has rolled in through the woodland. I can see no further than my feet. And round my feet a boa slithers. Naturally I recoil. I forget. I want to turn back but there is no going back. There is only the path forward, step by step into the fog.

Yet, in that milky, dim strangeness lies the Way.

For now, I am in the soup. Through the membranous walls light begins to seep. I can feel, however faint, the wind of the mountain sweeping through the glade. For now I am still fusing together. I am transforming whether I like it or not.

Some days the transformation is painful, the way unclear.

Some days my mind tries to cut through the chrysalis and free me to roam the earth, a caterpillar once more.

But there is no going back to the old form. There is only surrender to the transformation.

So now I wish to come down from the prosaic into the real.

I am grieving, but I do not want to. I am afraid of being left behind. I am afraid love has left and will not come back. I want her to stay. How can I get her to stay? My mind has ideas and they all fail. Because love neither comes nor goes. It is immanent.

Now, I am in a period of suspension. The Hanged One. This time is about accepting initiation. It is about looking into the mirror.

I am being initiated. But I have not fully accepted it. Begrudgingly, I wake up into the dark, slippery Unknown of my life. And I am being asked to simply trust it? No. No way. I will not go silently into that good night. I will not allow it. I will not befriend the Serpent. I will trap her in a cage and leave her there, continuing on with my old life of fear and control.

Nice idea, right? But the resistance is of no use. It only breeds more suffering.

I am aware my efforts at control and resistance are futile. And I am like a child being dragged into a new home, kicking and screaming because I miss the old one.

And I am full of metaphors today.

The point I’m making—the point of this post—is to elucidate the struggle I find myself in now.

Something is happening to me. A great change has been initiated. A sloughing. And I have been stripped of my old ways of dealing with it. Nothing external can soothe this pain. Not weed or alcohol, not DJ accolades, not romance or sex, not distracting myself with this or that. The pain remains.

It demands to be felt.

It refuses to be subverted.

The Serpent insists that we forge a friendship.

She says, I know the path is dark now but if you trust me, I will usher you into the light of your own being. I will give you what you’ve always wanted. But you have to trust me. You have to surrender to the Great Mystery, of which I am the steward.

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But the struggle isn’t just mine; it’s collective.

In the Western world, we are taught to hedge against the unknown. We are given a simple blueprint to follow: go to school, graduate, get a job, find a partner, start a family, work until retirement, send your kids off to do the same, and so on and so forth. Who and what does this blueprint serve?

It serves Capital. It serves those who depend on the labor of the common man. It serves the preservation of the superstructures that dominate our lives, divide our communities, colonize our minds and destroy our planet.

On a more abstract level, it serves our own fear of the unknown. It allows us to walk through life without questioning what lies beneath the surface. So long as we adhere to this predetermined path, we will be okay.

But if we stray from the path, if some secret force within yearns for something else, well then we find ourselves on our own, with no roadmap, no blueprint, no compass but our internal one. And for most of us, we are taught to ignore our internal compass, to deny the wisdom of our bodies, the truth of our being. We are taught to mold ourselves based on our surroundings, our material conditions, the role within our family of origin.

We are taught to conform to the external expectations heaped upon us from birth.

We are taught to fear the Unknown, to fear our own internal knowing.

Just look at our dominant creation myth. All over the world the Serpent is revered as the original creator, the bearer of knowledge, the union of opposites. But in the West, in Genesis, the Serpent is evil, the tempter, Satan incarnate, hellbent on corrupting the innocence of humanity. So we see the Serpent and her knowledge as evil. We were taught to hate her, to condemn her, to fear her. And in so doing, we were caught off from ourselves, from our own transformative capacities.

We are not given the keys to master our own lives. So the singular door of our individual being remains locked.

Now, though, I have been forced to find my key, to fumble through the dark for it. I have been shown the path forward and what it requires.

Which is surrender.

Surrender is not a one time act. It is a daily renewal of devotion. Today, I wake up not knowing what the future holds and yet I toil nonetheless in the name of love. I toil for beauty. I toil for transformation and renewal. I walk through the milky, dim strangeness, knowing full well that my body is grieving a great loss, a painful separation.

But in that separation lies a profound teaching which I soon hope to integrate:

It reveals the original wound: the forgetting.

We all walk with a web of forgetful creatures inside us. They insist on their stories, the roles they must play to protect us from the pain. They hold painful memories of the past, in which we were not fully seen, or held in our uniqueness; memories in which we were ignored or left alone, in which we did not receive the love we once needed. Memories that tell us: love is fragile; it does not stay without a fight; we are doomed to be abandoned, unseen, ignored. In response to these memories, these forgetful creatures take on roles within the psyche to protect us from reopening the original wounds.

So now, as adults, we walk around with these unexamined shadows. We are bound to unconscious compulsions and fears and maladaptive ways of navigating the world and relationships. We project those fears onto others. We point the finger at others and blame them for our overwhelming feelings. But the shadow yearns to be integrated—to be loved.

The shadow is simply all of those aspects of ourselves we’ve pushed down deep into the body.

It’s the exiled parts that long to be known. And so long as we leave them there, we are doomed to repeat old patterns. We are doomed to remain enchained to the old ways.

And yet, for me and I suspect for many others, the old ways are fading. And as we come up against situations and behaviors we can’t change or control or ignore, we must remember that the wisdom is surrender.

We have entered Scorpio season—the season of descent. Scorpio season is ruled by Pluto—God of the Underworld, of death and rebirth, Bearer of soul-level transformation. Now we are descending into the marrow of our suffering to confront the old, dying ways. We must not resist the descent. We can only surrender to the transformative process. In surrendering, we discover our true power. So this time is about learning the power of letting go and surrender. The more we do this, the more we remember who we really are.

We must remember, day in and day out. We must love and accept these wounded parts, embrace what we find in the shadow realm. We must listen to them, make space for them to breathe and sing and dance and scream.

But we must not fall victim to their stories; we must not become enraptured in their narratives. We must remember who we are. And do our best to stay rooted in that Higher Self—the one who is calm, confident, connected, compassionate, clear, curious, creative, and courageous, the one who knows the truth and holds fast to it.

And this is what’s becoming of me, of all of us if we allow it. We’re being made new in one sense and ancient in the other. For me, I am being taught, via separation, to anchor in this Self, and begin to live my life from the inside out.

It takes work. But it’s good work. Some days I backslide into old patterns, and I think, what’s the use in fighting these impulses? But that is the nature of the spiral.

Round and round we go, revisiting the old ways to reexamine them from new vantages, until finally we are ready to let them go and surrender.

That is the nature of the spiral, and of the Serpent—ever-turning, ever-teaching—the Way of Transformation.

May we transform gracefully.
May we love ourselves through this sticky, often overwhelming process.
And may we find, through the fog, our truest selves awaiting us on the other side.

With love,

Zoey