La Huesera, the ancient folktale of the mythical Bone Woman of the desert southwest, wanders the arroyos gathering scattered bones of wolves, singing over them until they reassemble and return to life. What if Bone Woman’s song is also ours to sing—the mythic medicine, the nourishing bone broth we can heal from if we dare to gather what’s been forgotten and scattered together at the same table, into the same circle of honoring? Bone Woman is the sacred feminine, known by many names, in many tongues. Her task is not to forge new connections, but to uncover what’s always been there. This is Old Story Medicine, the elixir She offers from her sacred cauldron when the world seems starved of connection, and in need of healing and repair.
Read MoreThe Spirit Wolves of Tengger: The Wild Wisdom of the Divine Enemy-Teacher
In the heart of the Mongolian grasslands wolves and sheep herders once lived in harmony with each other. Though wolves were regarded as an "enemy" and often killed and ate the sheep these nomadic herders depended on for their livelihood, wolves also modeled strategies of survival that herders adopted enabling them to live for generations in the harsh landscape. Like the Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang, the story of Mongolian wolves is a spiritual one about living in harmony with our greatest fear, learning from our greatest enemy, and ultimately developing enough consciousness to recognize the divine-enemy-teacher residing within each of us.
Read MoreThe Goddess Isis: Shedding and Becoming
In the beloved Egyptian myth of Isis, Isis searches for the scattered parts of her murdered husband’s body, resembles him, and breathes life back into him, and makes love to him, which then gives birth to Horus who becomes the next Pharaoh of Egypt. Isis shows us that taking the aerial point of view, or birds-eye-view, gives us the power to hold the tension between what is dissolving and what is emerging, to see the whole instead of only the parts, and to recognize our own agency in the potential for transformation.
Read MoreReassembling Rites: Piecing Together the Ancestral Bones
There is an archetype that weaves its way through many ancient myths and folktales that centers around the sacred work of recovering and reassembling what has been disassembled. This ritual of singing over the ancestral bones, honoring, mourning over, and reclaiming what has been buried or lost, is a devotional act. In these stories, grieving takes center stage and plays a transformative role allowing the folk-heroine or mythological heroine to reach a place of wholeness, aliveness, and joy again.
Read MoreTern Teachings: Guests that Nest & Give
It is not only humans that tell stories. . . In the voice of bright white feathers and a charming black cap, a story darts its way through gusts of wind off the coast of Massachusetts hatching out of makeshift nests of pebbles and dry grasses. during the months of April and May. It is a seasonal story with themes of reciprocity and interdependence between the arctic tern, a migrating bird, and local coastal cloudberry flowers suggesting that even temporary guest can still contribute to a landscape’s thriving.
Read MorePower Beneath the Surface: The Psychic Waters of the Unconscious
The ocean is a prominent and enigmatic feature in many folktales around the world including: the Irish folktale of the Selkie, the Inuit folktale of Sedna, and the Vietnamese folktale of Dragon and the Crane. According to Carl Jung, the radical and inspirational psychoanalyst, we can explore the meaning of the ocean as a symbol of the unconscious and through this process we can find ways in which the characters’ struggles and transformations resonate with our own illuminating the path to our own self-discovery, forging a deeper connection to our own true authentic identity and our full potential.
Read MoreYuletide: The Vital and Soulful Wisdom of Bothness
These twelve days between the Winter Solstice and the beginning of the next solar year are referred to as Yule or Yuletide in ancient Medieval Nordic folklore. What gifts does this sacred time belonging neither to the old year nor the new year offer us? How can we harness the transformative power of this bothness? Ancient folktales reveal that the past is not set-in-stone, but is continuously being reinvented, reimagined, and reweaved back into the upcycled tapestry of the present tense. This sacred time gives rise to the beautiful question: how can we cultivate new ways of relating to the past so we can move with wisdom into the future?
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