'It is a profound feature of the wild psyche that if we aren’t paying attention to our own seasons and the time for return, the Old One will come for us, calling and calling until something in us responds.'
Clarissa Pinkola Estes 'Women Who Run With The Wolves'
The Selkie myth has long lingered on the tide-edge of my psyche.
After reading Clarissa's telling in her epic book on mythic-psychological health it's ancient warning on self abandonment struck a watery chord.
The tale of a seal-woman who on a full coastal moon dances and has her soul-skin stolen by a lonely fisherman - who offers and then breaks the conditions of its return - speaks to the wild feminine in all that loses our way in life, often inadvertently trying to do the right thing for others.
Much fascinating prose has been written on the myth and how it relates to the plight of modern life blocking our wild nature.
Sharon Blackie in 'If Women Rose Rooted' writes
'The Selkie story is a story of a woman who breaks. Taken literally out of her element, trapped on the land, where she cannot find a way to belong.'
I want to bring a unique take on the story from the perspective of an energy healer who works in the psychic and somatic realms: revealing how the theft of the wild soul can be traced early in our bodies and particularly the energy field, calling the alarm long before the mind acknowledges the ship of the true magi-self has started sinking.
'We can be overloved, underloved, overworked, underworked. . . each costs much. In the face of ‘too much’ we gradually become dry, our hearts become tired, our energies begin to become spare, and a mysterious longing for — we almost never have a name for it other than ‘a something’ – rises up in us more and more, then the Old One calls.' Estes
The 'Old One' can be a breakdown, redundancy, a health crisis or a subconscious act of such profound self sabotage that the ego can only crash towards necessary surrender and dream-care.
One of the great treasures of Celtic mythology is how the Mermaid/Selkie legend deals with the trauma of disconnection from not only the original wild Self, but from Gaia earth and the ways an inhumane system can sustain and collude in its theft.
The Selkie story reflects a fluid yearning for freedom from the constraints of linear time consciousness, a moist expansion internally, and is particularly relevant in the dry heated world of tech stress.
The soul-skin in this story is irrefutable and unapologetic, a whole underwater world of deep mystery and animistic loyal tribe, which in turn feeds our life force and makes us feel vital, present and alive.
And yet as adults we often make unconscious choices that are incongruent with who we truly are.
We jump into an engulfing job that pacifies - for a degree of time - a deep fear, we enter relationships that mirror childhood patterning, we may even internalise an entire belief system that doesn't serve our deeper soul in order to fit in.
Often the theft of soul skin and core self esteem occurs before we have even discovered and fully anchored it into our awareness.
In the story the young Selkie is spirit-drunk in the company of her other soul-women and has a naive benevolence to the fisherman's request which is laden with emotional blackmail and yet sounds practical.
She is unaware of what is at stake: the essence of her own soul.
What I often intuitively sense and see in my clients as an energy healer is the gap between the cognitive mind's adaptation to life and the body's deeper threads of personal truth.
The liver may hold suppressed anger from work. The calves are rigid with buried emotion. A partner's trauma is being held in the womb, perhaps in addition to your own, signifying how deeply tired, emotionally unequal and enmeshed the relationship has become.
Estes writes how the Selkie lives too long on the dry land of over-give:
'As time went on, her flesh began to dry out. First it flaked, then it cracked. The skin of her eyelids began to peel. The hairs of her head began to drop to the ground. She became naluaq, palest white. Her plumpness began to wither. She tried to conceal her limp. Each day her eyes, without her willing it so, became more dull. She began to put out her hand in order to find her way, for her sight was darkening.'
I often perceive soul loss as functional freeze, a state of dorsal nervous system shut down in the body where the natural instincts of fight and flight from threat (of all kinds including energetic) are thwarted or buried, often through guilt and not enough healthy ego.
This type of embodiment impacts the life force over time and then requires more and more hypervigilant mental drive to compensate, a sort of digging-a-deep-hole away from the soul.
To recover our inner feeling senses - what in Polyvagal Theory is termed Neuroception - a profound rebellious immersion is needed in the cyclical rhythms of body and soul.
The mythic needs to draw us home, to lend a hand, fin, or spell.
In the myth the Selkie does return back to the sea, an unseen place from the perspective of dry land, but in fact an underworld where she is truly witnessed.
This being 'unseen' from the conventions of regular life can represent many things including disrupting what social theorist Michel Foucalt referred to as the philosophy of surveillance, 'Panopticism', viewer observation as a mechanism of social control.
Often people find immersion into nature connection, spending time away from social media, practising new more authentic ways of being with others, or even a spiritual pilgrimage to a sacred place can disrupt patterns.
What the Selkie myth highlights is a way of being seen that upsets the subject/object dichotomy, a way that is loving and wild.
In a healing session loving spirit guides become care takers and cheerleaders. The body lands in its own unapologetic tremoring truth.
Ancestors are invoked because they provide the necessary loving oomph to push out the dominating voice of the culture in the psyche, a sort of shamanic decolonisation.
And thankfully to reveal how the soul truth of who we are, often buried through trauma - much of it ancestral and from past lives - is easily evoked once allowed a safe encouraging space to breathe out its depths.
I'll leave you with these closing words from Dr Estes.
'Though many have tried to hunt her, time after time they have failed. She is known as Tanqigcaq, the bright one, theholy one, and it is said that though she be a seal, her eyes are capable of portraying those human looks, those wise and wild and loving looks.''
Immerse and enjoy x
Photo on unsplash by Samuel Scrimshaw