MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 5

METAMORPHOSIS

Metamorphosis is one of the new concepts in the Journey to Soul Initiation.  The core idea is that it isn’t simply enough to have a vision or a revelation of a mythopoetic identity. There is a great lack of psychospiritual adults who can guide us from having the vision to the point of being able to express the vision to a given community.  So he has developed this map and a whole series of practices to bridge the gulf between vision and successful return to a community and bringing that vision to life.

Plotkin defines Metamorphosis as “the fourth phase of a Descent to soul in which the Ego is shape shifted in light of and in accordance with the revelation or vision in the previous phase of Soul Encounter.” (Journey p. 379)

The great temptation, he writes, is to skip over this phase which he calls “the phase that has been least well understood in our Western world.” (p.239) “The foremost hazard of Metamorphosis is trying to skip over it entirely, believing you can go directly and near instantly from vision to a fully articulated delivery system.” (p.255).  This is exactly what I did.

What happens, he asks, if you open up the cocoon of a caterpillar too soon—you get a bunch of goop, and the potential butterfly dies. (p.239) That’s the fear.  What you have to do instead is make yourself vulnerable to the vision. Don’t interpret the vision or mythopoetic identity, don’t analyze it, don’t plot out the perfect community or delivery system.  Instead, ask yourself as frequently as you can, who is showing up—your ego or your new identity.  Plotkin kept leading vision fasts (called vision quests in those days) and asked himself if it was Bill or if it was Cocoon weaver who was showing up. (p.242) Thus he let himself be pulled into becoming Cocoon weaver.  The challenge always is that your subpersonalities want to keep you safe, and this new identity in service to a vision isn’t safe at all.

So how do you do this metamorphosis?  Plotkin offers both a series of suggestions and something he calls Experimental Threshold Crossings, or ETCs. Here’s some of the Plotkin suggestions before we get to ETCs. 

Review journals

Expressive arts to embody the visionary experiences

Reexperience the soul encounters in memory.

Do advanced wholing and self healing work.

“Experimental Threshold Crossings are practices for embodying your mythopoetic identity before you’re ready to choose or develop a delivery system.” (p.264.) How do you arrive at these practices?  Don’t try to reason them out, though that will be the temptation for many (most?) of us.  Instead begin by experiencing yourself as occupying the mythopoetic (or vision) place. What’s your bodily experience, your felt sense?  What emotions arise? Then ask what are the things I can do today to express myself as this person?   To receive artful and useful answers, let yourself be led by dreamer—don’t try to figure it out.  

The best ETCs are public and they can be really small things. I remember going to a super local farmer’s market and selling eggs from my eggmobile.  Plotkin gives a wide range of practices ranging from memorizing a poem to quitting your job. (p.266)

Metamorphosis is obviously much easier to do if you are in a supportive environment.  It’s much easier if you don’t have the stress of responsibilities such as a family or a full time demanding job, if you are reasonably physically healthy. Having a supportive partner or no partner really helps; a non supportive partner will activate your subs.  Having a helpful mentor makes a huge difference and is a great rarity.  

The reason for more advanced wholing and self healing work is that the deeper you go towards your true purpose, the more your subs are going to want to keep you safe.  We live in a society that doesn’t value the range of gifts that psychospiritual adults can bring; we’d rather have more adolescents in adult bodies because that’s more profitable. 

Let me give you an example, because I find metamorphosis to be a little amorphous.   Let’s say your vision is to bring herbal healing to the world.  Don’t hang out a shingle.  Apprenticing to a psychospiritual herbalist is great, if you can find one. But much easier to make a few remedies and try them out on your supportive friends.  Recite poems that are paeans to plants, read about plant healing. Work to become a person who can truly hear the plants with whom you will be partnering.

MY EXPERIENCE

My metamorphosis story is a really disconnected tale. I was blessed with my mythopoetic identity of Dances with the Rhythms of the earth in the mid 90’s.  Maybe a year and a half later, I was able to leave the day to day running of my business to my future partner when he retired from his job as a principal and came to work full time. I was single.  So far so good.  I knew I needed to live rurally, but instead of wandering (I was sick and tired of wandering), I decided to attempt to settle down and I bought a 100 acre farm in Central Virginia. This was, in hindsight, simply premature.  At the time, I thought I’d figure out how to make a living from the farm and I could turn my back on the business. You can see that I have what Plotkin after Harley Swift Deer calls my survival dance (how to make a living) and my sacred dance all mixed up. 

I bought the farm and spent a couple of months just wandering the land asking what it wanted from me. Perfect.  I named it “Rikudei Ruach” Dances of the Spirit Farm.  This was an alliterative allusion to Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth which I couldn’t figure out how to elegantly say in Hebrew (my Hebrew is mediocre).  I brought in a permaculture consultant (this was rarer in the 1990’s then it is today), who wasn’t much help, I planted a garden after buying a rototiller that sucked from Sears and rapidly broke down and wandered the acreage getting a feel for the land which I was blessed to steward. So wandering the land and asking what it wanted was a simply perfect act of metamorphosis.  I started to read Stockman Grass Farmer at someone’s suggestion and it felt really right to raise beef cows using rotational grazing.

On the one hand, it was a great choice, a perfect fit for the rolling pasture land that made up the farm and my experience with cows both in Israel and at the commune I’d lived on at college. On the other hand, it was a pretty funny choice for a vegan to make—I hadn’t eaten any beef for at least 15 years.  The core problem was I then got caught up in attempting to turn it into a delivery system and I lost sight of the process of becoming Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth.  Of course, I didn’t even realize that the next step was Metamorphosis.  At this point, I’d never heard of Plotkin and he hadn’t published this idea. 

So I became like the cocoon that is opened up prematurely.  I sold the farm in 2000 after marrying a woman who didn’t want to be on the farm and didn’t belong there.  Indeed, my subs are so strong that I completely forgot about the name Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth until maybe 2020. Your subs are just as strong.

During Elul 5777, 2017, I did another vision fast in Southern Vermont. I put my base camp amongst what I called a birch holocaust.  This was a small area demarcated by a whole series of small birch trees that had all been knocked down.  I needed my old self to die, just as those birch trees had died.  And I needed to be reborn, just as those downed birch trees actually support more life than they did when they were upright and alive.  What is life and what is death?  I no longer knew.

This is precisely what metamorphosis looks like, because in order to be Dances with the Rhythms of the earth, I needed to know deep in my bones, as I later came to put it “there is no life without death and there is no death without life.”

I was given a vision to facilitate earth based Jewish adults.  I didn’t know how I was supposed to do that. But really importantly, I didn’t rush to a delivery system.  I was also given a practice that reinforced the idea of looking at myself from the point of view of being dead.  I made a commitment to do this practice every day for the next year. And I did.  I did it outside when I could, but I also did it on the subway on the way to my office. When the year was up, I reupped on the practice and I’ve now done it every day for the last seven years—I think I’ve missed less than 5 days in that seven years and none since I mostly retired.

I knew I needed to become the person who could facilitate earth based Jewish adults.  My time connected to the earth has increased exponentially, even as I have continued to live a suburban life.  My connection to the earth has deepened considerably and my Jewishness feels richer, deeper and clearer than it ever has. All of this so that I could be the person who could facilitate earth based Jewish adults.

I spent a lot of time outside reviewing my life.  I reread my journal from my first vision fast in the late 1980’s. I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life, what had worked and what had not. I remembered the feel of the farm I had abandoned in Central Virginia, the smell of the grass and the cows, the feel of my muscles walking up the steep hill where the hickory tree had been blown over just before I bought the place.

And then I remembered my name. I am Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth. It came as a shock to me, a total shock. I’d completely forgotten.  I simply hadn’t been ready to really be Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth and now I was.  So I remembered.

Enactment is the next phase and we’ll turn to that next.