Healing What Ails You
Healing What Ails You
Category |Pleasure is our soul medicine! The central message in all of my Unlock Pleasure talks, workshops, and poetry concerts is that pleasure is essential to live well. It’s the most valuable means to build resiliency, strengthen our souls and buffer our psyches during life’s inevitable challenges.
I intuitively knew this in my mid 40s when I let pleasure guide me to reclaim my life after a cascade of losses. At that time, I lost a child, a marriage and a community of friends – my slate was wiped clear. I was living those famous lines of the poet Rumi – Sometimes god wants to manhandle us, break all our teacup talk of god.
As I struggled to get by day by day, I thought about what could give me comfort and strength and help me re-engage with a life that felt off the rails. So when I recalled that keeping bees had been an old desire still unfulfilled, I jumped into it. I had a sense the bees could heal me. So I took a course, found a teacher and ordered up my first hive – three hives actually. That was about 15 years ago, and I’ve been journeying with the bees ever since.
What’s healing about bees is they put me deeply in tune with nature. The hives peek and subside according to the season and the day-to-day unfolding of weather. They return me to my instinctual nature and my own wild heart – both essential to taking pleasure.
Bees also demand presence. Once I wandered into the bee yard unattuned to them. One bee quickly brought me to attention with a sting on my forehead just above and between my eyes. I got the message! “There’s something important happening here, so wake up and be present.” That important happening is the energy of the hive; the powerful life force energy experienced through the senses – the smell, sounds and sight of all those bees so focused, so devoted to their tasks, so calm.
When you’re in their space, bees come to check you out. They’re mostly just curious, crawling on fingers and hands. But then there’s the taste of the honey fresh from the comb – a flavor I can only call the essence of nature. It contains the sun, the rain, the earth and the flowers. It’s not called ambrosia for nothing!
A poem often captures a sentiment so much better than prose. I leave you with this one from Mary Oliver.
Honey At the Table
It fills you with the soft
Essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table
and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until
deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,
you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees … a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.
And join me for a learning experience of bees!
What the Bees Know on Sunday, June 19th, 2016, 9 - 4:30 p.m.
Spirit Matters Retreat Centre, Almonte, Ontario
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“I had signed up for the workshop with a vague idea of validating whether or not beekeeping was something I wanted to get back into, so wanted the real experience and ‘instruction’ around hive life. But I also wanted to spend time in the imaginative life of beekeeping – so the poetry, and your story of bees as a significant part of your healing journey was really important. Sensing into your relationship with them - the calm, the respect, the love – was an important part of witnessing how a relationship with bees teaches those very things. I loved how the different activities dove-tailed so well into one another. The ‘energy meditation’ of approaching the hive taught me well about respect for boundaries, and the deep purposefulness of their lives. We can co-exist beautifully as long as I ‘let them bee.’ “