Integrating Snake Medicine Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, published yesterday, I described the first steps of my personal journey of soul recovery, including my first encounter with Green Snake, in statues, dreams and hypnotherapy. Those experiences led to choosing to tattoo Green Snake on my left arm. Read more about finding my Medicine and embracing my Golden Shadow as I stepped into an ancient lineage of Snake Healers.

Sometimes we encounter really sweet, or funny gems on the road of individuation… Let’s start with one like that!

Sweet Intermezzo (6 years ago…)

In the film The Matrix, Neo receives a message to “follow the White Rabbit.” Just before I met my partner, he encountered a live Green Snake slithering across a forest trail in Thailand, followed by a Neo-like dream to “follow the Green Snake.”

Snake Body with Eggs (3 years ago…)

In 2020 I found a small dead snake on the road, presumably run over by a car. I sat down next to it, fascinated, and somewhat horrified too, observing, listening. I asked if I could work with its body and spirit.

Lucid Dream

Following on from that experience, I set a lucid dream intention a few nights later to work with the symbol of the eggs: “Snake Eggs, Come to me!” I dreamt I was holding a snake egg in my hand. In my dream it was as big as a chicken egg, whereas the actual eggs were only the size of my pink nail. All of a sudden, this large egg started shining with a golden light from within. 

This scared me so much that I willed myself to wake up, and my ego almost dismissed the dream: “This can’t be true. I must be making it up, it is too neat. It simply doesn’t work like that.” Ego likes the status quo, so dismissal is safer than accepting the unexplainable.

I tried to go back to sleep, and re-enter the dream, but that didn’t work. Instead, I wrote about what this experience represented to me. In that state between dreaming and waking, I heard a voice saying: “it takes a lot of courage to pick me up! Courage to go deep and face your fear, courage to accept transformation, while not many really want to transform.”

Golden Shadow

I mused about this deep fear inside me and realised that my power was hidden in something I hardly dared to approach, despite my pull towards it. I also had a sense that something in me needed to die before I could access it. I wondered if the old body of the Snake represented the attachment I still had to academia, or my fear of stepping into my witchy healer lineage.

Slowly I understood that Snake and her eggs pointed to my Golden Shadow. Most of us are familiar with the Dark Shadow, those parts we want to keep hidden or repressed out of shame or guilt. The Golden Shadow represents the light, radiant and talented parts of us, which all too often we repress even harder. We are taught to keep our heads down, not to stand out, not to be different. This message was originally intended to keep us safe (see also my post Is Life Still Shaped by the Witch Hunts), but hiding who we are takes a lot of energy and saps our innate power.

These unconscious messages are so strong that they can easily deprive us from looking more deeply at such soul encounters, and miss out on moments of transformation. Of course, fear is always a good ‘alarm bell’, but sometimes going toward the fear is ‘safe’ and healing, even if we don’t always expect it!

This was one of the experiences that eventually gave me the courage to leave academia and start my own soulful enterprise, which is now starting to flourish as The Way of the Wild Soul. But I still wasn’t there yet.

Necklace (several weeks ago…)

Working with her skin three years ago, I tanned it and put it on leather to make into an armband. I also preserved her head.

Even now, I know I’m not fully there yet. There are still layers to uncover as I’m stepping into greater visibility with The Way of the Wild Soul. Dare I describe what it is, can I even put it into words?

I’m reflecting on the many, many steps on a path of individuation to embody our transformation more and more deeply, for our actions and the life world we create around ourselves to become congruent with our inner landscape. It is also something that cannot be rushed. The foundation needs to be built slowly but surely, literally one layer at a time. It includes overcoming fears, misconceptions, and slow disentanglement from the hold that the overculture has on our psyche. 

Inspired by Snake Medicine and the lineage of Snake Healers, I wish for everyone to emerge more authentically in their true nature with each shedding of the skin, in their own, nature time, adding a bead to their necklace of soul recovery and personal growth…

PS

It’s only in recent months that I came across the work of Robert Moss Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole and Bill Plotkin Soulcraft. Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. The journey I describe here is very resonant with their work, which I have been doing intuitively in my own way for 25 years. Let the mysteries continue to unfold within and around us!

Events

Bio

She completed her PhD in dance anthropology at Roehampton University, trained in depth with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine. Eline worked at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University for five years, where she created a Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers, and pioneered soulful academic pedagogy. Her recent book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body was well received as a unique blend of theory and practice and a medicine for our times. 

She is now a full-time change-maker and facilitates deep transformation through coaching and courses both online and in person. Her approach The Way of the Wild Soul offers a set of embodied, creative, and spiritual tools to re-connect with inner strength and navigate life’s challenges with confidence. 

Website: https://www.elinekieft.com Also on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn