Inner vs. Outer Energy

Lately I'm in the mood to wax on about this stuff so I decided I should blog on any conversation about it I had to put in writing anyway.

So regarding the part where she plucked the energy-object from you: does an archetype ever request something like this and you don't feel comfortable giving it to them?

You mean, does an archetype ever make you feel wary and worried and unsafe? Hell yes of course, if I had a perfect relationship with them I usually wouldn't be meditating on them in the first place. ;-)

That is part of the point though. You honor them, respect them, and when you really want to run away or refuse them, you make a point to trust them, because that is another way of showing honor, is making a point to give them that. It's a relationship. It takes work.

Sometimes I've had a real problem with an arch and I've just stood there and poured my heart out about how I felt and how sorry I was that I found their giant insect head so revolting and how I wanted to truly know them however they were and I hoped they'd be willing to work with me even though I'm an ignorant dolt sometimes because despite my fear I meant well and I knew they'd be really awesome when I got over my own stuff and accepted them. This is another kind of working with an arch; talking helps too and can make changes, if you are really letting yourself "feel" emotionally during the process and you're being honest.

(As an aside, I once talked to a spider like that and had some cool experience as a result.)

If you feel poorly about the arch, it feels poorly about you. This is all one dynamic, one relationship. Unlike the outer world, it's not like you have relationship A with someone and they have relationship B with you and those might have nothing to do with each other because we inhabit our own perceptual universes. One person can be funny and another offended over the same energy in our outer world because there is so much personal filtering and interpreting on each side. But in the inner world it is ONE relationship. What you feel, they feel. So if you feel distrustful and fearful, that energy is just as much present in them about you.

If I have something I don't feel right about, I ask IG, and following their advice. If for some reason I am not communicating well with IG at that moment or they aren't responding, and I simply could not do something an arch wants for whatever reason, the way I would handle it is like this:

I would tell the arch honestly, "I want to work with you, and if that's what you want, I want to give it to you. But I am afraid. I tell you what. I will give you a bunch of energy of my trust and my fear and my hope that you and I will work better together in the future, and I hope you will accept this and honor this. I will bring you back again so we can try this in the future and I hope I'm less afraid by then." Then I would attempt to summon the energy of those feelings within me, and as much of the energy of 'whatever they wanted' as I could stand to part with to include for them, and I would make it into something and give them that.

The point is, it's a GOOD FAITH endeavor. It is more important to show honor and respect, to be polite and extremely honest, to make yourself care about the arch and about your relationship with it, to summon a degree of gratitude for it, than any of the other mundane details that a meditation might have involved.

I have a hard time trusting that my archetypes aren't going to hurt me, that I have actually healed them and integrated them (which is why my gut instinct is still "Aaagh! Something bad, kill it, kill it!"). I worry that they'll want some part of me or I'll take something from them, and it will be a bad, bad thing.

I kind of understand this, but it made me laugh, because it is actually applying a completely different framework to archmeds than they are based on. Like... mixing metaphors, sort of.

The whole point of an archmed is that you are working with the energies of your reality. Yours... really yours. So the whole point of working with those energies is because they are OF you. It's all you. ALL. YOU. Granted we are all pretty fractalized from ourselves, hence our problems and the archetypes with teeth (heh), but it's all a part of us. If it were not a part of us, there would be no point to doing it at all, and it wouldn't have the power and change effects.

The archetype is you. The energy they hold is you. Sure, we perceive them as separate, which is good thing, because I've had lots of stuff "in me", problems in psyche or health or emotion that seemed damnably difficult to deal with, to know where to start, to know where I could apply the hammer or the wrench. Personalizing something into a 'separate' identity is great because then I can interact with those energies directly. But perceiving them as separate doesn't make them separate.

An arch can't take a part of you in any way that would make it "no longer part of you". The point to sharing parts of each other is because it's all you but you have "become estranged from" the energy that is the archetype, you have developed a sense of separation and of filtered perception. You give it some of what you perceive to be yours, it gives you some of what it perceives to own itself, and the goal is that the 'separation dividing you' will 'blend' with that sharing, and on some level, you will become more aware of the fact that this energy is a part of you.

That is why we try to merge with archetypes at the end of it; we take it unto us because it IS a part of us and we want to become more aware of that and more facile with that energy. We're not merging with something 'other' or merging would be a frightening thing, seen like possession. We're merging with the energies we already own but are estranged from.

I suspect if an arch really wanted something you felt uncomfortable giving, that it would almost be a kind of test. The "trust" it would take for you to allow yourself that vulnerability and hand it over with good faith, would be far more important as a part of the process, than the actual thing handed over.

You can control stuff when you own it. You can't own it when you are separated from it. You have to get to the point where something is truly perceived as "a part of you" and then "their" energies, which were yours all along but inaccessible if not outright problematic, then become "your" energy to work with. Not only does the problem go away then, but you have a little more power in the here and now for everything.

You could do a meditation on "the part of myself I was afraid to give to the arch XYZ" too and that would probably be a good one!

PJ