Knight of Wands, part 1

I should have known it wouldn't be easy.

It has been days since I meditated. I tried a few times and fell asleep. And I didn't try more times than that. Some part of me inside has been freaking out about my losing the consistency of it when it seems to be working well. Some other part of me has been freaking out period and trying to avoid everything about the subject. I realize that there are parts of me that want to slow things down and adjust, but I don't really care. I WANT to work through some of this stuff, and I'm already too freakin old, I don't need to wait another year or ten of life before I deal with it. So last night, around more avoidance-evasion efforts than you would believe, I forced myself into meditation.

First I touched base with Bolehren, Taan and Nero.

Then I told IG that it was time: I wanted to work on the Knight of Wands archetype. I knew already from the tiniest exposure that somehow this was tied into my childhood and that I was likely to react physically to it, but I was ready.

It took a dozen attempts to bring my attention back before I could even partly see it. It was a bizarre chaos of visual collage. It was somehow huge and small, pink and black, there was blood and wounds, it was a monster, it was a cartoon, it was somehow a thousand things at once. I closed my inner eyes and just spent awhile imagining the 'rain of love' in a monsoon on us, and then the 'light of love', and then the 'wind of love' which blew off a lot of 'pieces' here and there, some that seemed to come from inside it, and then a sort of clear thick 'chemical of love' that first slightly numbed and then disinfected and then rinsed clean. It took awhile for all that (especially since my mind was frantically trying to escape to any possible universe that did not involve dealing with this).

Near the end of the chem rinsing I realized that for a few moments I had been seeing and looking at -- without consciously noticing -- something. It reminded me of sometimes when you get chakra visuals or sounds and you're oblivious to them and suddenly your awareness throws up a flag that your eyes are seeing one thing and your 'other eyes' are seeing something completely different. I suddenly paid attention again and realized everything had vanished to be replaced by two things: a man standing in front of me, and a really huge "hospital ward" filled with populated beds that started about a hundred yards back. Except although it was definitely a 'hospital ward' it was outside with us.

I looked at the man.

"How can I possibly heal all these people?" I asked him, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them and the sense even from a distance that the wounds were grievous.

"Only you can do it," he observed with a shrug.

I walked over to the nearest bed. My body abreacted wildly and I forced my attention to stay there. On the bed was a person, I couldn't even tell gender. Their body was on its side. The torso was opened up with a perfectly round hole, and all their guts were sort of "formed" into a semi-stiff shape that stuck straight out of them, like all the intestines had been fashioned into a blunt club of sorts. I felt revulsion through my whole body and shuddered. I looked at the head, which was turned so the face was mostly face-up. The eyes were slightly filmed over and still. I felt sick and nauseated. I backed off from the bed in disgust and looked back at the man.

Me: Oh my god. That one is dead.

Him: No, not dead. None of them are dead.

I looked back at the bed with a dawning idea. "How long have they been in that condition?" I whispered, starting to feel some degree of horror.

"Time is perceptual," he said, and I understood he meant, not real and not relevant to this question, but I also understood that these are old... generally these are not energies from any time near the present in my life.

I tried to see the far end of the hospital beds filled with bloody people. There were too many to count, and as I turned to ask the man about it, into my head came the understanding (I think from IG) that this was 'representative'; there were vastly more where these came from, but they were representing all the others. I wondered if each one of these represented some event of my childhood. Would I find a thousand bodies that resulted from a stepmom slamming my head against the wall repeatedly in her rage? A few hundred from a body covered with deep welts from the belt, conveniently that didn't show outside my clothes? Maybe one really mutilated body for the time I missed christmas and got slapped across the face about 120 times until I had a 3" black-purple bruise with blood blisters down my face, and got my presents given me the next May (when I got in trouble for not being excited enough to get them)?

The sense of overwhelm came back. I realized I couldn't possibly deal with this many things. I mean, it takes a bit to deal with even ONE archetypal piece; I would be meditating on horror every night for the next five years to get through that! I can't do it. I can't begin to do it. It's too much.

I walked away from the beds and back toward IG, and then I had an idea and turned around. I called 'The Great White Brotherhood Medical Assistance Team' that I'd heard referenced some, and that despite its rather silly name I had reason to believe was an identity-set that really did work with people in my world if requested. I told them, I know you guys are normally requested for medical stuff and this is probably psyche stuff, despite the medical archetypes. But surely you can deal with this or find me the kind of identities who can help me. Please, you've got to help me heal this stuff, it's too much for me.

And I left. I will go back. But I can't begin to do that alone. I've never had an archetype that I felt so completely overwhelmed by.

I should probably make my next few archetype meditations on the ones I love, like Responsibility and Sun.