The Halfling Girl

Loving Your Way Whole

Rainer Rilke wrote a poem titled “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” where he challenged us to not seek the easy answers but to embrace the unknown and to accept that life is not about winning or having it all figured out but about facing everything willingly, appreciating the beauty in the complexity of life, and allowing ourselves to be changed in our embracing of the totality of our experiences.

He challenged us to explore the “sacredness of defeat” and to stay in the game trusting that in the difficulties we come to find that the parts of ourselves that seem alien or even frightening might just after all be parts of us that are in fact helpless and in need of our affections.

The halfling girl is a story, like many stories, of liminal spaces, of longing, of the dark forest of the unconscious and the unknown through which we all must pass (more than once I’m afraid), and of stages of remembrance we move through as we awaken to ourselves and in that process ultimately to something greater.

My yoga teacher Nevine Michaan always says that it takes a long time to build a soul; that the road to building your soul is the long hard road through time but that we can find ways to make it a joy ride nonetheless.

The road to building your soul requires leaving the comfort of the village and setting out on a path that is all your own. If the path is already carved and the way easy and clear it’s likely not your own. We’re meant to wrestle a bit, to cut through the trees and create our own belonging.

We have to leave the “village” with no promises of who or what we will find in the dark forest or how long we will wander there.

The path of soul demands we drop timelines and our ideas of how things ought to go and to follow our longing and to plead our fidelity to it even when we may spend years or decades feeling like we’re getting nowhere. We must learn to keep showing up and know that that is the most important thing, not how we feel about showing up.

Our girl spends decades wandering and we don’t know what she did exactly in those days. If she took lovers or worked in a kitchen as a line cook. We don’t know if she stayed in her solitude or who she asked about how to become a whole girl.

Sometimes the most important things in stories are the things that aren’t said. We just know a long long time passed and in mythic terms that’s a lot. The story is letting us know this wasn’t a quick jaunt in the woods that led her to her Self but a grand adventure with dark nights and good trouble along the way.

I’m always struck in the story by her wrestling match with herself in the sacred waters. This grand fight that ultimately brings her to a trembling center. It was never lost on me that she was missing her left side. That she had to go find her heart.

In the ancient esoteric dialogues the left side is the lunar, the side of the heart, the feeling self, the unconscious mind, and the heart’s desires. While the right is the solar and the developed self, the worldly self, the part we show to the world, it’s the piece of us that signs a check and makes a deal.

In the Katonah Yoga® dialogue we speak of the mediating middle and how it’s our job to handle both our heart and the world and to weave a real braid so we’re not overly dominated by either; to be ones with both crow’s sight and the eyes of the dove which is where real wisdom rests.

I love that after she is unified with herself through this act of remembrance in the sacred river that she is totally discombobulated. For a while she dances with a limp and her eyes aren’t quite holding the same vision. It takes time to call ourselves home. It takes time to learn to mediate ourselves and to be congruent in our heart, mind, spirit, vision, speech, and embodiment.

I love that she dances anyway.

When she finds her way “home” she doesn’t remember the place. It is changed as her vision changes. She returns with clear seeing and realizes now that she wasn’t so exceptional after all. There are so many halfling girls and boys and it was only her painful story that led her to believe that “everyone else had it figured out" and that somehow her problems were “special.” This is a real humbling. I’m not you but I am something like you and really I’m nothing but you. This revolution gives her the wisdom to become a comfort to those embarking on their own journey to wrestling with their halfling selves.

When we make the difficult journey and we keep tender then we have something to bring back to the village that nourishes us all. And not just for now but for generations.

I’ll leave you now with the story. To make your own meaning. To see where the story has touched you and to sit with the images or symbols that are speaking to you.

It takes a long time to build a soul.

Happy trekking.

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Dangerous Women a year long container begins this August and doors are opening soon. We will engage with somatic dance, oral story, group and 1:1 coaching, breath, and ceremony.

Details coming soon.