An Archetypal Tale to Inspire
This is a true story about the Golden Buddha, a massive and holy relic that lives in Thailand. It is an archetypal tale in that it has the ability to lift one's spirits and help you plug into a greater perspective. It was shared with me at a time when I was struggling with the feeling of being stuck, and unable to move forward with my life. I recall that it was springtime and with the change in season I was feeling the first piercing of my shell; the first shafts of light coming in and the early stirrings of something new, tender, green. I had spent the past few years in a long dark night of the soul after a devastating divorce and selling of my business and I essentially went into hiding. My trust in others and in life had been brutally broken, and a lot of old pain and trauma had surfaced. I moved myself out to the country, spent time working with the earth, rooting, healing, raising my boys. It was a true underworld journey, a return to myself, but my stay began to feel confining and I started to have flashes of something more guiding me forward. Like any time in a cocoon, or dark womb I began to want to move toward the light again.
I went through my practices of prayer, patience, and trust that I’d honed for so long. I put a tentative toe back into my work by building a practice for friends and loved ones in my barn, but it just wasn’t clicking and I longed for the feeling of being plugged into my passion. At one point I even tried to leave my healing practices altogether until a dear colleague gently coaxed me back in.
Hope was alive in the air at that time. I remember hiking in the redwoods and seeing little green shoots growing off the branches of the trees, and knowing that if everything around me is growing brand new shoots, and I'm a small part of this grand landscape, then I must be growing too.
This is when I was offered the tale of the Golden Buddha. It wasn’t a physical healing or an emotional healing, it was cosmological. I hope there’s a golden nugget in here for you all.
The Golden Buddha is a large statue in Thailand made of pure, solid gold. During a time of invasion, when the opposing country was coming in and destroying the religious relics, the monks who attended the statue moved quickly to cover it in thick layers of mud and stucco. Over time and generations, it was forgotten that there ever was a golden statue. Everyone just thought it was another Buddha composed of stucco. It was moved from place to place and at one point left abandoned under a tin roof. This went on for 200 years. Until one day, upon yet another attempt to relocate the statue, the shell cracked and a tiny flicker of gold was exposed deep inside. And with a methodical and careful chipping away, the monks were able to bring forth the Golden Buddha once again. “Amy,” my friend said, “The most important part of the story is that they hid the statue because it wasn’t safe. It was necessary to protect it.”
The tale has been working on me ever since. Slowly chipping away at the stuck mud I’d hidden myself inside. The light of awareness trickling in and showing me that it’s ok now to BE MORE OF ME. Giving me a greater container to hold the process that we go through of casting out parts of ourselves because it’s not safe (the monks hurriedly applying the stucco) and then at some point, when it simply becomes too uncomfortable, braving the Reclamation process that cannot be escaped (the monks breaking it down again). I gain one more ounce of trust that spirit is ever at work chipping away at my stuckness, with steady deliberate intention.
And I rest for a moment in the medicine of the archetypes and mythology, and their power to help us remember our soul’s journey.
All my love.
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