My story is a mermaid story.
For years I have been searching for spiritual information about mermaids, trying to sate my hunger, but whatever I found was too… vague. Romanticised. Empty. Tame.
It was frustrating. I figured it was because Mermaids are so elemental and changeable and secretive, like the ocean herself – no-one could get a grip on them because they were so slippery.
Everyone talking about mermaids and romance, mermaids as nurturing caring watery spirits, mermaids as beautiful gentle guides and I thought….
What about all the bloodthirsty stories of Mermaids wreaking revenge? The mermaids drowning beautiful men for kicks?
Or, most importantly, the mermaids getting fucked over by agents of the patriarchy: their dads, the kings, the sky gods?
Why isn’t THIS mentioned? How can you make a study of mermaids and neatly ignore the reams of tragic literature, all the folk stories where the protagonist, 99% of the time, gets screwed over?
Why isn’t anyone talking about THAT?
Also I thought that, maybe, the darker side of mermaids wouldn’t be palatable or interesting to the New-Age audience this info was usually directed at. Much as I love the New Age, it does like to whitewash stuff to make it fit a Love and Light stereotype. There was definitely a side to this mermaid stuff that gave the finger to love and light.
Perhaps this was just my Scorpio side showing here, but I wanted to learn more about the sex and death and forbiddeness of mermaids. You know. The juicy stuff. It felt like I kept reading the same thing over and over – sea magic, ocean tides, romance, loosing yourself in another person, Atlantis, Lemuria – but never getting any deeper. I want deep. I need deep.
So after reading and researching and hunting and not finding what I wanted I decided, fuck it. I’ll sort it out myself.
I created a sacred ritual and called to the mermaids. I told them, come – use me as your channel. Teach me everything you want me to know about you and about being a mermaid priestess in the world today. I fell deep into a meditation where I was floating in the middle of the ocean surrounded by mermaid spirits healing and guiding me.
And, dude, since I have been working with Mermaids, using the Mermaid Archetype in my everyday life, so much has changed.
I’ve always been drawn to mermaids because of their untamable, totally feminine nature. I always loved how Ariel in the Little Mermaid, took the first excuse she could come up with (a boy) to follow her dreams and travel to the human world, fuck the consequences. Mermaids are uninhibited, in charge of their own lives completely, follow their feelings and desires and don’t give a crap what anyone else thinks.
This archetype of the wild, sovereign mermaid feminine has been guiding me for years, but after my ritual it stepped up a notch.
A lot of it has been in strange, subtle ways: things that are like a teeny, tiny builds up of pressure along a fault line that provoke an earthquake that changes the landscape forevermore.
I started thinking differently. The more I worked with the Mermaid Sovereign Archetype, the more I valued myself. No, I would not take that awful job that I will resent all the way. No, if you are going to be an hour late I shall not wait for you. No, my hurt feelings are just as valid as yours, deal with it.
It felt weird, but I felt honoured, protected.
I was braver.
I was bolder.
I was more aware and in touch with my feelings.
The hippies were right. Mermaids are about emotions, but not just in some romantic girly way – they are about accepting anger and jealousy and self destruction without judgement. The whole tumultuous dangerous ocean of dark, cold emotion.
I started allowing myself to feel and accept shitty feelings like anger, fury, jealousy and injustice, rather than stuffing it down inside myself and using it as fuel for my own self-loathing pyre. I was in a relationship with an emotionally abusive chap for many years, and I’d been blind to how much that had messed with me until the Mermaids came along.
I started seeing how much I suppressed and ignored my feelings in every day life because I believed that emotions were weak and unreliable, had no merit and that they were what made women less than men.
How FUCKED UP is that?
Then it got political. My studies of mermaids had really brought home to me how their message and history is fiercely political and fiercely feminist, and how you just can’t separate them from that message. They are free, powerful, independent feminine beings wielding the full might of Water (emotion, intuition, love, fluidity). We are so far from that being true in human society nowadays.
Through working with the mermaids, I began to feel and respect my own power. It sounds crazy, but I spent most of my life defaulting to other’s thoughts and opinions. I felt like I had this powerful fire inside me but I needed other people’s permission to use it. Working with the mermaids, I started to actually give a crap about what I thought. I even started to make my own opinions more important than others.
And I’d read every new age self-development book going, tried all the tricks, all the
affirmations and the visualisations and all the new age shit.
The difference was, mermaids worked.
For me, mermaids are a catalysing force: they fill me with a fire and drive, a burning power that destroys my indecision and self doubt and just fucking gets behind me and pushes me to do what is important and sod the rest.
That’s not what I was told from all my hippy books.
That doesn’t come from sweetness and romance.
That only comes from accepting the shadow side of mermaids: because they are the ocean. They are all that is feminine. They are the essence of wild, raw lady power.
And dude, I am not perfect. Sometimes I still forget the true magical strength of the mermaids and hide from my own power.
But when I remember, when I connect – woah! It’s like everything is clearer, more focused, like I have cut all the insecure worrying crap and am thinking like a boss mermaid again.
I see the truth. And I deal with it.
I forgive my mistakes (which is a huge deal for a life long perfectionist) and adore my messed up self.
I decided I wanted to break up with the normal human world and live in a better one, a mermaidenly one, driven by love and desire and feeling and freedom rather than fear and control and smallness.
Every step I take nowadays is a step closer to claiming my free mermaid self, a step closer on the path to becoming a Mermaid Priestess. It’s a path of embodying an aspect of the divine – the Wild Feminine, the Mermaid Goddess It’s about living the mermaid archetype in the real world, and loving the experience.
Sometimes I think about how strange it is that my obsession with mermaids has been the catalyst for so much in my life, so much growth and strength and badassity. I mean, mermaids. Come on.
Then I understand that if a person is irresistibly drawn to a thing, a being, or a concept surely it means there is some power there for them to claim? There is some magic there transmitted through that particular language – be that the language of mermaids, or faeries, or yoga, or My Little Pony – that is needed and will nourish you.
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If you want to learn about the dark fucked-up side of mermaids, if you want you heart to explode with sovereign inspiration and the power to align totally with your mermaid self (who, by the way, is a brave, bold bitch who is fiercely protective of you) Why not come join us on the e-course, Be More Mermaid this April?
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