Book Club: Week 6: Towards Healing
Queen Maeve and Addiction - 500 pages of mythical brain spaghetti!
Guest Post by
- Week 6, Chapter 5 of Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction by Sylvia Brinton Perera.
“I came for the Celts and stayed for the addiction therapy advice”
-Raven’s Review Good Reads
I read the above review about our book club choice and thought- yes that about sums it up!
This book is not an easy read!
But at times the words are so powerful, it disorients me, and I bounce back quite different.
For me, Perera is offering a profound take on addiction and addiction recovery, offering Celtic Queen Maeve as a potent vessel through which we can hold, deeply see, explore and integrate all that makes up our whole Self.
And since I know that my deepest struggles with sugar and processed food addiction marshal around disconnection from my true Self - those times when I cannot face all of me and I turn away - offering Maeve in all her complexity as a vessel to hold all of it, all the meaning, all truth, all the pain, all the suffering and in which to reflect is a truly beautiful thing.
Quotes:
Perera writes:
“When the suffering was thus held in the vessel of meaning, they [addicts] could disidentify from its grip to find a new relationship to their disease. They were healed by being restored to self-acceptance and more harmonious functioning as they wandered on their long journey from bondage towards the home that was ahead of them.”
Perera goes onto discuss the concept of archetypal patterns and perspective. She writes
“To find healing – the addict and those addicted parts of all of us must awaken to conscious appreciation of and conscious devotion to the many aspects of the archetypal field that we glimpse through the mythic images of Maeve.”
Provocations:
Battle Goddess, Earth Mother, Inspiring Muse, Sovereign Process, Loathsome Hag, Inebriating Drunk, Passionate Appetite and Sacred Vessel – these aspects of Self are all seen and held within Queen Maeve.
My question is.:
Do you recognise and accept these “mythic potencies” as the diverse parts of you?
How do these parts of you influence and play out in your life? For example, where are you the Battle Goddess, the Earth Mother, the Loathsome Hag? And can you accept and integrate all these parts within you?
Are you an integrated Whole Self or are the parts of you that you reject?
Thank you so much for reading along with Kate Oliver and I. This is a huge tome of a book, but I hope our short overviews, shared quotes and provocations, spark curiosity and reflection.
With you in Circle in these (r)evolutionary times
Mitlé
