Inner Journey – Snake Medicine

Treading water in a glistening pool of peridot green, I felt this new place and another challenge brewing. So, for one peaceful moment, I savored my tranquility.

Then I saw him. He looked the same, yet there was a distance between us that I didn’t remember from the other meetings.

I walked out of the water naked to stand next to this Indian man who without a word, reached into my heart and unwound the strings that entrapped me. They were blood vessels, nerves and other pipes, twisted and entropic. All mine, they were also energy channels, pinched-off and suffocating inside my chest. Once they were completely unwound, I could breath more freely; I could even see and hear more clearly.

“Work with snake medicine on the upper plane,” he gave me one simple verbal instruction. “Go on an inner vision quest to find and feel the medicine. Snake will heal you with its power and its sweetness.”

In spite of the odd identifier, “sweetness?” I mused, I lay down right there draping my body over the grand and rocky terrain that surrounded the water. Immediately a grossly large white snake rose up from under those rocks someplace and moved around my body. Intestines pulsing, I was viscerally frightened, or something like it.

My skin began to crawl and the marrow in my bones extruded fear rather than red blood cells as the great white snake weaved its way in and out, between my legs and arms, up onto my torso from between my legs. There it lay, on top of me, for a long time with its head lifted, looking straight at me, shooting its tongue in and out, lackadaisically. Soaking up the Sun, this etheric serpent widened and flattened, sticking to my skin.

After some time, I became accustomed to the presence of its big head on my body, and the fear began to slowly dissipate.

When the snake retreated back into a crevasse in the rocks, I stood up, still naked, and reversed my path too. I wasn’t really afraid, though I left nothing to chance as I backed out of my journey, up to the entry point where I stood on a mesa, looking outward at all that existed around me.

“Don’t forget who walks with you always,” the words were said as if from inside my heart, transmitting messages to me through the untangled strings into my limbs and my head, through my nerve plexi and chakras into my more subtle bodies. As the Indian reminded me, I closed and sealed the exit door to the middle world.

Standing there watching the sun set and the stars twinkle, one by one spotting the purpling sky, I called from my soul to my lion. My big-maned-cat with the big paws rubbed against my leg; his presence was comforting and encouraging.

We wandered a bit until we found some grass and lay down together, feeling the layers of the evening temperatures turn to cool night, the night to an even cooler dawn, and then the Sun rose again, heating and nudging us both to attention in the early hours of the morning.

That next day I went back to the same place. I stood on that mesa asking the wind, “who is my soul group here, now, in this time?”

The answer came from the Indian who again reminded me of what I already knew and somehow wanted to avoid, even in all this outward availability, “your soul group is all things on this planet.”

When he said it I had a moment of total acceptance and freedom, and like a monkey or a goat, sure-footedly bouldered my way down toward the green pool, swimming naked, just like before, almost in a trance.

“Look around you. See the anchors here.” The Indian was now visibly standing at water’s edge. He waved one of his arms, sweeping it sideways with his palm up as if to say, ‘it’s all here for you.’

Many people of all ethnicities stood silently at the edge. There were Indian, Asian, Hispanic, Caucasian and African people. There was also a snake, a bear and a wild cat, all looking in at me treading water once again in the middle of the green pool.

Even with the snake present, I remained still in the water and watched without fear.

Stirring my own primordial energies to meet his ability for transmutation and transformation, I waited for the white snake to initiate me again. This time it slithered into the water and began to swim around me in circles. The speed of its churning created a whirlpool, gathering and taking me down. Snake was wrapped loosely around my body as I went further down with it into the green bands of color. There were layers, maybe three or four, all different shades of green. Yellows, blues, even black-greens, were visible down there.

I remember acknowledging that my breath was moving along my spine in a state of containment and motility, expending nothing on the outer world. Not a single bubble of air released as this pranic force built inside me. Eventually I emerged, breaking the surface as a large bird, part human, part aviatrix, arms overhead, the water parting and the air swirling chaotically.

“You did well allowing your group to come to you,” the Indian nodded as he looked over his shoulder, walking away, up through the boulders, floating over the smooth and rounded tops, not a toe touching down.