Lilith & Health
When I sit down to work out thoughts on Lilith, I often find myself inside one or another feeling, and seem unable to express anything cogent or cogently. Yet when some other being asks me about her, I can respond with a torrent from I-don’t-know-where.
This is adapted from my response to a reader’s question about Lilith’s relationship to healing:
my thoughts on lilith and healing: lilith invites us to embody an uncompromised relationship with our bodies as extensions of the natural world. not a flowery, let’s-hold-hands ”we are the world and maybe we should all recycle” sort of thing, but that we have our own wild sides. that the wild is us, is natural, and can course through us if we let it, and it can inform how we tie together our whole beings and relate to all of life.
i live in los angeles, and we have coyotes here. LA has lots of hills, and at night they step out and roam here and there. people are often paranoid about letting their dogs and cats out at night. the presence of these coyotes (and their so very anti-urbanity howling!) makes me think of lilith often. i feel lilith is clear that the natural processes of life, even though messy, are of prime importance.
people terrify themselves with the idea of the messiness of life, and lilith is an energy that invites us to honor the fact that we’re tied to all of life, that we’re animals with drives and something wired into our makeup that is the wild of the natural world, and that things running their natural courses do get messy.
“it’s normal that pets get killed” would not be the point to lilith, but that when the natural flow of things is not interfered with, this kind of thing can happen. but it’s not heartless, it’s absolutely heartful in a way that modern people, civilized people, have tried to squeeze out of themselves. the good news is that we can never squeeze it out of us, never. it’s part of who we are.
so, then, think of health as the wholeness of body+heart+mind+soul, and consider where interventions thought of as modern (and therefore better than what people used to do, have done for a long time) interfere with the natural order of things. while we’re not aware of it yet on a grand scale, a huge giant bigbigbig thing on our collective plate right now is what happens to a woman using hormonal birth control. this is just huge. the body, and therefore the whole being, gets tuned out of whack by a chemical intervention, and any wisdom that the whole being might be offering by manifesting a hormonal imbalance in the body is not possibly seen. (it doesn’t mean that certain women aren’t positively benefitted by this as a treatment, but not the numbers who are prescribed it as an attempted answer to a problem.) can we recover the kind of eyes needed to see the messages of the whole being that the body has to offer? will we choose to relearn how to relate to ourselves in this way as extensions of nature, and therefore possessing in each of us the wisdom of the natural world?
transfer this kind of thinking to type ii diabetes, cancer, overweight, depression, and everything else and you’ll begin to have a handle on what lilith has to offer about health considerations: when the wisdom of the body is ignored, the whole being suffers. in the long term, we have gotten ourselves into screwing ourselves over for choosing to believe the newtonian perspective of science/medicine that the body is merely a machine. lilith would have us search out and experientially test potential remedies to bring the body back in balance. what does this food in my hand feel like to my body? does my body support taking it in and making it part of me? the headline: we’ve forgotten that we’re part of nature! and lilith offers a door into reconnecting with the wisdom of our wild selves, which possess much undeveloped and untapped wisdom and strength.
when we doubt the wisdom of the natural world (and forget how to identify as the natural world), we buy into the cartesian-newtonian model of life that we’re using to destroy ourselves.
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March 10, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
March 11th, 2008 at 2:03 am
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