The enlarging of the soul requires not only some remodeling,
but some excavating.
—neal a. maxwell
Excavating the Garden:
Digging Up Gems
and Bones
Tending to the surface will remove some of the inner mess, but at some point it’s time to dig deep. In Antibes, France, across from my sea-view apartment, cranes went up and big yellow machines dug and pounded on the bedrock at the building site beyond my window until one day they suddenly stopped. I knew something curious was going on. The loud men with cranes and hardhats left, and a new, quiet crew came in wearing gloves and khaki pants. The work transformed from heavy banging and scraping with clawed machines to delicate brushing and digging with small spades, sable brushes, and pails. The workers spoke in whispers. One quiet evening at dusk my curiosity drew me to the site. No one was around and I slipped under the barrier. To my delight I saw the remains of the ancient Greek city, Antipolis, buried several feet below the surface of Antibes. I stared in awe at a stone road and the ancient stone foundations of houses.
Well over two thousand years earlier, the Greeks had sailed across the Mediterranean Sea and settled this seaside port. Later, Romans came. The Celts came. Napoleon came. Each layer of history left sediment that settled and needed to be explored for treasures and clues to the past before the new buildings, replete with a walled-off secret garden, could emerge. From my kitchen window I watched the archaeologists pry and probe delicately into the past where previous generations worked, played, ate, loved, fished, drank wine, and produced olive oil. Crawling on hands and knees, their work progressed day by day at a slow, gentle pace that disrupted the building construction and delayed it for over a year.
Synchronicities can be powerful messages. This one marked the beginning of my own period of inner excavations. The outer world mirrored my inner activities. I mined my inner landscape and began to dig up trash, clear the grounds of old hurts, and prepare the inner foundations for new building and landscaping as well. I feared finding dry bones, skulls, and remnants of painful relics from the past. The fear blocked the thrill of excavating the gems. Just below the surface of the conscious self lie levels and layers of rich earthy experiences, dreams, ideas, and feelings to explore. With the attitude of a mystical archaeologist, this is like entering into a quiet, meditative exploration of the hidden artifacts that make up the basis of the current state of the inner landscape.
The civilized world sits on top of burial mounds, ruins from ancient civilizations, and knowledge that has flourished and shaped our minds and souls for millennia. Each past thought, action, and event has led us forward to where we are right now in time. By examining these, we may have an ah-ha experience and understand that the warriors and satyrs dancing on a Grecian urn are lodged in our psyches and our universal memory. We may glimpse some of the fragments that brought us to where we are now and even know some of our past lives.
Some people know they need to excavate, but hesitate. A friend, fascinated by archeology, desperately wanted to understand what blocked her and where her fears came from. She knew she needed to dig down deep and reconnect with her wise heart to find the answers. But she refused. She wanted to maintain the status quo and not get her hands dirty. In refusing to go deep and dig into her inner layers, she cut off her ability to feel her feelings, receive intuitions, and gain insight. Instead she opted for numbness. She yearned to express, create, and live a vibrant life, but until she dug in deep to unblock the creative well, it could not flow freely. She didn’t want to risk shaking up the framework of what she imagined to be her stable, secure life. Inside of her burned a white-hot core, like in the earth. She was full of vibrant energy waiting to be channeled into constructive, creative activity. She longed to let go and play. She longed to know and to pray. To find her way she finally decided to excavate. So she began to write, keep journals, and talk openly with supportive friends about her inner explorations.
I needed to excavate too. An illness arrived that required digging deep to find its roots. I knew that the source could be found in attitudes and old patterns. It offered an opportunity to explore the connection between body, mind, and spirit. When excessive bleeding and a cyst the size of a golf ball appeared, I knew it could be serious. The usually surly French doctor who scanned my ovaries using ultrasound made a tiny gasp of surprise when she saw the spot and suddenly seemed preoccupied with my comfort. A week later I ended up in a specialist’s office. After the discovery of the images of the black golf ball, I felt rattled. The specialist prescribed surgery. But I went home and decided to meditate on it. As an adolescent I’d had an ulcer and meditated it away in a short time. Maybe this would work for a cyst too.
Lying prone in bed, I placed my hands over my abdomen and imagined light filling the area. I concentrated and went deep into the past. I realized that I hated my body, especially being a woman. I recalled studying the Greek philosophers, who considered women to be like temples built over a sewer. In business I’d become the honorary man and acted like a man in a skirt to fit in. Feminine virtues and values like sharing, cooperation, and compassion get little play in the greedy, political corporate world. Those anti-feminine attitudes reflected my own and the way I’d cut myself off from my feminine, divine Self. But now I needed to dig them out and start over. “I love my body,” I repeated. I focused on relaxing and letting the energy of love flow into my body. “I love my feminine side,” I said aloud.
The work of an archaeologist is a tough one. It requires careful digging for long, often boring stretches and sifting through dust and debris for tiny chips of pottery and gems. Each recovered item adds to solving the puzzle of what is going on beneath the surface. Each careful brush stroke to the ground removes more of the earth that buries the heart of a mystery. The hours are long; the labor is painstaking under the hot sun. Bringing bones to light may not be pleasant. But once the earth has given up its secrets, once the mystical archaeologist has uncovered her inner remnants and pieced together the puzzle of why she hurts or what made her ill, she can share her discoveries, write down the reports of what she saw and how she felt, and then her world begins to shift with understanding. Bringing bones and gems to light frees the archaeologist in the garden to move on to other places.
During my archaeological dig into my inner landscape, I remembered the people in my life who gave me the impression that being a woman was a curse; the hateful words and slurs against the beauty, power, and grace of women resurfaced. These attitudes lodged in my being, hurt my body, and scarred my mind in the same ways that we scar and abuse Mother Earth. I imagined embracing my feminine qualities of softness, gentleness, and kindness. I held the womanly side of me in my arms and gave her permission to love, live, and express her creativity again. Tears flowed as the memories of the pain surfaced. A hateful relative who called me a whore; men at work who threw around the nasty energy of the word “bitch.” I gave myself permission to be a woman with all of the sweetness as well as the strength, power, charm, and the natural intuitive powers that we embody. The well of tears seemed endless and dark as the excavating continued, but finally the pain subsided and a sensation of lightness arrived. When I went for the tests the following week, the cyst had disappeared. I felt elated.
At the excavation site in Antibes, once the archaeologists felt satisfied that they’d found the most valuable items and discovered what they needed to know, they stopped digging. Their work didn’t go on forever. They quit and moved on. I hoped and prayed that the construction site would be transformed into a monument, and a park would grow up around the ancient foundations. But ancient ruins lay beneath most of the cities and dwellings in Europe’s Old World. So the construction workers got on with their job of pouring concrete, laying new foundations, and landscaping for the exquisite hidden garden. I felt devastated. As an American, I revered all old stones and wanted to preserve them. They should be public property, I thought. I wanted to protest and write to the mayor, but the work continued.
I had a small urge to get special credit and build monuments to the pieces of the past that I’d excavated internally as well. I viewed my inner work with a certain sense of pride. I wanted to erect a special shrine to mark the places in my past that had marked and injured me. I had dredged up painful memories from childhood, actions that I regretted, and memories of people who had damaged me. I saw faces I needed to forgive and how I needed to accept my role in the events that had occurred. I dug and dug a long time and brought many past hurts and pains to light. Couldn’t I build a monument to them as well? But like the secret garden and buildings taking shape beneath my window in Antibes, I needed to get on with my life. I needed to move on to other things and start to plant and build now, not dwell on the past or make memorials.
Like the archaeologists, I’d found enough. I’d found all that I needed and it was time to move into the next phase of planting and growing. In a few months a new building and landscape took shape, including a secret garden replete with a spectacular seven-foot-high wooden fence. In a short time, banana trees flourished and water fountains gurgled. For the passerby on the street, this looked like an oasis by the sea. From my balcony above the street, I peered over the fence into the turquoise pools and watched the fronds of the palm trees wave in the sea breeze. Only a few of us knew of the remains beneath the garden. Only a few of us needed to know. No one made a monument to the past, but on top of it they created a glorious, beautiful dream garden where people from around the world come to relax and take refuge. Soon the feminine aspect of the Divine would enter my life and reveal a deeper way of relating to my feminine nature, but she appears in her own time. For now it was time to begin to plant seeds for a better life.
Mystical Archaeologist’s Exercise
Sit quietly for a few minutes. Take up your digging pail and turn to the inner landscape. Dig down below the surface; dig gently. Stop. How does it feel? What does the earth look like? What things do you see taking shape under your archaeologist eye? Is it an image? A sculpture? An old piece of pottery? A jewel or bracelet with initials or a family heirloom? Is it an old bullet or an arrowhead? What did it shoot at? What wound did it cause? In your mind’s eye continue to dig and explore until you find something inside that attracts your attention. Pay attention. How do you feel about it? Write this down. Draw the images of your inner excavations—a vase, a doll, an old tin can. If you don’t like to draw or can’t, then create a collage using old magazines, glue, and colored pens. Give your drawing or collage a title.
If you continue to work with the images excavated from your inner terrain, they can become the source of powerful symbols for your writing, art, and creative expression, and also speak to you in your daily life. Sometimes they may appear in unexpected and synchronistic ways. Don’t build monuments to your excavated past. Locate the symbols of pain, understand your role in what took place, forgive yourself and others, then let it go. Compost your writing or art that comes from it; bury it; and see what grows from it or find some other unique way to transform it into something beautiful.