A season walking with The Hermit archetype

Im revisiting this blog, first published in December last year, since my sense is that this archetype beckons us earlier than that, and as October comes to a close, The Hermit might be a welcome companion to many of us.

This archetype  is the ninth archetype of the major arcana of the tarot, which is powerful imagery mapping a spiritual journey and of human consciousness unfolding. Spending time with these archetypal spaces is another way of exploring, and I see my job as offering these portals to you! Since the Hermit bears some similarities energetically to the 145 space we were in with the Ash tree, it feels timely to revisit her here too.  

Each archetype brings both mirroring and light to a particular part of humaning, and offers connections and meanings that can be powerful to explore.

                                                          The Hermit -woman in a cloak in the forest with a lamp and a deer

This mirroring can be both external and internal. In my time walking with The Hermit last year, I was working alone for close to a month on an island for a client. Alongside my work at The Soul Shed I have a small decorating business, and this took me to the seaside on the Isle of Wight where my days were very simple: I painted and wrote and ran along the sea shore, and did my yoga and breathwork practice. For three weeks my life felt very simple, focused, inward. Contact  with the rest of the world came in simple ordered pieces: a daily call with my husband, a whatsap chat with friends, a visit to the local shop for groceries…This order and simplicity brought a lot of clarity. 

I remember this time very fondly. And yet it was when I got back home that the deeper lessons of the hermit began to meet me. And it is my strong belief that it is in ordinary life that the archetypes can offer their deeper guidence. Far from signalling withdrawal from life, the wisdom of The Hermit seemed to be trying to show me how to hold to a path of alignment even in the thick of activity, in the thick of other humans doing their humaning.

How are we to know clarity when in the thick of busy life that is far from solitary? Far from predictably ordered. 

Here are some helpful ideas from "Meditations on the Tarot", athat I will share here:

The hermit has a lamp. The lamp  provides his clarity. He wears a cloak which provides his harmonious relationship with life, and he holds a staff which touches the earth, his immediate experience. 

I love the symbology of this. 

The Lamp

‘He possesses the gift of letting light shine in the darkness’

someone carrying a lantern in a desert in a darkening evening.

The lamp is held up to shine the way forward. This is an imaginal opening into the spiritual sight offered by corresponding with a power greater than myself. Humans experiencing ourselves as disconnected isolated islands is perhaps the great spiritual disease of our time. The “I” needs a place to re-source in. Often for me it’s the trees. Sometimes it’s resting in a sacred spot I have found in nature. Sometimes  I can find the sacred spot through yoga, breathwork, or creating with imagery. These practices help me to find the lamp -an illumination that shows path more clearly. These are the practices I share at The Soul Shed and I believe these lamps we discover are to be shared and celebrated. 

In my life there have also been people that have been lights that have shone ways forward for me. One was my friend Hilda. I met her when I was eight and she was eighty-three. I had recently changed schools and moved to a new neighbourhood. I was struggling to settle in and make new friends. She was a neighbour who lived alone, and  I would visit after school  and we would play Scrabble and watch Crossroads and Coronation Street, or I would badly play the piano to her. She loved  and accepted me with an enormous welcoming heart. The age difference meant nothing - she was my soul friend and we recognised each other. I was reminded of her in a conversation I had much more recently. I cried buckets as I realised I had not fully grieved her loss, when she died many years later,  while I was away at university.  Now I honour her here as a guiding light.

Hilda

The Cloak

The Hermit's cloak protects and enfolds his body and gives  him ‘The faculty of separating himself in order to listen and understand’. In spiritual terms, a Cloak gives the wearer sacred space for inner transformation, and it also offers a buffer for his direct human experience of the world. 

My witnessing self experiences this cloak  as the holy pause, between stimulus and response; if I take that pause,  I can  stay with what is, and come to know it more fully. This is often very different from what I expect. It’s an active pause, full of curiosity and enquiry. It’s not a place I can find when I’m fearful, exhausted, agitated. Comfort comes first. Self care comes first. Even if that’s as simple and immediate as a deep breath or referencing a re-source in my heart. 

This cloak creates something important - an internal boundary that means that I can reference both my internal experience and the external world, and choose my proximity in the moment. Unlike a shield or a sword, which offers protection, this cloak  offers flexibility and movement at the contact boundary- where skin meets life! 

The hermit archetype paired with a quote from Victor Frankl

The Staff

His staff touches the ground and ‘ possesses a sense of realism. He advances only after having touched the ground through immediate experience without intermediaries’ 

staff in desert and seascape

This inspires me to trust in what I know. In what I experience. Not as ultimate truth, but as my truth, and a necessary part of the whole unfolding. It is only if I stay anchored in my own human experience, that I can play my part in the unfolding. An enneagram teacher of mine says that we all hold a place in the matrix! And if we don’t each  be present and in  our place, then something is missing from this matric!

Did you notice that the female hermit in the imagery above doesnt have a staff? And yet she is surrounded by trees, offering her a vertical alignment of their own as she is walking in correspondence with them. The trees offer us access to the felt sense of our presence, by witnessing us with their own.

The Hermit. Rider-Waite

I wonder how all this is landing with you? Is there something in the Hermit archetype to re-source you today? The Hermit can offers a powerful opportunity to practice staying connected with yourself whilst walking through your life in these times of uncertainty and change.

When I enter into this spirit of inner witnessing of the human story that the Hermit offers, I give myself the grace not to expect myself to do it particularly well. But to try:

• To try trusting the lamp that shows clearer light when my own mind is confused or distracted or agitated.

• To know that I am cloaked and protected and that there’s always the option if pausing before I react 

• To remember to stand on the piece of ground I am in and connect with my sense of this exact moment of life and living in it. 

Here are some questions for journaling:

1.      Have there been people who have represented The Hermit for you in your life?  Have they led you forward in some way? Do they belong in your SoulCollage® deck?

2.      What practices help you to stay in a place that feels both safe and comfortable  in your skin,  and open to life? 

3.      What feelings thoughts and memories arise in you when you contemplate the archetypal image of The Hermit? 

4.      What do you need from the archetype of the hermit at this time in your life? 

5.      Which means most to you today? Staff,cloak or lamp? 

6.      Do you have a coat/stick/lamp that you could keep in your living space and meditate on this month?

If you’d like to explore your   soul imagery more…why not book a discovery call to explore archetypes together in a one to one creative session at The Soul Shed.

And, if you would like to spend a while together exploring this archetype, next weekend, then I would love to invite you to Sunday Openings, our monthly gathering online, for  The Soul Shed community, where we  share in intuitive creative practices of SoulCollage®, Deep-Mapping and journalling.

You will simply need to bring your phone camera and journal, and a willingness to go on a gentle interactive journey into your intuitive wisdom. No experience needed in anything apart from in being you

You will discover:

Imagery with messages for you

A deep reconnection with your heart

A connection with your breath as a re-source

The meaning  three empowering  symbols have for you

You will simply need to bring your phone camera and journal, and a willingness to go on a gentle interactive journey into your intuitive wisdom. No experience needed in anything apart from in being you.

I look forward to creating with you soon.