Fairy Tale Therapy: Part 4
The Hunger That Drives Us
This is an image that haunts me from Buddhist cosmology… a realm populated by two legged creatures with enormous, swollen bellies, spindly limbs, and tiny mouths. These
are the Hungry Ghosts who populate a realm that sits between the animal, and the hell realm. These miserable creatures suffer from insatiable hunger, symbolized by their enormous bellies, that they can never fulfill because of their tiny mouths…
I relate to the feeling that there is a big hole inside me that I stuff with media, food, scholarship, drink, and experiences… I think you probably relate to it at some level too. If you aren’t utterly consumed by securing your basic needs, you may find yourself chasing thrills, death scrolling, calculating macros, optimizing stock portfolios, and managing and endless parade of possessions...some of which have their own possessions…
And all the while, we are quietly, privately, aching for something we cannot name.
For belonging in rooms where you perform confidence.
The longing for release from your own inner demons who gather and seethe and fester.. and then strike out at the most inconvenient, most embarrassing, most why now moments imaginable.
A proper funeral for unimaginable grief.
Longing that learned to disguise itself as irritability, or numbness, or the restless need to scroll just one more time.
Your soul is on a silent and unavoidable quest to become.
But what does this mean? And how do we go about it?
You won’t find an online training for this. No insta-worthy, five-step framework that will walk you through the underworld and hand you back yourself, reassembled.
You will have to walk through the wilderness of life alone. But maybe, after reading the conclusion of our tale, you will feel the reassurance of soft weathered, ancestral hands reaching out as if to say, we see you.
Change Is Not a Choice
None of us have a choice in the matter. Every one of us will, indeed, feel the sharp edges of our broken lives. Not one molecule in the entire universe has a choice. The growth cycle will happen and will hurt where it hurts. Nature offers perfect examples of this:
The acorn will become the oak. Or it will break down and be recycled, carrying it’s dna into the earth to try again…and again.
The caterpillar will inevitably dissolve in a self-built transformation chamber to emerge the butterfly.
Jung called it individuation, and spent a lifetime mapping how the psyche seeks to integrate what has been split off or buried - the way a plant moves toward light: There is an essential nature to all things and all things gravitate toward it.
Aristotle called it telos.
Plato called it Eros: a cosmic and inherent movement of any living system toward its own wholeness, beauty, and the ultimate destination of completion.
James Hillman in The Soul’s Code talks about this destination of completion as your
daimon which has been present since before your birth, your soul’s intention that pulls you toward your true form and the clearest expression of who you are.
In stark contrast to the ancient priest, who tempted fate with offerings of meat to the fire, the ancient yogi recognized this becoming as inherent to all things - and offered his own “meat body” to the fires of discipline.
Like Luke Skywalker, we can attempt to repress or avoid the process. Increasingly modern thinkers are agreeing with the ancients - whatever is seeking expression will find another outlet like illness, addiction, anxiety, and depression.
The process of becoming is inevitable, but the quality of your participation is not.
You can move through the cycles of loss, pain, and injury, repeating patterns without ever understanding what they are asking of you. Or you can show up with attention, and with a willingness to be changed by what you meet.
Fairy Tales: Whats In It For Us
Studying the old stories offers us a witness to this becoming - which can be a twisted, miserable, lonely path at times. And doesn’t your pain feel a little less vicious when you’ve got someone there in the room feeling compassion for you? THIS is what the stories do for me.
Fairy tales also help to name some of the very subtle stings and stabs of life. And isn’t it reassuring when a doctor is able to diagnose your mysterious symptoms? THIS is what the stories do for me.
They say to me, We have left a trail for you to follow through the dark forests of your life.
Now, let’s dive back into the forest and complete the quest!
Handless Maiden Conclusion
The devil is furious that the maiden, who escaped the terms of his bargain, has now married the King who has made her silver, provisional hands - and that they have had a son…. So he interfered again. He caused a series of miscommunications between the King and his wife and the Queen is forced back into exile. She escapes with her son into the deepest darkest forest where a magical helper shows them the way to a modest little cabin. They lived there for 7 years while the King searched for them.
In that seven years, the Prince grew into a young healthy lad while the Queen tended to their daily needs. She cooked. Washed their clothes. Swept the floors. It was a quiet, and ordinary life. She had no expectation that life would become anything more - but slowly, over the seven years, her hands grew back.
One day the King finds them and they all return to the kingdom where they are married for a second time.
And they live happily ever after...
The end.
It Ain’t Disney
The tales are never what they appear to be at the surface. They are not meant to entertain. They are meant to communicate something valuable to you (specifically) about your life (specifically. They impart the kind of wisdom you can’t find written in neat Hallmark sentences…
This is material you have to sit with if you want the ancestors to speak directly to you.
You have to meditate on it. One bit at a time. You have to see where it lights up in your body. Where your stomach clenches. Where you feel resistance. You have to hold each element in the center of your mind like a statue in a museum where you can walk around it and consider it from different angles. (Called circumambulation by Jungians).
Here are my observations so far in my growing relationship with this tale.
Choose Exile
In our tale, the Queen chooses to go into exile a second time (I elaborated on potential meanings and relatable life scenarios in Part 1).
She accepts her life circumstances and goes willingly in full vulnerability.
She shows up with attention, and with a willingness to be changed by what she meets there.
Where have you consciously faced your realities?
Opened your arms wide and allowed the stream of your life to carry you into the unknown?
Have you ever tried to get sober or quit some other relationship of dependency?
Have you ever decided to go into analysis or therapy for something?
Left a relationship or other construction of reality without knowing where you might land?
These are trips into completely uncharted territory. They can be incredibly dark and scary times - and you are completely vulnerable! You can’t use your planner to organize your experience. You can’t even gather your pluck and go into the unknown with the intention of maintaining an attitude that it will be a good learning experience.
The process of becoming has its own agenda and it may have no care for your boundaries, dreams and preferences. Your vulnerability is a necessary ingredient.
You must be willing to be changed by what you meet in that darkness.
Feet On The Ground. Hands In the Soil.
The Queen’s hands grew back because she willingly gets up every day and participates in the life she has. It wasn’t a wizard’s spell. She didn’t drink a magic potion. She grew them back herself by staying. By doing the daily, unglamorous, and embodied work of showing up to the circumstances of life.
Feet on the ground. Hands in the soil. The magic is nothing more complicated than that.
The path is right under your feet.
You do not need to go to the mountain.
You do not need to find a magic pill or formula.
You do not need to sell your soul to a guru or self proclaimed content creator who promises to make you more special.
The magic is here now. The path is right under your feet. The magic medicine is found only here in this moment. In your pain. In your longing. And in your frustrations that this moment may not be what you pictured.
The quality of your presence to this moment is something - probably the only thing - that you can influence. Your challenge is to find ways of cultivating a living relationship with the now-magic. Meditation... nature... gratitude... pranayama... music.
Find YOUR thing and practice it with the same dedication that drives daily teeth brushing
Hands
As we learned in Part 1, hands are a symbol of our ability to show up and be of the world. To interact with it. To touch, receive, make, and do. To pray, heal. Hands represent our self agency. Our ability to say yes or no. To decide.
The Silver Handed Queen was only partially whole. Her hands were provisional.
In life this would look like showing up in a different way - and fully - to frustrations, irritations, and anxieties, as well as pleasures, and joys. in a different way. Not bypassing with food, screens, drugs, shopping.
Wholeness is built in presence. Not in escape.
In doing so she builds back her sense of self-agency.
The Child
As the Queen develops her own hands, she is also building something that was as absent as her hands: Her inner masculine principle (remember we aren’t talking about
binary gender stuff). Her ability to be, to make, to do, to grasp. To engage with the world directly instead of waiting to be rescued. Her hands grow back, slowly, cell by cell, through this doing. And beside her, growing at his own pace, is her son.
Anyone who has raised a child knows: parenthood cracks open everything you thought you understood about yourself. It doesn’t ask if you’re qualified. Parenthood requires you weather the task in front of you. The 3am fever after weeks of deficient sleep. The tantrum in the grocery store. The fierce, unglamorous repetition of “whats for dinner”.
Being a parent is an alchemical process in and of itself.
The child can become a window into our own inner child wounds. We see ourselves in them at different stages - each time is an opportunity to compassionately hold our own old wounds with the same tenderness we would give to them.
We start to care about our own becoming as fiercely as we care about theirs.
This is the doorway to real self-acceptance and integration of what we have sent into exile because either it was too big to feel, or because it posed a threat to belonging in our family or culture. You might recognize yourself in some of these examples:
Being praised only for performance, so your worth depended on achievement rather than simply being you.
Growing up around a parent’s addiction, where you learned hypervigilence
Managing your enviornment and everyone in it to avoid or absorb conflict.
“Boys don’t cry”
“What a cute little girl, why don’t you give us a smile.”
Growing up in a family where your sexual identity is viewed as a crime against God.
Have you ever looked inside yourself and decided to protect it like you would an infant? This is what the Queen does. This is what makes it possible to regrow her own hands. The magic of deciding that this thing (you) are vulnerable - and so worthy of protection - you will face life with a greater sense of strength in self.
Coagulatio
The growth of the Prince and the regrowth of the Queens hands are representative of
what is possible when two opposites come together and create something new.
In alchemical language, this stage is called Coagulatio, the process by which something that has been dissolved, broken apart, rendered formless, begins to solidify again.
To sum up: The whole alchemical process of living looks like this:
Calcinatio: We experience life whether pleasant or unpleasant. We suffer. We burn. It sucks. We try to avoid feeling this pain and it comes back somewhere else.
Solutio: We are broken down by pain and loss. We wander, broken. We wonder if life will ever be the same again.
Cogulatio: We are slowly rebuilt by a current stronger than our own will, and helped
along the way by moments of grace, unexpected ... help me here... and emerge a stronger, truer, version of ourselves. We experience a greater sense of wholeness each time we come to this stage. It’s worth it.
Coiniunctio: We experience periods of inner balance. Of sitting calmly in our own skin. At this stage we come closer and closer to being whole. Complete. To expressing the pattern our daimon hurled us into this life for us to experience.
Coniunctio: The Second Marriage
Why does the fairy tale end with a second marriage and not “happily ever after”? We can’t ignore this detail. When the King marries the Handless Maiden, they were both incomplete. She had no hands: no way of interacting with the outer world on her own (no masculine principle). The King was also untested. That first marriage was coagulatio. The union was a mixing of two people but it could not be said, alchemically, to be at the final, most pure, most whole stage. Coniunctio.
It is not until the Queen and King are both “purified” so to speak by the trials and the trudge of their individual journys that the two complete substances can come together and create the third, completely unique substance. The son.
In more relatable terms, think of it like this:
You have spent years developing a capacity to endure, survive, keep going. And somewhere inside, you’ve kept another capacity at a distance: the ability to receive, to soften, to let yourself be held. These capacities have been in opposition. One has kept the other in exile.
The coniunctio is the moment they stop fighting. Something inside you grows large enough to hold them both equally. In that balanced space something else is born. Something new: a grounded way of being in the world that neither capacity could have created alone.
This is where famous Jungian scholar, Marion Woodman’s, wisdom lands: the sacred marriage is not an idea that happens above the neck. It becomes real in a body where the psyche is finally no longer at war with itself.
Transformation doesn’t arrive as a concept. It arrives as a change in breath. In tissue. In the slow thaw of what has been braced against life for too long. The body becomes the place where wholeness is born.
This is the happily ever after that means something. The presence of wholeness.
We Are All Handless
When I meditate on this tale, I feel my own handless-ness. Do you? Consider this: have been handed screens instead of elders. Algorithms instead of ancestors. Metrics for success and no map for the soul.
We learned to outsource everything that mattered. We scroll for self-worth. We pay for meaning. We swallow antacids instead of asking what our body is trying to say.
We follow gurus. We join systems. We look for the one teacher, the one modality, the one retreat that will finally give us back what we have lost.
Jung saw this coming. The great danger, he wrote, does not come from outside. It comes from people themselves. From the collective loss of inner authority. From the severing of the individual from their own depths.
To be handless is to move through the world without the felt sense that you can participate consciously in your own life. The overculture has made us very good at looking everywhere except inward. We reach for the meta-analysis, the protocol, the expert opinion. We look for the framework that will organize the chaos into something manageable. And sometimes those things help. Other people’s maps can orient you when you are lost.
But the answers that actually change you are not found floating above your life. They are found in the middle of it. In the tightening across the chest. The sudden absence of breath. The way your shoulders have been holding something for so long you stopped noticing the weight.
The maiden’s hands grew back because she stayed in the forest. Not because she figured it out. Because she was present to it, day after day, in all its difficulty and ordinariness and grace.
That is the invitation. To stay present to what is unfolding. And isn't this exactly what the wisdom traditions are all trying to teach us?
What Comes Next
This is not the end of the work. It is never the end of the work.
The process is iterative. A fractal.
Fire of injury, loss,
Dissolution of who you think you were and what life is
Slow coming together of the new life
And then, when you are ready, another layer. Another exile. Another return. Each cycle bringing you closer to the center of yourself.
The natural world knows this. The seasons know this. The caterpillar and the oak and the tide all know this.
In the next series we will explore this process through the body directly, somatic practices for meeting the parts of yourself you have been wandering toward. We will go slowly. We will go together.
Samantha Leonard is a somatic therapist and yoga therapist with over 30 years of
experience serving the Charlotte and Lake Norman areas. She integrates multiple
approaches, including Internal Family Systems, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, Jungian Depth Psychology, and personalized Yoga Therapy to help people heal what talk therapy alone cannot reach.
Samantha is taking a very limited number of clients at this time. Please email infodavidsonyogatherapy@gmail.com with your interest.
You can read more, watch videos and hear podcasts on Samantha’s SUBSTACK page.
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