The Kraken

Hello there. Feel the places where the earth supports your body. Feel the sensations of your body as it is supported by the earth. Feel your lungs expand as you take a deep breath in. Feel the release as you let that breath go. Welcome to A Hit of Hope. And just a warning—this one goes deep, and so if that does not feel safe to you, I wish you goodness and light and hope, and invite you to consider listening to something else.

Transcript

Hello there.

Feel the places where the earth supports your body.

Know that you are held as you feel your lungs expand and take a deep breath in as you release and let that breath go.

Welcome to a hit of hope.

Just a warning,

This one goes deep.

And so if that does not feel safe to you right now,

I wish you goodness and light and hope and invite you to consider listening to something else.

In a past meditation,

I talked about the harpy in your head,

That voice that tries to convince you that you aren't good enough,

Or the one that is there to remind you of the ways you have messed up.

I bet most of us have a harpy in our heads.

I know I do.

But it also became obvious to me recently that I have something else lurking in my head.

A kraken.

Now one part of me wants to laugh at the melodrama of this,

And it is funny to imagine a big sea monster swimming around in my brain.

And who doesn't love the word kraken?

And yet the kraken inside isn't funny.

It's the monster that usually stays in the deep.

But sometimes that huge and fearsome creature surfaces,

Bringing terror and dragging all of those things with teeth up from the depths.

Inhale.

Exhale.

The word kraken comes from the Scandinavian word kraka,

Which is an unhealthy animal or something twisted.

Sometimes when it gets bad,

And I mean bad,

It isn't a harpy we are dealing with,

But a kraken.

We are dealing with something big and terrifying,

An unhealthy and wounded animal with sharp teeth.

Something twisted that comes from our deepest deeps and darkest darks.

It might be helpful to think of your kraken as your oldest wound.

The one that hurts you the most.

The trigger that brings out all kinds of monsters and darknesses.

And this can take everything in you to vanquish.

I'm not going to go into particulars,

And I'm fine now.

But my kraken woke up this week and started to hunt me.

It was terrifying.

I had met this kraken before.

It surfaced with my divorce,

My cancer.

And I knew my kraken thrived in silence and shame.

My kraken loves it when I keep my mouth shut.

Inhale.

Exhale.

When it got bad,

When the kraken was threatening to drag me down,

I knew I couldn't fight it alone.

Or if I tried,

I knew it would be harder and take longer.

So I reached out.

I emailed one of my wisest friends.

I went back to my notebooks,

Where I've gathered all kinds of wisdom,

And I let those words bring the light of love and hope and possibility into my battle with the kraken.

So armored,

This kraken almost instantly disappeared.

I do not mean to imply that battling a kraken is easy.

It certainly wasn't in the past.

But now I know what feeds my kraken,

What causes it to surface.

And I know what works for me in order to defeat it.

Saying the krakens aren't there isn't probably going to work.

And yet,

Knowing they are there,

Knowing what feeds them,

And refusing to give that to them,

That can begin to turn the tide,

As can reaching out for all of those comrades who are on your side.

Inhale.

Exhale.

May you be strong.

May you reach out.

And may you always defeat your kraken.

Namaste.

Reviews

Thank you as always. Perfectly timed and on point. Its especially good to be reminded not to wrestle long and hard alone with krakens. They flourish when you hold them close inside!

Fought my own Kraken this week Betsy, so listening to this this morning, was timely...
Xo

Excellent. Thanks for this session! 💥

Wow, Betsy, what an amazing piece! Thank you so much for creating this. 🙏💚🙏
I'm also deeply grateful for the synchronicities that brought me here. Exactly what I needed to hear right now... ✨

Just what I needed, just when I needed it. You are awesome Betsy!

Oh, Betsy, I don't have the words to express my gratitude properly, but thank you for this. I also appreciate the warning ahead of time. I didn't think I needed it, I just thought "oh yeah, I can do deep, I do it all the time, no problem." Well. My kraken came out of (seemingly) nowhere, somewhere in the vicinity of my reptilian brain. It smacked me around with all those wet tentacles and reached up into my forebrain to grab me and pull me under, sinking huge teeth into me all over the place. What came out of those wounds, some spurting, some draining, was shame and guilt and absolute disgust with myself for a series of related incidents stretching back at least four decades (my kraken started young). My kraken is still floating around keeping an eye on me as I write this, and it reminds me that someday it would be better for me to study it with openness and curiosity rather than trying to lock it up and/or run away. (My phone gets unruly sometimes when it thinks I've typed too much. Oops!)

Could relate to all that especially the reaching out part. Thank you