The killer!

The killer came with the both the full moon and my dark moon, an interesting combination of the light shining into the shadows to a deep and dark place, so well hidden that I hadn’t noticed how an experience almost twenty years ago continued playing out in my life in subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) ways! Still this is the way of the shadow, and I’m always grateful to the moon for helping me to see the patterns. 

I’ve had this thing about killing for a good many years now, wrapped into the idea of ahimsa and non-harming, the first yama or ethical principle of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.  Yet this has been tested a number of times over the years, not least before lock-down when we discovered a family of mice living in our wing. I didn’t like the idea of killing them, but coming face to face with them, quite literally, I also didn’t want them living with us either.

This happened at the same time that the ants moved in as they do every year on the equinox energy shift. I was challenged by these little beings too but refused to kill them either, albeit I was quite happy if someone else did. My friend, Jo, suggested that all of this was happening to allow me the opportunity to look at my relationship with killing, but even then, while I was quite happy to look at it, I didn’t really understand the lesson I was meant to be learning.

E managed to catch the mice humanely and set them free at the very back of our garden, where the rates live happily (I can’t kill them either). The ants drove me slightly mad as they crawled over my mat while I was teaching Zoom classes from the wing during lock-down, and I prayed to the ant Deva to take her ant family somewhere else and whether she listened or not, I can’t be sure, but they moved out once the seasonal shift settled. So I thought this subject was dealt with, I’d managed to find a way to live in harmony with all these beings (and was quite happy at the thought of living in harmony with Covid too), but alas not.

Then a week last Monday I was really challenged by the zillions of flies that had congregated in our kitchen and were continuously buzzing around me as I tried to prepare food. The flies usually arrive at the end of June for a week or so but this year they were late in their arrival and they were also larger in number, a recognised issue here in the country parishes of Guernsey, with many a household complaint (so too about the number of rats may I add) and distracting E and I each day with our fly ranting.

That Monday I had had enough and I resolved then and there, in a moment of frustration more than anything else, a pre-menstrual rage perhaps, when those things that are bugging us (no pun intended) become crystal clear and I concluded, in that moment of clarity also, that I was done with trying to pretend the flies were OK, and I would embrace my inner killer, ha, I would show those flies! 

I grabbed a tea towel and squatted a few of them, enough to vent my rage, before continuing with the food preparation. I didn’t feel all together happy about it, because I truly don’t like the idea of killing and feel that we should make an effort to live in harmony with other beings in this world, they have just as much right to be here as us, but enough was enough, it was time to look at that aspect of myself that could kill if it chose. Late that afternoon, and I didn’t see the coincidence or put two and two together until the next day, but I finally gave in to my craving for fish.

I’ve been a vegetarian on and off since the age of 13. There have been times when I have needed to eat meat due to acute anaemia, but this has only been short term. I have gone through phases with fish, yet last year, I felt less inclination to eat fish and dropped this from my diet. However, over the last few months my body has been craving it and I became aware of nutritional deficiencies that were likely caused by my vegetarian diet. 

The body always knows best, however I ignored this wisdom for my head had decided I would not eat fish and that was that. It’s very easy to get caught up in labelling and the separation and denial of our body wisdom that comes with this; I see it much more clearly in  others than I am prepared to admit in myself, yet because I see it so clearly in others, I was aware that I had started to fall into that trap too, of having to define myself by my diet…”I am a vegan…”, “I am a vegetarian”…”I am gluten-free”. 

I’m none of these things, not really. I am who I am and sometimes my body needs eggs and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it needs nuts and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it needs warming foods and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it needs fish and sometimes it doesn’t. I feel that with yoga especially, we can get so caught up in the idea of what we think we should eat that we don’t actually listen to the messages our body is giving to us. 

But that Monday I was listening, because I couldn’t not; I was virtually salivating at the fish counter at Forest Stores, I needed fish and I finally surrendered my mind’s holding that I don’t eat fish, and I bought the freshest locally-caught fish they were selling and ate it with love and respect that evening. It crossed my mind that I was actually harming myself more by denying myself what I needed, than by eating the fish, and it was only in acknowledging my own inner killer that I was able to eat it without feeling guilt. 

The next day, Tuesday, one of my students came for Reiki and there was an annoying fly in my healing room. I commented on this and told her how I had actually killed some the day previously and she shared with me a story of how she had grown weary of the snails attached to the side of her house that she had pulled them off and popped them in a bucket of ale, which she had been told was a humane way of killing them. Later that evening she met a friend for dinner and her friend had given her a really hard time about the snail killing.

I asked my student whether her friend ate dead cow meat. She laughed and said that actually, as it happened, they had been eating steak at a local restaurant when the conversation took place. I laughed at the irony and commented that perhaps her friend was in no position to judge her, given that she was eating dead cow, albeit that she had not killed it herself, yet someone had had to kill it for her to be able to indulge in her choice of eating it.  

 All of a sudden it dawned on me, this issue we have around duality and seeing things as black and white and right and wrong and being averse to something or attached to something and judging of the opposite. I realised how much I had been creating my own suffering by holding on so strongly to my sense that one should not kill, and yet how that was always being tested, not least by the mice and the rats, the ants and now the flies, but also my youngest son and his fascination with guns.

I honestly don’t know how he even knew about guns because we never talked about them, he never watched anything with a gun in it but one day he wanted a gun and that was that. I resisted but he persisted until his auntie bought him one. Even then one was not enough and on and on he went. I eventually did some research, discussing the matter with friends whose boys were allowed nerf guns and also with a gun professional from the local shooting club. 

This man told me that from his experience children will find a way to what they want, so if I was to keep denying him the opportunity to get guns out of his system now, and in a responsible and controlled way, then my son will likely find his way to guns in the future and when I had less control over it. I knew what he meant. I have seen children denied sugar and screen/TV time during their childhood, who then go on to spend their early adulthood eating as much sugar and junk food as they can while watching as much screen/TV as they can. Extremes don’t work. 

When it comes to killing, while I absolutely don’t condone killing for the sake of killing, all of these experiences have helped me to recognise that by denying my own inner killer and judging others for killing – and yet expecting others to do the killing for me - is contradictory and causes inner conflict and disharmony. How can I expect to experience peace of mind when I have not reconciled various aspects of self and judge others so openly (and myself may I add)? Simply put, I can’t.

I have recognised that we all possess an inner killer, and I have finally owned this. While this doesn’t mean that I am going around killing things (I’ve not killed a fly since, it was just part of me understanding the lesson, they’ve virtually left us now anyway…always the way when the lesson is learnt), it does mean that I have become less judgmental about it, because I know that if someone was trying to kill me or my boys that I would likely try to kill them first in self-defence – this is inherent within us, the need for survival and to protect those we love; we all have the capacity to kill whether we like it or not. 

I realise that in my quest to not kill I was trying to kill a part of myself that I did not like, to put it in the shadows out of the way, to deny it. This in itself will kill me - as I have mentioned a number of times recently, anything that is repressed will find expression through inner dis-ease. It was quite a revelation, and a difficult one to stomach at that, but all part of the process of gaining a better understanding of the workings of the mind and of ahimsa, which is not there to give ourselves an even harder time, far from it, it is about being conscious of what we are doing and the reason for it. 

This does not make it right or wrong, it is all just an experience anyway and it is one that will change depending on the day and the circumstances. Like so much in life it is not certain, and this is the trickiest thing to get one’s head around; that everything is subject to change, including our opinions and judgements. Once we can settle more into the middle ground of uncertainty, of things not being this way or that way, into that quieter unknown space, then I believe we are more able to hear our body wisdom and embrace all aspects of ourselves, including the inner killer!