This experience below, and sharing it with you, is the way that I honor my profound LOVE FOR OUR EARTH MOTHER.
I was startled to see the baby rattlesnake, as I was walking casually back from my morning sunrise experience in the Southern California Desert. , camouflaged in the sand. I jumped up in the air!
Then I felt drop-to-my-knees grateful for the gift of rattlesnake medicine. What do I mean “gift”? Read on …
Because I wanted to experience this rattler, I gently poked it with a stick. It was immobilized. Paying possum? Hibernating?
When we my gentle prodding, and talking to it, it was very slow to wake up, and uncoil. Several seconds, and numerous gentle prods with my stick later, it actually started to uncoil — very slowly, with no urgency or suddenness.
Then it started to fully uncoil into its 18 inches. I could clearly see it’s young rattle at the end of its tail: almost translucent, and now shaking, very quietly. Probably because this was a very young snake, and the rattles had not fully hardened yet.I could barely hear it. And I read that’s these rattles are going 50 times per second!
I was blessed to be able to videotape it, as it slowly backed up, always facing me, tongue darting, trying to find a safe place to hide.
The most amazing part of this gift, this power totem, this medicine — THE WAY IT MOVED.
Watch the video carefully. It’s moments are so striking. I took in these movements — at such a deep level, knowing this was a gift from Life Force itself. I’ll say more about the movements later. It has to do with THE GIFT.
But to end this journaling on the experience itself, it backed to itself into a bush with multiple, slender trunks. The rattler became was so tightly coiled and wrapped in there, I couldn’t even reach it with a stick. At that point, I thanked it, and continued on my walk.
As I walked away on the desert floor, I was reviewing, ingesting, and metabolizing this gift, medicine and experience into me, with deep breathing and humbled gratitude.
I could feel that movement in my own body, in my cells, in my limbs, in the circulation of the Chi and the sensuous coiling and sidewinding.
This embodiment of undulation was magnified, when two hours later, I continued with my regular practice of Sananga (for info, see https://psychedelictimes.com/sananga/).
In the aftermath of my eyes burning — burning away the old way of seeing myself in the world, and bringing forth the new way of being — these very same undulatory serpentine movements flowed through me in a deeply embodied way.
I experienced the coiled snake in my coccyx.
Then uncoiling and undulating up my spine. With my breath. Strange that I had never visualized or experienced this before. Prior to this gift, when I brought my breath up my spine, or down my spine, it was always in a straight line. Now it was the undulatory serpentine movement of the baby rattler.
“It” coiled and uncoiled in my third eye ….
… in my throat,
… and most amazingly in my heart.
To have this rattlesnake movement serpentine undulatory coiling and uncoiling in the chamber of my sacred heart was most extraordinary.
And a little edgy! I can imagine my more angel-focused friends having a conniption :).
This experience (especially of the coiling and uncoiling in the heart chakra) can become a guided meditation for others, for you if you choose, and certainly for me to re-experience myself.
I can feel it even now — even as I’m dictating and reflecting on this experience.
This coiling and uncoiling of the serpentine undulations gives juice, and heft, and weight, and opening to any embodiment meditation I’ve ever done.
One of the oracle cards I consulted online stated that “the experiences I am having are part of an initiation into being a greater healer.”
The oracle card specifically mentioned that new energy would be flowing into my hands. And so it was that the rattlesnake coiled, uncoiled, serpentined, and undulated within my hands — oh my God.
And just to finish this with a reflection:
How a powerful experience like this can occur in a seemingly casual and unplanned walk in the desert. This happened in a vacant desert path, behind areas that are fenced, with dog poop, and peoples trash littered about. In other words, seemingly no special place. Yet behold: the earth and the desert itself is sacred always. May we unify with them.
Insight added later:
I have continued to feel the edginess of sensing a rattlesnake undulating in different parts of my body. Yet suddenly in one meditation, it was wrapped, woven, and permeated in a luminous white and rainbow shimmering light. So now these two seemingly opposite life forces – – the reptilian of the underworld, and the celestial of the upper realms are working together in the Unifying way.
P.S. if you resonated with this, please see info on our Joy Retreat near Boulder, COLO, in. June 2021: