"She Shouts in our Pains"
Moana, Rumpelstiltskin and Naming the Demon
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
- C.S. Lewis
I will die on the hill that 2016’s Moana is a top three Disney movie of all time. Reflecting my mediocre parenting, when my little boy was three, he watched it probably twenty times. If you’ve never seen it, I’m about to ruin it for you. The trickster demigod Maui steals the heart of Te Fiti, the goddess of nature. A thousand years later, Moana’s island is being destroyed by a mysterious crop blight. She ventures forth across dangerous seas and eventually confronts the volcanic demon Te Kā. At the end of the movie, she realises that the demon is actually an enraged version of Te Fiti, Mother Nature. When she returns the heart to her, Te Fiti becomes her loving and nurturing self again. This is a variant of a story we’ve been telling for thousands of years.1 And, like all perennial myths, it reveals a hidden relationship in our reality.
As it happens, my own personal hero’s journey started in Maui. About ten years ago, I was snorkeling in the emerald ocean off Lahaina. Swimming in deep water often gives me a sense of primal anxiety because I have instantly moved from the top of the food chain to the bottom. But this time it just felt like gliding through the inside of a gemstone. A warm, silent cathedral, filled with rays of light from a hundred stained-glass windows. I felt truly at one with my body and everything else around me. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a crippling panic attack turned this dream setting into an instant nightmare. My mind became a very busy place. I was suffering from sharp abdominal pains and felt like my entire body had blown up to five times its normal size. It was like an allergic reaction, but for everything, including my brain. I rushed myself to urgent care, but they couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with me.
In fact, I’ve only recently come to really understand what had started happening to me that day, and in the years since. It’s actually been like a really fun detective story. A big part of that process has been discovering that what I thought was a demon was probably something else entirely.
I am fascinated by the concept of the Rumpelstiltskin effect. This is when simply receiving a clinical diagnosis for an ailment removes a lot of its negative power. In the original fairytale, a young woman promises her first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin in exchange for the ability to spin straw into gold. When she changes her mind, he says he will only release her if she can guess his name. As Alan Levinovitz and Awais Aftab noted in an article about the phenomena, this is also how classic demonology is supposed to work. “Discover the esoteric name, control, and destroy the source of suffering. Traditional exorcism works according to a similar principle.”
Throughout my entire two-year psychotic depression, I kept repeating to my wife and psychiatrist that “my dragon was time.”
But now, I think my “dragon,” isn’t the demon Te Kā, it’s the goddess Te Fiti.
Revealing the demons.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
-Blaise Pascal
Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring why aspects of my spiritual awakening experience nearly ten years ago felt so evil. The intuitive I love, Mary, recently said that my heart-opening and dark night of the soul was a deliberate reentry to hell in order to reclaim a lost part of myself that had been left there. She said that a part of me had been frozen in place by judgment.
I hold diagnoses of pre-verbal trauma very lightly due to the fact that I’m not sure I can never know for sure. But I was born ten weeks prematurely and was kept in an incubator for months afterwards. I was denied any physical human contact for all but four hours of every day. My nervous system was probably wired in an incredibly unusual and hostile way, one that treats connection to pain in the body as something existentially dangerous.
Whether or not that was the cause, I have recently come to realise that time without stimulation is literally physically painful for me. Time is my demon. Ten years ago, the universe had been doing everything it could to bring my attention to this dynamic. It placed me in sequentially less and less stimulating work environments until eventually my psyche cracked. And then during that awakening day, I think I was stripped of a lot of my defensive scaffolding. A few months later, I made a heartfelt commitment to deal with my trauma. I was immediately plunged into a state of constant terror. I felt like nothing was safe, and I kept grasping on to savings accounts, spiritual ideologies and job titles to try and keep me from drowning. After my son was born, every time he cried, it created a truly hellish burning in my heart center. Perhaps it was an embodied echo of the sound of the incubator room. But it made me so enraged, my wife was worried I might hurt my son. My psychiatrist at the time even called me one Sunday evening to tell me not to kill my wife and children. I was never even close, but that was how concerned he was.
Even now, years later, I currently have a life remarkably free of any obvious stressors. I don’t really suffer from worries or anxiety at all. I have two wonderful children who are healthy, a supportive wife, and a career that brings me immense meaning and purpose. I now understand what unconditional love is. But I also realize I have constructed a life based around near-constant stimulation. I live in buzzing Manhattan. Up until the last few weeks, I drank a shedload of coffee in the morning, while I wrote to dance music. Then I had the euphoric adrenaline dump of full blown combat Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at lunch time. Then I filled my afternoons with gripping conversations, largely with new people. The moment the stimulation dropped off in the evening, when my wife and kids came home, I would find myself retreating into my phone, desperate for another fix.
I was pretty aware of how bad it was and have committed to address it, but I didn’t appreciate how much of the physical impact was previously below my level of awareness. If I’d read this essay three months ago I’d be thinking “boy, I’m glad most of this doesn’t apply to me.” And yet, everything that’s happened recently seems to have been conspiring to show me how much it does.
First I started doing jhana meditation, which drew my attention to the burning sensation in my chest. Curiosity as to whether it had a gastric cause led me to cut out caffeine. An absolute humbling at the hands of a 110lb, 17-year-old Brazilian kid at Jiu Jitsu led to a wrist injury that put me out of action for a few weeks. Two of my very best friends came to visit me and took me for a relaxing week in the Bahamas. With that fresh clarity, I came to realize that time without stimulation is painful, threatening, and triggering to me. So I can unconsciously resent anyone or anything that drags me into it, including my wife and children.
I wonder how much this dynamic applies to everyone. I suspect the easiest way for you to find out is to cut out all stimulation for a prolonged period of time and then see how easy it is for you to sit in a room for 30 minutes without a phone. That’s probably a bit of a challenge for many of us now. Thankfully, Leading Edge also has an expert in nervous system regulation, Jonny Miller, and he has his own tailored assessment that will give you your own scorecard. I fared pretty poorly with 58/100, where 100 is the best. Whoops.
And then, if you want to see if your body is in structural alignment, you can simply place your heels against a wall, lean back for five minutes, and let gravity show you where the imbalances are (or, even better, use a slant board).
With considerably greater embodied clarity, I now realize I experience much of my day with a profound burning in my heart center. Mary described my current initiation as a reunion with an unenvolved heart. Time was my dragon, the demon Te Kā before she became the goddess Te Fiti. She was a literal fire in my chest.
So I decided to see what she wanted.
Hands-on Healing.
During my experience inside the King’s Chamber in Egypt in December, I had a strong intuition to resolve the chronic pain in my lower back. At the time of my panic attack in Hawaii, I had started to really stretch deep into my lower back and clean up my diet. Snorkeling put me into an unusual sense of embodiment and then suddenly a catastrophic sense of panic. Over the next few years, every appeal to embodiment, connection, or heart opening resulted in a crisis so intense it often felt demonic. I now wonder if it was because of my fear of confronting overwhelming trauma held in the body. My work with Egoscue physical therapy has now centered around instability in my back and hips, particularly down my right leg. My latest round of exercises is now once again getting very deep into my lower back.
While I was exploring these topics I typed in everything from all these hours of research over the last few months into Claude, and it concluded that I probably had a chronically stressed nervous system. I wondered if I could test this diagnosis with my lived experience. Because I’m impatient and curious, for the last few months I have I flooded my calendar with different practices and practitioners in New York.2
I eventually found myself in the office of a magical woman called Delia Ahouandjinou, who specializes in a combination of disciplines she calls “manual therapy.” Using only the gentlest of touches around my body, she generated dramatic muscular contractions and spasms. She said there were many signs of tension and armoring in my organs, muscles and fascia, especially my heart and kidneys. This wasn’t speculative; I could literally feel it in my body when she touched key spots. Most interestingly, she said that the area surrounding my kidneys were frozen in place, perhaps due to emotional repression. I’ve literally never paid any attention to my kidneys, which might be precisely the problem. I then recalled what Mary had said about an emotional part of me being frozen by judgment. I didn’t think that her intuitions would be so literal. Perhaps exacerbated by my body’s structural imbalances, I gain stubborn weight on my lower back. I hate my appearance, and being touched there, and I judge it awfully. It was also interesting to me that kidneys are the site of the adrenal glands, the ones I had been habitually stressing through my life of constant stimulation. They are also responsible for homeostasis; keeping the body in balance.
I then obviously spent a while interrogating different LLMs for their symbolic and spiritual interpretation. I always hold these particularly lightly, especially from A.I., but this was the summary paragraph from Claude (which emphasized a link to Chinese medicine).
The kidneys hold what is most hidden and most true about a person. They are the seat of will at its deepest root — not effortful willpower but the basic orientation of the self toward life. They carry fear in its most existential form. They hold ancestral material — what was inherited rather than chosen. And they are associated with discernment — the capacity to weigh, to know from the inside, before the mind has caught up.
My hidden demons, fear, ancestral trauma, and discernment have all been absolutely front and center in my last three months of exploration.3 This discovery implied a link to a specific part of my body that constantly hurts and is judged by me.
But I care more about how I’m feeling than the story around those feelings. When I walked out of Delia’s office, the burning in my chest was largely gone. The next day I sat with my children in the park, mostly off my phone, and started to notice the welcome return of presence to my world. Since then, I’ve had a couple of unusual “oh wow, this is it” moments of deep joy and happiness. But I still have considerable pain in my lower back, and the burning remains, now in my throat. After a couple of sessions, Delia’s take was that my body was resisting structural fixes. Her intuition was that it was waiting for me to learn how to hear it properly, and let it speak. I think that’s now what lies ahead for me.
The treasure is within you.
“The reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.”
-Philip Shepherd
In a finale consistent with so many fairy tales, at the end of Moana, Maui realizes he doesn’t need his magic fish hook in order to be a hero. The power lies within him. For me, it’s clear this is a change in the way that I perceive time. Joseph Campbell said the dragon hides the treasure. And I was always incoherently aware that my dragon was time. If you flip your relationship with your body, it turns time from a fiery demon to a life-giving goddess.
Ever since my panic attack in Maui I have been on something of a personal healing journey. I think I now understand what keeps some people stuck and how to help get them unstuck. It has resulted in me leading a life of exceptional flourishing. But over the last few months, I realized I hadn’t actually returned with the boon, the treasure. This is presence, and it lies within us.
A regulated nervous system is a healing gift to everyone around you. You could argue it’s crucial to the wellbeing of your children. Every parent knows they pick up on absolutely everything, conscious or unconscious. For me personally, it is also opening up slightly more headspace and time for me to consider the needs of my family, especially my wife. Previously, her asking me to think about or do something mundane was felt as a triggering invitation to pain. And during those worst days, when I was called into the agony of presence by my baby, I saw how those triggers could have turned me into a demonic monster.
I recently interviewed futures-trader-turned-Jungian-analyst Dan Lawrence. It was one of my favourite conversations I’ve ever had, because I realised how integrated he seemed. It was as if his presence alone had a healing quality. This is what I now aspire to. What has really struck me, looking back at his story, was a pivotal encounter with one of the scariest patients at the high-security mental health facility where he worked. This man looked terrifying, but when Dan approached him, he realized he was secretly compassionate. He kept himself unwashed because he was so afraid of what he might do to people if they got close to him. It reminded me that Mary specifically said the emotional part of me that had been repressed was dangerous and should be approached only carefully.
What happens when you realize the demon is actually there to help you? As C.S. Lewis wrote “God shouts in our pains.” Perhaps you can then open to receive more from the Goddess.
When I told Delia about my experiences in Egypt, she said her own meditations had given her the impression that the King’s Chamber was energetically powerful, but broken. This is something I’ve heard in multiple places, and the central sarcophagus itself is literally broken and cracked on the corner. She mused that it was interesting I had also emerged with the intuition that my body may also be energetically powerful, but broken. In my recent interview with Dr. Chris Bache, he described how the purpose of our incarnation is to become integrated enough to experience more of God, without being shattered by the experience. If our electrically-conductive fascia is constantly defensively clenched, I doubt we are maximizing that capacity of our bodies and souls. As one of Leading Edge’s members Daniel Thorson memorably wrote “Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality.”
One of the real felt shifts over the last few weeks has just been simply a sense of unclenching. Of being able to tell myself, and my body, that I’m safe, when I wasn’t even previously aware I felt I was in danger. I’ve been consciously relaxing parts of my body I didn’t realize I couldn’t previously feel. Through his nervous system research, Jonny Miller says he’s a big fan of Michael Edward Johnson’s theory on latches (great interview). This proposes that in times of danger or trauma, thin muscles wrapped around your blood vessels can clench and then glue themselves shut, restricting blood flow by as much as 20x. This “latch” is then constantly held in tension, waiting for a specific "all clear" signal to release. Perhaps this is what many of these somatic modalities aim to address, and there are so many different ways to do it. Johnson even has a provocative idea that dreaming is your body shuffling through scenarios trying to hit the "release password" for old clamps you no longer need.
Over the last few weeks, all these somatic practitioners have asked me questions like, “What does your body want to say?” or “What are your kidneys telling you?” And to be honest, I just find it mostly frustrating. But I’m wondering if my dreams might hold a key. One early morning in bed I was breathing deep into my lower back, and I had a half-dream. It was of a veteran Japanese soldier, the ones they found in the Pacific Islands still fighting WWII decades after it was over. In my dream, another figure walked up and asked him if he needed a hug. He nodded yes and fell into its arms.
I now wonder to what extent our bodies are still in foxholes fighting wars that ended a long time ago; years, generations or lifetimes. My awakening experience plunged me into years of living from a place of terror and insecurity. But I was also tantalizingly shown what a life could look like on the other side of this failed coping mechanism. A couple of days after my awakening, I arranged to have lunch nearby with some friends. I arrived half an hour early. As I waited, I realized I wasn’t bored at all. Quite the reverse; the passage of time was glorious: a rich golden river that I bathed in. I’d never experienced this kind of relationship – a loving friendship – with time before. It’s one of the best memories of my life.
“Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
‘I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts.”
-Brene Brown
In my last piece, I quoted Joseph Campbell’s biographer (and Leading Edge interviewee), Dr. Stephen Larsen: “The shaman descends to the matrix of creation, to reenact the archetypal quest of the hero: once again magically to transform the Great Mother from her angry, withholding aspect to her life-giving, bountiful aspect. He ignores the appearance of ugliness and does something nice for her. And only then does she respond in kind, granting the shaman his wish… It would seem a highly reliable rule of thumb, whenever one confronts such a grotesque hag in dream or fantasy, to give her the kiss, or as the Eskimo shaman does, comb her hair. For to him who is willing to face the appearance of ugliness is beauty given or the life-giving boon bestowed.”
I tried a number of different energy healings on Zoom, which obviously I think I found less effective. I tried FBR (Facilitated Breath Repatterning) a somatic bodywork technique combining conscious connected breathing with therapeutic touch. It was very relaxing. I tried 2 sessions of somatic experiencing (too much talking), one session of myofascial release (gave me a few good structural insights) and three sessions of craniosacral therapy (unsure: I think it’s good at prompting “releasing” even if the mechanism is empirically questionable).
Obviously, Claude knows this, so I was wondering whether it just was telling me what I wanted to hear, but I fed it into ChatGPT (which I now rarely use), and it confirmed I was on the money.
Thank you so much for this - it's genuinely generous and helpful and inspiring!