We Are Attached To Our Labels

In my shamanic teachings when you work with the winds of the South (Serpent) medicine you learn to shed your skin all at once.   This means that you shed your labels what you believe you are through the lens of your ego.

We can intellectually understand this but it isn't until you are completely undone that you really know what this medicine is.

In the past 3 weeks I have been playing a part of multi-personalities for my beloved.  He suffers from dementia and although this expresses itself differently for all those who  live with it, my beloved has a fragmented memory with role association along with emotional memory versus factual memory.  All to say that he sees me as 4 to 7 different women. 

I am seen and spoken to as the "therapist", "lover", "Carole - the wife", "sweetie" , "the old woman" and "the other lady".  It breaks my heart to no longer just be seen and experienced as his wife.  On the one hand being a "wife" is complex.  We truly do wear all these hats from one moment to another.  I would venture to say that I'm probably his mother somewhere in there too.

This experience has really unraveled me.  I never asked to be dissected.  I am made up of many moving parts and all those parts make up the one entity...until now.

This is the true medicine of the Serpent.  I am being asked to shed parts of me in the present moment he is "perceiving" me.  I am being asked to simply be one aspect.  This is no easy task and not one I wish on anyone.  It feels like day by day HIS beloved is being segregated, split, torn apart and soon there will be no identity left.  The Carole, the love of his life, his soul mate will have shed every label to nothingness.

I ask myself how do I navigate all of this?
Am I ready to shed all these labels? 
o I want to become nothing? 
Who am I without these labels? 

I am being stripped without request and I wonder what lies under the nakedness of this undoing?

Aho,
​Carole

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