Show Notes
Charna Cassell: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to LaidOPEN Podcast. I'm your host, Charna Cassel somatic therapist, sex educator, and a guide through the tender terrain of healing and intimacy and regaining vitality after trauma. This is part one of two with Ariella Daley.
Before we dive into today's episode, I wanna offer a gentle trigger warning.
In this episode, Ariella shares her experience as a survivor of sexual assault and how it's woven into her connection to the unseen, to ritual and her body.
We talk about how trauma lives in the nervous system, how healing can unfold through connection with nature and the dream world, and what it means to reclaim one's voice, sensuality, and sense of safety. This is a powerful moving and intimate conversation. I'm honored to share it with you. Please take care of yourselves as you listen. Pause when you need to, and know that you're not [00:01:00] alone. There are also gonna be resources listed in the show notes. Do you ever meet people that you wish you had met on a playground or in a field of flowers on a trail as a five-year-old, and you feel like you could immediately enter a whole other world with them and play and. Just be fast friends. Well, I feel like, , I feel that way about this guest and she is so wise, knows so much about mythology and animism and beekeeping and dream work that she feels, , kind of other worldly and magical to me.
Today's guest is Ariella Daley. She's a dream worker, animist and beekeeper. With over 15 years of experience tending hives and teaching others how to approach bees nature in their own lives through intuition, animism, and ecological care. [00:02:00] Welcome, Ariella
Charna Cassell: i'm so glad to have you here.
Ariella Daly: Hi. Thank you Charna. I'm really happy to be here as well.
Charna Cassell: So I found you through Instagram and, uh, there are those moments, there's a [00:03:00] lot to not like about social media, but the moments like this of like discovering somebody that I resonate with and I'm like, Ooh, I wanna have tea with this person.
, I feel very grateful. So to give a little, a little more context to the listeners, um, you're a beekeeper and you also are a, a, a, a, a dream guide. You would probably frame it in different language, but how, how do the two things connect for you?
Ariella Daly: I'm always asking that question.
So I could say, I could start with these, these two streams of influence that came from my parents and my, my mother was a, you could say like a naturalist. Still is.
My father is a mystic, and my brother, my father brought in storytelling and bardic energy and Celtic lineage. And dreamwork. We, you know, the Celts were avid dreamers. You, you know, still are. [00:04:00] So I was introduced to this idea of dreaming as just part of who you are. And, and not only that, but intuitive dreaming and psychic dreaming because mm-hmm.
It's, you know, we often think of the intuition as we, we associate it with the feminine or as a result with women. But really the intuitive thread that I inherited came down my father's line, through him. So I was hard starting to have intuitive dreams at a young age. And also it was mirrored to me as a normal thing.
And then I had this deep reverence for the earth, this passionate love affair, that even like my teachers joked about, you know, I was the kid who could not focus on the lesson if there was snow falling outside because what else mattered besides the beauty? Oh, I was the kid who was like, oh my god, another deer.
And my friends would be like, yes, they're here every day. And I was like, so, so I had this like reverence for [00:05:00] nature. That sort of came together in 2011. I had spent years studying women's traditions in ancestral cultures, which spread from Celtic, the Celtic cultures into ancient Greece and ancient the ancient world in general.
And we're talking about Europe. Europe, not there's lots of other ancient worlds, but so Europe and some North Africa and Scandinavia, different parts of the ancient world, specifically women's spirituality. And I came across women's spirituality connected to bees. And I went to go learn more about that. I wanted to understand it more.
And while I was taking a workshop trying to understand who are these bee women connected to bees in ancient Greece, wild bees moved into a wall in my house . and that wall happened to share my bedroom. So they were coming in and out of the cavity between walls, you know, they weren't in my room, but they were [00:06:00] in the wall behind my bed.
And I started dreaming literally with bees in the wall. And I had no idea. I, you know, all of my dream work hadn't prepared me for what it was like to share dreaming with a non-human organism. I, I even had the idea of perhaps like spirits and being sent dreams from spirits, but I hadn't experienced dreaming with, and it, it radicalized my whole worldview. I'd, I had understood that there was a thing called animism and these indigenous worlds views, but it was very different to experience it and to experience being held in a way, in my dreaming by the bees, particularly through a subsequent trauma, which was like surgical hospitalized miscarriage that I was.
So I was healing that while having these wild bees on the wall. And then about a week after that, I caught my first [00:07:00] swarm, which is how bees biologically reproduce as a whole, as a single organism. And swarms are very much associated in the ancient past with the feminine and, and rebirth giving birth to oneself.
So I caught this swarm while I was grieving the loss of pregnancy, and they got me back from what I would call a very loose hold on reality, not reality on life. A very feather, they just anchored me right back down into my body. And I learned very quickly working with bees, the , the incredible power they have to heal us.
As we are in service to them, which is a mutual exchange. And that's, that's pretty phenomenal. So dreaming came through that. I would literally dream of them, but also the sense of being held by them in my dreams. It's [00:08:00] hard.
Charna Cassell: No, it's so beautiful and so profound. And I First of all, I, I love the image of the bees live, like living with the bees and them being there, and then just imagining the sound and the vibration, , in, in the room. And imagining like that you, that the room is a womb.
Ariella Daly: Yes.
Charna Cassell: And I know that you're healing, you are healing your own womb. And that we also, there's so much we know now, like humming and vibration impacts our vagus nerve and can calm the nervous system and the, the wisdom of the bees offering that to you during that very vital time. And, , and also thinking about, I, one of the things I, I like to think about is, waking dreams.
Ariella Daly: Yes.
Charna Cassell: So here, here we are, whether I'm sitting with a client or my own experience, that sometimes we have these wild experiences in waking life, and it's like, if this was a [00:09:00] dream, how would I be with it? Like, do soul work with it in a particular way and...
Ariella Daly: Beautiful framing. I love that.
Charna Cassell: And I, I'm imagining given this is it's, it was such a potent period that you were, , existing in when this happened that you've worked a lot with, with that.
And have you looked at it as a, as a waking dream in that way?
Ariella Daly: I think, I think the answer is probably yes, although perhaps not using the same language, but I believe that we're talking about the same thing. I, I really, I, I work with what I might call cultivating the numinous or liminal states of being and.
So there's this, you know, in my dream classes, for instance, I teach, I teach intentional dreaming first and foremost. Mm-hmm. So intentional dreaming or dream incubation is this idea that you aren't just waiting for your subconscious to send you a dream. You are calling in dreams, you are writing down intentions.
And those can start with things as [00:10:00] simple as I want clarity about, you know, whether or not I should take this job. Something like that. But can go into areas of deeper spiritual inquiry or, and this is what I really love to do, the invitation of the more than human world. So to invite in what it is to dream with the bees or to invite in dreaming on a particular piece of land.
Like if you're traveling to approach it as a pilgrimage and what is it to dream with, you know, the river that you are near or you know, the, the ancestors, the grand, your grandmother's heritage, whatever it might be. As if your dreams can be co-created. So it's not that you're taking your agency out of it, but you're co-creating this reality.
And so what I find is that when we engage intentionally with the, the dream weave, the, the weave of life on earth as it's dreamt, as a place of mutability where anything and everything is [00:11:00] possible, we influence our waking lives. And a lot of the times today's modern psychology, we think of our daily lives influencing our dreams, which is of course true.
You know, we, we do dream about things that we've seen or experienced throughout the day or throughout the week or month, but what if it's also the other way around that we can dream healing into being, we can dream ourselves whole. We can dream with the earth, for instance, towards a wholeness or towards a healing.
So then what happens? In those in between moments when you're falling asleep. In those moments, when you are perhaps having deja vu or listening to really good music and go into that other place, it's all, to me, this, this similar threshold location. Mm-hmm. Where the fixed reality that we're in sort of releases, its hold and connections are possible, new pathways are possible.
I think this is in a way where [00:12:00] we start to reprogram our brain and our thinking. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I think so. The waking dream for me, waking often mirrors the dreams and it's... really interesting to follow along.
Charna Cassell: I love, I love all of that. It's endlessly interesting. And, and just so, so that listeners have a context, can you, , describe animism and an animate earth and, , kind of an animist worldview?
Ariella Daly: Yeah. All my big words.
Charna Cassell: Excellent, excellent concepts and so that we're on the same ride.
Ariella Daly: I am. God, I'm, I'm, I'm such a, a big nerd. I love words. I love language.. So, you know, animism can be kind of a scary word unless you apply it to modern context. And so what we mean by that is.
In some ways, we're stepping a little bit away from overuse of the term shaman and shamanic, because that's been applied as an [00:13:00] anthropological term, but it really belongs to the togas people, to the people who actually named themselves shamans. So animist is this idea, or animism, is this idea that the earth is alive, which is shared with shamanic cultures around the world, but that the earth is alive, that life pulses through everything, even inanimate objects.
And when we look at the world through this framing, which if, if you reach far enough back in, your ancestry is there in your blood somewhere, everyone has this because it was the baseline for many different cultures throughout time. The the mountain isn't named after. A white man that something is named after it's, it's not even named after it is, it's a presence.
It's a being. And animism from a modern lens is saying, we can rethread that connection through many ways in many modalities, but suddenly I'm not [00:14:00] just, I don't just have a rosemary bush outside. I have a particular rosemary bush outside, and I could potentially have a conversation with that rosemary bush and that rosemary bush might also connect me to the consciousness of rosemary as a whole, or perhaps the flowering of the earth as a whole.
And now I'm having these layered experiences of sentience. Similarly, the body can contain sentience that doesn't, yes, I am a whole, and yes, my blood runs through my whole body, but what is it to dream with the consciousness and the sentience of my womb or my heart? Or my bones, what might they want to tell me?
Mm-hmm. So animism in this sense is, is even applied to ideas that don't have physical experience, like the spirit of a group, the spirit of a, of a business. And we can, we can connect with the consciousness, the life force of [00:15:00] everything.
Charna Cassell: Right. Right. And the consciousness. It's like, whether it's something that's preexisting or it's something that you're birthing into being when I Precisely, yeah.
Yeah. Beautiful. Were you gonna say, oh, I was just
Ariella Daly: trying to say, did I answer your questions about, were there any words you threw out there? So the, is the consciousness of the earth Yeah. And that sort of thing. Yeah.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. And, and then, and then, and how that, you know, you, you answered this, but, but how it influences an orientation to life.
And a particular path that you, that you walk.
Ariella Daly: I would say something to that, something to that, and it, it's a comment on our society at large right now, especially post pandemic, in the current experience of tech technology. You know, we know technology can connect us, it can weave us.
You know, it's, it's comes from "techne", it comes from to weave and to speak and text and all of these ways that we communicate. And yet [00:16:00] we've never felt more isolated. We, we have this cultural discussion, the societal discussion around our, our disconnect from nature, disconnect from communities, or disconnect from our bodies or disconnect.
Mm-hmm. And so we're looking for how do we rewe ourselves, how do we reconnect? And the worldview shift into everything has life force and presence. And that I might be able to have a conversation through the feeling body, through my imagination, through my intuitive body, even through my physical body with a mountain is revolutionary, but it also makes me suddenly feel less alone.
And that is what the bees did for me, especially when I was grieving the loss of a pregnancy. I was no longer alone. I was cared for while caring for, and that stewardship, that kinship is, [00:17:00] I, I think it's kind of the part of the root of why we're here to be in love and be in relationship.
Charna Cassell: Absolutely. That's so sweet. I had a teacher, a significant teacher in my twenties who was, a, a mystic from Ghana. A brother, brother Ishmael Tate, and he, he practiced earth-based spirituality. Do you, do you know him? I see your head nodding.
Ariella Daly: No, I'm just loving,
I'm loving this description.
Yeah,
Charna Cassell: Yeah. Oh God, he was so amazing. I feel like, I don't know how tall, like six, seven. He's a huge man, and he would give these amazing hugs, but he would, you know, you could just, , drink a, a sip of tea and feel an element, like feel the wind in your mouth. Like there was, everything could be a ritual and everything could be a moment of being present with him.
So he introduced me to this practice. It's like this, this reciprocity practice.
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Charna Cassell: So I would walk down the street and if there, if it was raining, I would be in a conversation with the rain. I would even be in conversation with, like you're saying, [00:18:00] inanimate objects, like a, a lamppost.
I literally, I was just constantly in this practice of asking things, whether it was a tree or whether it was an inanimate object. Like, what do you, what do you need from me? And what do you, what do you have for, for me? And, and, and being in that dialogue and just listening for what arose. And so one of the things I'm curious about for you is, is your work with the bees and with dreaming and how that has enhanced your intuition and whole, how you also use that to help people connect more deeply with theirs.
Ariella Daly: Absolutely. Hmm. Your story reminds me of a, a mentor I had briefly in, in high school. I was studying herbalism for a project and she, she was very gruff, I was really intimidated by her. She was probably in her, early seventies at the time, and she, she didn't have me do anything in the garden but weed and what she's teaching me, she taught me, she like watched [00:19:00] me for the first day and then the second day is she said, okay, now I want you to ask the plants that you're waiting to please release.
Charna Cassell: Mm.
Ariella Daly: And it was just a totally different experience. And I still come back to it. I'll be weeding and I'll get into my head or I'll be thinking about something else and it'll be really tough. And then I'll just stop and I'll ask the plant to let go and it will let go. And it, it's immediate. It's phenomenal.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. This, this act of reciprocity, you know, bees, why bees is always my question. It could have been, could have been something else, could have been another element of nature. But it happened to be bees that really called me in. I don't, I don't think I found them. I think they found me. And they have a way because they are a collective that really gives [00:20:00] you that sense of inclusivity, gives you that sense of collective wellbeing and gives you a sense of that you're part of a greater whole when you're with them. I mean, literally when you're in a beehive, if you're opening a, a honey beehive, this is, we're talking about the honeybee Apis mellifera in this case, but could apply to other species of honeybees. You are, you are going into their body, which is according to science, actually more akin to a mammalian womb, than any other insect. It, you know, it has to be the right temperature to keep. What you're going into is, is where the brood is and the brood of the babies. So when you're opening a hive, it's primarily brood. It's surrounded by plenty, which is carbohydrates, nutrition, and gives them energy and pollen, which is protein.
But mainly it's this, this womb heart of the hive where all the young in the first few days of life are fed mother's milk. They're fed royal jelly, this milky white substance. My friend Sylvia Linsteadt is it [00:21:00] a beautiful author and she calls it hive milk. And I just love that image. So, this is a very tender thing to do, to open the body of a being.
And yet they, they envelop you. So you're standing in this space with bees flying all around you. Generally, if you're gentle, you're not getting stung. It depends on, of course the, the subspecies and whatnot. But generally, if you're listening, if you're in your body, if you are embodied, if you are not having a rant in your head or replaying a conversation you had, they require ultimate presence.
They are meditation. There is a reason bees have been used for, you know, beekeeping has been used for people dealing with PTSD, they've been worked with in prison programs and places like Chicago and the UK to help people drop into presence. And it's this presence that is so fine tuned. It's so cute because [00:22:00] you are being affected by the hum and the vibration of the hive.
You are listening, the shift in tone will tell you how they're doing and it'll tell your body before your mind clicks over because you are an animal. So your animal is listening to this hive full of pretty, pretty much like, you know, 50, 60,000 at times. Stinging sting, singing sisters, they can sting.
Mm-hmm. They're mostly singing. Mm-hmm. But they can sting. And there's a, there's a humbleness there. There's a reverence. So this is happening. You have to be with your feet on the ground. You have to pay attention to your movements. You have to slow down. So quite physically, you are shifting into a state of presence and.
When you reach that place, when you get into that zen It is, it is so interesting to watch. I, I see it with students all the time. When I bring people to hives for the first time afterwards. It's like they've just taken a drug. [00:23:00] They're like, "I don't know. I can't, I can't, like, I don't even know if I drive right now.
I feel really strange." And it's, you know, it, if you stay open to that feeling, you know, it's the same feeling of coming out of a very, very vivid dream where you're like, I don't know whether or not I'm back in my full reality. Yet. I feel the dream with me. There's something that's happening. You're being in my, like if I were to put a name on it, it's almost like you are being attuned by the bees.
It's not really the other way around. No matter how much we manipulate the hives, it's, it's the bees inviting us or holding us in their presence. So that alone for me is this baseline shift out of the thinking mind. Of course, you can stay in your thinking mind and analyze what's going on the whole time.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But this opportunity to come out of the thinking mind into the intuitive body.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And that alone opens us up to greater intuitive [00:24:00] connection. In my work, I then teach how to actually like hear the bees and listen to the bees and work with them from this deeper listening place.
And people always think of like, oh, I got this message that said this, this, this, and this. And that's not necessarily what hearing or listening means. It means what does your body say? What's happening in your body? What's happening to your emotions? What are those knowings that you're getting that you couldn't put names to?
Are there any, is there a sort of pervasive sense of a color around you as you close your eyes and feel into being next to the bees? And the same applies to how we approach. Dreaming. It's again, these altered states. So where do bees and dreams connect? For me, it's going into altered states of being where our logic and intellect gets to take a back seat so that the numinous other [00:25:00] benevolent spirits, the consciousness of the bees, for example, can, can reach us because our modern life doesn't allow for that.
So by creating space for dreaming, we're also opening up to that intuitive self that can be touched by the gods, so to speak, as the ancient Greeks used to, to do, they used to incubate their dreams and healing temples to receive mm-hmm. Spontaneous, miraculous physical healing.
Charna Cassell: Amazing. Yeah.
As, Asclepieion. Is that the place?
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Asclepieion. Mm-hmm.
Charna Cassell: That was something that I read about probably 20 years ago, and I always wanted to go and, visit those sites.
Ariella Daly: Yes. Over, and lay there all over
Charna Cassell: And write like, you'd just, you'd you'd outdoor amphitheaters where you'd lay and and dream.
Ariella Daly: Yes, yes and no. So Asclepieions were [00:26:00] dedicated to the goddess Asclepius, who's still the modern, like symbol for his symbol is still the modern symbol for medicine. Mm-hmm. He was considered the father of modern medicine. So the staff with the serpent whining around it, right? The serpent and the bee are very, very old symbols connected to the goddess actually, and connected to feminine or female regeneration.
Bees would swarm, give birth to themselves every spring. Snakes would shed their skin and renew themselves. And in the pre patriarchal religions, this was often seen as a symbol of the earth itself. The goddess Gaia. All the different names for her regenerating herself. Mm. Of course, this eventually shifted into a more patriarchal male dominant view.
And as Asclepius, there's nothing wrong with him, I'm just giving a sense of history.
Charna Cassell: Yeah.
Ariella Daly: He became the God of healing and dreams. Mesopotamia along before him, there was a goddess of healing and dreams connected to serpents and dogs. In ancient Egypt, there is a god of healing and dreams. They, [00:27:00] they came together, these two things.
Bridget is a God of heal, Irish goddess, healing and dreams. So these two things come together and it says a lot about, again, another worldview where one might experience healing through the dream world first, or the dream world might inform us of the healings needed.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: In ancient Greece, they kind of perfected the art of these dream healing temples where it people, I'm just smiling 'cause I, I know what I'm gonna say.
But people would go to these, they'd go on pilgrimage. It would be a big thing. There would be ritual offerings. There would be fasting. Bathing. And then you'd go into these dormitories. So actually was enclosed these enclosed dormitories. In fact the B priestesses at Lucas doing the Ellucian mysteries with deter and co ny, they also had dream incubation, so, this would happen. And then during that time, one would be visited by their the [00:28:00] gods or a God. The other thing that was going on is that in the Asclepieions , the ones dedicated to sleepies, they would release non venomous snakes. And the snakes would wander through. Over and around the sleeping people. If one was touched by a snake or licked by a snake, or dreamt of a snake, it was considered a transmission, a direct healing from the God.
Charna Cassell: I have a story I have to share with you.
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Charna Cassell: When I was in high school my senior year, I was lucky enough to have a, a program at my school from, from seventh grade onward, called Mysteries and Yeah. Oh my gosh. And the senior year, we... So jealous. I know. Well, I'm like, you had a mystic father.
That's amazing.
Ariella Daly: Okay. Fair enough.
Charna Cassell: So...
We would, we went to Ojai and we, we worked on the land and we spent a week there and we did, we got to do a sweat lodge and, and then there was a follow up after graduation, they did a. [00:29:00] Follow up Vision Quest, and it was like a one day thing, but we, we would go and we had to pick a, a piece of land that we wanted to spend 24 hours alone on.
And in a hypnogogic state the night before, we had to go out and pick a spot. I saw my spot and, and I, I, you know, I was so excited and I, the next day I was like looking and looking, I'm like this, you know, this is the, I fi finally found the spot and I was the last person to, to like pick my spot.
And I was standing on this big rock and I had one of the elders who is, who is a guide on the trip standing behind me and I was like, this is the spot. And he was like, don't move. Apparently there was a huge grandfather rattlesnake, like a really had a really big rattle that was right underneath the rock I was standing on.
And he basically said, without saying too much, he said, you have to pick a different spot. You can't pick this spot. What he had seen, which I didn't know at the time, was he just saw all [00:30:00] the holes. Like he was like, it was a rattlesnake den. And so I told him, okay. And I like picked another spot, but I didn't, I went back to that spot and that was the, the place that I slept with.
And so I'm just like picturing, you know, I, I didn't have any kind of follow up experience with the snakes.
Ariella Daly: And you didn't have any, you didn't see the snakes?
Charna Cassell: I didn't see the snakes. I heard like, just in that one experience, but I didn't, but the idea, I'm just like picturing that I have wanted to have this experience in one of these temples for all these decades.
And I'm like, oh, maybe I had my own, my own version and it, but it was, it was a profound thing to have that image and then see that, find the spot for me. . Yeah. That teacher later when I admitted that I'd gone back to the same spot, it's like every, every 10 years I'll see him. And that's the story he likes to tell.
Ariella Daly: Yeah, I bet that's, that is potent. [00:31:00] You know, there's a big difference between venomous and non venomous snakes. And yet, I mean, I get it. Rattlesnakes are why I'm in the job I'm in.
Charna Cassell: Ooh, say more about that.
Ariella Daly: Ooh. It gets a little dark, but yes, I will. Okay. I love that story. I love that it was a grandfather's snake.
I love that--so in my mind, a, a vision like that, like that's the land calling you, it might even been the snakes calling you. Just saying like, that is an initiation. To go back there to say yes and go back there. That's an initiation that some part of you recognized so early in life. Then they didn't hurt you.
You know, it's like when I got a different story, different time. Mm-hmm. But I got covered in bees before I ever started keeping bees. I accidentally got covered head to toe and honeybees. And those moments, like I, the only answer to this is yes, because otherwise there's fear. Mm-hmm. Otherwise there's panic [00:32:00] otherwise.
So I, I didn't panic. I just went into a euphoric state having honeybees crawl all over me in a tank top and skirt. Wow. Yeah. So that was interesting.
Charna Cassell: Could I tell you one other thing about that? Yeah. Like the, the, the interesting the frame of Yeah. They didn't, they didn't hurt me.
And when I think of snakes and after that I really, I really resonated with snakes. And I was shedding a particular skin.
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Charna Cassell: I had had quite a traumatic experience that I had been integrating. And this follow-up vision quest was a result of how undone I was from the previous trip. And it was my school's response to going like, wait, we actually recognize we need more integration for these kids.
Like we did a sweat lodge with this kid. And she came like,
Ariella Daly: yeah.
Charna Cassell: Being that honest about what was going on. Yeah. That I hadn't spoken. Created too much vulnerability for me. Yeah. Too much rawness. And then this was, this was a useful follow up. And, and what did happen with that next follow [00:33:00] up, after the vision quest, we had another sweat lodge.
And when I looked in the mirror, I saw myself born again, like the shed, the skin of a, a certain layer of trauma, obviously not all. Yes. But there was a... I could see my face, I could see my baby picture in my face. I could see a level of innocence. So I felt like I had shed something.
Ariella Daly: Wow.
Charna Cassell: And so that's how it resonates for me in relation to snakes.
Ariella Daly: That's incredible. And can I just say that again, this could be an entire different podcast topic, but
Charna Cassell: Yeah.
Ariella Daly: The fact that your school recognized the integration was needed.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: If I could like wave a flag for the need for integration, post spiritual experiences, I would, because how many of us sign up for a workshop, have a profound experience and have zero ability to integrate
it?
Charna Cassell: Exactly. Exactly.
Ariella Daly: So, you know, hallelujah for that. Wow. And yes, like, I, I just wonder how many listeners are out there going, I, I, I know that [00:34:00] feeling, or I've had that moment in the mirror. I've had that moment in the mirror.
And I, I do think it's, you know, we all know, we don't all know, but let, let's say in the field of trauma, we know that PTSD is a spectrum.
Mm-hmm. And that everyone experiences various degrees of trauma in their life. But, you know, there are pretty significant ones that can alter the course of our life. Sometimes it takes moments like what you're describing to like, there's nothing else will do it, and all the other things help. The therapy and the integration are really important, but then there's these profound moments where the healing takes place. So when I was, when I was a young girl, I had a, I was about four years old and I had a fairly confronting rattlesnake experience with a rattlesnake that had made its way into, at this point, I didn't know this, but into the wood pile. We lived out in the country.
And my, my dad and his [00:35:00] friend killed it. But you know, now that I think about it, you know, like my dad was a pretty peaceful guy. I didn't know that he hadn't killed it. It was actually his neighbor's friend. 'cause my, my dad was not quite that type. And they didn't know enough about rattlesnakes. So they, they, this is so graphic, but they cut it in half and put it in the jar.
And snakes, if you don't cut off their head, they actually take three or four hours to actually die. So they're in tremendous amount of pain. Yeah. And I had been a snake kid. I looked for them everywhere. I loved to pick the little red racers up and like find these little snakes in the garden and stuff like that.
I didn't know about rattlesnakes and I had never seen a snake that big. So I was put, like, I, I stood there face facing this jar, this giant gallon jar with a snake in it. And the snake was striking the glass and I was being told that it was dead. You can imagine what that must have been like for a child who was in love with the [00:36:00] earth, loved snakes, and was now told that this thing is dead.
It's been killed, it's still striking the glass. And so I developed nightmares. They were very traumatic nightmares. And it, it took me until about my mid twenties, after a couple, after my first week, let's say, kundalini awakening when I became sexually active and my, oh gosh, it must have been, I was a late, late bloomers much have been around age 18.
And then I, I had all, I started having all, like, the nightmares really increased once that happened, once I became sexually active. And so it was around my mid-twenties that I realized and had the memory that at around the same age I was molested. Mm. And so what happened is that my child brain couldn't handle that information.
And put all of it into the snake. Everything, it became a lifelong phobia. It became nightmares and I sought to heal the [00:37:00] nightmares. And in seeking to heal the night I did therapy, I did all these things, nothing worked, couldn't figure it out. So then I went down the road of like, who is the snake spiritually?
And I found, of course, the goddess. I found ancient tradition traditions. I found the snake as a symbol of reclamation and renewal and empowerment and the divine, and the, of course, the rise of Kundalini energy, which you see in many different cultures. This rise of serpentine energy. And it just totally rewrote my relationship to Eros.
Wow. It was so, it was the snakes that brought me into my spiritual work. Snakes and dreams. Nightmares in particular. Mm-hmm. And I think that's really common for people who go through trauma.
Charna Cassell: Yeah.
Ariella Daly: To like find their spiritual path through facing the shadow.
Charna Cassell: I'm, I'm, I'm having a strong, I'm moved by that story and I'm, I'm just gonna take a breath.
Ariella Daly: Mm.
It's a big one.
Charna Cassell: And how, [00:38:00] how beautiful that you, that you kept turning towards yourself and you kept turning towards like this, this symbol, this animal, this being, first of all, the image of the dissonance of, of seeing a snake throwing its body against the glass, and someone telling you it's like being, you're, it's like you're being gaslit, like it's dead.
It's dead. And you're like, no, I, I am seeing something and I'm feeling something. And it's not coinciding, it's not congruent with your words and the intensity of that for a kid, you know? Yeah. And then, you know, you're talking about Kundalini awakening. I'm just, I'm sitting here. I'm having feelings of, but also I am feeling awe for how brilliant we are as beings, like how creative we are [00:39:00] as beings, you know?
Mm-hmm. That each of our lives is, is we are mythic beings, and that there's these ancient resources that you're able to draw from and that there's this love for this being that you wanted to heal and you wanted to heal your nightmares, but also your relationship to snakes, and then, how profound. I mean, the snake is a very profound image. Mm-hmm. And symbol in, in all of our, in all of the unconscious, you know? Oh, yes. and then related to Kundalini, I don't know if you know if I mentioned this to you
mm-hmm. offline, but I just finished a four month kundalini, yoga teacher training.
Ariella Daly: Oh, no way.
Charna Cassell: One of the things that we do is we have this particular chant and we do it for two and a half hours. Hmm. Straight.
Ariella Daly: Wow.
Charna Cassell: And so what I'm experiencing currently, what I'm my body is working through is that that vibration, that, that chant, I feel like it knocked loose.
[00:40:00] Subconscious preverbal trauma that's mine, but also my ancestors, so I've, you know, yeah. Mm-hmm. This idea that like, you know, that we heal through a spiral and we keep, you know, we heal, we get closer and closer to kind of like the core closer and closer to the spine where this deep contraction lives like, like an imploding star during, you know, during a, a, a, a shock trauma. And then, and if it happens, if there's enough layers, I think of it as like the sediment that settles in a, in a, a rusty pipe. Right. And then something happens and it shakes the sediment loose. It can cause a blockage in the, in the pipe.
Ariella Daly: Oh, yes. Right. Beautiful analogy.
Charna Cassell: So. What I experienced, it's, you know, after this, during this training over this last month and doing this chanting is, this stuff being shaken loose and this level of intense contraction that's living in my chest and [00:41:00] throat, that's still wanting to come up and out.
And so thinking of that, Kundalini thinking of that snake and it's like there's such deep wisdom
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Charna Cassell: In our somatic experience, and you spoke about it so beautifully, like that being with the bees is such an embodied presence. Like it, it asks embodied presence in this exquisite way that there, what are the things that that have you.
Be that present without thought, you know, and I have a couple things I, I can share, but that just sounds remarkable because you're in this exquisite space of, love versus fear and like the line is so delicate you could just switch into it and panic.
Mm-hmm.
But if you keep choosing fear and presence versus getting into a fear of what might happen in the [00:42:00] future, right?
Like that's just, that's just so... Yeah. That's exactly it. So profound.
Ariella Daly: I still think it's ironic and like, makes perfect sense that I would turn towards a venomous creature as my life's work after that experience. You know?
Charna Cassell: Both, I mean, the snake story, venomous creature, like, I mean, just so profound. Yeah.
Totally.
Ariella Daly: And yet they are, you know, the, the honey and the sting. That's, it's such a profound, profoundly rich metaphor, but also lived experience.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that story.
I'm loving this conversation with you and I can already tell it's gonna need to be a two-part. Be sure to tune back in in two weeks if you wanna experience an extra special exercise led by Ariella in working with senses, somatics and your dreams. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, like rate and review [00:43:00] it and share it with your friends. And if you wanna stay connected, you can find me at LaidOPEN Podcast on Instagram, L-A-I-D-O-P-E-N-P-O-D-C-A-S-T, or on Facebook. Under LaidOPEN podcast, you can also check out more about my work at passionatelife.org and charnacassell.com is where you can find my course, my workbook, as well as listen to episodes and read my blog. So I look forward to next time, and thank you so much for tuning in.
