This is one of 12 artifacts from season 3 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact.
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Purpose:
to explore the power of containers for holding complexity: the both/and of separation & integration, safe boundaries for diving into rabbit holes, internal calibration, and psychic discernment amidst overwhelming challenges.
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Guiding Question:
how can you create the right-sized container as a practice of relational magic, to support your work?
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Excerpt of Artifact (4 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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hi friends, welcome to the second artifact of virgo season: nesting dolls.
in virgo, we're working with analytical soft earth. so the question that comes to mind for me is: how do we support wilderness, organic process, through the right-sized containers?
because mutable earth can expand or shrink, it is the ground to hold the other substances, whether that's water, air, fire, or ether. how can we try to create containers to make those other elements feel supported, through mutable earth? this is the virgo pleasure of finding the right-sized tupperware, or the right-sized jar to hold everything.
nesting dolls are special because they are not just containers, they're inter-nesting containers. traditionally created in the 1890s in Russia, called matryoshka dolls, they tend to be elaborate painted female figures — peasant mothers or fairy-tale figures — where the innermost tiny doll could be a baby. these nesting dolls relate to fertility, maternity, motherhood, legacy, community, interconnectedness.
I thought this was really interesting for virgo, because virgo, as a virgin maiden, is a symbol of self-sufficiency, self-containment. and how is the self also a container? how can we hold smaller containers of our creative practices, of our projects, while being a part of larger containers within relationships, or communities, and environments?
purpose: the purpose of nesting dolls is to explore the power of containers for holding complexity — to look at both how we are separate and together. how do we create safe boundaries to help us and support us in diving into rabbit holes, and getting lost in the details? how do we guide calibration and practice psychic discernment in overwhelming, complex tasks and challenges of our lives?
the guiding question is: how can you create the right-sized container as a practice of relational magic to support your work — whatever that work is?
the first thing I want to talk about is the power of containers to hold the both-and of separation and togetherness. in season one of labyrinth, I taught a workshop called ‣. it's really about seeing containers as similar to spellwork — creating a safe zone. the boundaries are essential for helping us gather energy into that container.
there is a both-and-ness of understanding that we are separate and distinct from each other — each container, each scope, each project and practice is separate on every given day — and we belong together. there's always a relational context. there's always a web. there is a sense of inherent enough-ness, a sense of completion, no matter the size or scale of the container. in other words, you can relate to each container separately, and you can see how the containers relate to each other.
the purpose of nesting dolls is that it is containers that hold containers. once you separate out the containers, each container can hold the substances inside. you can have an individual relationship — you can put one nesting doll into your pocket and go for a walk and leave the others behind. you can choose whether to separate them or hold them together.
so when you look at nesting dolls as a metaphor for examining the singularity of relational containers, as well as the interconnectedness, you can see this play out in many physical examples.
the body + environmental containers
your body is a container for your sensations, your emotions, your energy, your thoughts, your memories, your experiences, your consciousness. and any place you go to with your mind, with your imagination, is held by the largest container of your body — which is held by the container of the room you're in, the house, the building, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the continent, the earth, the galaxy, the universe.
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.