By Keri Mangis, author of The Essential Ingredient
When our personal lives don’t unfold as planned, it’s easy to lose hope. When the world feels overwhelming, it’s tempting to believe we are powerless.
The Essential Ingredient reframes these moments through the endless cycle of breakdown, reflection, and rebirth. Grounded in Jungian principles and inspired by alchemy—the art of transformation—The Essential Ingredient asks us to explore what it might take to remake ourselves, and our society, from the inside out.
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The Ant Within Us: Surrendering to the Spiritual Process
Spiritual healing and growth take hard work…right?
Well, that’s what I always believed.
Spiritual growth, to me, was something I believed I would achieve through hard work and commitment. Hours of butt-in-cushion time. The right mantra to open the right chakra. A regular practice that took precedence over…I don’t know, getting the kids to school on time.
I admit it now: I saw spiritual practice as a way out of my life. Never as a way into it.
I took the same drive and ambition that got me through school, my first jobs, and my career as a competitive runner and applied it to my spiritual practice. In fairness to myself, what other way would I have known, other than a Herculean way? Force, might, effort. With those, I thought could accomplish anything.
This white-knuckled approach to spirituality led me not to enlightenment but to an emergency.
It took years for me to stop modeling my spiritual practice after the god Hercules and instead draw my wisdom from Psyche.
Allow me to share a part of her story:
Eros and Psyche
A beautiful human woman named Psyche had men from all over the kingdom pining for her. This made her two younger sisters jealous, but it also angered Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, who feared that her own beauty may be forgotten in admiration of Psyche.
Aphrodite sends her son, Eros, the God of Love, to curse Psyche by putting a spell over her such that she will fall in love with the ugliest, most despicable creature. Yet when Eros sees Psyche, he cannot follow through with those orders. He falls in love with Psyche, and she with him. Eros takes her to his castle, marries her, treats her with great kindness, but never once shows his face to Psyche. No one, not even Psyche, can know the truth—else they face the wrath of Aphrodite.
For many days and nights, Psyche enjoys the bliss and whispers of love that Eros provides. But during the day, she is left alone in boredom and confusion. She loves her husband, but she does not know him.
One evening, prodded on by the evil whispers of her younger sisters that the man she’s married to is, in truth, a monster, Psyche decides she will learn the true identity of her husband. After he falls asleep, she holds a candle over his face. To her great relief, she discovers a truly beautiful man. But then a single drop of oil falls onto her husband and he wakes up in pain. Once he sees his identity is revealed, he flies off in a rage, leaving Psyche in a state of confusion and heartbreak. Soon, Aphrodite discovers the truth.
To punish Psyche, Aphrodite gives her a nearly impossible task: to sort through a huge pile of tiny grains and seeds—wheat, corn, millet, barley, poppies— and create separate and distinct piles.
Psyche stares at the huge mound in disbelief. She only has until morning to finish the incredible task before her.
Psyche doesn’t know what to do or how to begin. She sits for several hours, helpless before the pile before her. She finally falls asleep in exhaustion and overwhelm.
As she sleeps, a group of ants march into the room. They take on the painstaking work of sorting through the pile. For them, this work is easy, natural.
In the morning, when Psyche wakes up, the ants are gone, but all the seeds and grains have been neatly organized. Psyche is quite relieved and grateful.
Until, of course, Aphrodite gives her the next task…
You might imagine a different outcome, where Psyche sits by the pile of seeds and gets right to work, staying up all night until her fingers bleed. In that case, our takeaway might very well satisfy our Western ideas of work ethic—something about diligence, or personal sacrifice, or taking one for the team. Those seeds aren’t going to sort themselves, am I right?
Psyche does none of that. Instead, she falls asleep on the job. Some kind of hero she is!
And yet, something magical happens while she sleeps. The ants come, one by one. Ants, well, they may be small, but they are mighty. They take care of the sorting with the industriousness they are known for.
If Thor had shown up with his hammer, what could he have done to help Psyche? Hercules with his might and power? What about Athena, with all her wisdom and strategy? She could have drawn up a plan, organized the effort, delegated the work. But even that wouldn’t have helped Psyche here. This wasn’t a problem to be solved with a plan. None of these mythological heroes could be of service to Psyche at this critical stage of her growth and transformation.
We humans have inner ants, too, that work while we sleep, rest, or even just take a pause. They help us sort out our lives—through dreams, imaginings, reflections. The ant within us doesn’t need our guidance, let alone our willpower.
I always believed spiritual work was something I had to work at. Now, I know that our inner selves already know how to do this work. We just need to surrender—the ants are on the way.
