I love movies… always have. They teach me so much and help me see more deeply into myself and our world. I’m always searching for the esoteric knowledge embedded in each. This weekend is movie packed-the most I’ve done in awhile. The latest conquest was Black Swan starring Natalie Portman. She was quite beautiful on the screen, but this is not a movie review. It’s the Enchantment of the Mystery Goddess….
The dancing role as the Swan Queen mimicked the life of the ballerina, Nina perfectly. The Swan Queen must dance the role of the White & Black Swans.
With too much yin, not enough yang, little Nina was a little girl stuck in a grown woman’s body. Her room mirrored a school girl’s with its pink stuffed animals and butterfly twin bed. Her mother was overbearing, and Nina hardly voiced her opinions–stood up for herself. She repeatedly sacrifices herself for the sake of perfection-niceness-do-no wrong. Nina probably had a throat chakra blockage. Virginal, Nina ignored and suppressed her sexuality, shying away at the spoken word of sex. Oh, the white swan-beautiful, pure and innocent–Perfect in that, yet so limited.
The White Swan knows it is limited, yet so perfect in its being of what it does possess. It does not embody the raw liberation of passionate energy, nor embrace the human nature of sexuality. In Nina’s discovery of what she does not own, she becomes obsessed with acquiring the attributes she desperately needs to achieve the perfection of the role of the Swan Queen. Her obsession drives her to insanity and to her limit. Inside the desperation, she explodes in rage, injuring her own mother. Subsequently, injuring herself, believing she was hurting her rival. Finally, Nina had allowed raw passion to take her. She lost herself becoming the Black Swan, dancing her most beautiful dance as the archetypal shadow of herself.
Nina acquired what she had believed to be perfection. But at what cost? Was she not perfect already as the White Swan? What is perfection then? It was all that she was as the White Swan, but not at all like her for the role as the Black Swan. It can be limiting or limitless all at the same time. It can be imperfection-simitaneously. The lesson is at least two-fold. Accepting the fact that perfection may be some sort of an illusion that we manipulate ourselves. Additionally, In our quests towards wholeness, we must become limitless, relinquishing what we’ve perceived as “right”, to embrace what we lack-our shadow.
