Sorting in the Time of COVID: Psyche’s First Task

“Intuition provides options…. If you’re not vested in the intuitive, you may think you only have one choice, and often that it is an undesirable one. And you feel that you should suffer about it. And submit. And force yourself to do it.  No, there’s a better way. Listen to the inner hearing, the inner seeing, the inner being. Follow it. It knows what to do next.” (Clarissa Pinkola Estés).

COVID is requiring us to sort. For many people, their busy lives have become even busier with the loss of childcare and steady employment and in many cases, the need to juggle homeschooling with holding down a job. As a result, there is a need to discern which tasks to take on and how to best spend precious time.    

Other people may be experiencing a great slow down as social activities or work may have been curtailed. They may be faced with finding new job options or creating new ways to engage with friends and activities. So, they, too, are being challenged with how to determine where they spend their energy and time. And with a never-ending stream of social media and TV to eat up one’s life, it is easy to just get swept away into inactivity and not face the options in front of us.    

This need to sort, to discern, reminded me of the ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. It has captured the imagination of many depth psychologists as, when looked at metaphorically, the myth reveals a path to developing feminine consciousness, and the first step along a path of four steps is the ability to sort. 

According to the myth, Psyche, the daughter of a king, is so beautiful that people worship her instead of Aphrodite, the goddess of femininity, love, and beauty. Aphrodite, full of jealousy and rage at Psyche, tries to get rid of her. However, Aphrodite’s son, Eros, otherwise known as Cupid, falls in love with Psyche and wants her for himself. 

By the hands of fate and some jealous sisters, Eros and Psyche are separated, but Psyche is desperate to get Eros back. She implores Aphrodite for help, and Aphrodite agrees to help if Psyche can complete four seemingly impossible tasks, each of which leaves Psyche feeling overwhelmed and incapable. It seems that the conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law goes back to ancient times….

The four demanding tasks that Aphrodite tests Psyche with represent challenges that we face in the process of conscious development much like we are facing today. I will explore the first task here and will continue to explore the other three in subsequent writing.   

In Psyche’s first task, Aphrodite “took wheat and barley, millet and poppy seeds, chickpeas, lentils, and beans, blended them all together heap after heap and poured them out into a single hillock.” She then tells Psyche that she must sort the seeds back into their piles by the end of nightfall.

The task is impossible, and Psyche is stunned into silence by the enormity and cruelty of it all. However, as she stands there frozen, helpers arrive in the form of ants. They quickly and efficiently sort the heap into appropriate piles and leave before nightfall.

This myth, and specifically this task of sorting the seeds during the time of COVID, is currently in my path, and I would guess others are also facing their own heaps of seeds.

I completed my dissertation less than a month ago. For the previous five years, every single day, when I woke up, I knew that it was waiting for me. It gave direction to my life. The dissertation process was also a gigantic task of sorting as I had to figure out what to research and how to research it and which information to put in the dissertation and which to leave out. 

Now for the first time in many years, I wake up without a distinct set of tasks to do. At first, I felt great relief and a sense of freedom, and then slowly anxiety started to rear its head. What do I do now?  It sometimes feels as if there are too many options and at other times not enough options, particularly during this time of COVID. I’m in a time of transition, in the liminal, in the space in between. It is a place that leaves me extremely uncomfortable as I prefer a clear destination with a marked-out path to follow.  Yet, in this time of COVID, nothing seems clear.  Thus, I find myself back in the position of standing in front of a pile of seeds trying to figure out how to sort it, and it feels even bigger than the last heap I had to organize.

I think others are also experiencing this as a time of liminality. Someone referred to COVID as the time of the Great Pause as things seem to be at a standstill- like Psyche frozen staring at the seeds.  

It is a time of disorientation. Some of our important ways of life have ended, and we aren’t clear on what our new ways of being will be.  And we aren’t sure when our new beginnings will begin. When will schools and businesses re-open?  Will our jobs still be there?

So, what does all of this have to do with the myth of Psyche sorting her seeds?

If we think of Psyche’s task in metaphorical terms, it seems that we are being asked to sort in many ways. We may need to sort through the immense number of tasks we are facing in our day-to-day lives. Or as certain aspects of our lives have ended, perhaps we are being faced with a pile of options and we need to sort through the seeds of potential opportunities in front of us.  That’s what seeds are after all, sources of new life.

We are being asked to pick and choose like Psyche and put things in their appropriate pile, and like Marie Kondo cleaning through someone’s home, we may need to throw some things out.

This process of sorting feels particularly important right now for the parents who are trying to juggle working from home and taking care of their children. If there was ever a time to be crystal clear about what we should say yes and no to, it is now.  We are being brutally reminded that we cannot do it all.

This sounds easy. We think we can just rationally decide what goes in the yes and no pile, or the maybe-at-a-later-time pile. But it isn’t so easy, nor is it so rational as our choices are often driven by the unconscious. We need to call on our “ants” to help us, and I’ll discuss how in a moment. 

For many women, we have been socialized to say yes.  The word No has pretty much been stricken from our vocabulary.  There is an expectation that we will go the extra mile for our bosses, the PTA, our children, and our spouses.  We often do too much for others, saying yes to whatever is asked of us.  This is all a part of being raised to be a “nice” girl.  It is expected that we will support others and put their needs in front of our own.  We often do this without even realizing it.

What if, in this time of COVID-sorting, we are being given an opportunity to develop our No voice? This is a time to recognize and break with our unconscious habit of just saying yes, even when we don’t want to or have to.

If we are standing in front of a pile of different options or opportunities, we may also need to develop our No voice so that when the Great Pause is over and life resumes, we are saying yes to the things that feed our soul and our vocation.

During this time there is a clear opportunity to ask ourselves: What do we really want or need to say yes to?  What are we saying yes to because we always have in the past or we feel pressure to live up to society’s expectations?  Believe it or not, we don’t have to go the extra mile; the amount that we are running is quite enough.  

When looking at our pile of seeds it seems important to ask: What seeds should really be in our pile, and what seeds should really be in someone else’s pile? What needs to go in the boss, spouse, friend, or the kid pile? Where am I unnecessarily putting other people’s seeds in my pile? When am I saying yes to things that I don’t really need or want to?

The ants can guide us to move things into the correct pile as Psyche was only victorious in her task with their help.

Ants are chthonic, they live under the earth, which is often associated with the unconscious. Their nests may seem chaotic, but when closely observed, ants have a pattern and are incredibly hard-working and industrious. They achieve seemingly insurmountable tasks.

Ants are deeply connected to the instinctual- the unconscious, intuitive aspect of ourselves. Our intuition guides us to say yes, no, or maybe to our tasks and options. It has our best intentions in mind; we just need to listen to that niggle that we feel, or that “sense” that we have.  The decisions that I have regretted most in life are those where I ignored that niggle.

The ants, our instincts, can help us in the day-to-day as we try to get through our to-do list by nightfall. They help us to discern what goes on our list and what does not.

Our intuition can also help us when we are trying to decide which way to go in our career. Do I take on this assignment? Do I take this job? Do I go self-employed? It guides us to identify which seeds we’d like to plant.    

People often ask: How do I get in touch with my intuition? How do I connect to my inner ants? Many of us have disconnected from our intuition as it is one of the aspects of the feminine that is disregarded in our society. The intuition is labeled as “irrational”, and we are taught to make our decisions based on the rational and the logical (the more masculine approach to information gathering and decision making), rather than that feeling we get in the pit of our stomach. Yet, that niggle sometimes provides us with more wisdom than any data analysis.

Connecting to intuition is different for different people. Some people feel it in their bodies. Their stomach signals yes or no. For others, it is a “sense of knowing”.  For others, it may be having an inner dialogue- talking to oneself about it. 

Aligned with depth psychology is the experience of synchronicities when we are trying to decide what to do. What are the signs around us when we are in these places of indecision? For instance, I was talking to a friend about a consulting job I was considering. It sounded like a logical fit as it was work that I’d done in the past, but there was something that didn’t feel quite right about it.  As we were discussing it, a strange alarm went off on my phone. I couldn’t explain why it went off, but the alarm seemed very much like the feeling I had about the project, both of which were clearly saying no to the opportunity.  

The ability to hear our intuition and to find our No voice are all important aspects of feminine empowerment. They help us to direct our time and energy towards our projects, the things that we want to do with our lives. Certainly, we may have responsibilities to others such as family and co-workers, but it is also important to check to see that we are only putting those things in our pile that really need to be there.  Each seed needs to go into the proper pile.