Honey Bee Wisdom in Times of Chronic Stress…

I reminisce on one particular time I was chronically ill.

A bee came to visit me.

Two of them, actually.

It was a time were I had been stretched, tested, and pushed to many limits and beyond. A nice slathering of physical, emotional, and mental stress, with some of that Dark Night of The Soul medicine thrown in for good measure too.

The kind where you genuinely contemplate if you're starting to go crazy; perhaps touching upon a slither of psychosis.

It took longer than I would have liked to admit how overwhelmed and overtaxed my body was. The busyness, the whirring cogs of the mind, the pushing, the striving for more, the heaviness of the body. The need to slow down, to detoxify, to purify, to simplify… but not listening to those messages.

A good way indeed to call in SNS dominance. Extended Sympathetic-Nervous-System activation. Aka, stuck in Fight-or-Flight. Aka, nervous system overload. Aka STRESS.

We as humans are incredible “meaning making machines”, so it was only natural for me to contemplate what these chance encounters with these honey bees meant in a time of great ordeal.

The first bee, I stood on. I ended up on crutches for almost two weeks. My foot had swelled up to the point where I couldn’t walk nor put any pressure on it.

The second bee, I grabbed, after not paying attention when hammering in wooden stakes into the garden.

I didn’t experience anywhere near the same swelling as my foot, but being stung twice within a number of weeks at such an auspicious time of my healing process, I knew there was something here for me.

Totem animals. Animal spirits.

What was the message?

I got contemplating. And I got researching.

I stumbled upon information reminding me that Bee Venom Therapy had been used as a healing modality for disease and injuries for over 5,000 years, practiced by Egyptian, Chinese and Greek therapists, including Hippocrates.

I came across information depicting early hunter-gatherer rock art signifying the honeybee as a source of medical treatment, alongside some interesting hieroglyphs acknowledging a clear relationship between the Egyptians and the bees.

Ancient Egyptian bee reverence.

Dare I say it, rock art was all the buzz back in the day.

One might say that I’d been spiritually anointed and initiated into a nice dose of bee medicine. I can confirm though: at the time, it certainly didn’t feel like part of my healing.

A friend graciously linked me a couple of interesting articles written by Raeline Brady. She pointed out that ”since antiquity the bee has been venerated in various cultures such as Egypt, India, Ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and Australian Origins, who as I also mention, consider the entire colony to be one creature. When you speak to one bee you speak to the entire hive.”

I couldn’t help but contemplate… Are the entire colony of bees trying to pass on a message to me? Am I supposed to become some great caretaker of bees and devote my life to the re-emergence of our buzzing overlords?

Tongue-in-cheek aside, little did I know that a few years later, I would actually become an amateur beekeeper out on our homestead.

Brady continued on by sharing that “the bee is the symbol of Royal bloodlines in several cultures and in countless instances has been spoken of as coming to this world from other planetary systems and heavenly realms and that that this connection is still in existence.”

My jokester wonders if I was being chosen by some intergalactic cosmic bee federation that was way too confusing and complex for my tiny human mind to try and comprehend.

Whatever the case, while I continued to come across further information on bees as totem spirit animals, shamanic bee lineages, and the deeper meaning of having these ecologically important creatures in ones life, I still couldn’t quite put together why I’d been initiated into all of this recent bee-phenomena. I parked it to the side and trusted that more insight would come when, and if, necessary.

After many weeks deep into my reactivation of what were symptoms linked to decade-old chronic illness, the penny dropped. The bees were quite simply trying to tell me to slow down and take more time to rest.

I’m reminded of Hippocrates wisdom, “Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that made him sick.”

There’s a collective pattern that’s hard to escape during bouts of chronic illness:

• Symptoms become intense.

• We get stuck in thought loops and emotional cycles of stress worrying what's wrong, what the underlying cause might be, or if things are going to get worse.

• Symptoms eventually get a little better.

• Symptoms return.

• We get stuck in thought loops and emotional cycles of stress again.

It's a vicious cycle of unhealthy thought patterns and anxiety.

Comparisons to past experience, projections into future potential. Staying in a cycle of stress doesn’t allow the innate healing cycles and wisdom of the body (ala German New Medicine philosophy) to have a chance to completing that particular stage of healing.

There’s something important to be said about resistance to what is. Resistance is stress. Stress is SNS activation. Consistent resistance leads to extended cycles of stress which evidently leads to a disharmony, dis-ease and break down of the body.

Symptoms are a sign that the body is already unwell and trying to detoxify and purify. The body knows how to heal when we slow down, listen, provide it with what it needs, and create a nurturing environment conducive to health and wellness.

The bees have something to say about the interconnected elements of the entire hive. All aspects of the colony work together cohesively to form one hivemind creature, and beyond that, the health and integration of the surrounding ecosystem is equally as important to ensure the health, sustainability and thrivability of the hive.

Pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides, heavy metals, petrochemicals, nnEMFs… the list goes on. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist, or a beekeeper, to know what these poisons are doing to our colonies of bees.

Forgive me for any incorrect percentages here, but I do recall that there has been a staggering decline in our insect population, perhaps as much as 70%, over the past decade.

Just as the health of a beehive requires the entire colony and their environment to function as one holistic organism, so too does that apply to us as humans.

There can be no holistic healing of the physical body without a healthy integration of the psycho-emotional and spiritual aspects of being. Mind, body, soul, nature connection.

There’s much more to be said when it comes to bee wisdom in times of chronic stress, let alone bee wisdom in general…

Producing and relishing the sweet honey of life, pollinating plants to ensure the health of the ecosystem, finding one’s place in community, honouring the feminine, fertility, abundance, symbols of the sun, transcending their non-aerodynamic design to actually be able to fly, creators and stewards of sacred geometry…

One thing’s for sure. In sickness or health, we can learn a lot from the wisdom of the bees.