Fairy tales describe our Habit Body 2018

Bruce Dickson
Sep 6, 2018 · 7 min read
Antique salt grinder

This is a revision to an existing book, Your Habit Body; An Owner’s Manual: Gut-brain Axis 2.0, which I will put into the book some day.

I made my living for ten years telling stories in public schools as a “super substitute” teacher who brought their own material with them.

I’m aware of three famous fairy tales about our Habit Body. All use a similar motif. All dramatize how wonderfully abundant — or abundantly pernicious — habits can be, when behavior repeats over and over.

Grimm’s “Sweet Porridge” highlights a magic cooking pot. It produces cooked porridge (oatmeal) whenever a magic formula is spoken. Sweet porridge is enjoyed until a user forgets the magic formula for making it stop. The pot continues producing porridge until a tsunami of porridge is unleashed on the countryside. Is this the pot’s fault? It was simply following instructions: make porridge.

The moral of this tale? Habits are behavior conditioned to repeat; be careful which habits you set in motion. How to end a habit is equally meaningful with setting one in motion.

Grimm’s’ “Sweet Porridge” bears a close resemblance to “sorcerer’s apprentice” tales (motif type 325 in fairy tale scholarship): a naive helper charms a broom into carrying water correctly — but then — cannot make it stop because he does not know the correct charm. Goethe published a ballad of this 325 type in 1798.

From a Three Selves point of view, both “Sweet Porridge” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” fairy tales point to our less conscious habits, those difficult to access — but if and when you do — watch out! The results can be magical — either positively or negatively!

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice motif points to the magical nature of our Habit Body, warns us not to trifle with it unless we are as good at stopping a spell as we are at staring one.

Maturity and wisdom is needed to handle the Habit Body, visible in the person of the older sorcerer, in the Disney cartoon version. The story highlights you have to know how to speak with the Habit Body, in the special way it can hear and respond to. In our deep unconscious:

It does not work the way we THINK it works;

it does not work the way we WANT it to work;

it does not work the way we WISH it to work.

It pays no attention to what our rational mind — thinking or feeling — from the neck up.

It works the way it works in a frequency of intelligence quite distant from the comfort zones of Waking Self.

How our deeply unconscious Habit Body works, its terms, its mechanism, can be known. Learning these terms is rare because few wish to journey there. Why? Humility, gentleness, safety, trustworthiness are the pre-requisites.

The hidden nature of the Habit Body changed rapidly once Touch for Health popularized muscle testing in the 1970s. In parallel, NLP began getting serious about documenting Unconscious Patterns, how to access them, how to alter them for therapeutic purpose.

Still the cautionary tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice still holds: ‘With great power goes great responsibility’ ~ Spiderman.

Magic Salt Grinder “put right”

The fairy tale connecting these motifs and the Habit Body for me was “Why the Sea is Salty” (motif type 565). An okay print version of the tale is here: http://park.org/Korea/Pavilions/PublicPavilions/KoreaImage/hangul/litera/mill/index.htm

How our unconscious functions, as viewed from the unsophisticated conscious self, is colorfully pictured in fairy tales of the salt-grinder at the bottom of the sea, “Why the Sea Is Salty.”

Did you know there was a time before all the oceans of the world were salty? Here the magic implement is a salt mill which, once started, continues turning out salt, until a certain command it can understand is given.

Before the salt grinder turned the sea salty, we infer from the fairy tale, the sea was useful, drinkable, FRESH WATER.

Turning it to SALTwater is an error, an accident, a tragedy a large body of fresh drinkable water has been polluted with salt and made undrinkable.

Consider a magic grinder. It does not start out to grind salt endlessly and wreck a freshwater ocean. The fairy tale tells us, “It looked like any other stone hand mill but it had special powers. All one had to do was say what one wanted and turn it. Out would come what had been requested.

If gold was requested, gold would come out. If rice was requested, rice would come out. Whatever was requested, the small hand mill would produce it.”

This is the cornucopia, Horn of Plenty motif, images for the power of our unconscious mind set free from all narrow boxes; and then, linked with archetypal Abundance.

The fairy tale entices us to conjure with harnessing the power of our unconscious, releasing learned restrictions put on us, so we again have a magical servant, who can manifest whatever is needful.

The magic grinder is not owed by a peasant or wood cutter but by a king, someone wise enuf to understand and respect the potential for good and harm inherent in a magic salt grinder, our habit body.

The King only asks the grinder to make what is needful, for the highest good, only when it is needed, for the highest good of the entire kingdom.

The precise form of the effective command to stop is of interest in this tale: “Mill, mill, stand still, for I want nothing more!”

In Three Selves terms, the conscious self has to step in and command a cessation of activity, must consciously redirect activity on the level of the mill clearly, directly, explicitly.

In the tale, a thief steals it; sells it to a new owner, a boat captain, who cares little about the magic phrase. The captain is unable to stop the mill as his boat fills up with ground salt and sinks the boat. The captain throws the mill into the ocean, where it continues to grind out salt infinitely forever — and this is why the sea is salty.

The thief and the sea captain both lack kingly discernment. They know only greed. The grinder goes rogue due to untamed greedy-thinking.

The endless, mindless salt grinding, salt-making, points to the repetitive cycling nature of habits, once set in motion. They do not stop — until the rational mind engages and understands the language of the habit at its depth.

From freshwater to tears

The tale highlights the change in quality of a large body of water, from fresh water to salty, undrinkable water. Sea imagery in fairy tales points to the emotions and/or the huge uncharted realm of our unconscious.

That one habit, done for thousands of years, altered the taste and drinkability of all water everywhere equally, tells us about the power each habit has to alter the inherent happiness of our etheric body into sorrow.

How do we get down to the grinder and re-program it to grind fresh, sweet drinking water, instead of salt? How do we reverse the process and turn a salt sea back into drinkable fresh water? The fairy tale does not say. The fairy tale is obscure and opaque about how to remedy the tragedy of the salt grinder, how to turn it off, to stop it from producing salt in toxic amounts.

The tale was composed no later than the 1400s, before Carl Jung, before hypnotism before inner child work. these were the start of reliable methods to communicate directly with our inner salt grinder.

Inner child work empowers us to find and reprogram an errant salt grinder. It “lives” at the bottom of the ocean; so, time and effort are required to get down there.

The magic words required are: Acknowledgement, compassion, kindness, apology, self-forgiveness and re-negotiation.

To change the behavior of a rogue salt grinder, you have to GO DOWN INTO THE SEA, far down deep. Depending on the depth, this requires some courage. Deep sea diving requires some technique. Prepare before you dive.

Afraid of deep-sea-diving? The more you do it, the more familiar it becomes; your confidence increases. It becomes ordinary.

You’re simply visiting parts of your psyche with much less choice than you are used to consciously, from the neck-up.

Your salt grinder is part of the human operating system. This is not safe, comfortable nor familiar. As a first-timer, this environment inevitably feels FOREIGN. James Cameron’s movie, The Abyss is perhaps the best imagery we have of this journey, leading to a happy ending.

The deeper you go into your unconscious, the lower the frequency, towards Delta. You find more and more primitive thinking, less and less awareness choice exists. The deeper you go, the further away from “choice” you get. You bring choice to them; you bring a candle to your own darkness. The deeper part of our unconscious is far away from free choice. It does not understand and cannot make choices. You bring awareness and choice to these parts.

What do our unconscious parts know? They know rhythm and repetition (etheric), like a plant. This gives their current behavior-expression tremendous inertia and momentum.

What do they want down there? Primarily they want to continue doing what they are doing. The words “boredom,” “new,” “novelty” are not in their vocabulary any more than a plant becomes bored making new leaves or your blood gets bored circulating in your body.

Secondarily, they want to be released from carrying burdens no longer necessary for them to carry.

PTSD is exactly like this. The parts of us who do not know the worst is over can cycle thru old trauma pictures infinitely, like a needle stuck on a cracked record, in a never-ending manner, until someone can reach down and in to this part, who is perceived as safe and trustworthy to our Habit Body, who speaks to it relevantly: “The worst is over; you can relax now.”

This is wisdom from one version of Emotional First Aid. It works for adults, kids, sub- and unconscious parts, anyone suffering.

The “Hobbit” in our “habits”

To point out the obvious, “hobbits” are called “hobbits” because they represent our “habits” and our practiced “comfort zones.” Hobbits dislike change; they prefer to keep doing the same old comfortable routines they have done — forever. Dramatic tension forms when comfort-loving Hobbits are urged to leave their comfortable shire and go on a dangerous, unpredictable quest.

In this sense your own child within is like a “hobbit.” Conscious Waking Self? That’s Gandalf.

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