A little while back, I shared about how I made the Million Dollar Decision to secure my only trusted babysitter for one overnight Mama’s night off, two times a month, for the entire year of 2022.
We’re only a couple of weeks into the year and this is already ranking up there in my Top 10 Decisions of All Time.
I’ve started this beautiful routine where I leave Londyn and the sitter in an unrushed, leisurely way, then I take a little journey through the village of my neighborhood, dropping in to pick up a luxurious new journal or a green ginger smoothie from a new juice bar as I make my way up to the resort that’s connected to our country club (and FYI: joining the club is probably also on my Top 10 Decisions list).
I check myself in for the night, spread out my laptops and books and papers, turn on some meditation music, sit for a bit, and then GO. Monk-mode is on.
After a few hours, I take a break, get dressed up and go downstairs for dinner. After I’m greeted with a million “Where’s Londyn!!??”s from the smiling staff, they seat me at “my table”, aka the chef’s table, aka the best table in the house.
I might just sit and eat and gaze at the setting sun and the dawning moon. Or I might have a friend join me for dinner. Or I might not be able to stop writing, so I just bring my laptop with me and click away.
Just in the first couple of these mini Monk Mode sessions, I’ve already outlined two new courses and done much of the research for my next book.
But what I really want to share with you today is what happened when I got home from the last of these little retreats.
It was a glorious Sunday afternoon by the Bay. It’s January, so it was like 70 degrees outside (21° C). The sitter brought Londyn to meet me at the club, and we swam and had brunch all together before L and I headed home to prep for the week. As we buckled Londyn into her car seat, the sitter mentioned that Londyn had complained about her ear bothering her several times the night before, and suggested that I ask her about it.
So I did.
Very nonchalantly, Londyn said: “Yeah! Last night a rat climbed into my ear and laid eggs in there. I can still hear the eggs!”
Me: 😳 “Wait. What happened?”
And she repeated herself.
Very clearly. Very precisely.
I asked her a few follow up questions to try to figure out whether it was a dream or something she’d read about in a book… or…anything other than a rat laying eggs in her ear.
And then—because you truly can know too much about psychology to be a peaceful parent— I began to search This Here Internet with queries like “Jungian dream eggs ear”, “dream analysis rat eggs ear”, “bug eggs ear dream” and my personal best: “what does it mean to dream about something laying eggs in your year”.
I think that by asking her about it, I re-activated the subject in her mind. She hadn’t mentioned it all day up to then, but once I asked… she kept bringing up the eggs in her ear.
Maybe an hour into this conversation, it occurred to me that there might actually be something. What if something’s actually in her ear?
Well that skeeved me all the way out. So I asked her if we should go see the doctor about it, and she enthusiastically agreed that we should, her little Afro nodding vigorously. I called the pediatric nurse hotline, and told the woman who answered exactly what happened.
She said, “We’re in peak Omicron right now, so I really can’t tell you to take her to the emergency room. I can get her in at 10:00 in the morning. Will that work?”
I turned to Londyn and said, “Babe, how about we see if the eggs come out tonight and go see the doctor in the morning?”
Her facial expression was my answer. She looked like…well, she looked like how you would look if you had rat’s eggs in your ear and managed to keep it together for one whole night, but then someone offered you the chance of relief, and then you found out it would be another whole night before you could actually get the relief you’d glimpsed.
And she started to panic, “No, Mommy!! We need to go to the doctor now!!!”
So I got back on the phone with the nurse and said: “Listen. We live in Oakland. I can drive up to 50 miles, but I’ll go in any direction. I need you to look for any urgent care center that’s open right now in any direction. We can go to San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Pleasanton, Richmond, Marin… wherever. Where can we be seen immediately?”
The nurse clicked and clacked away, and came back with an answer: “Well, Dublin is about 30 miles from you and they have an urgent care that’s open right now. I have no idea how many people are in line to be seen, but you can try it.”
And that’s what we did.
I fed the dog and let her out, threw a bunch of snacks and books in my backpack and packed up The Little Homegirl.
Before we got in the car, I got down so my eyes were at the same level as hers, and I said: “Okay, honey bunny… I heard you say there are rat’s eggs in your ear! So we’re gonna go to the doctor’s office. But we’re gonna have to drive a long way, and we might have to be there the rest of the evening. So before we go, please tell me if you really need to see a doctor tonight or if there’s something you watched or read that made you think of eggs in your ear. If you tell me we need to go see the doctor, we will go, but if you don’t really need to go, please tell me right now.”
She said: “We need to go now, Mom.”
And two hours later, after the very-quick drive (by Bay Area standards) and a not-terrible-actually wait (also by Bay Area standards), I told the Physician’s Assistant (PA) about our rat’s eggs in the ear issue.
I told her I’d searched for what an eggs-in-your-ear dream might mean, and she said “WHOA, people have dreamed about that?”
Me: “Um, yes. Sooooo, humans have dreamed every dream that could be dreamt. But dreams are symbolic in meaning, not literal. In our case, I think Londyn actually has something in her ear.”
PA shined the ear scope into Londyn’s “good” ear and quickly declared it good. Then she shined it into the “rat’s egg” ear. She looked a looooong time, stepped back, raised her eyebrows and said: “Mom, you might want to come look at this.”
Deep in Londyn’s ear was one, single crooked white pug dog hair, probably an inch long.
You know. Rat’s eggs.
That single hair had been stuck in there, tweaking The Great Londyno’s little eardrum, probably making a cacophony of scritches and scratches for maybe 24 hours. All afternoon, I’d noticed Londyn opening and closing her mouth which (according to Dr. Google) was probably causing the hair to make even weirder noises in her ear.
My 4 minutes of Internet mastery of the subject quickly revealed that a) hair-in-the-ear is a known issue that usually arises after a haircut, and b) there are a handful of ways to get them, but if you don’t, it’s no big deal because c) the ear canal is self-cleaning, so even with no intervention almost anything in your ear will come out on its own… eventually.
And the PA said something to the same effect.
But I couldn’t let my girl just sit there with rat’s eggs in her ears—not with a bunch of trained medical professionals standing around.
In the end, it took three different people 45 minutes to get the hair out of Londyn’s ear. They actually couldn’t get it out. After the ear-nose-throat specialist tried and failed, the PA came back, shone the light around in there a bit more and exclaimed: “Oh! It just fell out!!”
Londyn broke into an enormous smile.
She drolly said, “Mamaaaaa there weren’t rat’s eggs in my ear. It was a Miko hair!!”
And: Scene.
By now I’m sure you’re (relieved but also) wondering why I’m telling you this story.
And I’m telling you this story because on your journey of spiritual awakening of recalibration, of self-actualization, and of alignment, sometimes —a lot of times—a Spiritual Alarm Clock will ring—you’ll encounter an illness, an injury, a crisis or seeming-catastrophe—and you will not know exactly what to do. You will not know, should you stay? Or should you go? You will not know, should you wait, or should you go see the medical doctors about it, or should you try to treat yourself?
I think the rats-eggs-in-the-ear experience is an excellent symbol for those moments of discomfort, dis-ease, disharmony, and alarm.
So here’s what you should do if you feel like you’ve got rat’s eggs in your figurative, metaphoric ear:
1. Listen to your Inner Child. Do not gaslight yourself into ignoring the symptom, a misalignment or disharmony until it’s more convenient to address it.
That time might never come, and your Inner Child will panic and grow louder in her discontent until she gets heard.
Chronic stress that leads to chronic and complex disease is just that: your Inner Child crying out to be heard, acknowledged and attended to, especially when you’ve been overruling, and overwriting, and ignoring those cries for a really long time.
2. Get symbolic. Dr. Jung said that in our lifetimes, we’ll each have five dreams that could accelerate our awakening in life-changing ways if we could catch the symbolic meaning they were trying to convey.
I’ve come to know that this is true for our sleeping dreams, but it’s equally true for our Ignored or Unfulfilled Aspirations, many of our physical symptoms, relationship breakdowns and all manner of other crises.
I call these our Spiritual Alarm Clocks because they are actually trying to do the work within us of waking us TF up from the trance-like thought habits that keep us from aligning to our True Selves out of fear, scarcity, unworthiness and trauma.
So when these things come up—a crisis, an impasse or an illness—it’s a best practice to look for the symbolic meaning.
Sometimes, it’s very one-to-one. Sometimes, it’s symbolic but it’s still direct.
Throat problems may symbolize lifelong self-expression that you’ve been holding in.
Feet problems may represent being stuck, not moving forward in life.
Bone problems may suggest your infrastructure is out of alignment.
Connective tissue issues often track back to unprocessed trauma and resulting disconnection: from self, from others, from Source.
Inflammation? Sure, cut off all the sugar and alcohol, but look for the unexpressed anger or boundary violations you’ve never addressed.
Dis-ease in your body can be dis-ease in your own skin, your own life.
Overeating? You might need more spiritual and emotional nutrition.
If you want help decoding these sorts of symptoms symbolically, I’ll list some go-to references at the end.*
But also know this: This is unconscious work. This is shadow work. And when you work with your shadows, you must never judge yourself for what you discover. You must be very patient, and let the symbolic meaning reveal itself to you in its own time. And you must never be too hasty to feel like you can check the box of having figured it all out from a single Google search, because it’s also essential that you…
3. But make sure you don’t get TOO symbolic. Don’t gaslight yourself the other way either. Don’t forget that you have a real physical body in a real physical world. Don’t be so hasty to find a spiritual, symbolic or psychosomatic root cause that you overlook ACTUAL rat’s eggs in your ACTUAL ear.
Londyn is 4. Her vocabulary is very advanced. But she didn’t have the knowledge to think, “hmmm statistically speaking, something else is probably in my ear”. What she knew from reading her books is that rats are bigger than mice, and that mice make a scritchy-scratchy noise. And she knew there’s no actual animal in there so… ipso, facto… rats > eggs > ear.
Sometimes, the health breakdown is not a self-created, metaphoric crisis. Sometimes you actually need medical help. Sometimes the relationship breakdown is due to real boundary violations or a true mismatch and there’s no amount of reframing, love and light or therapy that would create true alignment. Sometimes you feel all torn up about sending your kid off to the school they hate every day because your Inner Intelligence knows your kid is actually being treated poorly at that school, or their independent spirit is being snuffed out. Sometimes you hate your job because it’s an actively toxic workplace and a terrible way to spend the precious moments of your life.
Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking everything is symbolic or even deep. Sometimes a shitty job is just a dog hair in your ear.
4. Don’t ask for too many opinions on what’s in your ear. If you feel the disharmony, let that be enough. Don’t try to calibrate how bad you’re willing to let yourself feel by asking everyone you know if you’re being too sensitive or if you should sleep on it until the next day/week/month/decade.
Don’t get it twisted: MOST humans in the Western world are uninspired, unhappy, disengaged and disconnected. Never let someone else’s low bar for joy be a justification for overruling your Inner Guidance and trying to drown out the discomfort that’s trying to give you information about what changes you need to make in your life, when and how.
By all means, ask for help, support and resources making the changes you need to make.
Ask for insight, connection and companionship as you make them.
Ask for someone who loves you to witness your experience.
But never predicate your willingness to make a change you know needs making on whether others in your life will understand or approve of those changes.
And don’t ask for permission, opinions or approval and do not make their understanding or participation in your change be a prerequisite for you to heed, honor and answer your Spiritual Alarm Clocks.
It is not your job to explain your Inner Guidance to them or anyone else.
Here’s to a rat’s-egg free rest of the (y)ear.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: A few relevant resources:
Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life has a handy-dandy chart in the back where you can look up the psychospiritual roots of many physical symptoms.
Gay Hendrick’s Big Leap has a similar chapter that decodes some of the crises and catastrophes that befall us when we hit our upper limits in life.
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Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour
@taranichollekirke on FB | TW | IG | LI
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