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A Karmic Noah's Ark
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Ariadne Weaver
[Volunteer-4]
Hummingbird
With Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.

Hummingbird Photo

Beltane/May Day, 2011: Today I did a session with a woman living in Southern California whose academic background in mythology is very similar to my own (although she got her PhD 18 years before I did).  Over the years, she's studied with Mircea Eliade as well as my long-time friend, Jean Houston. She even took a one-day class on "naming" with Deena Metzger and her lovely "Ariadne Weaver" name emerged from that experience.  We were both looking forward to our encounter and she especially wanted to do it on May Day.  So we did......

Session We started at 4pm, shared many experiences, and finally began the actual session at 6:10pm EDT.  I lost track of time & forgot to record when it ended -- probably c. 7:30-8pm.

Based on my notes taken during this session:

Ariadne had already told me that she goes into trance states very easily but she still wanted me to guide her into one.  So we begin the induction-process with the World Tree.  I ask her to relax and tap into the colorful auric energies around the tree as well as the earth-based, non-human forms emanating from that World Tree.

She goes under almost immediately and hears a bee buzzing, which we assume is her.  She has a very rapid heart beat and can feel her wings beating.  She finds it an interesting contrast between beating heart and beating wings.

She's flying towards a bush with lots of tiny lavender-blue flowers.  She feels a sense of "sweetness" -- it's between scent and taste.  There's "a thickness to the scent," she says -- not just a sweet smell -- more like a "sweet pull." She explains that it pulls, or attracts, on a wavelength that's neither scent nor sight, but a combination of both, yet with a little something more added to it, which she defines as "a magnetic sweetness." She says it's very pleasureable.  In what we assume is her bee-memory, she is aware that there are parts of her job description that aren't as pleasureable as that magnetic sweetness.

She says everything feels fresh, like springtime.  She doesn't hear or sense others around her and is troubled by their absence, yet she's so enjoying the attraction to the "sweetness" that everything else soon fades away.  She then realizes that she's smelled these flowers before and is very pleased to have found them again.  It's mutual, for the flowers are as pleased to have been found by the bee as the bee is to have found them.

Hummingbird

Then something shifts, as it does so often at the beginning of a session.  She begins wondering if she's a tiny hummingbird instead of a bee, especially since she's so alone and her wings are beating so extremely fast -- she doesn't think bee-wings beat that rapidly.  I explain that the buzzing sound she heard when we started might have been related to something else in the environment -- or it might have been a tangled cross-current between bee and hummingbird lives.  It's not unusual for someone to start a session in one life, one body, and then shift into another as scenes become clearer.  The fact that the bee was troubled by the total absence of community, while the hummingbird would turn out to be just the opposite, suggests that there was indeed such a shift between two very different lives.

To help settle the matter, I ask her to rise up and fly above the lavender-blue flowers to get a better view.  She does and sees a vast garden offering her many choices.  She can drop down easily wherever she wishes.  She says she really feels much more like a bird than a bee -- she even senses that she now has a long beak.  And she's definitely drinking from the flowers, not gathering pollen as bees do.  She finds it a very interesting sensation to zip around this garden, seeing it spread out with endless supplies of flowers -- everything she needs is all around her! -- some humans have even put out little saucers and round things with sweet liquid for her.

She tells me that she likes humans today, but there are other days when she doesn't.  It depends on the neighborhood she finds herself in.  She can get easily turned around and lost, which means she often can't return to favorite places.  Big storms, for example, can make her lose her way.  When neighborhoods change, the same thing happens and she gets lost. "Humans do so many strange things --" she says.  After a pause, she adds, "Mother Nature too." She does the best she can to keep up with such changes but it's difficult.  An issue related to her lack of navigational skills is about going south, where she somehow knows it's always warm, but she's never been able to figure out how to get there.

She also has no sense of others of her kind.  When I ask her about her mother, siblings, mates, she is completely amazed by the question, amazed that there could even be such things.  She has no awareness of other birds either. She feels totally on her own, "looking for a warm place with flowers."

She mentions that she did see snow, just once, and she was cold, but she somehow managed to get to someplace warm -- "a garden inside with grass," she called it (by which she probably meant a greenhouse).  She saw humans there but no birds.  The following winter, she couldn't find it again.

At that point, I abruptly changed the session's trajectory.  Too much wasn't adding up and I was experiencing the discomfort in my physical body -- a  not-to-be-ignored sense of feeling increasingly "antsey" in my Hara-center -- i.e., the 2nd "sacral" chakra in the navel region.  What had happened to cause this hummingbird to lose all sense of direction?  Why was she so unaware of other birds?  Why couldn't she even recall a mother?  What could have disabled this tiny bird so severely?

I didn't feel we could keep going as we were -- we needed to discover what had happened to her.  So I asked her to relax, take some deep breaths, and go back to when she had a mother.  I wasn't sure if this would work, but Ariadne was able to go back with surprising ease.......

Two Baby Hummingbirds in a Nest

She's tells me she's all scrunched up in a small nest of straw with two other squirming birds.  A bigger bird comes with food in her mouth and the three babies nibble at it.  It doesn't taste good to her but feels like the right thing to do.

After a pause, I ask her to move to the next event-of-interest:

Now she's feeling even more scrunched in the straw as they've grown bigger. They can hop around a little now, which she says is fun.  Their nest is in a tree-crotch where straw's been collected.  Their mom has wings that go up and down but the babies can't do this yet -- they hop around instead.  They "communicate" by deliberately banging into each other (the human version, Ariadne says, would be like poking your elbow into someone else's ribs).  Their mother teaches them lots of things.  Sometimes another adult bird comes by -- he doesn't relate to the little ones, but their mom knows this one so it's probably her mate.

Hummingbird

Again, I ask her to move forward:

She now experiences, almost as if it's time-lapse photography, the complete process of maturing from "hop to fly." She watches the entire sequence, but also sees that after she's able to fly a little, she loses her balance and falls out of the nest to the ground below.

The ground is completely foreign to her.  No wonder she feels so frightened and alone! -- the trauma must have been shattering.

Humans eventually find her lying there and tend her until she is able to fly off by herself, but nothing is ever the same.  "I missed a whole lot of imprinting," Ariadne comments tersely.

Now that we know the cause of the trauma, it's time to return to the adult bird.  That bird-self had been in a state of amnesia.  Ariadne, however, has just experienced the restoration of those memories and they're probably now going to be in the adult bird's consciousness as well.  Such amnesia has never come up in a session before.  If we continue, how valid will the rest of the session be?  If it's no longer genuine pastlife recall, it can only serve as a metaphor, parable, analogy, active imagination, or fantasy.  But might not those levels of creativity prove to be deeply significant in their own right?  Are they not capable of stirring profound insights, regardless of their origins?

On the other hand, and I know this is a stretch, but what if in the actual hummingbird's life something once happened on its own to restore those memories at about the same point in her bird-life as when I directed Ariadne to go back and explore the babyhood hummingbird memories?  Although such a reality-meshing between two completely disparate timeframes might indeed be possible, it does seem most unlikely. What are the odds? -- maybe a billion to one. So should I stop the session? -- or keep going and see what emerges?  I waver briefly but decide not to mention my concerns to Ariadne.  I go ahead as if nothing has interrupted us......

Painting of Two Hummingbird Mates

Next:  the restored memories are indeed now in the hummingbird's consciousness -- and the bird is totally delighted.  She even gets the idea of hanging out near one of the garden's hummingbird feeders in hopes of meeting others like her!

When another hummingbird eventually comes by, she follows it.  A second bird joins the first and she keeps tagging along.  They accept her and take her to a park where there are a half-dozen other hummingbirds.  She holds back, not knowing the rules.  She feels very excited but is unclear about what to do.  Then, after awhile, she realizes that the others are very open to her joining them. She decides to stay.

They go out two or three together, then return to the park at night.  I ask if a mate appears.  She describes seeing a group of male hummingbirds -- they show an interest in her so she assumes she's female (we hadn't been sure of her gender until this point).  She's unsure about what's going on but says some of the other females give her a hint (she doesn't mention how this is communicated and I don't ask lest it distract her).  Then a male "accidentally" knocks into her.  This starts the courtship, "awkward though it is and," Ariadne adds, "not very courtly."

Next:  she says she's been sitting on a nest of 3 eggs for what seems like a very long time.  She keeps them warm and her mate brings her food (she mentions "worms" but I assume that was Ariadne's own mind getting in the way --  larger birds like robins eat worms but I don't think hummingbirds do).  She finds his thoughtfulness very nice, especially since she's never gotten much attention before.  If she gets bored, he's even willing to sit on the eggs.

Then the eggs start to break and squirming little things come out of them. She's thrilled, amazed.  It seems miraculous and incredible for someone who's been alone forever.  "Absolutely amazing," she keeps saying over and over.

Next: when the time is right, she's able to teach her babies how to hop -- she remembers how her mom taught this.  She conveys to her mate her story of falling out of the nest -- this is a warning to him that they must be very careful with these three (she doesn't mention how they communicated and I don't interrupt the flow).  She feels it's desperately important to take care of these children. After teaching them to hop, she successfully teaches them to fly.  Only when the time is fully ripe, do they safely go off on their own.

Next:  It takes another two years for this process to begin anew, this time with 2 eggs instead of 3.  All this is still amazing to her but she's "more into what it is to be a bird now" -- the rhythms, being part of a family, having an extended family, and so forth.

Hummingbird

Finally:  I ask about the warmer climes she once longed to find.  At first she feels that hummingbirds couldn't possibly go on a long journey south with such small bodies so it was unclear to her how they spent their winters.  To zero-in more closely on this issue, I ask her to go back to an autumn.  Then she sees that they make plans to fly just far enough south to be safe.  Oregon hummingbirds, for example, would fly as far south as Santa Barbara and then stay there instead of flying all the way to Mexico. She says her group was part of a larger group that had been doing this for a long time so they knew exactly where to go.  They would start early enough in the autumn so they wouldn't have to make a mad dash. Then instinct would guide them back home when the weather was safe.

*******

Before bringing her back to the present time, I asked Ariadne if she'd like to comment on anything else about her hummingbird life.

She replied: "Once I got into the rhythm of it, I enjoyed it very much. I liked the idea of being in an extended family, knowing that earth provided what I needed, and knowing I could teach my children what they needed to know.  I wish I had all that in my human life!"

How lovely to hear from you. I think you did a wonderful job of describing our session, complete with our long chat. I particularly agree with the following note [FYI: it's my long one just before we returned to the adult-bird and continued Ariadne's session from there], as during the session I wondered myself how much was recall and how much was the intrusion of my conscious mind.  I'm glad you decided to include it as a valid session, as it certainly felt valid to me [I'm deleting Ariadne's emailed copy of my note since it's already on this webpage]....

I was pleasantly surprised by the first hummingbird photo, in turquoise and purple, as these are colors that I love and wear more than others. A holdover from my hummingbird life?  [I wouldn't be surprised!  We're often drawn to colors, smells, sounds, tastes we've loved in earlier incarnations <smile>.]

Of course you may use my name. I am proud to be included in your study.... Best to you, and thanks again for the session. I loved being a hummingbird.

...These Interspecies/Noah's Ark telephone mini-sessions are $95.  If you are interested, you can reach me at: jenks7ATfrontierDOTcom

My Reincarnation Webpages

New 2011 Focus on Interspecies/Noah's Ark:
Exploring Your Karmic Noah's Ark: Interspecies Lives
A Karmic Noah's Ark / My Elephant Life
A Karmic Noah's Ark / V-1:- Rabbit & Hippo

For links to earlier and later reports on interspecies lives,
please return to the portal page at:
Exploring Your Karmic Noah's Ark: Interspecies Lives

General Info on Exploring Earlier Human Incarnations:
Portal Page
What Is a Past Life?
Frequently Asked Questions
Letter to a Child
Perspectives on Exploring Past Lives
On China and Tibetan Reincarnation (from the New York Times, October 2007)

Testimonials:
Testimonials about my work

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© 2011 Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
Page designed and begun: late 30 May 2011.
Completed c. 5:30pm,  31 May 2011.
Proofed, etc:  4 and 5 June 2011.
E-mailed unlisted link to Ariadne 5 June 2011 around 3pm 
& received her approval of all text and photos less than 30 minutes later!
Thus, officially launched this page c. 4:45pm, Sunday, 5 June 2011.
My thanks to her!
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