The Ant Bite
- Sage Taylor
- Apr 13
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 15
A story that blossomed from nature meditation,
the Sacred Questions,
and the Scale of Perception.
I am in the garden meditating.
I want to relax. I want to cultivate the quality of relaxation, so it becomes a second skin to wear as I walk through the world. Bringing ease where I must tread.
The sound of the birds are lulling me gently, with every passing minute, into softness. A big yielding puddle of centre. Breathing. Making me a sleepy bear, gazing with half an eye open. The sky is yawning brightly above, blue mouth agape to swallow the trees. Ants moving in the moss seem to swell, as I recognise their importance and pay them heed.
Suddenly a weight bears down on me. From the centre out. A crushing contraction. It is fear. In my minds eye I see a figure, all teeth, rimmed with darkness, lunging behind me from the hill below.
I know there are gardeners here today. Men with chainsaws. In that split second I am sure I have caught a whiff of their ill intent. Some hint of barely perceptible un-safety. I brace myself. I listen more intently. Perhaps it is simply that break is over and they are about to be noisy again.
And then from my foot nearest the hillside…
I feel a throb.
Tiny.
All teeth.
An ant has bitten my ankle.
And I wonder at just how precise my knowing was.
And how wrong my assumptions were.
Here I’d like to introduce the Sacred Questions.
In Holistic Therapy we use the Sacred Questions, given to us through the Stalking Wolf Lineage, taught by Tom Brown Jnr at Tracker school.
The first is simply ‘What happened?’
And it seems like my nervous system new Exactly what was happening.
The second is ‘What does this tell me?’
And this is where I got the story all tangled up!
That first ‘WHAT’ came through SO clearly and was utterly accurate.
Within the space of a few seconds or less, a story jumped in to claim the meaning. A story that had nothing to do with the WHAT in actual reality.
The gift here was that this happened when I had chosen to sit and practice for 20 minutes of noticing and listening. (Not just to this crazy monkey mind, but outside, in the open air and on the earth). So that that my frame of reference, my aperture of listening, was wide enough to SEE the story unfold. And the living world was there in conversation, bouncing my ideas back at me, helping me see them more clearly, just like a therapist.
Thank you Nature!
So I’m definitely someone with a highly sensitive nervous system.
Sometimes this feels pretty tiresome.
But today felt like a gift.
Connecting to the SCALE of my sensitivity, and realising, sometimes my nervous system gets tuned all the way down to Ant Size, and who knows how much smaller… To recognise the reliability of my perceptions. The trust worthiness of my awareness.
And be able to make a distinction between the necessary amount of energy required to mobilise for these perceptions.
In this case, the energy required was one foot brushing the other.
Sorry Ant.
This is so comforting for me.
Sometimes I feel fear and contraction, and I think it is for NO REASON… and I am left with an icky feeling, a lack of resolution. A sense that maybe my radar is broken. And that tends to frighten me more.
Well now Im thinking…
Perhaps there is a very real, very tiny cue in my environment.
Perhaps there is a cockroach hiding in the corner giving me side eye.
Perhaps I don’t need to build a great big story around my fear.
Perhaps I can bring in a little bit more curiosity, each time I notice it, and thank my nervous system for being so diligently aware. For holding so much presence around me, Always.
About the Writer - Sage Taylor
Sage's approach to therapy is grounded in meeting things as they really are, embracing discomfort and letting it reveal another face. She is no stranger to grief and believes that in many dark corners we find our gold.
In therapy she offers gentle curiosity, to help create safety for the intelligence that lives inside you to speak and be heard. Entraining new patterns in the nervous system and new possibilities in life. Working together, from the present moment, to cultivate a deeply rooted sense of relational safety and trust in life.
Sage draws on years of her own lived experience in therapy as well as life long creative, nature, embodiment and story telling practices. As a neuro-divergent woman she values diversity and the gifts of difference;
In her words:
"I welcome all flavours of weird and folks from all walks of life. I look forward to sharing the path of the brave and the curious."
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