Climate change, racism, injustice, and personal growth — and how spirit guides can offer spiritual lessons for them all.
When I watched Disney’s Frozen II in theaters a year ago, I had no idea about the ways the world was about to manifest its plot. After living 2020, I feel that Frozen II was a way for the universe to warn and prepare us. Little did we know, a dense fog was about to descend on the enchanted forest of our lives in the form of a global pandemic. I absorbed four essential lessons from Disney’s Frozen II that I want to share.
I personally had an awakening this year, much like Elsa’s awakening in the movie. Often, I felt that a spirit was calling out to me, beckoning me to take a look closer at reality and discover who I really am. Instead of traveling to a glacier the way Elsa does, I meditated, listened deeply to the universe, and looked within. I felt that something was guiding me. I got messages in the form of synchronicities and openings of opportunities in my path. The journey I’ve been on mirrors Elsa’s closely.
This is why I want to explain, through examples in the movie, what spiritual awakenings feel like, and the main takeaways in the film for understanding them.
Be warned, reader: this article contains spoilers for the movie, as I describe four lessons from Disney’s Frozen II.
1.) The Universe Will Manifest a Deep Fog to Force You to Find Solutions.
We’ve all seen how humanity was forced to face its deep problems in 2020. In Frozen II, the kingdom of Arendell is living in perceived peace and prosperity, just like we were up until the beginning of 2020. They are suddenly and forcefully faced with their dark past which involves racism and injustice, a direct cause of some unexplained climate changes. Sound familiar, America?
Elsa and Anna discover that a long time in the past, in a place called the Enchanted Forest, Arendell’s people — their direct ancestors — acted out of greed and hate in dealings with an indigenous group called the Northuldra. This group lived in harmony with nature and respected the elements of the Earth, able to work with it to achieve sustainable living. But the King of Arendell, Elsa and Anna’s grandfather, didn’t see the value in this type of living, and instead chose to trick the Northuldra with the promise of a dam being built and a set-up involving an attack. This part of the story has roots in real life, sadly.
We know that removing indigenous people from their lands and building dams causes disaster in the ecosystem, ruining nature’s ability to sustain us. It’s one of the causes of climate change. Indigenous peoples are best qualified to be stewards of the land, and when we act out of greed, which parts of humanity have done for many years, the natural result is a shift in climate.
“We know now that when we dam the rivers, we dam ourselves.”
— Kate Horner
The fog descends on the Enchanted Forest, and the elemental spirits descend on Arendell, calling on Elsa to heal the ancestral trauma. The only way to move forward is to make things right, even when they weren’t aware of the wounds their people created.
In 2020, humanity was given an ultimatum by nature: face your problems or face doom. Our planet was racing toward unsustainability and the end of our species, and so much of this was caused by industrialization and colonialism. We had to face the racism and division among us, and we were forced to understand nature again as people spent more time outdoors than ever before. Climate change is top of mind, and the major hurdles have slapped us in the face.
This is not a coincidence, humanity. Mother Earth had enough of our wasteful and selfish ways. The privileged few, like the old royalty of Arendell, can’t take advantage of the underrepresented majority any longer. This was the plan for us, just like the thick fog was the plan for the Enchanted Forest.
2.) Spirit Guides Are Always Helping Us.
Elsa’s spirit guide appeared in her life at the right moment, just when things were settled for her. Even though she resists at first (as illustrated through the lyrics in Into The Unknown), she opens herself to the experience of going through a complete transformation.
When the moment is right, they’ll appear and send us on our true path — when we’re ready to break through and ascend to the next level of awareness. All you have to do is be open to it.
In the song All Is Found from the movie, the lyrics show us that we have to lose all of our assumptions and our attachments to this surface existence in order to grow:
Yes, she will sing to those who’ll hear
And in her song, all magic flows
But can you brave what you most fear?
Can you face what the river knows?
Where the North wind meets the sea
There’s a mother full of memory
Come, my darling, homeward bound
When all is lost, then all is found
In order to follow the spirit guide and transform into her higher self, she must lose everything — only then can she find everything. For anyone who has been through a spiritual awakening, these concepts are perfectly true.
To grow, we must be thrust into the unknown.
3.) Water Has Memory — and So Does Everything.
Nature isn’t dead. It has consciousness. When Olaf says “water has memory” and it retains the memory of all the animals it has passed through, he has a point. Perhaps it doesn’t contain memory in the sense that we think brains do, but the energy that is exchanged in the great ecosystem we inhabit can retain information. I’ve written before about the energy of trees, and that applies to all things.
Perhaps the memory contained in water is hard for most of us to detect with our intuition. But it has been shown that DNA encodes “memories”, passing information between generations. Trauma experienced in the past can be held in the DNA of living descendants — another theme evident in the movie which I touched on two sections ago. Past wounds must heal in order for our species to move forward so that the cycle of abuse and trauma is broken — amends must be made for injustice, displacement and genocide against large groups of peoples. The descendants of the perpetrators can still make amends.
The ancestral healing must begin.
Water, like DNA and everything, contains spiritual energy that passes messages between things. We can pick up on it if we tune into our intuitions. The scars of a place can sometimes be felt when we get “the creeps”, and tense energy can linger in a place where injustice has been done. In the movie, the injustice is made clear through the ‘memory’ of water, carrying messages to Elsa — much like anyone going through a spiritual awakening starts to receive information through their intuition.
4.) The Four Elements Are Not All There Is
In the movie, Elsa discovers a “fifth spirit” — the lore of which the Northuldra people already knew, proving that indigenous people all around the world are tuned into nature in ways we’ve forgotten in industrialization. The four elements that are well-known are: air, fire, water, and earth. In the movie, these elements are each manifested into the form of some spirit and magical creature, such as the Earth Giants who throw rocks. However, Elsa ends up being the manifestation of the fifth spirit.
In Ayurveda, the ancient Vedic philosophy of life, there are five elements. In addition to the four I listed above, there is ether, which is space. Humans must take up space, and we need space to allow sound and our throat chakra manifestations to travel. I personally imagine that space is filled with unseen energy and consciousness, so the fifth element is consciousness. The makers of Frozen II had the right idea — that the fifth element of nature is intrinsically related to humanity.
Final Thoughts on Lessons from Disney’s Frozen II
Disney’s Frozen II is a magnificent story of a spiritual journey. Elsa shows us how our everyday, repetitive, mundane lives can be transformed into something new and beautiful if we just give in and follow intuition. If you see synchronicities in your daily life, perhaps your spirit guide is coming to start you on your path — likely it won’t be a singing phantom, but anything is possible. And once you see reality clearly, you can begin to mend the injustices and trauma around you. With these lessons from Disney’s Frozen II, start on your journey now!
