For many of us, initiation into soul awareness . . . Awakening . . . occurs by way of transition, shattering, loss, and reorganization, where what we were so sure about and the way we thought things were begins to fall away and dissolve.
This dissolution is not evidence of error or mistake, but is a fundamental alchemical unfolding, a non-negotiable, universal law-based, sacred and holy process. That our 21st-century western world has lost contact with and even pathologized cycles of loss, dissolution, death and grief has led to surging mass-medication of anxiety disorders. We are becoming a society resistant to the fundamental tenants of transformation. Not a single movement upward, into the light, transcendent, solar, and clear can occur without the movement of descent, ground, dust, and lunar, of the earth and the mud . . . And death.
The experience of dissolution is archetypal and wired into the human psyche and points to how wounding can serve an initiatory function, revealing that there are pieces of the soul, of the spirit, and of the Divine that are knowable only by way of a falling apart, of a holy crumbling. Access to these parts, to their wisdom and insight, aren’t accessible in times of clarity, certainty, and status quo.
And, this is painful. Like . . . “REALLY, I don’t want that!” And it is IMPORTANT to HONOR that part of us that just isn’t interested in participating in that whole death and restructuring thing. Let’s be clear . . . we DO want the rebirth part, but not the death part, not the restructuring. This longing for certainty, for flow, for transcendence, for upward, for light, for clarity, of course this desire need not be shamed, made wrong, or dishonored - it’s SO very young, so very human.
But perhaps the invitation is to develop the capacity to hold both, to hold the tension of the opposites and to travel into the very heart of contrast, paradox and contradiction, the very essence of life itself . . . Perhaps the invitation is to honor and hold the desire for flow, and to also honor and hold the inevitable reality that the rug will be pulled out from underneath us as part of this path.
Settling into the realization that loss and death are also holy, are also God, are also Life. Sensing into and experiencing that dissolution is in flow, that restructuring and reorganizing is in flow. Grace is sweet and tender and also fierce and uncompromising . . . Yet still Grace, nonetheless.
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