There are times in our lives, sometimes observable cycles, when our most precious beliefs, insights, awarenesses and realizations fall apart and dissolve despite our attempts to hold on. What was so clear only days or weeks ago is dust in the wind.
Me, my life, the way I was so sure it was supposed to go, is not going that way at all.
It’s so tempting to assign meaning to the experience of dissolution, to assume that something has gone wrong, some great cosmic error or mistake has occurred, we have failed, or we’ve been forsaken.
But this reassembling of our world is a sacred process and the journey into death and rebirth is everywhere, all around us, all the time. It is there in peak moments of balance, holding it all together . . . and it is equally there in moments when everything falls through our fingers, when everything is falling apart.
When we fantasize that we have figured it out, that we've come to some plateau of “mastery," that we have some control over the wild and unfathomable depths of the human heart, Life flows into the present moment, humbling the master and grinding our imagined security to dust. This transformative force is the purpose and focus of Life. Life moves the made and the manifested on to its next, more expanded possibility. How tragic that we will lose what is. What mercy that Life has it handled and we can surrender to growing into whatever comes next.
Inner Being, Soul, God . . . as you wish . . . is always communicating to us. The Universal One is always looking to draw us toward knowing and accepting its role in our existence. Soul communicates by moving Life energy around in ways that evoke feelings and sensory experiences. As Soul unexpectedly shifts and reorganizes Life circumstances, the parts of us that believe they are in control are bewildered and humiliated.
In order to get our attention, Soul must at times upset and dissolve the status quo, turning inside out the dreams and fantasies of "me" and the life I thought I was living… causing us to see that perhaps we have no idea who and what we are, what a relationship is, what healing is, what the Divine is, and where we will find meaning.
As we deepen in our inquiry, we might start to see this activity of somatic and psychic restructuring as the expression of a certain kind of grace… not the sweet, flowy, and expansive grace that is our favorite kind, but a grace that is fierce and wild and is entirely devoted to the manifestation of Love.
It’s the grace of Kali, or the wrathful Tibetan goddesses, or the moon, a raging grace, a creative and destructive reorganization of consciousness. But it is grace nonetheless.
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