It’s essential to take time each day to slow down, rest our nervous systems, feel our hearts, listen to our bodies, and allow the unconscious a chance to speak to us.
Otherwise, the density of the shadow – ancestral, familiar, cultural, and collective – has a way of pressing down upon us, and can deplete us of vital life energy. It can be like a soul-level sort of exhaustion, as the lost orphans of psyche and soma call out in their longing to be held.
Emotional experience which remains unintegrated - which means it isn’t felt, articulated, and made sense of, will leak out in less-than-conscious ways. We’ll find it being evoked in others, enacted in our relationships, or somatized in the body-vessel.
This is not some sign of error or mistake, that we’re unevolved, unspiritual, or that we’ve failed. It is an organic process where psyche longs to know itself. It will never give up in its attempt to reach us, which is the activity of love.
Making the time and space in our lives to imagine and to feel, to rest a nervous system which is shaken by collective trance, is a devotional act. It allows us to tend to the non-rational parts of the soul, which contain vital data and information essential to a life of richness, meaning, and creativity.
This tending is what parts the veil and takes us inside the Beloved and its world.
The alchemists modeled this to us by way of the love-affair they had with the materials in the vessel. They loved the metals, the minerals, and the mystery of what was happening at the intersection of spirit and matter.
To step out of the matrix for just a moment, into inner and outer nature, into the wisdom of the body and the imagination, into the holiness of emerging, right-brain flow… and to listen, to feel, to sense, as the sacred world begins to reveal itself.
Photo: entering the mandala, Rocky Mountain National Park
