There are times in our lives when even our most precious beliefs and realizations fall apart and dissolve in front of our very eyes. What was so clear only days or weeks ago is transformed to dust.
Yellowed away by the alchemical putrefactio, me and my life and the way I was so sure it was supposed to turn out.
It’s tempting to conclude 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 path is everywhere. It is there in moments of holding it all together and it is equally there in moments when everything is falling apart.
In the fantasy that we have come to some resolution or “mastery” of the wildness and unending depths of the human heart, the beloved appears to turn the master into dust, which was precisely his or her role all along, a special arrow in her quiver. How tragic. What mercy.
The soul is always communicating to us. The great Friend is always looking for us, in the hope of drawing us nearer, but often in ways that are unexpected and even bewildering to the part of us that believes it is in control.
In order to get our attention, the 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 can have a certain disassembling energy to it.
It’s the grace of Kali, or that of the wrathful Tibetan goddesses or the moon, a raging grace, a creative and destructive reorganization of consciousness. But it is grace nonetheless.
#healing #spirituality #psychotherapy #oneness #nonduality #tantra #meditation #yoga #spiritual #spiritualawakening #alchemy #alchemical #alchemist #mystic #mystical
The commitment to our immediate embodied experience is the most radical we could ever make. To fully participate in the unfolding of the feeling body – right here, right now, as it is – is the unknown and direct path into the love and freedom that we all so long for.
When sadness comes calling, grief appears, or shame arrives from behind the veil, they do so as ornaments of the heart, revealing a secret doorway into one of the essence-qualities of being, inviting us to come face-to-face with the goddess who guards that gate.
In the words of the great tantric sage Saraha, “Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places… I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.”
Whatever we are offered in this day – the beautiful, the challenging, the heartbreaking, the painful – may we take the risk to know it fully, inside and out, dual and nondual, and to infuse it with our embodied presence. Even if it takes us to dust…
As we pilgrimage through the cells of the heart, we bear witness to its secrets, its nonconceptual wisdom-essence, and sail down the sacred rivers which reveal the currents and subtle pathways, as they craft this precious human body.
And behold the movement of love as it washes through every organ, reorganizing our entire somatic sensual reality into a vessel of spacious kindness and attuned empathic presence, filled with a profound care for this life and for all beings everywhere.
Each individual human heart is differentiated yet somehow non-separate from the great Heart, a unique vessel through which one of the qualities of love may arrive here and find its way into a world that so badly needs it.
I had a dream recently where Sophia (in her form as a Western yidam/ dakini) appeared and showed me a circle. It emerged in the space between she and I, but at the same time was in the center of my heart.
Every aspect of my life – my relationships, my strange body bodily symptoms, creativity, unlived grief, intergenerational trauma grooves, clear light realization, unintegrated shadow – it was all circumambulating around the center and pointing back toward it.
The feeling-sense and imagery was of scattered pieces of soul coming back into linking, revealing their relationship with the center and with one another.
There’s this experience of living in the mandala, where we’re living with the Self as an inner partner, revealing how that orienting principle continues to manifest itself as the phenomenal world.
Whatever image appears – the alchemical vessel, the mandala, Winnicott’s holding environment, the secret chamber within the heart – contains the radiant expressions of wholeness, ornaments of totality.
The hermetically-sealed vessel of the alchemist, signed with the seal of Hermes, the trickster who is ever-revealing the linking and connections within and between the personal and transpersonal Self.
I was drawn toward what Sophia was showing me, as I usually am, but at the same time hesitant, shaky, unsure, a trepidation… because of the implications. Because of the death required.
But even so, to see and feel into that containment, how we’re being held and surrounded as we make the journey, especially in these times when the ground can so easily fall out from underneath us.
.jpg)
.jpg)
