Pulling back the veil so that we can see

In alchemy, things coming apart and falling away are essential stages of the work, evidence of the transmutation and the emergence of the red stone: something/ someone in my life, or some way of being-perceiving, begins to yellow; dissolve, disintegrate, reorganize; seeking our blessing to move along.

It can be a challenging and uncertain time, shaky, groundless, restless - and has a way of aching in the body, burning in the heart: an emptiness, a longing, and simultaneously, somehow, a sense that things are pregnant, open, naked, and alive.

That aching, burning, longing – reflected in the words of Rumi, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila – we might open to the possibility that these experiences are evidence of the Ally, of the emissaries of Wholeness, foreshadowing a coming rebirth.

But of course, it doesn’t always feel like that in the moment. Being ground to dust.

Maybe it’s Hermes who is beginning to appear, pulling back the veil so that we can see, cleansing our perception, polishing our hearts, washing our cell tissue from the inside-out. Hermes, being one of many trickster figures, whose role it is to link the various figures and wisdom-centers in psyche.

And also, to link the individual self with Ultimate Reality; to reveal that Unity as our perception is reorganized in and as a single, unified whole.

Mythologically, Hermes connected the Gods to one another, who would ordinarily stay in their own realms; the connection-maker who links together differentiated and dissociated parts in a system, in this case the system of the human heart.

A reconnecting and relinking of orphaned aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul who have become scattered due to trauma and other forms of emotional wounding, those core wounds around love.

Simultaneously connecting the individual heart with the Divine Ground, linking spirit and matter, linking Self with the unus mundus, with the one world prior to the emergence of the opposites.

It’s Hermes, as connection-maker, who plays in this in-between space, where at times he may appear and reveal his Presence, dancing inside those sore places, into the very center of the weeping wound, and provide the missing tincture.

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VIDEO - Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body

Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body 

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking. We can’t think our way out of trauma. A more tactile, sensual tincture is required.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, shards of unmetabolized experience (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage and held in subcortical and somatic circuitry.

From here, these figures long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s just your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, even as the activity of violence and aggression.

The orphans retreat, and go deeper into the subtle body.

This “advice” is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory.

In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain, on top of that is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night. No relational temple in which to rest, breathe, and tend to the orphaned ones of psyche and soma.

The ally is nearby, but hidden behind the veil. A cleaning of perception and polishing of the heart is needed to see and to feel it. In ways that are counter-instinctual to that part of us needing to know ahead of time, the ally has located itself inside the wound.

Only an open wound can be healed. Otherwise, the tincture is unable to enter, reveal, and transmute. It’s within a sensitive vessel that the physical and subtle tears can weep freely, and wash us from the inside out.

It is the flowing of these tears that allows for the grieving to unfold, the mourning of the unlived life… the beginning of a new world.

Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy

In the Autumn, there’s a way that things illuminate, break open, and reveal some previously undisclosed doorways into reality. Things are tenderized, in inner and outer nature.

Unprotected, unguarded, unable to hide from the shimmering alive nature of reality, as it is, which is rarely going to conform to my own hopes and fears, or the fantasies I have about who I am, what this world is, what love is, what the Divine is.

It’s just too wild and naked for all that. We can’t pin Reality down, wrap it up and resolve it into some nice tidy package, including through our great spiritual realizations; the Beloved is just too undomesticated for that, and just isn’t interested.

There’s a certain sort of shakiness that can go with this, an atmospheric coloring of melancholy or sadness, but not a sadness where something is missing or in need of healing or transformation. It emerges somatically in response to some experience of overflow: this life and heart and the sensual world, the outpouring, it’s all just overflowing.

It can burn at times, in the belly, heart, throat, the eyes, in the subtle body. A blazing aliveness and raging sort of awe at the whole thing.

All expressions of the “blue ones,” a particular group of inner travelers, pieces of soma and soul who reside in the blue regions of the spectrum of consciousness; internal figures who carry tenderness, melancholy, shakiness, and grief.

Where the heart is on the outside of the skin and not safely tucked away inside the rib cage. Fully exposed, naked, unguarded, its flesh just right there.

A “sadness” that’s also quite full at the same time; somehow the emptiness and fullness come together, as One; not in response to something missing or lost that needs to be recovered, cured, or healed. But if you really gave yourself to that that it will take you to the ground, turn you to dust, with the moon looking down upon you.

It seems this burning, this achy openness, this overflow, this being “turned to dust” is the direct response of the Beloved, the way she pours herself out of herself and into this world; they are her portals. Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy.