Much is being said these days about healing and spiritual
awakening, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are the promised fruits of
the inner journey. Not all that much is mentioned, however, about the
disappointment of awakening and the ways it can shatter our hearts, breaking us
open to the reality of the crucifixion, the resurrection, *and* the
transfiguration we are likely to encounter along the way.
In the rush to convert the negative to the positive, to
manifest everything we (have been conditioned to believe we) want, and to
manage our lives into some permanent state of “happiness,” we lose contact with
the reality that there is no transfiguration without embodiment to the dark
cross within. The journey of individuation, of becoming a true human person, is
a bit messy by its nature, as it requires attunement to the full spectrum.
The confrontation with the unconscious is not pleasant, in
the words of Jung, but offers new vision, depth, and meaning. We must come to
face the reality that the path is not organized around our hopes and fears, or
the dreams of the way we thought it was going to all turn out. It is just too
creative, too magical, and too alive for all that. Your brain, your nervous
system, your heart, your body – sacred temples appearing before you. There is a
unique journey unfolding inside the temple, but requires a non-conventional
sort of approach to find the way.
In an inclusive embrace of life - right inside the messy,
shadowy, nether regions of the psyche - we are invited to open into wholeness,
which includes the dark *and* the light, the joy *and* the deflation, the hope
*and* the hopeless. It involves the entirety of what it means to be a fragile,
sensitive, and powerfully alive human being. Paradoxically to the mind, but in
ways the heart knows natively, in the core of the vulnerability is a
non-ordinary gold, a jewel that is found only there.
Awakening is not only a creative process, but a destructive
one as well, and love appears to be equally ready to employ either energy in the
revelation of the mystery. What this mystery is we can never know in a
second-hand manner, ahead of time, but only by way of primary experience,
bearing witness to the numinous as it comes alive within us, and as we become
crafted as a vessel for it to move out into the world.
Photographer unknown
The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now
