The alchemy of inner exploration

With practice and courage, over time we can train ourselves to move toward uncomfortable emotions, to stay with them and explore their qualities, textures, colors, fragrances, and signatures. We can replace the demand for relief with that of a fiery, caring curiosity and longing to know the full-spectrum of what it means to be an open, alive human being.

This alchemy of inner exploration is not just a matter of clarity or awareness, but is primarily an activity oriented in the heart. While it is an important developmental task to learn to witness our experience and take a perspective on it, it is the surrounding and infusing of the material with warmth, kindness, and compassion that will unwind the tangles and the knots in the psyche. Mere insight is not enough. It is love that is the ultimate medicine.

We heed this invitation not in order that the emotion goes away, shifts, or transforms into something else – which it sometimes will do – but out of our love of the truth, longing to know more than anything how love is coming into form in this moment. Our emotions are not what we think. They are translucent, flexible, and non-solid. They have not come to harm, but as harbingers of wholeness.

While the shell of the emotion is filled with all of our personal associations, complexes, and a very vivid storyline and colorful cast of characters, at the core of the emotion is pure space. It is from this space that flow the qualities of warmth, compassion, luminosity, and wisdom. Inside this core is a special type of guidance, filled with energy and information for the journey ahead.

Each wave of sensation, each surging of somatic data, like a snowflake is unprecedented and carries the fragrance of your true nature, surging to reach you and share its unique signature.

Photo by Comfreak c/o Pixabay, Creative Commons license

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