As our inquiry deepens, we may notice our center of gravity beginning to shift. It’s not so much that the limiting beliefs and painful feelings have stopped, or even lessened. But they are coming and going in the context of a vast space.
In this new environment, we are in close, intimate contact with the emotional world, but not so close that we fuse or fall in. We no longer need the feelings to go away, but long to know them more fully, to flood them with curiosity, warmth, and embodied presence.
But more than anything, we are drawn to call off the war. To step off the battlefield, for there are no more enemies left. We are no longer willing to abandon ourselves, to attack our own vulnerability, or to meet the inner world with violence and aggression.
The sense of unworthiness, the panic in the belly, the avalanche-like rage, the thought that there is something wrong with us. The feeling of shame, the ruminations of despair, the constriction in the throat, the pressure in the heart. Saturated with intelligence and information, soaked with some sort of sacred data that yearns to be known.
Underneath the thoughts, feelings, and emotions we might come to discover a raw, tender, shaky core. It’s so alive there, a womb of creativity, but not quite knowable in the ordinary sense.
In a moment of flight-flight reactivity, we are habituated to the extremes: to deny, repress, or dissociate from what has come; to dismiss it and turn away, deeming it as error or evidence that something is wrong with us. Or, to become flooded by it, engulfed in the energy, enmeshed in the chaos, losing ourselves in its appearance.
In the middle of these two impulses is a place of wisdom and creativity. It is not easy in a moment of activation to turn into the center of the unknown as it is dark, unfamiliar, and a bit groundless inside. Our ordinary reference points are not able to provide familiar orientation.
But there is a light there, too, shining out of the very core of the visitor. This one has come not as an enemy from the outside, to harm and throw us off course, but as an emissary of the inner family, longing to be allowed back home, to be reunited in the vastness of what we are. As a harbinger of integration, of a new organization oriented in wholeness.
And then the invitation arrives: to provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to complete a sacred journey, to accompany this one as a fellow traveler along the way of love.
My next event is a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO.
