Buried inside even our deepest neuroses are the raw materials of healing. In the tantric and alchemical traditions, those less-than-awakened thoughts, emotions, and raw sensations are the prima materia for us to work with. They are the secret keys to the sacred world and special portal into the intimacy, connection, and aliveness that we long for.
The shit, the piss, the dirt, the failures, the heartbreak, disappointment, the crumbling relationships, the disintegrating ideas about the ways we thought it would all turn out, the raw eruption of our vulnerability, the achiness of a tender body and heart. These are the holy materials we have to work with as alchemists of our own lives.
While we live in a world that has forgotten the mystery of dissolution, it is the nature of all form to arise and to pass, a shapeshifter of new forms which evidence wholeness. When the forms are dancing in this holy reorganization, go into the earth, into slowness, into the body, and into the ground. Lay your hands on your heart, on your belly. Listen. Feel. Sense. The temptation will always be to replace the darkened form with something else – some new person, belief system, identity, or feeling to cut into the hot, rich, textured, pregnant, groundless void.
This ancient longing for relief need not be shamed, nor approached with abandonment and aggression, but held as utterly valid and workable, allowed to arise, unfold, and be metabolized in curious, loving awareness. But the deeper invitation is to rest in the deflation itself, to descend inside the core of the creative energies of the dissolution, and take refuge in the intelligence of the naked, the tender, and the raw unknown.
To slow down, finally, and touch the emptiness with love. To become an archaeologist of the inner landscape, to see with cleansed perception the inseparability of inner and outer, and to know the union of matter and spirit. It is up to each of us to bring these truths into the collective, in a world that has grown a bit weary.
The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and
The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
