We’ve been through so much over the last year, a full-spectrum reorganization, including the loss of so many of our familiar reference points - personally, culturally, and collectively.
Where what we thought we knew about ourselves, what matters most to us, what we’re doing here, where we’re headed… so much of this has been called into question and in many ways has fallen apart.
The way things were supposed to unfold in my life: the person who was supposed to be by my side, the work I was supposed to do and find meaning in, the body that was supposed to always be healthy and strong, a psyche where there was never going to be any exhaustion, depression, loneliness, or anxiety.
It’s important to slow down now, to connect with the earth and the ground, to hold the broken pieces near, and to grieve. To mourn not only the loss of health and life, but also the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out.
The rebirth part of the death-rebirth cycle is realized by way of our willingness and capacity to grieve. The portal to resurrection and new life opens through conscious, embodied lamentation, as we gather the shards of the heart and collect them in a holy vase.
And open to the possibility that this process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error that we need to correct, but a harbinger of integration, an emissary of wholeness. To fall apart consciously, to allow the alchemical process of dissolution as an essential and sacred phase as we open to what it is that will emerge from the ashes.
It is love, of course, that guides the reorganization and its unfolding. But it is also love that is the substance of the ashes, and also of the tears, the tears of grief and the tears of joy… tears emanating out of the longing of the earth herself.
If the tears could speak, perhaps they would remind us that there is no medicine in a wound that is already healed, but only in one that is weeping.
My next online course - Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety - will start in March. Please visit the Befriending Yourself home page to add your name to the wait list or to receive detailed information.
