Much is said these days about healing and spiritual transformation, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are the promised fruits of the inner journey. Not much is mentioned, however, about the disappointment involved in waking up, and the immense deflation wired into the transformative process. It doesn’t really sell that well.
“Making the darkness conscious,” as Jung noted, “is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
Healing can break our hearts and shatter old dreams. It is oriented in birth *and death, creativity *and destruction, transcendent *and descendent currents, and must by its nature dance in the full spectrum.
Not only does it involve resurrection, but the chaotic glory of the crucifixion as well.
While it is natural to have a bias for renewal and rebirth, it would appear the beloved does not share this bias as he or she (or it or they) will make equal use of the alchemical processes of dissolution and putrefactio to open us into her world – each holy arrows in her quiver.
We want to heal but we don’t want to have to feel too much. We want to feel fully alive, but not too vulnerable and tenderized. This is so understandable and so human, and need not be shamed. But it doesn’t seem to always work like that, not in this star anyway, where shakiness is the portal.
At times, “getting what I want” is no longer a majestic or sensitive-enough reference point around which to organize our experience. Love is the new organizer and may have a different idea.
Relationships ending, dreams collapsing, careers recycling, the dissolving of the way it was all supposed to turn out: these yellowings of soul are not evidence of error, failure, or defeat, but of the relentlessly creative nature of love as it emerges here. One form dying so that another may come into being.
Yes, at times the burning can seem unbearable. Such is the nature of the human heart. We may burn until we are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that wholeness is revealed.
Image by Sara Richter
