In ways the conscious mind isn’t quite able to understand, we can also be held by the darkness, inside the womb of the unknown.
It’s going to feel counter-instinctual to allow ourselves to stay in that place of not-knowing, meaning we’re not going to want to do it. The pull will be back to certainty, clarity, and knowing ahead of time how it will all turn out.
Holding the tension between all the contradictory feelings in the body vessel is the activity of love. Providing a home for the burning, the longing, and for the darkened material to reveal its nature is the essence of the alchemical journey.
There is wisdom here in the shattered – and profound guidance for the path ahead – but it can’t be accessed with ordinary awareness. It can only be felt and known through the heart.
This process involves an emptying of the cup, a cosmic decaying and recycling, where we’re shown that the path of awakening and healing, while giving us everything, will simultaneously take everything away.
This “taking everything away” is one of the signatures of the beloved, of a fierce and reorganizing grace, but it’s not necessarily the sort of “grace” we had in mind when we started out on the path.
It is only through the process of embodiment and incarnation that the beloved, her being and blessing can find its way here, with us as the vehicle for that sort of embodied, ensouled transmutation.
Yes, it can be so shaky at times: “I can’t take any more. Can I just go back to the way it was?”
But this tenderness and sensitivity, that ache in the heart, that burning in the body for union, is a sign you’re on the right track, that you’ve crossed the threshold into the liminal place where the Friend is there to receive you.
That longing is the doorway in.
