The crystalline rooms within the center

To unveil the medicine inside the poison requires a shift in our interior center of gravity, into the Earth and the feeling body, with all our sensitivities by our side and available as doorway.
In this, we provide an inner temple where the unlived pieces of soul might arrive from the underworld and into immediate, embodied awareness.

In any moment, the beloved may appear to pull the rug out from underneath us and our most profound realizations, revealing an open, yet luminous center within the heart. An empty cup.

Perhaps this is the core function of the wild, untamed nature of love in our lives, to upset the psychic status quo and take us to the ground, as it’s only from there that our wholeness and non-separateness from life can be known.

To step all the way into this world and know its sacred nature directly requires that we no longer apologize for our doubt, confusion, and tenderness, and that we deeply question the cultural (and spiritual) fantasy that we’re never supposed to feel shaky, anxious, or uncertain.

Or that the emergence of these experiences, visitors from the blue places, is evidence that some cosmic error has occurred that must urgently be corrected, by some conceptual process or quickly scrambling to learn the latest techniques.

Instead, we open to the deepening revelation of the visitor and enter a conscious, embodied, and compassionate relationship with it.

The ally will shift shapes and appear in unexpected ways; in this way it is a trickster – living, moving, and breathing outside our ordinary knowing – arising and passing in the infinite expanse of the not-known.

The (sometimes aching) reality is that the emissaries of wholeness and completeness will enter through our sore places and our wounding, not to harm or take us down, but to reveal the nature of that interior castle that Teresa of Avila described, those crystalline rooms within the very center of our being.

These are the direct portals into our essential nature, whether we conceive of that as a union or oneness with God or the Divine, or direct, nonconceptual realization of the primordially-pure clear-light nature of the heart-mind.

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Circle and spiral - the cycles of grief

Tending to grief is the essence of the wounded healer. Proving a sanctuary and safe passage for its unfolding – in the body, the psyche, and the nervous system – requires that we fall to the ground, at times, and weep.

Weep for the shattering, for the dying of a dream, for the entirety of the unlived life. For it is these tears that form the substance of the portal to joy.

Grief is not something we “get over,” but a partner we spin with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of reorganization. But to marginalize the experience of grief to work against nature. Out in the natural world, the earth grieves by way of her seasons. We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists called the rotatio, the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us for a lifetime. But the grieving, orphaned ones of psyche and soma come not to harm, but to reveal. And to open a doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we “make it through” and come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear, purifying midwife of the unknown. It moves not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

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