Shadow-sensitive, emotionally-grounded inner work is distinct to each nervous system. We must discover for ourselves the most skillful, effective, and compassionate ways to open and enter into the body, psyche, and heart. No one can tell you what the right way is for you. No one can know ahead of time the places where the light will enter.
The hero or heroine's journey is individual by nature, requiring experiential, primary experience; a collective spirituality will never meet the longing within. While there are many mentors and guides that appear as grace along the way, the true teacher will always point you back into your own uniqueness.
The journey of the heart is radical and revolutionary and requires you, exactly as you are, in all your chaotic glory.
At some point, we will be invited to revision the concepts which have guided us along the way. To bring them into the vessel and heat them up with the fire of our longing, dissolving what has come before and starting over, as if it were the very first day. To illuminate the lenses through which we are seeing self, others, and world and from that place decide if it is time to re-imagine.
Healing is not a state where we become liberated from feeling, but freer to experience it more fully.
To enter inside a mood, image, or emotion and be touched by its color, fragrance, and essence. To know firsthand the rarity and preciousness of having a human body, a sometimes shattered heart, and a miraculous, sensitive nervous system. To truly meet the blooming spring flower, to hear the birdsong as it comes out of the other world, to see the color in the eyes of the one in front of us.
Not a transcending of our vulnerability, fleeing into a state of power and untouchability, safely hidden away in some protected spiritual cocoon. But something wilder than that. Something more magical. More raw. At times, even more painful. But it is a pain we enter into consciously, as a willing traveler of the unknown, to behold in more depth the untamed activity of love as it comes here.
For some reason, we were given a heart that is whole, and we will never be satisfied with that which is partial. We will never be fully alive by embracing only those feelings and those dreams that our families, societies, and teachers claim are worthy and valid. But only through the courage and the mercy required to touch it all.
To partake of the entirety of the spectrum of this human experience, with as much curiosity, soul, and kindness that we can discover. To give ourselves permission to care, to take a risk in allowing another to matter, and tend to the heart it inevitably breaks in response to suffering, disappointment, and despair.
To see for ourselves to what degree the unconscious quest for power, mastery, certainty, and invulnerability may be an expression of fear, not love.
To at times crumble to the ground in awe at it all. Awestruck at the bounty that has been laid out before us. To fall apart. To fail. To get back up. To be humble again. To start over. To be a beginner. An amateur at the ways of love.
To realize how little we know in the face of the mystery.
It’s not so much that we need to (or even can) get out of the matrix, the developmental-cultural-historical lens through which we have come to perceive what we call “reality.”
Instead, to begin to see it clearly, in all its nuance, subtlety, and dream-like luminosity. How am I imagining myself, others, and the world? What is the myth in which I am living, through which I am seeing? What is the story I’m telling, who are the gods and goddesses I am traveling with?
Am I willing to take the risk to dream a new dream? To differentiate from the voices I have inherited from a world that has forgotten the mysteries. To listen to the new poetry as it pours out of the stars.
While we may never be able to fully step outside the matrix and report back as a neutral observer and “detached witness” (another fantasy of modern consciousness), we can play within it, dance inside and around it, allow ourselves the freedom to hide and seek, and the imagination to get lost and to be found.
We can get messy, fall apart, be vulnerable, fail well, fail with heart, forget and remember, dissolve and come back together. And set aside the fantasy that one day we’ll come to some safe, secure, knowing resolution to the wildness of love and its contradictory, untamed, and relentless activity. That one day we’ll become a “master” at life, wiggle into some invulnerable/ untouchable state, tucked away and protected from the reality that the rug can and will be pulled out from underneath us in each unfolding moment.
To allow others to matter, to allow our hearts to break (and maybe even not be mended), to practice embodied intimacy without becoming fused, to fully participate in the dream without falling into trance. And even if we fall into trance, to dare to see it, too, as none other than the beloved in disguise.
It’s really like being a character in our own fairy tale, with all the mythical and archetypal beings by our side, curious as to what the crazy love-struck boy or girl is going to do next, in awe of the human form and the inseparability of matter and spirit.
