A Place for Healing...
Healing and Moving On...
"The soul once turned toward matter, fell in love with it, and burning with desire to experience earthly pleasures, could no longer hold herself away from it. And so the world was born."
We are both an ego and a soul; a species whose nature is made up of "spirit-matter." Psyche is the mirrored reflection of our soul, and functions as the mediator between the spiritual and earthly dimensions, which we must somehow learn to blend. Our psyches are the battlefield where all our dualities play out. When our higher and lower selves are in misalignment, we suffer, for this is a violation of our nature. All human disease is the soul's inability to express through us.
Psyche is our perceiver. In order to be healthy, our bodies must have a healthy psyche to wrap themselves around. We must have a strong intention to live, and to know that our lives matter - to sense that there is a purpose and a plan for our incarnation here. Otherwise, no matter how much we exercise, how well we sleep or eat the proper foods, our physical health will run amuck. With no reason to live, we'll eventually break down. All disease is the soul's inability to express through us. So we must all learn to release anything that's in the way of living a soulful life.
It is indeed time that we all stop focusing on our wounded parts and get on with creating our whole self. It's time to turn away from the past and start creating our longed-for future. But "getting over it" is not an intellectual declaration. It's a process that truly must be honored, with compassion, right timing, patience and understanding. We didn't get wounded all at once, and our healing doesn't happen just like that. We must commit to the necessary inner work of making conscious, all that we've repressed, so that we can truly focus on what we intend to be as more of our ideal. No one can do this work for us. We are self-creative organisms.
Your soul and its counterpart, your ego, have had a long history here... and have taken on many wounds. If we try to jump past any unfinished business in our biographies without bringing the issue out of denial and healing it, our bodies will tell the tale. We can sicken, and even die. We call it stress. The wear and tear of our unprocessed distant or immediate past, cause us to suffer an emergency that was intended to be a spiritual emergence, a lesson we were to learn about being a loving human. We transform our lives through making our ways of being, completely conscious.
Your psyche seeks completion, not perfection. We are to know and claim it all, both the dark and the light - for this is how we are made. It's in this willingness to live authentically within the tension of all the contrary opposites that plague us, that we ultimately find that "something" that brings us fulfillment. We've given it many names: We find out balancing point, our center, the archetypal self, the jewel in the lotus. We complete our grand design. We come whole, or home. Whatever we call it, this is the purpose of our incarnation - to remember that we are divine.
So, in this crazy world of stacks of email and overloaded appointment books, where do we go to find ourselves?
How do we proceed for the advancement of our soul?
Is there a map, or are there certain stepping stones along the path?
... there are.
Home is simply the remembrance of our divine heritage, the full awareness of who we really are. Psyche dove into matter, remember? She decided to take on this life, to experience it all. In the doing, she forgot that she was divine. Then, she had several impossible tasks to complete in order to return to from whence she came. She had to remember, while in human form, that she was divine. And this, too, is our story. This remembrance is our true healing.
... to get back home again, the following may serve to comfort you and help remind you that you're not alone.
STEP ONE: We realize we are dying to our old ways. The first step we take upon this path is one of complete upheaval. Your old life begins to fall away. And it seems to "just happen" while you were looking the other way. This process will usually start with some event that shatters some strong belief you hold. A spark must be bright enough to blast open the doors of our psyche, so she can release her divine/human treasures from the collective unconscious mind. Either an outer crisis, like your house burning down... or an inner crisis, such as a complete loss of faith in life, serious depression or loss of life force. Nothing turns you on anymore. Life is no longer interesting... and you lose hope. This can be the beginning of your journey. Some refer to it as "the dark night of the soul."
At this stage, we're required to remember: the self is greater than its conditions. Then we can pass through this stage more gracefully, being "in the world but not of it." Faith is the quality our soul brings us at this stage if we make it through. Then we must practice being a faithful servant to this process itself, and allow it to fully take hold. We consciously surrender to a power greater than ourselves, and voluntarily enter "the mystery."
STEP TWO: An uncomfortable confusion sets in, and you know you're no longer in charge; something's now in charge of you. So for a while, you'll go this way and that, trying first one thing, then another, hoping to regain control. At this stage, you at least become active, but not to much avail. Your energy is too scattered. Back and forth you go between opposing forces inside you. You may crave a geographical move, feel that you're in love with two people at once, and having to make a hard decision, you might desperately yearn to have a different profession... anything to get away from your unhappiness or ambivalence. Whatever the opposition, you feel stuck. But you simply must wait. Now... the keynote that will aid us is: it's not "out" but through that we heal.
Patience is the quality that our soul is bringing forth. We are now to learn about cycles and rhythms, the natural season of change. Like the farmer who kept pulling up his new crops to see if they were growing, we are tested to the extent we need the lesson about how to stay faithful to our process and remain open to whatever is happening. We watch; we study; we journal and document our experiences. We are willing to know ourselves. We commit to not act until destiny truly moves us onward. And this, too, will seem to happen while we're looking the other way.
STEP THREE: We see how our shadow, the dark side of our personality, defeats us until we own it. The human shadow is our "holy grit" that keeps forcing us to move toward the realization of our ideal. We will detest our dark side. And we're even more resistant to owning it! We'd much rather project it out onto others and call them the problem. We've gone into denial about the parts of ourselves we're ashamed of, so we can do just that. But the shadow will act out and cause us a great humiliation until we finally face it. This means we are willing to see our faults and make the shadow conscious so it can heal. Anything still unconscious in us, has the power to ruin us. We keep an ongoing dialogue in place with this unlived, unloved part of ourselves until it's fully known. Then, it loses its power. We can watch our emotional reactivities as clues to where we're still "charged" with some unprocessed stuff from our past. And we'll see the story we tell ourselves that's holding all this in place. Because we've repressed it, it's never had a chance to be conscious. So it's hard to act out when our guard was down, to get our attention. The shadow is your unconsciousness - your anger, your fears, your pettiness, your unhealed or undeveloped aspect. It's not evil; it's just uncivilized.
If we'll do our shadow work, we'll start to become more transparent - so the winds of change can blow through us more readily. Knowing this is the dawning of our awakening. The keynote here is this: the shadow has a sacred function. Owning our shadow gives us compassion for others when their dark sides are acting out. In shadow work, we learn the quality of spiritual discrimination. This is the ability to separate the essentials and non-essentials in our lives and the willingness to heal or walk away from what's blocking our advancement.
STEP FOUR: We begin to forgive ourselves and others. We see how it's all been for our good - no matter how great the cost at times. We see our mistakes in the light of understanding, and this changes our past - how we view ourselves and others who have harmed us. We'll see that all our mistakes were for a sacred purpose of refining our personalities for the work of spirit. how else can we learn about human life and love? We now feel a part of a greater plan, and are beginning to see our purpose here, though we still may have many unanswered questions. We've discovered by now that there are no outside "experts" on us: we see that the self is our only true teacher... that all is learned from within. The keynote is to remember now is this: the open heart is the bridge to a higher conscience.
We develop the quality of compassion. Our old judgments begin to fall away, and we become more broad-minded. After all, who can we blame when we once see that it's all a part of the plan?
STEP FIVE: Our higher and lower minds come into rapport. Now we walk through life simultaneously gathering knowledge from our experiences while the wisdom of our inner and greater self brings us more enlightenment. We are growing in spiritual stature. Insights and revelations we've had, begin to integrate into our daily lives. During this stage, we become fascinated with the study of the self, of the universe and of the divine from whence we've come. We still seek out a spiritual practice or way of life that fits and feeds our deepest yearnings. Questions about our true life's purpose or life's work begin to preoccupy us. We want to find "our group."
Our creative imagination awakens, and we see that we can cocreate our future by imaging our own ideals. We take responsibility for being cocreators. The creative imagination is our higher cognition that fills in the gap between who we are today with who we long to become. This is how all manifestations comes to be. We can never have what we cannot imagine.
Here, we learn the power of creative intelligence. And your keynote will be the recognition that "whatever you say 'I am' to, has a way of claiming you." As conscious cocreators, we are learning to "think like gods." Having the courage of our convictions and the willingness to own the responsibility for what we create, becomes our new ideal.
STEP SIX: Our aspiration to serve awakens. And we learn to follow our bliss. No longer so preoccupied with "what's in it for me?" we actually feel how connected we are to the whole. We are becoming soul-dominated human beings. And our true service to humanity is really quite simple: it's our willingness to be our authentic selves and to bring forth, our true talents and passion to serve this greater whole. In this manner, both our egos and our souls are gratified all at once.
Integrated egos are an essential aspect of our transformational process. A healthy ego learns to sacrifice itself to a greater good. The ego feels high when being a faithful servant to something bigger than itself. It's the grandest "ego trip" of all. At this stage, we experience the marriage of the ego and the soul. Without our personal egos, we cannot function on this planet. Egos are masters of the material world. The soul would have no way to embody here on earth - no one to take care of it - without this healthy partner.
The soul quality we access here, is the courage to be free. And the keynote that holds this step in place is this: service is doing our being. Most of the stress leaves our lives completely when we become free of so much egoistic need so our souls can shine through. All human disease is the soul's inability to express!
STEP SEVEN: Our biographies become a small piece of our greater story. Now, we've faced our shadow, forgiven ourselves and others, and stepped out of our limited past as being our only identity. We see that we've grown into a larger skin, now containing all the "goods" from our past, but no longer limited by believing we are our conditions. The self we've now become, is no longer fixated on the same old needs. We are now a different and greater identity who walks upon a higher plane.
The quality we develop at this final stage of our human transformation is that of non-attachment. And the keynote here is "Our spiritual intention guides us home." We see that we are the journey itself, with nothing to prove, no place to go, only someone to be. We can relax now, and even know moments of enlightenment - which can only come when we are no longer attached to being enlightened. Psyche's task is to remember that she is divine. She is the feminine principle who lives within each one of us, whether man or woman in gender. It's time we all remember that it takes a healthy psyche to create a true and viable spiritual life. For psyche is our divine and earthly perceiver, who can "look both ways." She is the bridge between spirit and matter, our consciousness who makes us whole.
God, I send forth gratitude for the healing that is taking place in my life. I see myself as whole and healthy. I acknowledge You as the Source of healing and energy and the life force that sustains me. I ask for assistance from the angels, ascended masters, and divine spiritual beings who were created to help me along this journey. I pray to be guided back to my true state of perfection and communion with the Divine. I pray to start over. No matter what has happened, I am willing to let today be new. Thank you for thhe chance to begin again. Today, I begin anew.
