This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening a portal into feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain. We may also have some positive associations with the holidays ~ joy, connection, play, and belonging ~ a childlike innocence as to what the holidays symbolize to us. And, for many of us, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. Let us take a moment to tend it all with one another, including the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. And open together into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, each an essential portal into the depths of BEing.
We’ve been through alot this year and lost many of our familiar reference points, unsure where to look for refuge and meaning, with the rug pulled out from underneath us. Not only external, but internal quarantine, asked to turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us. To take a moment to touch and to shepherd this ~ not only the loss of health and life, but of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out.
Birthing the new is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, the misfits of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder, knowing the aliveness we long for will only be found in embodied attunement to the full spectrum.
The process of 'falling apart' is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes of reorganization. It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears.' ~ words by Matt Licata.