by Matt Licata
Much is said these days about healing and spiritual awakening, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are the promised fruits of the inner life. Not much is mentioned, however, about the disappointment involved in waking up, and the immense deflation wired into the healing process.
Awakening can break our hearts and shatter old dreams. It is oriented in birth and death, creativity and destruction, and must by its nature dance in the full spectrum. Not only does it introduce us to transfiguration, but to the chaotic glory of the crucifixion and resurrection as well. Yes, the Kingdom is here, now, but requires your full participation for its qualities to emerge here.
While it is natural to have a bias for resurrection, inside the crucible dark and light are one. Here, crucifixion is holy and disappointment is sacred, for they are forerunners of wholeness. Death and life are not two. Confusion and clarity are not two. Vulnerability and aliveness are not two.
It requires a nonconventional, courageous commitment to participate in these pathways, and you may always find some resistance inside you and within the collective. It requires erupting momentum to reorganize what has until now been the status quo. “Getting what I want” is no longer the reference point from which you will be asked to organize your experience. Love is the new organizer and may have a different idea.
You may always be asked to provide sanctuary and safe passage for fear, uncertainty, doubt, and despair. These are the secret allies guarding the gate and have been placed on your path as disguised forms of love. They have not come to harm, but as portals into something new, quantum, vast, and non-controllable.
Dare to see that things are not always as they appear. Relationships ending, dreams collapsing, careers recycling, the death of a family member, and the infinite symptoms of the somatic and emotional worlds … drenched in purpose, soaking in meaning. Evidence not of error, failure, or defeat, but of the relentlessly creative nature of love as it emerges here.
