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The Incubating Stillness

The Incubating Stillness

by | Dec 31, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Mental Health, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 0 comments

Art by Heather Mclean

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the yearly cycle draws to a close, people I work with have been reflecting on the year that has suspended most of our habitual ways of being. Their reflections have been surprising, inspiring and powerful, as they reveal a deeper narrative of silent growth. The dominant narratives in the public discourse have been focusing on the experiences of stuckness and stillness.

 

The words ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ have entered our daily vocabulary, casting a spell on our sense of the world around us.  And while these words describe concretely what is occurring in the external world, the people I work with brought forth new narratives that acknowledge the ever-unfolding and ever-evolving movements of nature, that apply to our inner worlds. While life on the outside seems to have stood still, our internal worlds have kept on ticking. Perhaps even more so, as a reflexive balancing act towards the excruciating constrictions of the outside.

 

Up against the background of stillness, the movements of our inner worlds  are more discernible than ever. Indeed, so much has happened in a year that so little has moved. Taken out of our routines and habits we have all had to sit with our fear, our frustration, our discomfort, our rage and most importantly we have had to sit with our selves. Our internal world has taken centerstage, urging us to deeply question our lives, values and choices.

 

Such disruptions break the mold and unleash a chaos that holds the imprints of a new potential emergent order. A chaos that supports new openings towards deep and meaningful transformation. In the shadows of Self, movement and connection have not ceased. In these conditions, many of us have come to realize what truly matters, what needs to live and what needs to die. The chaos of uncertainty and restrictions seems to have become fertile ground for people to find the resolve to meet and invite even further uncertainties in their lives. To break the mold a little bit more.

 

Decisions and movements that seemed monumental at the start of the year have started being a reality in motion for many by the end of the year. This year of collective fear, loss and grief, has challenged us to let go in unprecedented ways and degrees. As we have let our layers of habit fall through one by one, as we have stepped into the deep uncertain, as we have lost our ways of being in the world, as we have felt powerless to choose, we have arrived to our grief. We have had to grieve for our communities, our sense of connection, our freedom of movement, people we have lost.

 

Grief that is grieved becomes the fertile soil of regeneration. A new lease of life unfurls when we become intimate with the forces of death. The people I work with have made profound shifts this year. They have decided to face long avoided divorces, they have ended long standing affairs, they have moved houses, they have left their jobs or made career moves at a time where the public discourse insists on keeping us still. There is no stillness in the universe. There is no stillness in our soulful depths. The stillness we were plunged into on the outside was an incubating space where we were all hatching a different future to what we had sleepwalked into.

 

At the end of this year I feel deeply moved to witness people’s spirit and commitment to sitting with their discomfort and attending to the process of midwifing forth whatever is ready to emerge. I see a deepening resilience and a commitment to planting new seeds, pursuing meaningful and authentic ways of being, in service of greater growth. It seems that we have needed the outside world to stop so we can regain the space, time, energy, presence and inner resources required for listening to the voices within that tell us who we are meant to become. These opening to our emergent self are in service to the individual and to the wider collective whole we all belong to.

 

I invite you to take stock, as the year comes full circle to its close, to the seeds you may have intently or inadvertently sowed, deep in the soil of soul. We anticipate another year that will challenge us even further, but despite the external realities and narratives we must hold on to the narratives of our inner resources. All the seeds I have witnessed being sown this year, will be sprouting next year. Whatever challenges we may have to face ahead, next year is destined to be full of new growth, directions and emergent potential.  

 

 

Coronavirus and Collective Transformation

Coronavirus and Collective Transformation

by | Mar 23, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Mental Health, Nature and Self, Political Psychology, Relationship to Self, Shadow Work | 10 comments

Art by Aitch

Art by Aitch

We are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, a crisis that in its speed, spread and intensity has exceeded any other experience of our lifetimes. This crisis is nudging us beyond our current social structures. We are being called to transcend the usual order of things, to think outside the GDP box and move from a humanitarian place; to contain individualism and re-member collectivism. None of the other current crises of our world have mobilized such a need for instant and profound adaptation. We feel safely removed from them as they tend to happen in a localized and distant way, to someone Other, mostly unseen and unfamiliar. We are vaguely aware of the threads between them and us but we have not been good at weaving together things that stand apart. Yet we have now been reached by a crisis that brings all the broken pieces of our world back into wholeness. This crisis has reached us all at once. We are up against an invisible force that has lifted the veils of illusion, offering us a glimpse into our interconnectedness, vulnerability, impermanence and lack of control. It has brought us up against the inescapable hard truths of our fragility and mortality. Of who we are and of our true place as a species in the wider whole. 

Crises have been surrounding us for a while now. In the last few years we have been moving through the tremors of sociopolitical splits, divisive ideologies, mass migrations, fragmented thinking at the expense of systems thinking and the breakdown of climate and biodiversity. Yet as the virus is spreading indiscriminately across borders, race, gender, social class or creed, we come to witness the links of our interconnectedness. Humanity for once is becoming aware that we have always stood in the steps of collective fate as a whole. And we cannot silence this emergency and carry on with life as it was. We need to dig deep to find the gifts that will move us forward. But for now, there is a lot of death to face and a lot of grief to move through. We can no longer hide. We stand in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene extinction. Humanity is part of it. Cause and effect of it. Our lives and ways will too be threatened. When progress is fueled by arrogance and narcissistic tendencies, it will act against the very nature we are part of. The journey ahead will test and challenge our resources, but also our integrity.

2020 has been so far short and full of warning signs. We started the year with the raging bushfires of Australia and the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest.  The lungs of our earth are under threat and attack. With the coronavirus, now human lungs mirror the same fate. In Chinese medicine, the lungs are associated with grief. We are coming to face our grief and the grief of the land. The grief that longs for what has been lost and ravaged. The grief for all our wrong turns. Our missed chances. Our choices at the various crossroads. Our priorities that have been guided by the illusion of separateness. In destroying the land and its ecosystems, we have been disrupting ourselves for there is no separateness, we are of the land, its dust is in our bones, its rhythms in our heartbeats. Every recent crisis has been moving us one step nearer to realization. This virus is bringing us even closer. It is only by allowing and moving through our grief that we can process and assimilate our losses and recalibrate our moral compass. This is where the new layers of regenerated life can ever really emerge from. The coronavirus pandemic is not just an enemy, it is a medicine just as much. The virus, like any other symptom or ailment, is also an expression of a healing movement. An attempt for healing doesn’t have to feel good to be of urgent necessity. Whether we can use its medicine will depend on our collective ability and will to integrate what we discover in this journey of descent and initiation. It will rest on our capacity to renegotiate who we are, with who we need to become.

Transformation happens through the rhythmic process of taking the self apart and then putting it back together. Chaos gives birth to a new order that is of greater complexity than before. This chaos is the pool of infinite possibility, our unconscious, and the new order is its assimilation into our consciousness. According to Carl Jung:

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

For now, life gets pushed into the underworld, and death takes central stage. We are in the stages of descent to the subterranean realms of the unconscious, an essential aspect of an initiatory process in any mystery tradition. We are moving to the mythic and archetypal layers of the collective psyche. This is our collective dark night of the soul.  In psychological terms we are in the stage of suffering and darkness. This is a time of inner turmoil, confusion, and uncertainty where we come to face our shadow. It is also a time of immense value, as it is only through this darkness and chaos that we can come into greater wholeness. The journey of initiation and ascent moves our psyches through the cycles of nature and mystery. What is above comes into balance with what is below. What is cultivated within, finds its outward expressions.

In our fast-paced lives, we have been conditioned to short attention spans and to distracting ourselves form our inner worlds by holding our attention outwards. But keeping up with the world outside of us has caused us to run out of step with the world within us. This time can serve as a deep reflective space where we can cultivate our capacity to engage with our inner world and resources, in sacred silence. This is not the silence of disconnection, but the silence that attends to the great mystery that is unfolding all around us. The silence of awe and of intimacy. The silence of meditation and initiation. The silence that seeks rather than stops. The silence that unites us with what hides beneath the noise of everyday life.

As we stand in the spaces of great uncertainty, we are having to find our own ways for holding and soothing ourselves. On an individual level, chaotic and disorganized states will be managed differently by each and every one of us, and will greatly depend on our inner resources for self-regulation and on our capacity to negotiate the chasm between intimacy and isolation. How we will relate to this crisis will be linked with how we relate to ourselves and to others. By turning inwards to meet with all the parts of ourselves that are awakening in the midst of this collective crisis, we might tend to broken parts and pieces that have been long-lost and forgotten. To grief that was never grieved. To tears that were never shed. To fears that were never soothed. To rage that was never met. To self that was never held. It is by moving through our feelings that we become truly embodied. This is how we root into our inner worlds.

All birthing initiates in the darkness. It will take a very long time to fully relate to what is dying and what we are birthing forth. This knowing and clarity only arrives with the wisdom of hindsight, under the weight of time. What we do know is that we are in urgent need of systems that are more sustainable and honor all life on earth. We are being called to move in harmony with the greater ecosystems we are part of. Let this virus be our mirror, guiding us in, through and out.

 

 

Rites and Rituals

Rites and Rituals

by | Oct 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Systemic Family Constellations | 0 comments

Art by Stuart Griggs

Art by Stuart Griggs

Intentional rites and rituals are meaning carriers of great spiritual and psychological importance. They bring us back into belonging with the wider whole we are part of. As we call on the unseen to meet the seen, the higher and the lower worlds to meet us in the middle, we re-animate the world around us. We call everything back into life, into relationship and into co-creation.

For our early ancestors, ritual was the language for communing with the unseen. It held their prayers and offerings that appeased the Gods and Goddesses of disaster and called on the powers of protection. Ritual acts supported a complex emotional connection with the wider energies of life outside Self and community. They also weaved individual and tribal identities tightly together through their intrinsic meaning making process. Indigenous cultures and communities that have retained their links to the tribal soul keep their rites and rituals richly preserved and embedded into their social fabric of life. In the western world, ritual lineages have either been isolated from their spiritual and instinctive dimensions or have been completely forgotten and long-lost. Severed from our mythological and mystical roots, our spiritual capacity has been displaced from its rightful expressions.

Rituals are usually held by the wider container of ceremony or initiations and rites of passage. Our tribal ancestors knew that during transitions from one threshold to another, in order to preserve one from psychic injury, adequate containers are essential. Rites and rituals held the crucial tensions that underlie significant developmental transitions. They safeguarded a sacred and meaning-full space that supported the adult to emerge from the child, peeling back the layers of the Self into greater truth and maturity.

These rites are not to be romanticized in our yearnings for what we have lost. These initiations are bruising and painful transitions that require the shattering of what once was in order to re-assemble us into what will be. But the act of ceremony and ritual would render these spaces safe for surrendering one’s innocence and the community would be there to tend to the open wounds and transmit generational wisdom that would restore a new and yet ancient order of being. Rituals guarded the threshold between one way of being and another, one way of seeing and another, one way of living and another, holding the space sacred while a deep transformation was under way.

Our secular modern western culture has retained very little of our ceremonial past. What still remains has been mostly locked within the remits of organized religion, devoid of its once serving truth and purpose.  In the absence of collective initiation rites that mark the developmental transitions of life, young men and women seek these thresholds unconsciously through dangerous and self-destructive thrills, guided by a soul that seeks the next stage in its journey. The soul always remembers what we seem to have forgotten. But with no adequate internal or external guidance, these attempts remain incomplete and can fragment instead of deepening the Self.

Our Great Forgetting has left these forces to reach us only through fate, accidents, love and grief. These come complete with inner rituals and initiations that we tend to fear and medicalize, as we lack safe containers that can support us in offering ourselves to their transformative intentions. These archetypes of initiation unfold into inner rites of passage that can lead us into a greater knowing of ourselves and the world around us. Not always easy or palatable, they are tasked with ensuring we travel where we need to.

A ritual act is a form of soul prayer that ignites from the farthest, faintest recognition of Self deeply within and moves towards the greater collective soul of the entire universe. During inner work, ritual acts invite the wider forces to witness our journey and gift us something of the collective wisdom. They align our psychic energies with our intentions and amplify the potency of our work. They penetrate our ego structures and guide us through the liminal spaces between the worlds of reason, heart and soul, summoning buried layers of Self into action. These symbolic realms nourish our hidden depths and offer a safe container for opening up soulfully.

As we stand collectively at this point in time before the threshold of radical change on so many levels, the timeless wisdom of rites of passage can be a significant resource.  What we are collectively tasked with ahead is as old as earth herself. It rests on the elemental wisdom of ritual initiation spaces that restores our connection with the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Unless we recover conscious rituals around the cycles of renewal we will lose our direction in our experience of the visceral flow of life. Restoring our ritual connection to the thresholds of death and rebirth opens us up to receiving the gift of life.

Cultivating Presence

Cultivating Presence

by | May 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Defence Mechanisms, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development | 4 comments

Image by Collin Elder

Image by Collin Elder

A world that is aching requires more of us to be available as a resource for its healing processes. It needs us to show up fully and engage responsibly with the collective task at hand: supporting the intricate balance of environmental and relational ecosystems that can support the forces of life on our planet. We can only do so by moving beyond a narrow sense of self and into the greater spheres of interconnectedness and oneness. By opening up to an inner and outer wholeness.

The task of cultivating presence is even greater in a world that entices us in constant disruptions and invites us to disconnect in a myriad of ways. A world that is intent on moving us at great distance from our inner worlds. We are persistently removed from our deep despair, alienation and grief as well as our boundless creative and regenerative potencies. Shielded but weakened, we lead fragmented lives that limit our sense of self and presence.

Presence emerges from the act and art of deep inner listening. It rests on our capacity to remain open and available to all that exists within ourselves. On our capacity to re-member our embodied wisdom. When moving inwards we are called to meet our light and darkness in equal trust and measure, with a heart that includes all and touches everything with compassion. Free of judgement and full of curious attention we can move in closer to whatever emerges, cultivating greater intimacy with all that we are. The greater the contact we have with life within ourselves, the wider the space we can relate to others from. Gradually we become more available to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us.

Our capacity to be present is equal to our capacity to be vulnerable. When we commit to the forces of presence we have to show up in our fullness, allowing ourselves to be seen, witnessed and reflected back through the mirrors of intimacy. We enter the relational field of life that supports awareness and growth. Our sense of Self emerges through the intricate web of interconnectedness. When showing up in our fullness we stop hiding behind the longings of who we wish to be and enter the container of who we truly are. We arrive to our responsibility for how we exist in our inner and outer world and to the source of aligned action. This level of awareness is enlivening; to cultivate greater presence is to be brought back to life more fully.

Practices that quieten the mind, teach us how to inhabit our embodied selves and hone our attention can support us in cultivating greater presence. They teach us how to engage with the attentive stillness that true presence requires. They move us into the deeper layers of our experience of Self and the world, tracking our inner dance with life. But like the movements of nature whose imprints we carry in all that we are, our emotions and states have their own cycles and rhythms of opening and closing, constricting and releasing. Our sense of presence will ebb and flow and like everything else in life it will exist in constant flux. Under the nourishing gaze of attention, we can attend to every stage of our inner journey. Honouring each opening and closing supports their true essence and their service to the forces of change and transformation.

Presence supports intimacy and in return intimacy supports presence. Together they create the freedom to reach and be reached, to touch and be touched, to move and be moved. Throughout our lifetime we have mastered endless disappearing acts that arise from a deep-seated fear of being hurt, harmed, disappointed, let down and abandoned. As adults we have to re-learn trusting our hearts with others. We have to re-learn trusting contact with ourselves. Deep inner work requires presence and intimacy with whatever guides us internally or externally. By surrendering to the deeper movements of our relating self, we remain open to what needs to emerge. This is a potent medicine for the poisons of our world today. In presence we can include it all, in absence all is lost.

Nature’s Cyclical Wisdom: Autumn

Nature’s Cyclical Wisdom: Autumn

by | Oct 1, 2018 | Anxiety, Depression, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development | 0 comments

Image by Daniel Taylor

Image by Daniel Taylor

Modern life has alienated us from nature and that has cost us a disconnection from our own inmost nature. The seasonal cycles are life-sustaining and attending to them can enrich us and resource us for meeting life’s demands. The cyclical rhythms of the seasons reflect the movements of change, transition, loss, death, grief and regeneration, the universal and most ubiquitous challenges of life. Living a life informed by the cyclical wisdom of nature’s movements is to live mindfully in connection with the world around us, weaving the threads between inner and outer, finding reflections of us outward and outward reflections in us. We are, after all, made of nature and its rhythms and wisdom reside deeply within us.

Autumn is a season between seasons, a transitioning space between what was before and what’s ahead, between summer and winter. On one end autumn is the season of the last harvest and on the other end it is the season of letting go and dying. It is the dance between gratitude and grief, life and death. It holds the tension between light and darkness, as the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer, crossing the threshold of holding the two in perfect balance during the equinox. It is this tension we are called to attend to in our lives during autumn, by finding ways to harness the nourishing dimensions of life, as well as death. By honoring and embracing both for their fertile powers.

On one end of its spectrum autumn is a reflective season. It is the time when earth gives us the last harvest that will sustain us during the dark winter months. In our lives, this is the harvest from the seeds we planted and the dreams we built throughout the year. This is the time to reflect and consolidate on what we have achieved so far and assess what fruits of life have matured enough to nourish us in exchange for our efforts. It is the time for channeling contemplation and gratitude into creative inspiration for the months ahead.

On the other end of its spectrum autumn is the season that begins the great letting go. Earth releases what has completed its cycle, to become the fertile soil for life to come. For us, this is a time to relinquish what we might carry that no longer serves us, or holds us back. To create space for new growth, for attitudes, projects, people, relationships that will nurture and support us in our life ahead. What we let go of, becomes the compost of things ahead. We let go in service of life.

If we attend to the cycles of life, death and rebirth in nature its important lessons about these edges of life can infuse in us through our senses. In autumn nature speaks to us through the rustling of leaves, the cool dry air, the golden colored trees, the woody smell of earth. It tells us that death is part of life and the path of regeneration. It supports us in surrendering to our own shedding. This shedding is a process of separation and autumn is the season of grief and a time that can evoke our own grief and calls on us to attend to it. This might be grief that has accumulated throughout the year or in some cases throughout a lifetime.

Grief is not to be done with and disposed of. Grief is to be allowed to move in us, through us, with us until it is ready to give way for new life to grow around it. Grief is to be felt and lived, until it too becomes compost for our personal growth. Because as long as we live, life will call on us and it is on us to listen. As the seasons well know, there is a time for life and there is a time for death, there is a time to bloom and a time to wither. Nature can teach us how we can open our hearts to shedding our leaves, in trust that when the time is right, new ones will come to take their place.  

Find some space in this season, within yourself, to acknowledge the growth and death that has moved through you from the beginning of the year. To harvest the last ripe crops of the year and to create space and rituals to let go of what no longer serves. And like the plant world, to put the energy in your roots, your foundations, while you prepare to go deep into the dark months ahead.