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.