I walked a mile with sorrow

“You don’t go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of a dark night of the soul.” ~Sam Keen

In my experience, deep personal transformation like this journey through the chrysalis I am on cannot occur without provoking a dark night of the soul experience, but I also think that any dark night of the soul experience will also trigger deep personal transformation. I suspect we never find out without the other.

I think this is because the loneliness and desolation of the dark night of the soul experience is what opens our minds and hearts to the unresolved sorrows and fears and hidden longings that we have tucked into our shadows, and it is this opening to a more complete experience of our full reality from which we’ve tried to hide that makes transformation possible. This is part of what makes deep personal transformation so uncomfortable (for ourselves and for those around us); it is also what makes it so freeing as we stop carrying around the weight of the unexperienced and unresolved traumas from our past.

The weight of a straw

The weight of a straw is small—so small that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever do any damage. But if you pile enough straws together, the weight adds up. It adds until one day the addition of just one more straw is all it takes to break the camel’s back.

Life is like that too. Things that would be minor annoyances or frustrations in normal times can be lethal when they hit on top of an already enormous pile. We’ve all seen people who “over react” in some way to some situation and wondered what their problem was, when really the situation we observed was only the final straw that broke through their control, and the reaction we see is more to the whole pile of other straws that we didn’t see than to the one we did.

I keep wondering which straw is going to be the one that breaks me.

Alchemy and spiritual transformation

Until a few days ago, I had no idea that there was a form of alchemy that dealt with spiritual transformation. I thought it only had to do with ancient scientists trying to change base metals into gold. However, as I’ve read about the way that alchemy describes the process of spiritual transformation, I am amazed at how well it describes so much of what I have been experiencing during this last tumultuous year.

Welcoming each emotion

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor… Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. …Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.” ~Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Last night I was filled with such joy that I could hardly sleep. That was an emotion that was easy to welcome in and invite to stay.

By lunchtime today, I was so angry and so frustrated that I was ready to beat my head on the wall. Those emotions were considerably harder to welcome.

Synchronicities abound

I am always amazed when I encounter synchronicities in my life, so I just have to share the two following messages that appeared in my inbox within hours of my last post about journeying into darkness.

Journey into darkness

“The task is to go as deeply as possible into the darkness and to emerge on the other side with permission to name one’s reality from one’s own point of view.” ~Anthea Francine

I love this quote. I am well acquainted with the darkness; it’s been a near present companion for many years of my life. But while it’s been ever-present, it’s been something I’ve spent much energy trying to evade, trying to avoid going into very deeply. So this quote really caught my eye. What if darkness has remained so ever-present in my life because I’ve never had the courage to enter it willingly and deeply, to journey through it to the other side, to find that ability to name my own reality from my own point of view?

Oh, how the thought of having the permission (if even just from myself) to name my own reality from my own point of view draws me! The very thought of it makes my heart leap in my chest. It draws a gut-level “YES!”  The ability and the freedom to do this is what my life has been missing. I’ve spent too much of my life trying to live my life in ways that adapts to everyone else’s version of reality first. That’s not working for me anymore, not that it ever really did. If I am going to live the life I’m meant to live, the first step is learning to claim my own reality.