I’ve gone a little quiet these days. Sometimes I process challenging times publicly and creatively; but some darkness renders me speechless for I don’t yet have the words or actions that even closely resemble feelings that have no shape or coherence yet. To say the least, it’s been a grating and grueling year, a disorienting and losing-myself one. And it has grown me and deepened me as all darkness does. It’s opened my eyes to more of what I do want in life by contrast of having experienced so much of what I do not.
And now, at the outset of an already grinding year (few years, to be honest), it seems that I have just a bit more uphill to go before the big upswing, which I know is certain to come, as life’s pendulums always ensure.
What’s up right now is that I’ve lost my job, my house, and my long-term relationship in the span of a month. I feel like I’m walking around in life with no epidermis, all raw and gooey and like I have no identity or container to hold my parts together, and I’m dripping all over the place, staining the sidewalks with my mess.
But what’s also up is that after a lifetime of tremendous losses, traumas, heartbreaks and formidable mountains of adversity, I now know a few things about myself and times like these. It is in this knowing where I’ll find my footing and my safety in an otherwise very unsafe-feeling time.
And what I do know is this:
I know I’ve made it through all of my bad days and not one has failed to spit me out to the other side transformed. Not one have I not come out singing. Not one hasn’t turned out to be the catalyst to my next plane of expansion and self-actualization (in other words, made me more ME).
What I do know is that times like these only prompt me to dial up the self-love and compassion, and out of that, I synthesize with my Higher Self in a deeper and more avowed way than ever before. A more in-my-own-corner way than ever before.
What I do know is that when I’m forced to confront fear and loss and confusion triggered by present events, I then have an opportunity to heal the parts of my past where all that is actually sourced from, and I always choose to dive deep into that opening, as much as it wrings the hell out of my heart to do so. I know that if I just stay in the fire, many old hurts that have long overstayed their welcome will be exhumed and purified from me and I’ll be that much freer, that much more rooted in my Light. And what I do know is that facing fear and pain only musters out of me the tools I have to battle those beasts, and I’m prompted to call upon the medicines I know — dance and movement, meditation, journaling, EFT, prayer, my personal growth resources, community, time in nature, and on — just throw everything I got at it. Here is where all of those seminars and workshops and all the conscious learning come out of the world of insight and actually play out and pay off.
What I do know is that because things always work out for me in the end (and they do for all of us), having traversed yet another once formidable mountain only serves to have me more connected to humanity and be a space for others going through the painful places where I have been. I get the honor of being allowed in there with them because they can trust that I can hold space for any kind of experience, that there isn’t anything they can give me that I can’t be with, and they would be right. And so my dark places only serve to make me more of a contribution in and to the world, and thus they are a gift to me, for that is perhaps the best me I could possibly be, and ultimately the reason I’m on this planet.
What I do know is that I always have a choice, no matter what life throws at me. And I choose to stay in the fire, and trust. I choose that when the bottom is dropped, the only way for me is up.
I hope you do too, because the world needs the gift of more humans like that.
To our collective transformative fire…i love you, brave ones.
The Blyss Catalyst 