by Matt Licata
The invitation, which at times we can hear clearly—during the dark of night, in the slowness and the depths, in silence in nature, as we move in and out of states of sleep and dream—is not to abandon death in our rush to be reborn, not to short-circuit the intelligence and creativity that is death, and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the creativity of dissolution.
Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and fragrance, not partial but whole. Death is not merely a phase to get through as quickly as possible en route to new life but is pure and complete on its own, with wisdom and perspective not available during times of birth. In those periods in our lives, when things are being rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what is truly being asked, whether it is to cure death and reassemble the known or to allow the forms of love safe passage to continue their journey. We can listen to the wisdom in death and what it has to teach us about love and helping others and this world.
During times of transition, grief, and loss, we are asked to honor the forms of love as they come into our lives and touch us and share their beauty. But equally we allow them to dissolve so that new forms can emerge and provide the healing and transformation for which we most deeply long.
We can give these forms permission to dance and play and also to move on and continue their journey without us. We can grieve with or without them, with the stars and oceans and moons as our witnesses.
The Purity of Reorganization
A certain death occurs as part of the healing process; in the deepening of self-awareness, something does not survive illumination. There is a fantasy that we can come out the other side intact, without having to sacrifice some aspect of ourselves in the fires of transformation. But it doesn’t really seem to work this way, not with lasting and deep healing. Although it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and into rebirth as quickly as possible, as I’ve suggested, there is wisdom and purity within the reorganization itself that we cannot know if we abandon it prematurely.
When we engage in any work of depth, we inevitably come up against a cultural bias toward the light, the upward, and the brightened dimensions of the path. Although the journey invites us to touch, travel, and explore across the entire spectrum, we cannot sidestep or bypass the darkened condition, those parts of psyche buried and hidden beneath ordinary awareness. We’re not going to want to go into these areas of the personality—our core vulnerabilities, shadow parts, painful feelings, inconsistencies, selfishness, unmet narcissism, and tendencies toward self-absorption. Especially if we identify as a spiritual person cultivating the light, kind, compassionate, giving, selfless, grateful, forgiving, at peace, and not ever caught in the so-called negative emotions of fear, rage, jealousy, and depression, this turning into the dark can be quite challenging. In any event, we can’t wait around until we feel like doing it, until we’re open to it, until we can accept it all, or until we feel inspired. Somehow, we must find the curiosity, courage, and energy to engage this dimension of experience even if we don’t want to.
Seen with eyes wide open, the dissolution (which can occur by way of the alchemical solutio or putrefactio) is initiation because it offers vision not available from within the clear, reflected, held-together state. It is as if an ancient part of ourselves, a kindred traveler who has accompanied us for so long, is no longer permitted to continue the journey by our side. The old dream crumbles—“my life” and the way I was sure it was going to turn out. This prior soul companion might be another person or an inner traveler—a feeling, memory, idea, or image through which we’d been seeing ourselves and others; any emotionally significant part of our world that has finished its time here.
To go through the initiation and fully participate in the creativity of the death-rebirth cycle, we must slow down; return into the earth; and listen to the music, poetry, and high-voltage guidance found in the depths. Yes, there might always be an urgency to overcome the dissolution and get to the next phase as quickly as possible. But wisdom in the dark is preparing the vessel for the next illumination. The invitation is to allow the old to wash away and to grieve the way you thought it was all going to turn out. This grief is holy and opens the heart to imagination and revisioning.
As tempting as it might be, we cannot skip stages. Take some time to mourn the reassembling of your world and provide safe passage for all that you will inevitably lose as you heal and awaken. In times of transition, what is here now is often unclear, uncertain, and unknown. From the conventional perspective, these psychic states are not usually envisioned as rich, meaningful, and valid in their own right but merely as “processes” to get through, ideally as quickly as possible, so that we can return to life and the next series of accumulations and births. Or they are fantasized to be of a “lower vibration,” which only places them deeper into the personal and collective shadow.
Upon closer examination, these states are awash with meaning and wisdom, but to stay with them and unearth those qualities, our perception must be reorganized. New images, new myths, new lenses must emerge through which we can navigate a new world. Even more than those, a shift of the heart is most required, a willingness to befriend ourselves at levels previously not thought possible. If we are interested in feeling alive, in tapping into the creativity within us, and in fully participating in the sacred world, we must revision the model that pathologizes the darkness and the moon and glorifies the sun and the light. Inside the body is a temple that reveals the union of opposites; a sanctuary where they dance and play, fall apart, and hold it all together; a secret place where they meet as one.
The Wisdom at the Core
Again, let us look to the alchemical prima materia to guide us here. The alchemists were in search of this sacred substance, which had to be located before the work could start. Until the primary material was identified and isolated, the alchemical opus could not begin. It is like that in our own lives. We must clarify what in any given moment is most wanting and needing our attention, awareness, care, and love. We start there even if we do not want to, even if it feels icky and meaningless and unspiritual. The intelligence in the heart brings forward the prima materia for us if we slow down and open into the unknown. Remember, we might never want to go into this material, for it has come to be associated with the unworkable, overwhelming, and potentially devastating, unworthy, irredeemable—evidence of our neurosis, selfishness, narcissism, or failure. Somehow, we must overcome this momentum and see for ourselves if tending to this prima materia is actually unsafe in our here-and-now adult experience as it likely was in our developmental history. We must go slowly, at times very slowly—one microsecond at a time—and honor the realities of our hearts and nervous systems. But at the same time we push ourselves just a little and see.
As always, it can help to explore difficult thoughts, feelings, memories, images, and bodily sensations alongside an attuned other who can help us to create a strong-enough, safe-enough, and sacred-enough container to hold the material without the vessel or our nervous systems breaking. Of course, it is not always possible to do this with another, and there are times when we will be asked to walk alone. Even if you do not have another to enter into the vessel with you, know that you are never truly alone. There are beings everywhere who are doing this work and opening their hearts in this same way, who alternate between feelings of fear and encouragement, excitement and terror, clarity and confusion, hopelessness and hope. These ones are with you and you with them in the relational field and you can feel them, love them, be loved by them, hold them, and be held by them in nonphysical ways.
In archetypal psychology, we are invited to see through the appearance of our emotional affliction and into its mythological core, to the gods or goddesses responsible for a particular complex, symptom, or realm of psychic experience.1 To do so can help us see beyond the personal weight of the difficult thoughts and feelings and allow them to be held in a larger context, opening ourselves to a deeper layer of meaning and purpos
e. In a similar way, in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, the five primordial Buddhas each watch over emotions with which they are associated.2 Whether I’m referring to Greek gods or Tibetan deities, my invitation here is not to believe in any of this in a literal way (please feel free to do so or not) but to step into an imaginal realm where wisdom energies dwell inside the core of even our most difficult experience. The invitation is to allow in the possibility that there is tremendous intelligence and creativity within our symptoms that we can mine and release by infusing the material with awareness, curiosity, and compassion.
There is information in our symptoms, a certain intelligence or creativity evidenced in the way psyche manifests in our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, images, fantasies, and dreams. By turning toward the symptom and tending to it with presence, warmth, and kindness, we are able to unearth the unique wisdom found only there. No matter how the prima materia appears for us—as a difficult relationship, challenging health diagnosis, unexpected depression, profound boredom, or loss and transition—we can begin to “heat” the material and create the conditions under which its hidden meaning and intelligence may emerge. Although this “heat” is unique for each of us, it is none other than love itself. But what this “love” looks and feels and moves like in our experience is something we must discover for ourselves. A secondhand fire will never do.
The alchemists viewed the prima materia as sacred, holy, and the substance of the gods, given uniquely to each of us at a specific time to further the great work of unfolding consciousness. Even though this material can be quite challenging, it is not merely something to let go of, transcend, or replace. When we’re able to enter into its core, what we discover is neither neurosis nor pathology. It is not something to cure, fix, or even “heal” but a portal deep into the vessel of our own psyches. The invitation roaring within this passageway is into friendship, intimacy, and cleansed perception. It is not always going to feel safe or comfortable to do this because we are hardwired to turn from the pain and the uncertainty and return to safe ground. We can honor this call back to homeostasis at times—as a valid and appropriate choice in a given moment of our experience or time in our lives—whereas at other times, we can take the risk of moving closer to ourselves with curiosity, interest, and love. This work is an ongoing journey, cultivated in each here-and-now moment, not a destination at which we one day arrive and are done. Neither is it an urgent race to the finish line. There is no urgency on the path of the heart.
If in a given moment, we are met with fear, worry, anger, or shame, the invitation is to first slow down, recognize that a visitor has come, and renew the ancient vow we once made that for just this one moment, we will not abandon ourselves. As we all know, it can take quite a lot of focus, energy, and presence not to fall down into the quicksand of overwhelm and claustrophobia, where we become flooded and swallowed up by the feelings and associated thoughts, memories, and impulses. It can be challenging to cut that momentum of habitual consciousness, whether it comes by way of repression, dissociation, or being aggressive toward ourselves and realize, “Oh, I’m hooked. I’m triggered. There it is. Another opportunity has been given.”
Just this one simple instant of recognition can cut into billions of moments of turning away. We can begin to reframe these emotionally saturated moments not as ones of failure, in which we’ve been neurotically activated yet again, but as ones of gratitude and opportunity: somehow this time we’ve been able to see; to stay close; not to get caught completely; and to bring in awareness, space, and perspective. We can recognize the miracle of pausing, slowing down, and at least contemplating the possibility of choosing a different path. In so doing, we reorganize our perception, revisioning and reframing what is happening so as to see that in this moment the prima materia is presenting itself. It is arising here and now, in this moment, not to obscure or obstruct our path as an enemy to take us down but as some sort of ally, albeit a fierce and uninvited one. This is a sacred moment. It doesn’t mean we like it or love it or want it to continue or even that we force ourselves to “accept” it. It is sacred because it serves a holy function, one of revelation. And it is an ally because we have met the visitor in a new way, with some curiosity, mindfulness, openness, and warmth, and in an unexpected way it is helping us to lay down a new groove in our tender nervous system and raw, open heart.
It’s not easy to do this when our emotional world is on fire—to slow down and recognize that we’ve been hooked, to reframe what is happening and see that what is here now is valid, that it is the way psyche is expressing itself in this moment and can be respected. It is purposive, even if we are unable to know or articulate its precise purpose or function in the moment. It is a radical new way of trusting in ourselves and even our most disturbing experience. With practice, slowly, over time, we can catch ourselves in these moments with increasing awareness and self-compassion before the avalanche of feeling takes us down. Even if we only notice it one second earlier than we normally would, that is a miracle, really. Then two seconds. Then three. At some point we might start to realize that we notice and articulate the activation as it arises—just as the anger, shame, rage, despair, criticism, and self-aggression appear, we are there to meet and receive it. It appears within a larger context of awareness and is apprehended and held as an utterly workable, valid part of our self, as a mine of wisdom filled with important information for the way ahead. This doesn’t mean it’s not painful or we won’t fall back down or slip up or forget or have to start over. But, slowly, we continue building this new skill and neural groove of slowness, empathy, and spaciousness. And over time, it begins to become second nature, not requiring so much practice and effort. But that happens at a pace and according to a timeline unique for each of us.
The Courage to Participate
As part of our work with the prima materia of our lives, we must be increasingly aware of conditioning that tells us that the mere appearance of difficult emotions is evidence some problem has occurred; there is some error or mistake we must urgently move to correct; we “should” be feeling joy, happiness, gratitude, and bliss; the emotional activation is the result of our being stuck in a “low vibration”; or we have lost contact with some magical law or secret of the universe and should quickly start to think different thoughts. Embracing and befriending the prima materia is the end of self-abandonment and self-aggression, when we are no longer willing to turn from ourselves and our vulnerability in those times when we need ourselves more than ever. Pain is not pathology.3 Emotion is not pathology. They are revealers and allies of the path, but we must slow down and reorient with fresh vision, as beginners curious about what it is like to fully participate in our experience, stay with ourselves, and open to the wisdom within us.
In a larger sense, this is courage, that willingness to discover what the prima materia is for you (which can of course change over time, and even within the same day) and to honor, care about, and dare I say even love it. This is not some manufactured love or a certain feeling state of sweetness and peace. It is fierce and alive and has nothing to do with whether we even like what we discover. The alchemists loved the material they worked with and recognized that it was filled with soul, with its own subjectivity, perspective, and beingness. For them, entering into the vessel with the material was a love affair to which they gave everything. This love of the psyche, taking a risk to trust (over time) what it produces, is such an important part of the journey. We must each discover what this “love” looks like for us, beyond a mere concept, in our actual, lived, embodied experience. What would it possibly mean to “love” our heartbreak, our sadness, our confusion, our feeling down? What would it mean to open our hearts to our experience in a new way? Even if we do not “like” what we are experiencing and wish it were different, there is a deeper invitation into an unconditional love we might discover as we deepen our work. We love reality, and this is how it appears in this moment.
No matter what is happening in our lives�
�the ups and downs and pain and joy and struggle and beauty and grief—this is the prima materia. We can start exactly where we are; in fact, that is the only place we can start. In this sense, courage is not so much a feeling state that comes and goes but a passion and interest in what is here, in what has been given, in the intelligence of psyche. It is a longing to know yourself, to know the material of your life, even to be friends with those parts of yourself on which you had given up or otherwise turned away from and shamed.
It really is a conundrum, this being human: we want to heal, but we don’t want to be too vulnerable, take too much risk, or turn toward the shaky, raw, unguarded life sure to be there to greet us when we open into a new way of being. Yes, we might feel some excitement about the whole thing—imagination of a life beyond conditioning—but how do we weigh that against our intuitive knowing of what will be required to transform perception and wake up out of old and outmoded ways of being?
We do not find the freedom we long for in our attempts to resolve this conundrum but in attuning to the creativity at its core. Our felt sense of freedom arises naturally when we begin to perceive the contradictions of the psyche as carriers of sacred life energy, revealing a mystery beyond the conscious mind’s capacity to understand. The true nature of freedom makes itself apparent when we dare to see that the beloved, or love—or God or nature or Life or Source—is not separate from this conundrum but is taking form as the conundrum itself. In fact, it is His or Her actual body. It is not some cosmic error or mistake we must remedy by means of process or improvement but a pure emanation of wisdom itself. The contradictions have been placed inside us as a gift and benediction, the prima materia for us to work with, the exact material that has come into the vessel for tending and heating with our passion, interest, and commitment. The faithfulness and allegiance is not primarily to shifting, changing, transforming, or even healing but to participating, to infusing the material with our presence, to wanting more than anything to get to know it, take it as a lover, and dance with it as a way to embrace the mystery.