On any sort of path of wholeness, at least in my experience, there are always going to be
moments of deeping into shadow, where we’ll be asked to come to the ground, or we’re taken to
the ground, taken to dust, our heart breaks and our dreams can dissolve in front of our very
eyes… the way we were so sure it was all going to turn out
But this more fierce grace, this reorganization of the unknown, is an emissary of wholeness, an
ally of integration, clearing the way, preparing the soil; it’s an expression of the Friend, which is
the word the Sufis use to describe that Presence.
One of the core realizations on the wounded healer path is that there is often an important
communication from the soul, in the core of the shattering, the sorrow, the transition, the loss –
a special blessing not able to be transmitted in moments of certainty, peace and joy. An
invitation into the depths, a reminder of what matters most to you in this life, what’s most
important, a dispatch from the Friend that can only be decoded in the slow silence of the Heart.
There are times in our lives when even our most precious beliefs and realizations, our most
valuable and dependable reference points around which we’re organized our lives, when these
fall apart and dissolve in front of our very eyes. What was so clear only days or weeks ago is no
longer available, no longer valid, no longer true.
This is an incredibly important moment in alchemical work, that process of solutio, or
dissolution, associated with the color yellow, where things are putrified, or yellowed away by the
alchemical putrefactio, a reorganization of me and my life and the way I was so sure it was
supposed to turn out. But it’s this dissolution that plants the seeds of a future revisioning and
reimagining of who we are and what we’re doing here.
It’s tempting in these moments - or in these periods in our lives - to conclude that something has
gone wrong, some great cosmic error or mistake has occurred, that something is wrong with us,
that we’ve failed, or that we’ve been forsaken, forgotten, or abandoned… by the Beloved, by
life, by God.
But this disassembling and reassembling of our world is a sacred process and the path is
everywhere. At times, we’re going to be required to live out that archetypal unfolding of death
and rebirth, which is the very essence of initiation and transformation. And the beloved is there,
the Friend is there, the ally is there… in moments when we’re holding it all together, and it is
equally there in moments when everything is falling apart. The form may change, but the
essence is One.
The soul is always communicating to us. The Great Friend is always looking for us, in the hope
of drawing us nearer, but often in ways that are unexpected and even bewildering to the part of
us that believes it’s in control, that we’re truly steering the ship.
In order to get our attention, the soul must at times upset and dissolve the status quo, turning
inside out the dreams and fantasies of me and the life I thought I was living… initiating us and
helping us to see that perhaps we have no idea who and what we are, what a relationship is,
what healing is, what the Divine is, and where we’re going to find meaning.
As we deepen in our inquiry, we might start to see this activity of somatic and psychic
restructuring as the expression of a certain kind of grace… again, not the sweet, flowy, and
expansive grace that is our favorite kind, but a grace that is fierce and wild and can have a
certain disassembling energy to it.
It’s the grace of Kali, or that of the wrathful Tibetan goddesses or the moon, a more wild and
untamed and unknown sort of grace, but grace nonetheless.