Rebirth

Over the last few years, I’ve personally gone through many deep ebs and flows into my own underworld, dipping into the darkness of my conditioning and pain, and in turn the fires of self transformation.

It’s been a gruelling and forging process, but as a wise woman once said to me many years ago “that which comes without hard work and risk, will only be superficial and fleeting” What I took from this was that if I was to ever want deep and ever lasting results in that which I did, I would need to be consistently and diligently moving through and beyond my comfort zones.

Not that long ago I was presented with a profound opportunity to integrate this very lesson into a deeper level of my being.

It all began when I found myself in a situation where I was opened far beyond what felt to be safe and comfortable.

The intensity of what arose for me was overwhelming to say the least. My body began to go into flight, scanning my environment for ways to retreat from the escalating panic. As my mind continued to race into damage control, a soft voice come through; “Sit up, breath and hold yourself” So i did, I came back to my practice. I sat up, I breathed and faced the turmoil of feeling deeply under resourced and unsupported in my experience.

My usual pattern, would have been to psychoanalyse this to the nth degree, and then go into some form of clearing process, but what was actually being asked of me, was to simply just hold myself. So I did, and as I sat there, I wrapped my arms around my body and whispered; “you’ve got this” and just like that a profound regression began to take place, right back to the moments after my birth; where my mother and father weren’t present in the hospital, one minute they were there, the next minute I was alone in a cot, with white lights above me, and in complete terror for what felt like hours.

As I continued to hold myself, focusing my attention on my breath, I noticed my body slowly beginning to rock back and forth, and then through spontaneous sounds of expression, my nervous system began to relax, and in turn I began to feel safety slowly enter my experience again.

As safety came through, I began to feel myself opening, and as I opened, an unwinding and a deep healing proceeded to take place. Just like that, I began to feel myself coming back home, and into a familiar place of greater connection to my body and into a space of love again.

As I look back now, It all began with holding myself, something that in hindsight, I’d never really been able to do until then. It was a deep reparenting and repatterining of something I wasn’t given in those fundamental and informative moments of my life.

As I look back further through my life, I can see all the times I either ran away from situations that felt overwhelming, or stepped onto new ones that numbed or covered the ones I was unable to feel or process.

So for me, this piece has been huge in this most recent process, as it has supported me in being able to really drop right down and finally for what feels like the first time, really hit the very bottom and depths of what was being presented and wanting to be felt. And here, just like Joseph Campbell once so aptly said; held in the depths of the cave I’d been running away from for so long, was the treasure I’d been so desperately yearning for. That cave, was my pain and my fear. And that treasure, was my truth, my vulnerability, my opening and my returning & reclamation of the old, yet not forgotten parts of my self and my being.

As this experience and healing has continued to integrate into my every day life, I’ve noticed a beautiful repatterining that has taken place around my relationship to life’s ebs and flows. A refreshed reminder of the true grace and beauty of that internal fold, collapse and contraction that each of us feels as apart of this human experience.

Just like the exhale offers a space for the inhale to enter, so does the contraction offer a lending hand for the expansion to come forth.

The darkness offers a place for the light to shine, and death equally initiates the passage of greater life to then be rebirthed.

It seems that right now we are in what could be described as a big collective transition / death; some people may be experiencing this as a complete collapse and ending of what they had previously built and come to know. Others may be in the process of being invited and propelled forward into newer and more aligned ways of living. And others again, may be feeling the complete rapture of rebirth into new worlds of wonder and excitement.

I know that I’ve personally experienced all of the above in recent stages and moments of my life.

If I was to offer a final prayer, it would be that we can each find ways to give ourselves what we need to feel held and safe in whatever we’re experiencing, and from here give ourselves permission to truely let go and find grace in the descent of death, and into the portal of rebirth and transformation.

And then, like the Phoenix, we can both individually and collectively rise together into renewed worlds of invigorated and liberated ways of being.