Transformative Cycles - Matt Licata

In the cycle of death and rebirth - the archetypal basis of all
healing and spiritual transformation - there are two aspects to
that sequence, each being an equal portal on the journey of
embodied wholeness.

There's the aspect of death, where part of ourselves
 must fall away: the death of an old dream, of me
and my life and how it was all
supposed to turn out.

At the other pole is rebirth, renewal, and the emergence of
new life.

It is understandable that the rebirth aspect is one we most
welcome and are drawn to: healing, union, the coming back
together of that which has fallen apart.

To embrace dissolution as path, as initiation, as a manifestation
of the ally [Friend] will feel contradictory and counter-
instinctual.  It will ached in the heart.

However, in many alchemical and mystical streams, dissolution
and the death of the material (known) is the very essence of
the path and required for our perception (and subtle body) to be
cleansed.

Rebirth is not possible without full participation in the process 
of death.  There is no doorway in and through without
embodiment to the cycles of grief. 

We see this experiential discovery for example in the writings
of Rumi, St. John of the Cross inThe Dark Night of the Soul, in
Teresa of Avila's vision of the Interior Castle.

[But] there's no real reference point for it in a lot of our
contemporary traditions, which remain oriented exclusively
to the upward, clear, and ascending currents.

In addition are the currents of the divine descent, the illuminated

black sun, the lunar cycles that unfold within the somatic
unconscious and the underworld.

~

Remembering that spiritual transformation and awakening
involve not only what we'll access and gain, but what will
inevitably be taken away in the process of being emptied out.

The goal isn't so much to rise up and out of the unwanted,
and unexpected, but go into its interior chambers.

The light found there isn't what we normally think of as 
"light".  It's a "full-spectrum" light that contains the dark.
It's not only the light that can hold us, but the darkness as well,
in a holding benevolence...

There's an innate patterning of experience within the human
psyche to falling apart and coming back together again.

Things "falling apart" and "coming back together" is the 
essence of a  more tantric, or alchemical approach to
healing and spiritual transformation...

Matt Licata

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
2012