A Sacred Process - Matt Licata - for Solstice

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is
playing out within us.  With each breath something in us is
dying: some aspect of who we think we are or what we're
doing here, and idea about how life was going to turn out.
[the loss of your faculties :)]

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so much how
can we be reborn, but will we participate in death,  fully, and
with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge,
trusting that rebirth will take place according to a timeline
originating far away in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth,
 quickly back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure,
maintain, or heal that which is dying (in us), that which longs
to transform.  It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need
to put it all back together.[the way it was].

But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a death 
tended to consciously - that re-birth can come into being.

The invitation, then, which we can at times hear clearly,
during the dark of night.....is to not abandon "death" in our
rush to be re-born [into the light].

To not short circuit the intelligence and creativity that death is,
and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the
creativity of dissolution, without the alchemical disintegration.

Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and
its fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole.
In those times in our lives when things are being rearranged
and reorganized inside and around us we can attune to what
is truly being asked, whether is is to cure death and reassemble
the known, or to allow the forms of love safe passage to 
continue their journey...

To give them permission to dance and play and participate
fully in the sacred return...

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Moon thru skylight

 

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