Re-membering
In Calling Our Spirits Home, I laid out the phases of the evolutionary process people tend to go through in their spiritual awakening and continuing travels, illustrating it with ordinary people’s stories as examples. It’s a model through which I now work with others and call The Re-membering Process. The hyphen in Re-membering is intended. My sense is that it’s the soul’s journey in this life to forget almost immediately who we are, become encrusted with society’s and our family’s of origin programming and then, at some point, to spend the rest of our lives rediscovering our own true nature. This is the universal way of the soul’s learning.
To explicitly recount the phases, we must first wake up, or experience a Sparking. This arousal state may take place because we realize that we’re feeling out of sorts. Something doesn’t quite fit. But more often, we’re so soundly asleep that the Universe pushes us into wakefulness through such crises as loss of various sorts, or health challenges.
Once we’re past the rubbing-our-eyes stage and can look around, we wonder how much of ourselves we had been giving away. In other words, what kind of false life had we been living while being untrue to who we are? We then go through Separation. This is a process of detaching from the old self, the one who had been lured into, or opted for, forgetting. At this point, if we are savvy enough, we will begin to question life beliefs we unconsciously ingested. If we truly make it through this stage, we will find ourselves making moves. These changes can be dramatic or subtle. They can cover the gamut from moving geographically to terminating jobs to severing relationships. At the same time, none of these things may happen. The Separation may possibly have little outward manifestation and go unnoticed by others. However, an intense discomfort may be experienced inside, enough so that a crack in consciousness begins to occur.
Separation is often a very challenging phase to transition through because everything within ourselves and around us is fighting to keep us where we have been. It’s the robust energy of the status quo.
If the core desire to be true to ourselves and live an authentic life is profound enough, it will override homeostasis and propel us into the Search. Here we are bent on discovering who we really are and what seems right. In the Search, we may move through communities of people and places, a plethora of spiritual traditions, sample various careers and partake of diverse healing modalities. It’s a sorting process that begins to give us grounding after the destabilization of Separation.
If we perform the tasking well, eventually we will find what rings true for who we are at a core level. When that happens the deepening process of Initiation occurs. This is a blessing that we unconsciously or consciously perform for ourselves, recognizing we have found home base. As who we are and what we are about in the world settles in, an integration transpires inside that gives us strength for the next part of the journey.
The Re-entry segment is often equally as challenging as Separation was. This is the point where we are ultimately aware that we have been through a deepening process, and to complete the circle we must return to the world with our new and more authentic identities. We have gifts to share with others, even if only indirectly through role modeling what is possible. Here we find that most people are too sleepy to notice, or actively turn their backs and refuse our gifts. But once in a while, someone gives a glimmer of interest and perhaps awareness. And we realize that we are sliding back into the world, even if only piecemeal, until we one day find ourselves firmly in place.
The ultimate joke of the journey is that, after a while, we begin to yawn and slip once more into a kind of oblivion. However, the sleep this time isn’t so deep and we increasingly arouse from the slumber more easily. Having been over similar ground before, we now carry much more alertness and vigor for what lays ahead in the landscape.
The Re-membering Process is not necessarily linear, but within the confines of a model is most easily presented thus. In reality, there is little that is truly linear about human beings. Therefore, we may find ourselves going back and forth between two or three phases, usually only dealing with one or two contexts of life at a time, and we may unfortunately get stuck in the process. But as we are able to complete the journey, even in just one aspect of our lives, it creates an infusion to the Core Self. It transmits a strength and wisdom that allows the peeling away of the layers to become much more fluid than any previous stop/start irregularity. And deep down we know this is the path we are meant to take over and over again.
As we choose to plumb the depths of the layering, we sometimes enter an even darker forest. Just because it’s darker doesn’t mean it’s frightening, although it can sometimes be quite unsettling. It’s just that the ways through are more hidden, sometimes shrouded intentionally in mystery by the Universe, meant solely for those who persevere toward finding the guidance that will light the way. That’s part of the test identifying intent and durability.
We don’t meet as many fellow travelers who have opted for this little-worn path. Discernment toward the helping hands proffered may be confusing. Indeed, assistance may even seem invisible or nonexistent. We then know we are traveling the way that leads toward a mystic’s life. We must now learn an entirely new form of relating to find the signposts that have been there all along.
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Nonfiction, Spirituality
Rating – PG
More details about the author
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment