I am absolutely convinced by the universal law of free will, that no one can ever make us do anything that insults our soul. That we are all completely sovereign beings. When I connect with someone’s higher self, I am deeply connected to the root of their own sovereignty. There, the muddy waters which can sometimes swirl between a client and a practitioner, things like power dynamics, transference, countertransference and projection have very little impact. No one for a hot second is allowed to put me on a pedestal, or to substitute my own framework for their own, or divest their authority to me. Not even a tiny bit. Their higher self won’t have it. Neither will mine. So when I relate to them like this, it is inherently empowering for them, and it constantly reminds them of their own grace, dignity, belonging and agency.

God risked embodiment, risked loving and losing, risked pain and suffering and betrayal and abandonment and exile. God risked meeting God’s own limitations and God did it anyway. God may or may not have known that her own death would result in resurrection, or maybe God was just participating in a bigger story that God was compelled to enact, something that only the God-Imagination can know and understand.

This boy is well into his apprenticeship, learning how to work with energy, how to map it, locate it in his own body and in others’ energy fields. We play around with telepathy, with energetic exchange, with healing modalities, with mindfulness and prayer and quantum exploration. None of this seems strange to him, it all fits neatly into his worldview and perspective on a loving God who has designed a liturgical and ordered universe, in which there is sorrow and delight in equal measure. He is, in fact, a healer in training. And I am teaching him all the time.

The prize for the narcissist, is the self-hood of the other. Narcissists are interested in supply, not connection. They have two modes of relating – total enmeshment (which they think is intimacy, but which feels to the other person like being consumed by a black hole) or absolute rejection. They don’t know how to have middle ground, which is friendly and well-boundaried connection.

I only just have time to catch my breath on this new horizon before the fire comes to burn away anything I don’t need anymore. Which is most things, as it turns out. This stage teaches me that we really need only one thing; unconditional love. And that is always available to us as close as our next breath in this abundant universe stitched together by Love. Anything that cannot resonate at the frequency of unconditional love now has to go. And so the fire is here for it. And with the fire comes grief for what is burning.

There are things I learn from that experience that I will never be able to translate into language. They are Knowings that go deeper than language, and as such, are the fingerprint of Divine. They are planted in me, like a series of internal way-showers, map-markers, energetic signposts. They cannot be explained or described, they are simply Known, where once they were not-known.

This place might sound sad or lonely to you, if you yourself have not been invited to live here. It might even sound terrifying.

It is not sad. It is many things, but sad isn’t one of them.

It is wild and generous, untamed and scandalously beautiful. It echoes with many millennia of sacred songs, thrums with the beating of a million hearts and two million feet dancing the ancient mandala of life and love and bearing witness to the unfoldment of all of creation. It is holy and unspeakable and I never want to leave.