A whole generation of people are walking away from external reference points offered by faith communities, and developing their own soul-esteem. I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he compared the Kingdom of God to treasure buried in a field. The narrative goes that when the person realizes this, they sell everything they own in order to purchase this field that they might be able to dig for, find and legally take possession of the treasure. Soul-esteem is the treasure which is the germinated seed of the Kingdom of God inside every human heart, and ironically, many of us have to walk away from the scaffolding of the faith community, selling everything we have in order to buy what we need to finally lay hold of it.
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Mythology is replete with stories of goddesses and mortals alike, who called on their divine right to shapeshift, often to escape something shameful or violent or in response to unbearable grief. This shamanistic wisdom predates written histories by a long shot, practiced and understood by wise ones inside every civilization that has ever walked the earth. Great literary works like the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh feature shapeshifting, as does much of Roman, Greek, Geltic, Norse, Indian, African and Asian folklore and mythology.
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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.
Read MoreGod 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.
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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.
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When we say ‘I am afraid of the unknown’, what we are really saying is ‘I am afraid of what I am currently projecting out from my own field of consciousness into the quantum realm.” Those are two very different things, in point of fact. What we project into the ‘unknown future’ is largely a function of our family of origin, our trauma-patterning, our religious or cultural conditioning and our deepest fears and insecurities. Future-gazing is, in fact, an epic exercise in projection. Projection, far from being something we should avoid doing, is – in fact - a powerful tool at our disposal, which we can use to co-create our reality.
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This is what Jesus meant when he talked about dying to ourselves. This is what it takes to have the mind of Christ. Which is why so very few people who call themselves Christians will ever have it: because post-modern evangelical Christianity is one of the strongest pillars propping up the Kingdom of Empire, which has literally nothing to do with the Christ Consciousness. The two are diametrically opposed. So much of what happens in churches these days is like a weird cocktail of superstition, tradition, leadership seminars and group therapy.
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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.
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An amazing thing happens in this part of the journey. I find that my own cosmic cocoon is transparent to a certain number of close friends and companions. They can see it because they know it; they have also been initiated by the cocoon and so it holds no terror for them, to see me undergoing it. They are the Mystery-Holders for this part of my initiation and the astonishing and scandalous grace of it all is that I get to have them by my side through the whole thing.
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In the fluid horror of the dark deep, I am invited to meet my own adaptability, supple strength, fluidity and resourcefulness in the motif of the octopus. As I watch myself in octopus form, tentacles curling gracefully in and out, shifting with the current, methodical, slow, magical, measured my frightened, ragged breathing slowly give way to the kinaesthetic mysticism of measured inhale and exhale with the octopus, and the Big Task facing me starts to lose its power to halt my forward motion, to freeze me in place.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But, and this (as my friend Chris likes to say) is a powerful truth; it can be hard to come by. And sometimes I find myself wandering around aimlessly in my truck echoing the laments of the Psalmist and mumbling things like ‘in a dry and sun-scorched land where there is no Biggie Juice, my soul grows faint.’ Because I am not above entertaining myself with some mild heretical appropriation of scripture.
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