Healing we took birth for

With ongoing attempts to commodify our inner terrain via social media and 24/7 information coming at us, it’s easy to toss off the experience of “transformation” as just another experience.

And yet, when we go through a difficult passage in our lives, it is an invitation to “the healing we took birth for” as Stephen Levine would call it. When the ground goes out from under us it’s a call to initiation–which should never be sentimentalized. It means we ask for support and we are curious enough to go deeper. “What’s here? What’s being asked of me right now?”

A non negotiable skill needed for our emotional health is the ability to locate ourselves in the larger rhythms of life. Many of us have been through inner or outer dislocation in the past two years: the task at hand now is to slow down, simplify, and regain our trust in the cyclic nature of life.

American culture in particular puts a premium on the emerging butterfly but often devalues the journey which is where the actual transformation happens! The journey to real change is messy, confusing, chaotic and uncertain. Those are qualities that tend to fall into the shadow side of life and are often dismissed as problems to be solved rather than a part of the process.

We could be like the caterpillar that yields to its unfoldment. We could have our faith restored in our resourcefulness. That is the gift of the inner journey. Such a gift renews our respect for the process of “the healing we took birth for.”

I’ll leave you with a poem that I hope you find restorative.

Chrysalis Diary / by Paul Fleischman

November 13

Cold told me to fasten my feet to this branch, to dangle upside down from my perch, to shed my skin, to cease being a caterpillar and I have obeyed.

December 6

Green—the color of leaves and life has vanished, the empire of leaves lies in ruins, lies in ruins! I study the brown new world around me. I fear the future. Have others of my kind survived this cataclysm? Swinging back and forth in the wind, I feel immeasurably alone.

January 4

I can make out snow falling for five days and nights it’s been drifting down.
I find I never tire of watching the flakes in their multitudes passing by my window. The world is now white. Astounding.

Astounding. I enter these wondrous events in my chronicle knowing no reader would ever believe me.

February 12

Unable to see out at all this morning, an ice storm last night. Yet I hear boughs cracking and branches falling. Hungry for sounds in this silent world I cherish these and ponder their import miser them away in my memory and wait for more.

March 28

I wonder whether I am the same being who started this diary—I’ve felt stormy like the weather without. My mouth is reshaping and my legs are dissolving—wings are growing, my body’s not mine, my body’s not mine.

This morning a breeze from the south strangely fragrant—a red-winged blackbird call in the distance—a faint glimpse of green in the branches—
and now I recall last night I dreamt of flying.