I have, recently, been sitting with the utter preciousness of the journey to reclaim wholeness.
It feels like experience is wave up on wave of emotions and processes. Sometimes I am cresting the wave, exhilarated by a new opening; sometimes I am drowning in the crushing surf; sometimes I am floating on a calm ocean where nothing is happening.
It’s so easy for me to look towards a ‘place that I’m going’ – like, staring at the lighthouse in the distance, wanting to arrive.
But at some point, I tipped into a different frame. It became clear to me that none of these processes will last. As I’m in touch with my existential terror, I realize that I only heal this once. As I learn to incarnate and come into my cellular experience, it becomes so evident that this exact process – the experience of feeling through the fear that has lived in my cells and digesting it – will never happen again. It is finite. And that makes it feel infinitely precious.
One day, I think, I will look back on this journey from a place of wholeness. One day I will be Home, and I will look upon the mountains and oceans I have crossed to get there with a rugged grief. I will feel in my heart the joy of being young and uncertain, the exhilaration of climbing up a rocky slope not knowing what’s on the other side, the deliciousness of falling. The tender grief of letting go of youth and everything that comes with it. Every aspect of experience will feel like a precious stone to rub my thumbs over.
We move through the stages of soul incarnation – from the innocent, to the explorer, to the wanderer in the dark night of the soul; through soul initiation, into adulthood, and then elderhood. The next phase will come. There is no need to rush there. I am in my adolescence, in my initiation, in my (prolonged) dark night, and I will only be here once. I find myself savoring every morsel of it I get.
It breaks my heart now, even as I touch it. One day I will know, and I will never again be able to not know. And I will treasure my experiences of not knowing like old photographs, like dried petals in between the pages of my journal.
Last year, I spent a month in Scotland. It was one of the most intense energetic process months I’ve had. There were days where I was pulled under by non-human energies that wanted to consume me, lying in panic as they seduced me. I became sick from the dark energy swirling around Edinburgh. I drowned in the thick energy of the forest king standing guard over the pagan ritual sites. There were days where it was just me, a car, and nowhere to sleep that night.
Inside the intensity, I kept trying to run from it. If you had asked me, I would’ve said I wanted a way out.
But it was everything I needed. It brought me strength, and alignment, and Self beyond the material. I feel a sense of pride and fondness for that time. I look back with nostalgia, feel a gratitude for its intensity, and a love for the turbulence of the unknown.
I have been through this process – kicking and screaming my way through an experience, only to feel gratitude and fondness and an ache of its preciousness on the other side – enough times to know what will come.
And I’m inside one of those experiences right now. Not because anything special is happening right now, but because whatever is happening right now will never be happening again.
Once you get there, you’re there. So you may as well enjoy the process.