The following post was inspired by the monthly session on ‘Attuning to our Deeper Being’ as part of Nurturing the Fields of Change programme where we continued to delve into holistic approaches to transformation which involve experiencing nature as our guide and teacher. Given that so much of my time is spent exploring how best to enhance awareness of nature’s wisdom and more fully embrace this in all areas of life, this discussion was right up my street, or rather in my habitat.
Nature is a mirror and perhaps why we so often use the same words to describe our feelings or events, especially by using the weather patterns. Noticing how our mood shifts from one to another, like any weather coming and going. Our thoughts are like clouds, appearing, changing shape, passing through and then disappearing without a trace. The sky itself feels like our eternal awareness, always there beyond the mental rumination. The rain cleanses the sky, just like a ‘good cry’ can help release the inner tension. Some days look like fog, unclear, unknow, and uncertain. Soften your gaze, relax your jaw, release your shoulders and drop into your heart, it knows. Though disruptive, storms herald a time of renewal. They clear the dust out of the air and re-energize the earth. Yet “do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” (Lao tzu). If you are going through a storm right now, do not despair. Hunker down, seek shelter in love, nature, art and spiritual practice. The fog will lift, the clouds will part and the rainbow will appear in time.
Yet, there is also something to say about the more dramatic changes in weather we are experiencing, which are too, I believe, reflecting back to us our own internal state. After all, both the floods and the wildfires are wreaking ever greater havoc, much like unresolved pain from the past continues to re-enter the fabric of our lives, re-creating dysfunction in our social, political and ecological structures. Most people feel scared and powerless when faced with the power of mother nature. Emotional overwhelm can illicit similar sensations. Repressed feelings emerge with great force, surprising us and those around us. Yet, purging the body of an emotion we’ve been holding ourselves back from expressing is something that happens eventually, whether we want it to or not. Though today we relate to chaos as destructive and dangerous, the early Gnostics and alchemists recognised it as a vital element of the creative process of transformation that “is not to be imposed, it is to emerge”. Until we retrieve and integrate our collective shadow in our psychic development, we will continue to act out our neurotic fantasies and endanger the survival of every living thing on this planet. This is not a pessimistic view, because some kind of breakdown is usually necessary before any significant breakthrough into new ways of living not so encumbered by past conditioning, much like the pandemic was, I believe, a nature’s way of informing us of the incorrectness of our behaviour and a chance to do things differently.
Grounding our experience in Gaian Awareness can in itself supply us with the resources needed to transform the challenges we face. As earthly creatures continually subject to disappointment, pain and loss, we cannot stop the shifting tides of our existence, but we can learn to ride them with more grace and ease instead. We can learn to honour the radical profundity of our own psyche and trust its processes. Those shifting tides is where we experience nature and life in its profound independence, because we can do nothing to stop the tide from turning, except to watch it. The waves may get destroyed when they hit the shore, but the water stays unharmed. The water, like the sky itself is our eternal awareness, unchanging underneath all the disruption. It knows that nothing in the end is absolutely lost, but it doesn’t mean that we won’t potentially get really hurt on the way of life finding its way.
What has the weather passing been like for you inside?
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Activating archetypal leverage points for change
Monday 16th September 14:00-15:30 BST
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