At five years old, my grandson can tell me about a dream he had the night before in ways I know he really dreamed it. He is close to the invisible world, the world of spirit, can speak of it as easily as he speaks of what happened to him at school that day. His imagination and intuition are clearly honed. Most young children can do this, if we hang close enough and listen.
The visible world in which we live and act, and the invisible world with which we interact each day, are really two aspects of the same energy, God-energy, set in motion with the same breath. Like two professional dancers who know how to allow one and then the other to shine, then to support, back and forth, effortless, the visible world and the invisible world interact with one another in seamless flow. They are one and the same energy, of the same source.
The natural immersion in things it takes to keep our visible world going – our career, our daily commitments – slowly tilts our focus and our comfort level in favor of the visible world, makes us less aware of invisible forces just beyond awareness. It’s difficult to hold the tension between the two so they can both be visible to us at the same moment, both shine and support, back and forth, in seamless energy. By the time we’re in our teens, the invisible world has lost its shine for us.
These two realities, however, go right on serving us without our notice. The invisible world of spirit holds the light, the sacred energy that releases anything bound. The visible world of matter holds the ground so spirit can impregnate all life forms. This frees up God-energy in them both. Together, they allow our human story to unfold.
Spirit longs to make its home in us, but this incurs a wound, a blow to the status quo. Like a mother, spirit patiently instructs. If our matter is supple and open, spirit moves in us with ease. If our matter is emotionally damaged and defended, there is resistance. Then the wounding is more marked, more pronounced, as a mother disciplines her child with love. Spirit has to create more space in us so the dance with matter can unfold with grace.
This is the history of our wounds, what looks to us like struggle and defeat. Our natural urge is to get away, to escape our wounds, but the only way to address and treat them is to allow spirit’s healing light to move within and have its way. We have to hold the light within with conscious intention and move into our wounds — to love the pain and brokenness out of them.
We have to hold whatever wounds us – our job, our relationship, a broken dream – and allow the light of spirit to dance around it, until we too can join the dance. Spirit sheds light: another way to see our wound — a needed insight, a way to even live with it in love. We have to take that light and dance around what wounds us until we see something in it that becomes the way through it. Only then can healing happen and the dance with spirit be fulfilled in us.
We have to consciously hold the light and dance, as if unaware of our wound’s crush; unaware of how our job, our relationship, our broken dream interferes with our openness to the light. We have to trust spirit’s word in us that what wounds us now is also in the mind of God and will be transformed in its own time. This leaves us free to focus on our dancing and not the wound. We know the final essence of whatever wounds us is good, because it, too, carries this God-energy.
The underworld is the theater of our wounding. It is a place of extremes – a place where we experience extreme dark and extreme light. We feel the crushing blow and we hear the voice of the transcendent, both present in the wounding. It is the birthing place of spirit within the matter of our body. It stokes the evolution of our unconscious matter into conscious spirit. It is the point at which we hold the tension between all opposites or metaphors. Use whatever language you prefer, it is the radiance of spirit burning through our human essence in a way that allows our matter to receive more light, more consciousness, more sacred energy.
Extreme light is that sudden illumination of the invisible golden world, the world of spirit; this changes us at our core. We carry that vision, that remembrance of our spiritual beginnings, with us for all our days. Extreme dark, from our human perspective, is trauma, a hurtful loss, a wounding experience that shatters our equilibrium. Both experiences touch us at a level we cannot escape. Both are life’s way of making space in us so spirit’s dance with matter can have more room.
It’s what we say to ourselves about our wound, not the wound itself that takes us down. Down we dive, into the darkness of our matter, fearful, with spirit right behind us in quick pursuit. We sit in darkness, disoriented, unconsoled, until we notice spirit’s presence next to us. Spirit’s healing light begins to light up that which we descended here to find — the truth our wound can teach us. It may be what we need to change, to accept, to forgive, in order to allow in a larger wisdom.
Life kneads us like unbaked bread until our compassion, our heart, rises from our animal nature and pours itself upon the world. This birthing is our spirituality – our recognition of us as spirit, an awareness that this same spirit in us is in all things. Our heart breaks wide to bow before the Thou we sense in all before us.
This insight does not make our wounding less a wound. It merely helps to make the process conscious, more of love. It offers yet another perspective from which to Yes our wholeness.
It builds from our intention a holy link — one more thread of sacred energy that forms the eternal dance of spirit and matter.