The edginess of the eclipse sandwich
Note to self: don’t sit on a sacred spot on a solar eclipse - or do, but be better prepared for what might happen next!
As the moon covered part of the sun, I felt the spiral shift, go anticlockwise and should not therefore have been surprised to find myself spiralling downwards to the very depth of my being in the days that followed.
This is one deep eclipse sandwich and we’re not quite there yet.
My journey with grief has taken me to a grief counsellor, and there have been attunements and Shen sessions to say nothing of honest conversations with loved ones to stir up the pot, everything is always divinely timed and I am conscious the universe never gives us more than we can handle, but it’s been a ride.
Coming through the other side (thanks to some shadow work to see the pattern more clearly) I am aware that I am not alone, that the powers that be are casting magic into our life by asking us to do some deep dive letting go of how we think life should be lived, versus the reality of life being lived and in the process allow the necessary dissolution of the ego which so beautifully holds onto its stories and expectations and ideas of how life should be lived to feel that it has control.
Which of course it doesn’t but it likes to think it does, and crikey, doesn’t it hold on tightly to its idea of how it thinks things should be…the control…to the extent that if it’s not going to get its way, it feels it might just then annihilate us, because the feeling of failure - the idea that it isn’t in control and didn’t get it right, is just too painful.
Obviously this is all a load of mental claptrap, because there is no such thing as right/wrong, perfect/imperfect, good/bad, not really, but we have been programmed to believe otherwise, and some of us, especially us pitta types with perfectionist tendencies can easily fall into the trap of thinking there is a ‘right’ way to live based on societal’s conditionings and expectations let alone our annoying programming. We have a tendency to over judge and criticise ourselves and make ourselves wrong to fit the worldview of ‘right’.
For me though, these very painful, dark and heavy periods are to be celebrated, because I am now aware that it means magic is taking place, that I am in some alchemical and transformational space and hence the discomfort. No one said growth was easy, far from it. Women make no secret of the pain of birth. And often there is pain in death too. These edges that life takes us too are deeply and profoundly uncomfortable as any of you who have suffered deep depressions will know.
And these metamorphic periods of our life are exactly that, a death of the person we were - a stripping away then of all our false identities, roles, beliefs and thought patterns, to say nothing of the our idea of control, to allow more of our essence to have space to shine through instead.
Our essence of course is love and so following a break through, we often feel as light as a butterfly, not least because we have left the discomfort of the chrysalis, but because we are filled with the lightness of love, and are full of beautiful and blissful potential.
There is only so long we can carry the heaviness of our outdated stories and ways of being preventing us from seeing the light our being.
The process is like grief, with all its anxiety and shock and tears and the letting go that it demands of us.
We grieve all that we have been, all the relationships and situations in our life which now need to change.
It’s an extremely liberating process, especially as it generally gifts us a new direction to follow, an inspiration, a potential we hadn’t realised, or at least that has been my experience.
So for those of you wading through the darkness, take comfort - it is just a process. When I’m in it, I see it as a sign to take better care, to go deeper into practice, to spend more time on my mat, to immerse in Vedic chanting, enjoy more Yoga Nidra, take longer baths with essential oils, go for walks on my own, get in the sea, avoid harsh environments and people, and journal how I’m feeling, oh and working with a trusted healer. To also remember that all things come to pass.
Ultimately though, for the pass to come, we have to surrender and give it up. That’s the annihilation bit. That’s the anger at the universe bit. That’s the questioning the point of life bit. That’s the loss of faith bit. That’s the suicidal moment.
Once we have dropped to our knees and surrendered, asked, wished, screamed for help, admitted that we are not in control and can’t (funnily enough) figure it out, it allows something else to come in and it is this, that allows our greater awakening.
First we have to get out of the way. And by ‘we’ I mean ego. We have to accept that we don’t know another way. And to allow that other way to reveal itself, of course the bit of us that wants to stay in control has to let go.
Pride is our greatest obstacle. Fear too. Because the future is not known and is not certain and it is this which causes our mind to want to control in the first place. But the mind only knows what has happened previously and we’ve outgrown that now.
The light has returned for me ahead of the eclipse and I am inspired and I immerse deeper into my Tantra journey. I hope that the light is returning for the rest of you put through the mill and that the process helps you let go and find greater peace in the reality of life as it unfolds, without wanting or wishing or willing it to eb different.
What I have really learned is that sometimes the greatest change is not changing at all, just letting everything be as it is instead and allow life to unfold in its own timing, without making it good/bad, right/wrong. pass/failure, perfect/imperfect. There is a certain freedom in all of this, but the conditioning is deep, so watching the thoughts and patterns that tell us otherwise is key!
Happy full moon lunar eclipse ahead!
Love Emma x
