It’s important to honor what it is that we’re really asking of ourselves when we engage a path of individuation and healing. It’s no small thing. When we make that sort of commitment – to psyche and soma, to the angels, allies, goddesses, and gods, to nature and to all of life – we open the door to the interior castle, that luminous holding and transitional space where the figures of the unlived life await our holding. Not only the disowned and marginalized, but also those pieces of soul who carry the quantum and the new, lost creativity, awe, wonder, and the joy of pure Being itself. To step into that castle requires that we break through the orbit of the psychic and collective status quo, and the dense matrix of intergenerational trauma and trance. While we may have a genuine desire to do this, there are parts of us who simultaneously have an unconscious investment in not healing, because at a very deep level we know what that will require – an underworld journey into the darkness, to liberate the lost ones who have become frozen there. It will ask everything of us, but that voyage bears fruit beyond our imagination, beyond what we can imagine ahead of time. It is the end of one world so that a new one can come into being. No, we’re not always going to want to do this, to embrace the shadow, to tend to that grief and shakiness in the heart, that sensitivity in the body, and to stay near while the soul incarnates by way of psychic activation, complex, feeling, and through the imaginal and relational worlds. It can ache and burn and at times is sure to feel so claustrophobic. At other times, a lightness of being, a moment when the veil parts, and we’re in the Mystery. And in that space of unknowing, we know that love is with us. The Beloved is there inside the aching and the burning, and will take form at other times as a sweeter grace. Each are equal arrows in her quiver, ways of drawing us nearer, opening us through our longing. Not to harm, but to reveal… to show us that the path truly is everywhere. Photo by Jose Antonio AlbaMatt’s Self-Guided, Home Study CoursesMatt’s YouTube Channel