The rebirth aspect of the death-rebirth cycle is preceded by a willingness to enter the unknown and to grieve there, to come into Earth and allow an old dream to die – me and my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out. To place the broken pieces of the heart onto an altar in front of us and provide a sanctuary in which the lost and unlived can shatter and be reorganized. To mourn all that we’ll inevitably lose as we heal and awaken. Individuation is not only a process of acquisition – what we’ll “get” from the path – but also one of restructuring and dissolving, oriented in that which will be taken away. To feel and tend to that in the body can burn and ache, as it is tenderizing in the soul. It is an act of kindness to remember that the transformational process, by its very nature, is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum. It’s not only the activity of creation, but of reorganization as well, unfolding not by straight-line but through circle and spiral. There’s a sweet and flowing, nurturing sort of grace that we’ll encounter on the path, at times… and there’s also a grace that is fierce and reorienting, one that works against the psychic status quo. Grace is alive within the rebirth and the renewal, spinning out the fruit of a new world, but equally alive within the shattering and the dissolving, inside the particles of dust as we’re taken to the ground. While as open, sensitive human beings, we very understandably have a bias for the former, it would appear that the Beloved does not share that bias. Each are equal arrows in her quiver, equal ways to draw us nearer. Image from Jung’s Red Book