I had a dream recently where Sophia (in her form as a Western yidam/ dakini) appeared and showed me a circle. It emerged in the space between she and I, but at the same time was in the center of my heart. Every aspect of my life – my relationships, my strange body bodily symptoms, creativity, unlived grief, intergenerational trauma grooves, clear light realization, unintegrated shadow – it was all circumambulating around the center and pointing back toward it. The feeling-sense and imagery was of scattered pieces of soul coming back into linking, revealing their relationship with the center and with one another. There’s this experience of living in the mandala, where we’re living with the Self as an inner partner, revealing how that orienting principle continues to manifest itself as the phenomenal world. Whatever image appears – the alchemical vessel, the mandala, Winnicott’s holding environment, the secret chamber within the heart – contains the radiant expressions of wholeness, ornaments of totality. The hermetically-sealed vessel of the alchemist, signed with the seal of Hermes, the trickster who is ever-revealing the linking and connections within and between the personal and transpersonal Self. I was drawn toward what Sophia was showing me, as I usually am, but at the same time hesitant, shaky, unsure, a trepidation… because of the implications. Because of the death required. But even so, to see and feel into that containment, how we’re being held and surrounded as we make the journey, especially in these times when the ground can so easily fall out from underneath us.