Tag Archives: dark wisdom

Spiritual Guides and How To's

A spiritual path is a one way street. This is a law of energy.

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A spiritual path is a one way street. This is a law of energy. You take one step and everything about you and everything about the path changes all at once. Take one more step and you are in. The path itself becomes your tether to this life through an ever-shifting forest and what comes to you, in challenge or exhaltation, comes across the way you are walking. It is specific to you.

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You don’t get to go back. You don’t get to change your mind because, unless you are just tasting around, unless you are just workshop shopping, unless you are just riding the trance high from one cosmic spiritual hipster event to another, when you finally pack your bags and get out on the road, your commitment will have been heard. The silent vow that you made deep in your heart will already have been accepted. If you turn around to go back, the forest will have changed by new awarenesses that you can’t take away. Try as you might, journeying back would only mean moving on, to a home that will never be the same and a knowledge that will never let you rest again in the ignorances of before.

This is why so many people are afraid of letting go and submitting to their spiritual hunger. They can feel the danger. They know that to give up control of what happens in the spiritual practice would invite other forces to participate and for power to be given to the unknown. To accept the quest of wisdom will mean to begin the irrevocable unwinding of avoidance patterns they have set up in order to keep their lives going the way that is most comfortable. Some people are aware that their marriage would not survive a spiritual awakening. Some do not want to face the difficult conflict they see would arise with their job. Even those of us fully committed to the path know that eventually, we all have to contend with, rather than bury the realities of our sick, abusive society.

Stepping onto a spiritual path is a dangerous thing. Dangerous because we are all good people and once we know the truth, we will not abide by what we tolerated before. We will have to change and change means loss.

But it will be so good to let go of what does not serve us anymore.

We will know when we have found our real spiritual path because we will become consumed. Unseen forces from the other side reach over and pull us in. We become enamored, star-struck, empowered, entranced, lured, unstable, dismembered, turned inside out, renewed..but under it all our drive is our hunger for wholeness, for love, for deep communion with the blessed compassionate spirits. For soul food. As we are dragged into the shadow, we are taught ruthlessly about our own imbalances. We are faced with a choice, find our strength and spiritual allies or die. Die a spiritual death, die in our purpose.. die a long death of acceptance or a short one of physical illness. If we are going to die, we might as well die all the way, forget who we are and come out the other side to live in the light of awareness and wisdom of love.

There is no spiritual path without shadow. This wonderfully sticky personal mire that captures us and won’t let go until we have understood it’s every mechanism. With this knowledge we are able to dismantle the patterns that have been and free our vital life energy. Then and only then can we return. Like flowers in the spring we arise and when we resume our lives, it is with more power, more traction, more vision and more consciousness of the assistance we receive from the other side. We are now in the revelatory work of learning new ways of creating, of play, of new constructs of pleasure. We know ourselves in a new way and we are strong. Our ability to love has increased.

And when time has passed and we have known all that we can know, we return to the shadows, delving for more.

by Tasara

7 Samhain: Shadow and Descent, Sabbats - seasons

Winter Dreaming

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– A Time of Dreaming –

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We have crossed the threshold of Winter Solstice. But, darnit, it is still dark! We called in the light in holy ceremony, but where is the actual light?

The ‘pull’ towards the abyss has ceased. We have had our brush with the great shadow, sat through our lessons with Grandmother Darkness. Some of us have even plummeted into and crossed the Abyss. Those that have plummeted and not returned have passed on to other worlds, to be mourned by those left in this one. What do we do with all these leftovers from the Death feast of the season passed?

To understand this, we can look at the Wheel of the year in a few different ways. Firstly as this big wheel with huge powers on it’s opposite sides, of Sun and Moon, Light and Dark, Life and Oblivion. Creation. Disintegration. The closer we are on the wheel to one of those powers, the more we are under it’s influence. So, it being just post Winter Solstice, we are still heavily under the influence of the great shadow – but in a different way than before.

Different, because the great Wheel is moving. There is a movement. When we are before a pole like the sun or moon, we are being pulled towards it. Once we have crossed it’s center, we have been released. The great event is over and all the ‘making sense of things’, repositioning, realignment, refinding, digesting.. all that after-the-event stuff happens. We are now riding on momentum. The light may be dawning but it won’t be until Spring Equinox, one of the balance points between the poles, before the Sun is able to catch us up in his infectious spell and pull us towards his massive heart.

Back at the time of Samhain, when the great gates to the yawning Abyss opened, it was a time to release, as the great forces of the void pulled us, inescapably in. We went into stasis, the time between Death and Life. During that stasis, under the influence of the sacred darkness, some Thing built up and happened. Some alchemy occurred. An event, which peaked and then made room for a pin hole of light to return and begin to expand.

So now, after the Solstice, there is another release while the light enters. We, tired again from the drama of conception, rest in the unfathomable womb of the angelic mother as our guardian spirits move in to dream with us the dreams of our new incarnate existence. Therein is the gentle complexity of a life’s layers being grown. There is the simplicity of lying fallow under the inexorable, slow dawning of the nurturing sun.

We are preparing for the moment when we nail down our intentions with the naked force of our honest will – or more gently put, plant our seeds. This happens on Imbolc, Feb 1st.

But true intentions cannot come before the dreaming. We are still dreaming.

As we sleep, inspiration touches us, sending reverberations into the bones of who we are. There arises a yearning for what is next in the truth of what we are. More inspiration comes and this yearning, an open space, a ‘need fire’ as they say in the runic alphabet, combined with the love of the inspirational spirits, (this sublime safety we feel with them which gives birth to devotion) this, altogether forms a seed.

A most precious seed of life, dreamt in the most sacred way. For we do not create in this world as humans. We co-create.

Such is the sublime ecstasy of living.

by Tasara