How to stay lit as I emerge from a cavern of fear
Miz DeShannon
Space holder, romantic, covert goth and history geek.
Guiding humans through extraordinary embodied experiences with inner and outer worlds (as a yoga teacher)
Grumpy Sagittarius Sun / Capricorn Moon
By the water, under the stars, near Copenhagen, Denmark
IG: @natarajayogauk
An adventure through dissolution...
There are these stages to life, right, which reflect the cycles of many things that we can observe arising and dissolving. The seasons; the heightened energy when the sun is up and we feel fiery warmth and joy, to the dropping of leaves and the rising darkness as we dive into a thoughtful restorative winter. Our awareness; momentary, split second noticing of a sound or a sight that in as quick a moment has gone. Cycles of consciousness, flowers emerging into form, or of the continuation of life and death….
We as humans attach ourselves to our bodies, circumstances, and physical material things. Much as we might think that we don’t hold much in possessions, we are a physical form, and are even attached to that physical form, but until that form is taken away from us somehow or the ability of the form comes into question, we don’t realise our attachment. We often see this when we’re sick and we get frustrated that our body is slow and lethargic.
“Ordinarily there is an end to sickness, more often than not, and we can move on with our cyclical life. But we’re mostly riddled with fear when it comes to things being removed and having to face change”
There are no time constrains on these cycles happening, when the dissolving starts. We may find when cycles align with our life, that we spend most of our time in a stage of development for instance, full fire element power, growing and creating more and more. We may find that doesn’t happen and we easily spend life stuck and stagnant, or we enjoy staying in the same place in order to learn and preserve ourselves.
What happens when we’re pushed out of the stage in the cycle that we’re comfortable with, and something somehow forces us into the next? We have to face change. Or what…?
In the cycle of creation of our reality there’s a process of dissolving; a word not often associated with anything positive - break down, vanish, melt away, dissipate, bring to an end, terminate…..
Dissolving anything that we know and love - rather than just dissolving a fleeting moment of awareness - is heavy work. Dissolving constructs of identity and ego though, isn’t actually a bad thing. The constructs and identities that we somehow undertake in life aren’t always serving us in the way that they should. We never have one ‘hat on’ of course, we are a different person for our boss than we are for our partner than we are for our parents, and between us those characteristics differ too. And yet we’re often incredibly fearful of moments in our lives when we realise that the constructs we know are shifting. As much as we know some of them are unnecessary, we somehow fear losing them.
“We can’t imagine what dissolution feels like until we feel it. We can’t imagine what anything feels like until we feel it, because all feeling is personal experience”
But what do we do when things we know and love dissolve, even what we (in our limited humanness) see as our all - our body? When there is seemingly no end to the dissolving and no knowing of knowings return, the flower emerges into form and when autumn arrives we have no grasp of when the summer will come again….?
Trust.
Dissolving feels like you’re losing everything, not just making a small change, but your entire psyche is shifting and every part of the existence of you as form comes into question. The physical form, the constructs of the mind, the passion of the heart, everything that we thought was the ultimate reality of our own Self is unravelled and broken down.
Is this a bad thing? Is it so bad to let the boxed-off constructs of life, and labels we’ve been conditioned to live up to, be burned away in order to reveal our true nature….?
Dissolving gives us opportunity, for discovery and adventure to find what’s necessary and unnecessary, and emerge with a new path, a new sense of clarity and optimism. It’s like a re-birth.
This is the work.
This is the hard graft - the sitting back and analysing all of you.
This is how we stay lit, by trusting, that something will emerge and it will be better than before.
When we face all of the bad parts (to whatever degree they are ‘bad’), we can use them to help us dissolve the identities we’ve attached to them, and which we don’t need. And in removing the identities that we don’t need we subsequently remove the bad parts. They aren’t given any fuel. They dissolve.
I don’t feel that it’s something that we can easily put on ourselves, dissolving. A lot of questions need to be asked…
For me it happened by accident. I thought I had a grip of letting things go, and I’d pushed them behind me to motor on through with new ideals and surroundings, thinking that moving on was problem-solving. The dissolving for me started with my body, the vehicle that I had always attached joy to, and subjected to pain. The vehicle that had carried me through every trauma, embraced every joy, saved me from every fight, and held me through every movement and shift with only a few aches and pains along the way.
Who am I now my body doesn’t work….?
What am I doing here?
Where am I, physically, emotionally, personally?
Why do I do what I do?
How do things happen…?
What part of all this am I imagining, and creating through my own sense of lack?
Have I done that throughout my entire life….?
How do I get what I want…?
What do I want?
THE GUILT.
The disconnection.
The noticing.
The patience.
The whirling around in spacious confusion.
The fear.
We often talk about letting things go and finding space for the new, but I wonder how deep that goes - it’s thrown around in some sort of Instagram-cool rhetoric; “let go of what you don’t need” - oh, okay then I’ll just forget about half my life. Letting go, pushing things away, forgetting about them rather than facing them head on is not problem-solving - it’s ignoring. Ignorance is one of the main causes of our ‘suffering’ - it isn’t bliss.
Rediscovery, through dissolving, entails uncovering things that have become hidden or that we possibly never even noticed; qualities and thoughts and deep-felt emotions. Enlightenment and being released from negativity, means becoming something apparently ‘new’. But at the same time knowing that that ‘new’ thing will change and will be dynamically different at every given moment.
And a deep knowing and trusting that at the same time, you have not actually changed and there is nothing new. You’ve simply found your core, which has been there all along it’s just been covered. You are now, fully lit.
So ask yourself; what does LOVE feel like to you? Or what does love FEEL like to you?
Thank you.
I love you.
I’m listening.
To quote Christopher Wallis –
“If you think the goal of life, or even worse, the spiritual path, is to feel good all the time, then you are a slave of the mind.
If you think happiness is the result of maximising everything you like and minimising everything you don’t like, you are a slave of the mind, and you run around doing its bidding every day.”
This post is prompted by a huge journey into the goddess Bhuvaneshwari and her guidance, with my Tantric Philosophy school, Samavesa.
This post was originally posted on Miz’s Substack: dharmathings.substack.com/