“Where Are We Now?”

Life, death and everything in between. Loss, gain, triumph, success, failure . What is this journey about and where are we on our own personal evolutionary path towards the growth that everyone speaks about? The growth that is replicated and mirrored to us by nature, the unfolding and continuous seasons, which come and go, as our life has come and will eventually go, as we travel on the trajectory of our karmic determinations, as we sustain loss, grief, as we enjoy life, exuberance, as we may experience excess, stress, sickness. We may give gratitude and appreciation for abundance in spirit and creativity, for family, children, friends, community,  or simply times of prayer, where responsibility is reduced or ended. Times of caring and sharing, times to grieve and times to be joyful. As the well-known biblical passage goes  “there is a time for everything under heaven”
(Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8).

Green White and Blue  – green – our Mother Earth,
White the sweetest smelling Gardenias, lovingly
cultivated from no growth to yearly yield, blue –
borders – strong boundaries to assist us to safely
navigate throughout our lives.

For anyone who has lost a beloved in their life, timely or untimely, prematurely or exact, be it be a parent, child, a friend, or a fur friend, as I reflect this early pre-dawn morning prayer time, I’m being shown, that with the loss of my beloved Mama just 18 months ago, as I grieve the loss, along with this comes the inevitability and requirement, of relinquishing the past and everything it beheld.

Everything that came with the relationship to that beloved, in physical form, now is no longer. Life as we may have known it to be, during their lifetime, is no longer. Forced to sit in the void, created by that immense loss, realizations and insights, as our awareness deepens, can and do inevitably arise.

Bearing witness to the physicality of how grief manifests in the body, relates primarily to our karmic residue and unresolved issues from our past. Everything that we are right in this moment, is an accumulation of everything that has come before. No real need to travel back or regress into past lives to understand where we are. All the lessons are here right now. Lessons learnt. Past dissolves. Into the Now we come. So the question is, where are we on our current journey in this present moment?

Sky Blue of Heaven and Clear Water

Through this process of grief, comes with it the blessings of creative manifestation, of my “model of mourning”. Whether it be through my music, painting,  writing or teaching, all giving me an ongoing platform to externalize the grief, and continue somewhat, to contribute to the world. At least for the time being.

Equally as important, is the ability to sit still and be quiet. Many of us try to gloss over the traumatic events of our lives, whatever they may be, however deep they cut, however vast the wound. Sometime or other, they will surface through our physical body, attempting to throw off their noxious effects of so many years of suppression.

I am of the firm conviction, that cumulative and incremental suppression, due to a need for survival, as a young child, and as some of us may resonate with this, that the only choices we had, were to suppress in order to be able to survive, those current then events. Eventually all of this undigested emotional material needs to surface, in order to heal and lead a healthy,  “sattvic”  -pure essence-  and precious life.

The body is the barometer of what is going on emotionally and mentally. It is incumbent on each one of us,  if we choose to, to take responsibility for our own healing,  as we sit in the quiet, as we divest ourselves of unnecessary and excessive external involvement with the technological, consumeristic and materialistic patriarchal world, with the manifestations of quick fixes, “want- it- now” type of world attitude, deeper meanings arise, which bring comfort, rest and peace.

Green and white Ayurvedic protocol reducing inner
heat and balancing for excessive pitta+ kapha
constitutions. Not for the faint-hearted

At this juncture, I can only speak personally of course, that the place of what I call the  “fertile void”, however distressing at times, that I have been led to detoxify, not only my body, but my past. What a task this is! I now follow an urgent call to health, to a place which is unknown, and yet promises relief, renewal and deep rest (“depressed” when we split that word = “deep rest”). I sit in occasional quiet joy, in the ramifications of what may be on the “other side of myself”. This New Path is often peppered with spontaneous surprises, serendipitous moments and smidgeons of  joyful expressions!

Jung coined the phrase “the second half of life”, where ego and mind-driven external world activities are dropped, experienced as no longer necessary, the old modes of conditioning and behavioural responses, no longer fit into where we find ourselves, moving thus into the second half of life, where the connection with the Divine, the spiritual takes centre stage.

In conclusion, I survey the natural world in colours : green the colour of the earth – Mother Earth, blue the colour of the sky – Heaven, the colour of God, white the colour of light, the Light of the Spirit, purple the light of Supreme Consciousness. All these colours are perfectly cooling. As we cool down, deep down, our nerves calm down, our kidneys function with greater ease, our adrenal glands no longer over-adrenalize, stress minimizes, the heat in the body starts to diminish, the water that we retain in our physical form, flows out, the excess adipose tissue is released, and not only do we weigh lighter in the physical body, we are lighter on all levels of our being, as we deepen our connection to nature and to the Divine.

Green dragon topiary, cultivated from
and by loving hands in the garden of the Tourné estate.

Cooling is feminine.  As we “feminize” ourselves and our world, we can become lighter and we slowly morph towards our True Nature, experienced as “Universal Consciousness”, Divine Energy and our connection to All That Is.

The Web of Life – All Is Connected

Mohini Chatlani © 14, July 2023