Today is the Winter Solstice, the day with the most dark and least sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a sacred day on all the world’s calendars. Because Seeing with Your Heart’s motto is Dive into the Darkness to Find the Light, it is no surprise we celebrate it. For us, both Winter and Summer Solstice are celebrations of consciousness. The Solstice reminds us that consciousness merges darkness and light in every moment.
For the past two years, Dan’s sister has been sick with a life-threatening illness. It has been especially hard because their sibling entanglement with their mother and father tightened and hardened with her disease. Last week, in the middle of the night, the phone rang waking Dan from an uneasy sleep. His sister’s hospice caregiver made the call and then handed her the phone. She said, “Dan, I’m dying. Please come.”
Emily and Dan quickly packed, found friends to take Ruby their dog, and headed to be with her. We are writing this from their ancestral house where his sister came to face the end in the same bedroom where their father and mother had their last days. After a week, she continues to decline day by day. As her body and mind transitions, it demands we work through our own emotional and physical darkness to be present in a way that helps her reach the light that awaits.
Dan writes, “This stretches me. How can I not get sucked into the entanglements in my mother’s field, my father’s field, as I’m confronted directly with the hurt of unresolved conflict and blame? How do I tend my beaten and despised inner child, while arriving fully in my wholeness and love as a man and grown adult brother? Is it possible to love and accept like none of my grandparents?”
“Can I open the front and back doors of my heart to let them all in, witness my sister’s suffering, and mourn her life and death, while I stand steady and rooted, press my feet to the ground, keep my body straight, and be present to who I truly am?”
Emily writes, “I value showing up fully to every threshold, be it birth, death, marriage, and everything in-between and feel honored for the invitation to be here now. Yet, in the moments of fear and judgment, I am challenged to unearth a deeper capacity to compassionately witness, emanate love, and offer healing energy and rhythmic, vibrational support to all beings present (living and dead). And I wonder when the portals open with such intensity, how can I do this in a way that doesn’t self-sacrifice my own frequency, intentions, and everyday balance?”
Here’s a Solstice meditation. Imagine two staircases that lead from your mind to the cosmos. One staircase is obscured by blankets of darkness and the other illuminated by brilliant light. If you are attracted to the dark staircase, you will walk into your worst fears, deepest grief, most complex trauma, and compounded shame. After a while, a light appears ahead, and you find yourself connected to the illuminated staircase. When you follow the path of light, it leads you to new realms and then returns you back to your mind and the moment… expanded and touched and forever changed. If you start with the light staircase, it is the same. You eventually descend into the dark night of the soul where you feel utterly lost in the depth and width of an unimaginable void. Only at the bottom, does the goddess offer her initiation to lead you back to the light and home to your mind.
Those staircases are eternal. The living mind is this little space of intense reactivity where eternity comes for the experience of rhythm and flow, the movement of true nature, inside a living organism. Evolution took 3½ billion years and countless iterations to create a human body as a vehicle for consciousness to roam free. Our bodies are an exquisite creation beyond anyone’s comprehension.
Yet, how do we experience it? In that standard model, when born, we are immediately entrained to the menu of complaints. “I was supposed to be a boy instead.” “My sister doesn’t love me.” “My father was an alcoholic.” “My mother was never there for me.” “I’ll always be alone.”
As we approach death and begin our soul’s review, these torments surface along with new ones. Either it is God’s Judgement that we disappointed or failed. We didn’t say the right prayers, or practice the right creed, so we will be deprived of our reward. Or there is no reward, no staircase whatsoever. Just dirt and oblivion await. Beloveds and enemies infuse our mind’s eye, whether present physically or not. As life descends and spirit arrives, most seek to reconcile what is unresolved in their hearts.
In our circles and others like them, people are coming back into contact with evolution’s design and consciousness. Seeing with Your Heart is not about giving you the answers. It’s a container and a community to explore the questions. Ancestors do their magic when we see them and honor their fate. They celebrate the festival of consciousness that appears everywhere in everything we do. They hand us a phone in the darkest hour of separation and speak through us, “Please come.” We can respond, “I am with you.”
On this solstice evening, we are opening our hearts, bedside with Dan’s sister, to “quest” the questions plaguing our minds. We are inviting the field of consciousness beyond to cradle us under the night sky in the light of love and support transmutation for each person and ancestor entangled in the knotted threads of suffering.
Upcoming Programs
We invite you to consider our upcoming Seeing with Your Heart Alchemical Constellations Training and Facilitator Certification. We designed it for individuals ready to untie the tangled threads of past generational sorrows, free themselves to live into the possibilities of spontaneous creation, and expand their lives, healing practice, and work with Constellations.
Our advanced tools are designed to teach you how to harmonize your own emotions, mind, body, heart, and consciousness with the lifeforce that comes from the earth beneath our feet, the ancestral codes in the cells of our bodies and the greater intelligence of the cosmos.
We are all artists as well as being works of art. We are creator and creation. Whether we are crafting a program, wildcrafting herbal medicine, writing a book, telling a story, navigating a canvas or exploring the landscape of the heart, we are a portal, conduit, and incarnate collaborator with and for our greater muse. The question is: Do we have the courage, audacity, and soulful confidence to say “yes” to the seductive ideas coursing through our minds eye, waking us in the night, and knocking on the doors of our heart in synchronistic moments throughout our days?
We invite you to enroll in the Creativity to Spark Your Soul and Source Your Movement Two Day Virtual Workshop on January 21-22, 2023!
If you are interested in working privately with Dan and/or Emily, we welcome you to CLICK HERE to learn more about our services. Together we will identify the inherited patterns present and the pathways to create space for the possibility of the future calling you forward.
