When we think of Spiritual Awakenings there are images that come to mind. Birds chirping, a beautiful but approachable woman (probably the one you saw most recently in an all natural skin care ad) sitting cross legged in a millennial grey room with her eyes closed and a serene smile on her face. Maybe a different woman: long wild hair streaked with grey in long tasseled skirts untangling the secrets of the universe. You might possibly smell patchouli. You think crystals, chakras, and other buzzwords. You might even think of a lost soul kneeling in a church, succumbing to the way of the Lord.
I’m here to say: It’s not always like that.
Two months ago I discovered my partner was having an affair.
To say I went into a rage is an understatement. I truly felt like my soul left my body as I ripped through my life destroying everything I could control. The most vile words I could imagine came out of my mouth as smooth as honey. I viciously ripped everything I could from him piece by piece. I went public with my fury to let the world know how he betrayed me.
This rage lasted for a full week. I was feral. I was mentally frothing at the mouth. I became unhinged. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. With clenched teeth and wild eyes, I drove miles in my car trying to separate myself from the hurt in any way that I could. I would grip my steering wheel and scream out in anguish. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
The point I want you to focus on is that I felt like my soul left my body. In this sheer primal rage my mind was violently ripped from its center. Everything I was and had been was absolutely destroyed by the wildfire of emotions I was experiencing.
When it had nothing left to destroy the anger finally subsided. I stopped running. With my chest heaving, I turned around to see nothing but charred, smoking, and desolate trees for miles behind me.
To be quite honest, I didn’t know fuck all what to do with that.
But the smoke was clearing. I was beginning to have clarity. I made my way through the next few weeks and reflected on the ones prior. I began to notice how… divine it all seemed. I could map the events leading up to Affair Day and what happened afterwards and it all seemed a little too.. perfect. How every single thing that happened moved a chain of events along to a point where everything fell into place.
I was able to make choices with ease that had been agonized over before.
In a series of mundane moments that I can’t actually pinpoint to sound poignant and woo woo, I started to have a deep rooted feeling of, “Everything is exactly as it should be. I am exactly where I need to be.”
But I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I felt more ‘spiritual’.
I started deeply exploring my mind in the couples therapy my ex partner agreed to do after Affair Day. Our counselor challenged my thought processes and how I interpreted my interactions with the world around me. It began breaking the cycle of what I know now is Codependency. As I beat my self limiting patterns back, my True Self began to emerge.
With the desire to rebuild my True Self ignited, I stumbled upon a book with exercises on meditation that integrated grounding, breathing, and visualization techniques. Our counselor had mentioned this in my one on one so I decided to start giving it a shot. (You think with all the therapy I have paid for over the years I would have taken this advice before, but I digress.) I started to ground myself multiple times a day. I began to feel more present in the now instead of the later.
I dug deeper. I meditated on the idea of building self. On who I wanted to be, who I was. I began to open myself up to what I sometimes refer to as Spirit or The Divine. I started reading Tarot again and found the messages I was receiving deeply reflected and affirmed my circumstances. I implemented the advice that was given. I felt led. I felt like the weights I had put on myself over the years were slowly lifting as I trudged along. Soon I found I could run.
One morning I realized that the constant need for control in my life had faded. I had started to have an understanding of what it felt like to truly trust my ‘intuition’. I am working on trusting myself to hear it.
I know it will take time. This is just the beginning, I’m told.
What is Spirit? I don’t know. I’m still defining it for myself. What I can say is that I’m grateful it all happened. It was supposed to. That primal state of rage completely destroyed everything I had defined myself by until that moment. I am not the same person I was. Things don’t look the same, they don’t feel the same. I think of time as before and after.
None of these things eliminate the hurt of what I experienced. It’s anguish lingers. Those trees I looked behind me to see are still smoking, but the fire stopped there. I have turned my back, my feet are planted forward on solid ground.
The smell of smoke may still always remind me of the hurts I’ve endured but the warmth of the Sun will remind me why I embraced Death when it was drawn.
At the end of every funeral there’s a moment when you look around, exhale, and get up to begin moving on.
This is Hawkmoth Rising.
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