The Alchemy of Love
“It feels like I’m standing in the middle of a burning pyre being burned alive. When I look out through the flames, there is this intensely raw feeling of being at the complete mercy of a process that I cannot change and can only allow. The flames fly wildly around me and there is nowhere to go. It seems that the flames are coming from my own flesh and bones, so wherever I go, the flames follow.” 1
Hexagram 30. Li/The Clinging, Fire. Li means “to ‘cling to something’, ‘to be conditioned’, ‘to depend or rest on something’, and also ‘brightness’…what is dark clings to what is light and so enhances the brightness of the latter. A luminous thing giving out light must have within itself something that perseveres; otherwise, it will in time burn itself out. Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine… Human life on earth is conditioned and unfree, and when man recognizes this limitation and makes himself dependent upon the harmonious and beneficent forces of the cosmos, he achieves success… one may put aside hope and fear, and sigh and lament: if one is intent on clarity of mind, good fortune will come from his grief. For here we are dealing not with a passing of mood… but with a real change of heart.” 2
A ‘real change of heart’ opens pathways for healing.
Daoist sages teach that there is a heart within the heart where the spirit of divine consciousness (shen) resides, guiding and protecting us in our earth walk. To stay rooted in the heart, shen needs us to tenderly care for the altar of our heart—a threshold between the realm of the timeless and the time-bound where mystery lives and informs us in the most sacred ways of the Dao. Shen needs our stillness and silence so that we may hear, with the inner ear, the guidance of Mystery whispered in a language only the heart understands.
There is a fire that comes from some unknown source, from Mystery itself, that emerges through shattering—through the humbling of our darkest nights, when life as we know it is disassembled, and our sense of identity is changed beyond recognition. It is the fire that burns though all that is false, ushering us toward something indestructible, true, beyond persona and belief toward a place of clarity, possibility, wholeness, love.
Healing cannot happen without love.
Like the healing journey, love offers itself in mysterious ways, transforming all in its wake. In such times, it is best to move with humility, openness, and patience—the kind known by mountain, water and tree. Love and healing often come unexpectedly, emerging through darkened places where visible and invisible worlds erase and create one another.
The transformational fires of love and healing sometimes touch us in ways that can feel like a violation—a burn—penetrating the hardened surfaces of our being that have not been loved or valued properly, if at all, reaching straight to the mysterious depths of the inner heart to shatter our smallness so that we are free to grow.
Love takes us to the empty space at the center of all striving and losses, dramas and traumas, posturing and judgements and transmutes them in its healing fires.
There is a wound common to many that often arrives early in life that comes from having not been truly seen. Too many have not been encouraged to listen to the heart and soul of their inner truth or to live in communion with the earth and more-than-human beings who ceaselessly support us with their wild, loving and sometimes contrary wisdom. Too many do not recognize that all living beings have value simply because they exist, and that we all have something unique to offer the whole-earth community that is wanted and needed—that we each do, indeed, belong and matter.
It’s never too late to let the soft animal of your body simply love what it loves. To lay on the belly of the earth and let her deep, pulsating song lines carve new riverbeds through your soul. To let your heartbeat with hers, giving shape to a new story writing itself in the marrow of your bones. Whenever we share with her our untold stories or offer her our love and sorrow with wild abandon, she receives us so completely that we cannot help but to feel a little more whole, true, real, seen, loved.
The dance of healing is a dance of love—love lost, love betrayed, love unreceived, love patiently waiting to be recognized, lived, embodied, expressed. Love sees the wholeness in all beings and all things.
As the fiery sun engages in its wildly passionate dance with the earth, it penetrates the boundary of flesh and melts the outer edges of our being, guiding us toward ripening like the earth who flowers all around us. Places of vulnerability or wounding reveal new insights.
This season of tenderness, heat, passion, connection, vibrance and abundance in the outer world offers itself to nourishing the cold, forgotten, yet to be known beauty of your innermost being.
How might life be different if you were to discover something deep within that perseveres through all change? What if the love you need streams endlessly through the more-than-human world around you, through the cosmos, earth, plants, creature beings and through your very own inner heart?
“As indifferent and harsh as life and nature can seem on one level, my experiences keep bringing me to love… always… no matter how grueling things may get…no matter how uniquely bewildering each challenge may seem… no matter how outraged, guilt ridden, horrified, heartbroken I feel along the way… still… love.
After being purified in the transformational fires of life and death over and again, what remains each time after the last embers have dissolved is always love.
And I realize that it has always been … love. And that there is nothing else… but… love.
Not the small kind of love that comes easily, but the love that remains after all has been destroyed. The small love is thrown into the sacrificial fires of our becoming so that we may know in our own being the essence of all of life.” 3
1 From a healing session, used with permission.
2 Wilhelm/Baynes, The I Ching Book of Changes, p 118-121
3 From a later healing session, used with permission.
Healing Power of an Open Heart