COVID-19 – 4 Gifts of A Great Awakening
I love the notions of transition and transformation. If you have ever read my writings or heard me speak, you know how much. The dark night of the soul, as some call it, or a void, a place we find ourselves – sometimes by choice and often by force. But as dark and lonely as transitions are, they are also always littered with opportunity, and they bring gifts of transformation. I can think of no more extraordinary privilege in life than embrace life’s challenges and find more in-depth and profound connections with my authentic self.
COVID is such a transformational opportunity. For many of us, the past eight months have been isolating, maybe lonely, and often a time of anxiety as we have tried to sort through connecting to life differently. It has been overwhelming for many of my clients to grab for threads of normalcy amongst the discontent. Some dream of the day things will get back to normal. Others just withdraw into learned helplessness and resolve to wake up when it’s all over. For some, these strategies have helped to a degree, but for most, life has felt like an exercise in swimming upstream: exhausting, demoralizing, and quite frankly depressing.
But subverting the process with fantasies of how things used to be or avoiding it altogether is to reject what transition offers. Transition seen through to completion allows for a transformation that provides profound growth and the opportunity to return to old things in a new way, for the process has changed you. You can’t go back as you were, as your fantasies had wished, but you can return to experience familiar things as if for the first time if you embrace transition and allow transformation.
I was born with an inner knowing. I knew that despite the initiations into this lifetime by my parents and others, I would face challenges in time and that, through facing them, I would get glimpses of who I am. Each would provide a piece of the puzzle of my authenticity. And as I put the puzzle together, I would (re)discover who I really am.
You were born with this knowledge, too! We all are. Every challenge thrusts us into a transition. Every transition presents problems that must be solved. And in solving them, we are transformed. Life gives us many such opportunities. Often, and overwhelmingly so, we find ourselves in multiple transitions at one time.
COVID is the transition challenge of our lifetime. The Great Awakening it offers is that if we embrace the faith that we can navigate the uncharted waters instead of giving in to the impulse to row back to shore, we will get past the waves representing anger and resentment and bargaining, and fantasies of life returning to normal. Then, and only then, will we reap the gifts the transition bears.
COVID has gifted me many times over so far, despite the challenges and any losses.
- I experienced real-life confirmation that Paradise (re)Discovered is a thing! Negotiating every challenge these past eight months has revealed a clearer picture of my authentic self, long ago taught to reject.
- It has shown me that to remember, I must forget everything I know. Having a blank mind is the only way to experience again that first breath that reconnects me with the spirit from which I came.
- I have learned that I must give away all that I have to have anything at all and that in giving it all away, I have plenty for myself as well.
- And COVID has blessed me with clients to serve who wish to (re)discover their authenticity.
When it is time to emerge fully, and that time will come sooner rather than later, I will be ready to experience the world as if for the first time, with a consciousness shaped before I ever got here. That is the only “returning to old things” that there is to embrace. 😊
“The wound is where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi
With gratitude, authenticity, and wounds well worn,
from Santa Fe, NM,
Dr. Mark.
