Renewal

“The chaos of life… pushes you into renewing/upgrading/transforming who you are into who you can be.”

What is renewal? A thousand answers, most seeming cliché, bounce around inside my head. Not wanting to think the answer, I enter my Sacred Garden, the Inner Temple for my Soul, and seek the advice of my Spirit Teacher.

At the edge of my river I find the perfect spot to sit and talk with my Spirit Teacher. Sitting on the grass with our arms wrapped around our knees and gazing at the flowing water he watches me in amusement. I guess I’m still trying too hard to think. Time for a deep breath and letting go. “Renewal is action bursting out of the Stillness,” he says still watching the water.

“Renewal is creativity and Power pushing forth from that sleepy, dreamy, stuck, don’t-know-how-to, finally surrender place inside where you only believe there is nothing happening. Some people look at the River and see action, movement, beauty. Some people see nothing but the same old water just flowing along like it always does.

“Renewal, in shamanic terms, is initiation. Pushing forth to new levels of awareness and understanding within your Self through the practice of repeatedly going into the worlds of dreaming and awakening bit by bit to a greater awareness of the potential of the soul.”

I wait to see if he will say more. “That’s it,” he says. “You slow down and get stuck floundering around. That’s the cold winter of the Soul. Then you die. Something must wake you up or you REALLY die. That’s when we (spirits) shake you up a bit so that you can release your imagined sloth and allow your Power to flow again.”

“Sloth. I like that word,” I say laughing. “Sloth,” he says. “Slowing down like molasses. Sometimes you’re actually creating in your hibernating state, and sometimes you’re just stuck because of your attitude. The chaos of life, if you live through it, pushes you into renewing/upgrading/transforming who you are into who you can be.

“In shamanic terms, that’s dismemberment. The tearing apart of the soul in the shamanic state of consciousness and the coming together again as someone with greater potential and abilities is Renewal. Remembering who we are is a constant journey of coming back to our Soul and seeing the Self more clearly. Thus renewed, we can create again and Live!”

I’m thinking, “Then what about the eggs and the rabbits?”