Cosmologies and Reconstituting Ourselves as Practitioners

Considering it's been a year since my last post, this topic seems fitting.

There are moments in our practices where it's appropriate and perhaps necessary for us to take a break: either because we deserve a well-earned rest…and/or because fundamental changes begin stirring our innards into rice pudding and we have to wait until we solidify into a new shape, much like a chrysalis.

(Common Crow Butterfly Chrysalis)

These moments generally happen when our cosmologies--that is, the stories through which we perceive and create reality--groan and creak under our burgeoning evolution. In some way, we have permanently or temporarily completed our explorations of these stories. Perhaps they are stories about good and evil, about the nature of reality, or about our place in the Universe. We face new experiences which don't reckon with our old stories, because these stories do not offer space for our expanding range of awareness. And when we have enough new experiences for critical mass, something catalyzes within, forcing us to spend time with Great Mystery until we hit the next Magnitude of Order in our path.

But why go through this? Why put ourselves through the grinder until we're reduced to metaphysical baby food? Frankly, it's dang hard to stay functional when your insides are pureed into protein shake. Why not just plow on using our well-worn machinery of perception and understanding--those trusty ironclad tools that have served us so well, and for so long?

Stagnation is not pretty. All of us have witnessed what it looks like in others: how the ever-changing, supple vitality that graces us as children turns into hardened cheese that's well beyond its expiration date. Perhaps we've seen it in our grandparents who refuse to give up old ways of thinking. Or in dogmas that do not account for the new ripples and patterns that are ever-emerging in life. Or people who hold onto jobs, relationships and insecurities for so long that their fear in losing these things outgrows their exuberance to discover new aspects of the world and of themselves. These are folks who have lost their abilities to engage with dismemberment in a good way. And without dismemberment, we cannot grow into the new selves that await us…that is, we cannot re-member the other innumerable aspects of ourselves that haven't had a chance to assume their places in our life. 

The more we recognize our multidimensionality, our multi-layeredness, our beautiful complexity, so may we better witness them in others. Not only are others honored and nourished by our accurate (and therefore loving) comprehensions, but such perceptions nourishes the perceiver as well. We eliminate the diminishment and mini-soul-losses that come from incomplete witnessing, that come from viewing people or events through too-small cosmological binoculars. More expansive recognition elicits a Win-Win which is the holy grail of shamanic living and practice. 

Why these musings of late? I've just come from another workshop from Betsy Bergstrom. It is a workshop I took 3-4 years ago on Compassionate Depossession and Curses Unraveling--but Betsy has expanded her explanations on cosmology and field theory. If it's been a few years since taking this workshop: Totally. Worth. Taking. Again. With a few years of practice under my belt, I found that I took things in more deeply. She unfolds much more information about practices we know and love. I got to witness all the different styles of practice while sitting in a powerful community field. I re-experienced what it was like to sit in the client's seat--always valuable for a practitioner. And as a fringe benefit, I received healings. 

Mulching our cosmologies (every so often) is an energetic dismemberment that allows for renewal. Our cosmologies are spiritual immune systems (more on this on a future post), so it's worth doing. When our immune systems are healthy, we use massively less energy to "defend" ourselves or to avoid situations and people. We naturally and effortlessly handle things as they come along--thereby allowing us to settle into our world in a good way.