The Alchemy of Awakening: How Pain Becomes Our Sovereignty

I remember starting my spiritual journey back in 2008, baby steps of course. I didn’t really have a roadmap or a mentor in the very beginning. I had a curiosity, my intuition and a connection to something outside of me that I couldn’t quite name yet. I just recall making very difficult choices in my life that opened up space within me. Inside that space, I had some quiet and in that quiet space, arose a voice I had not heard before. I didn’t know what or who it was, but I intuitively knew I could trust it. That’s how my journey started, and in between then and now, it’s been a series of highs and lows and happiness and sadness. Those are all part of the human experience and all things we are meant to journey through for the purpose of awakening to our divinity. The only access to the soul remembering, is through the pain and darkness. That doesn’t make that suffering a good thing, but we’re going to do it anyway. It’s a natural part of growth and of life, so why not take the opportunity to turn lead into gold while we’re at it. Now I’m not saying that alchemical process is easy or painless; it isn’t. Though at this stage of my life, I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything worth having as easy. I do believe that once our souls remember, things do begin to align in a way that feels almost magical. My opinion is that is a direct result of the work we have done. We don’t twist ourselves into pretzels to continue to suffer and be at the behest of our patterns and inherited belief systems. We twist ourselves into pretzels in order to undo everything that has been done. Not just by our families and society and also by our own doing. Though subconsciously, we have been the artist of our own lives, it didn’t just happen to us. Things happened, we gave those things meaning and we developed a personality that would ensure the bad things, would never happen again. But what if those “bad” things were actually the access point to awakening to something beyond what the human mind can fathom? What if the pain, the losses and the failures, were actually preparing us for the inevitable task of the soul remembering it’s divinity and gaining it’s sovereignty, in this lifetime. It takes guts to look suffering in the face and give it a purpose, I know this. I also know, that on the other side of fear, is exaltation. In the words of Jung, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”