when the maps stop working

When I first started my life coaching business in 2012, my mantra was “No limits, just love!” To my mind, I was taking a wrecking ball to consensus reality and annihilating my limitations so to live a life of freedom. 

What I didn’t understand was that this mantra was a clarion call, initiating me onto the path of the Great Alchemical Work. A magical summoning of destruction I could have never prepared for. 

Five years into my enterprise, just as I was beginning to experience real success, I met a man whom I assumed to be the "icing on my already iced cake". Boy, was I in for a surprise. He turned out, instead, to be a man with two faces; both Jekyll and Hyde. 

Our entanglement was a slow-motion implosion, climaxing as an intense bolt of electrical rage in which all my projected images, comforting illusions, and spiritual pretensions were incinerated. 

My attachments were gone, and the meanings I once stood firmly upon no longer held, all while my old motivations failed to stir me. The maps that once gave me power and direction had stopped working; my arms and legs had been amputated. 

What followed was a very long and very dark night as I slithered limbless through the smoldering rubble, consumed by dust and smoke, full of emptiness and despair. 

I tried many times to lift myself from the valley I’d been relegated to, but the valley was quicksand, and the more I tried, the more stuck I became. 

Life had truly brought me to my knees, and I was mortified.

The only thing I could do was surrender to my reality. The only way out was through, and the way out would not be rushed. I had to learn to navigate the underworld, to shed my addictions, to give up my coping mechanisms, and sit in the empty uncertainty until the void became a vessel for a new kind of grace. 

To the degree I surrendered, my mortification morphed into humility. The more humility I embodied, the more capable I became of doing the slow, patient work of integrating my lessons and allowing the demons of my shadow to become part of my retinue.

Originally, I had assumed I was having an identity crisis of my own making (I am the creator of my reality, after all!). What I didn’t understand, though, was that the New Age principles I’d devoted myself to for decades could only take me so far. They were preparatory, but they could not take me across the divide. I had not failed; I had succeeded in traveling to the edges of the New Age terrain, but to go any farther, a threshold would have to be crossed, and I was not capable of initiating that crossing myself.

Turns out the two-faced man was my dweller on the threshold. A monstrous manifestation of my own fears, embodying the rejected aspects of myself that would have to be integrated if I were to be reacquainted with my agency.

The implosion of that entanglement was a lightning bolt initiation from a higher order, targeting what had become rigid, false, and outgrown. Its message was simple and absolute: “This, which you have built, is no longer true.”

It was the ultimate act of mercy: the destruction of a “perfect” dream to make way for my wildly imperfect, yet utterly real, awakening to a higher octave of peace, power, and freedom, where the low magic of New Age manifestation teachings meets the high magic of the Great Alchemical Work. 

I had been gifted the kind of thorough humbling one must undergo before the creative intelligence of life would open up to me. This was, afterall, what I'd deep down been wanting more than anything since my first declaration of “No limits, just love.” 

Had I understood the threshold, I was crossing – if I’d had a guide to walk with me through the dark, and help me acclimate to a new realm where the old maps no longer work – had someone told me that what I was experiencing is a natural rite of passage on any serious seekers path of spiritual development – I truly believe it would not have taken me five gnarly years to travel through.

I suppose this is why I now sit at my door, prepared to guide those who find themselves at the threshold, navigating new terrain with no candle or compass. 

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