An Army of Locusts
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
I wonder if you struggle, like most of us, to have compassion on previous versions of yourself?
The versions of yourself where you acted and thought and made decisions from a place of unconsciousness, often repeating templates of wounding laid down before conscious memory began…
We often operate from this place, I’ve noticed.
We allow ourselves to move forward in life expecting the same thing that we have always expected, then we are not surprised or disappointed when things play out. We play on sickening repeat the narratives of betrayal, abuse, addiction and abandonment that we were raised in - until we are ready to heal them.
One of my wisest friends once told me that the brain knows when it is ready to heal. We cannot force it into consciousness before it is ready. I know this now. And when we are ready, there are signs we can look for.
Back when I was a cowgirl working all day in the saddle, traversing the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I learned how to read my environment. The poplar trees would turn their iridescent, soft green leaves upside down about fifteen minutes before the rain would start. The northern lights were most magnificent on the nights preceded by muggy, warm days. The frogs would croak at night three more times after the first snow, then they would go silent for the winter. The mosquitos hatched about three days before the dragonflies did, and those three days before the dragonflies began feasting on mosquito eggs were the ones where you needed the heavy-duty mosquito repellant.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have not been able to bring that same level of conscious engagement, awareness or ability to read signposts about predictable events when it comes to the landscape of my heart.
Although I am now finally brave enough to move beyond blundering and into mastery in this space.
“The one thing that I have now, that I didn’t have in my twenties or thirties, is a kind of fierce self-compassion and the strength and capacity to go within and re-parent my own inner wounded child, and the willingness to sit on my floor and let the rage and grief and sorrow rip through me like a tsunami, trusting it will not last forever.”
All of life is cyclical, we repeat and repeat the same painful mistakes until we are finally able to learn the lesson, bless and release it from our consciousness. Some of these loops are more painful than others. The ones we are cycling through right now, as a collective, are generational. That is, they are - at a minimum 200 years old. There are others that are 800 years old, and others that are thousands of years old. We carry epigenetic trauma inside our DNA which dictates certain subconscious behaviours, patterns and wiring. Those of us who are alive on this planet right now and committed to increasing consciousness, which is always the goal of mature and grounded spiritual practice, have committed to healing this kind of damage in our family line on behalf of our ancestors, for the benefit of our children. That is literally why we are here.
We are Divine consciousness working itself out into increasing beauty, complexity and power- which always comes through cycles of death and rebirth.
We are in another moment of death and rebirth right now, can you feel it?
Today on this first day of Lent?
From an archetypal consciousness perspective, we are all - at this moment in time - being beckoned toward our own garden of Gethsemane moment, to re-live our own betrayal, the abandonment of those we hoped would stay near, we are preparing to stand before our accusers and have them misunderstand our deepest intentions, as they publicly shame and punish us. We are preparing to be strung up and crucified on the garbage heap, a spectacle of ridicule and suffering. We are preparing to experience the excruciating reality that hell is a place here and now that we go to whenever we experience separation from Divine. We are preparing for the tomb. For a span of three cycles in darkness, quiet, decay and letting go.
It is beyond me how the Christian church has somehow turned this liturgical sequence of pain and suffering into a spectacle of lights and smoke machines and slick production value inside a 70 minute service which runs three times a Sunday on the broken backs of exhausted volunteers while the pastor drives around in his flashy car pressing flesh and kissing babies like a politician at a rally.
In moments like this I am so grateful and relieved to have been able to carve out for myself a radically supportive and coherent spiritual practice to ground and anchor this liturgical cycle of preparation for entering into the dark which always comes before the dawn. I am so glad I no longer rely on the church to scaffold this for me. I feel immense grief for the ways in which I was unable to be a safe and supportive scaffold for others to do this work inside the structure of the church, for my own failures in that space and the damage I left behind me in my own unconsciousness.
Because grace operates as a universal principle and does not require the mediating influence of the ecclesiastical leadership, (thank God) I have, in my dwelling in the Void place, or the desert - to use mystical Christian language, finally discovered the willingness to begin to read the landscape of my heart and to look with unflinching compassion at the wounds I have sustained there. Both the ones I have willingly participated in and brought on myself, and the ones that have been projected onto me by others. I now have the ability to see how my earliest conditioning set me up for heartache and pain and predisposed me toward the choices I made from the unconsciousness of those patterns. I now have the courage to let them come through and be seen and held, as well as the medicine I need to heal them and the fortitude and discipline necessary to build new structures to support new ways to operate my own heart-energy.
Glory be.
This is the never-ending work of being human. This divine dance invites us into the ever increasing capacity to heal and grow, through our deepest and most painful seasons.
Today, as I took a retrospective look at what this current cycle is inviting me to notice, tend to, and heal, I was undone by the grief of realising how I had wasted years pouring my energy into perpetuating a specific painful looping pattern of behaviour inside of relationships, which has its roots in very early grooming and abuse. When we bring unconscious patterns into the light and allow the body of the Christ to become the crucible for their transmutation and healing, we walk out of bondage and into freedom.
When we heal at this level, we shift out of victim-consciousness and into the reality that we are powerful co-creators of our lives and we get to live them at the level of love, acceptance, companionship, belonging and intimacy that we will allow in. We cannot, however, allow these good things to arrive for us while we continue to loop inside of our old patterning; we literally teach those around us how to respond to us. Others are only ever capable of reflecting back to us what we are willing to accept.
When we are ready to shift out of old patterns of brokenness, pain, rejection, abandonment and betrayal, we will leave some people behind - they will not be able to come with us because they don’t know how, won’t bother learning, or are too scared to do this work themselves. The old patterns carry with them a sick kind of comfort and predictability - love and hope steer us into the wilderness of unpredictability where our vulnerability leaves us exposed to being wounded all over again - something that many of us find intolerable. And therefore are unwilling to do.
There is grief in this, too, for me. For the ones I have had to leave behind. For the gradual acceptance of the way things are.
As I sat with these painful revelations, turning them over in my hands like smooth river stones as tears fell quietly into my lap, the Spirit spoke to me using the tender, comforting and powerful words of the prophet Joel:
”I am sending you grain, new wine and olive oil, enough to satisfy you fully. Never again will I make you an object of scorn to the nations. Do not be afraid, land of Judah; be glad and rejoice. Surely the Lord has done great things. Do not be afraid, you wild animals, for the pastures in the wilderness are becoming green. The trees are bearing their fruit; the fig tree and the vine yield their riches.
He sends you abundant showers, both autumn and spring rains, as before.
The threshing floors will be filled with grain, the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.
I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten - the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm - my great army that I sent among you.
Never again will my people be shamed.
Never again will my people be shamed.”