guardian angel at work in the wings….3-4-19

Up top? Journal snapshot from Vancouver’s Leap with Kate Shela in January. This little being has been on my desk since then and I’ve been recognizing her early wisdom, tenacity, courage. Only now do I realize she’s been patiently informing me about destiny. Got it when a library angel landed a few weeks ago: James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: in Search of Character and Calling.   Quotes are from this book.

Hillman, psychologist in the mode of Carl Jung, rejected reductionist behavior based psychotherapy. But he also veered from the archetypal Jungians, shifting focus away from ego and placing it solidly in soul. Hillman wrote of cultures over millennia that acknowledged soul at work in our lives, quietly operating in the wings of imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor. In a lifetime of dedication, he returned the soul to a deserving place in treatment of the human psyche.

This is entirely logical to me. Many of us mindfully cultivate heart-inspired embodiment practices for that very reason: face-to-face delivery to our souls, our spirits. It’s just one natural outcome of full presence. We sense and cherish these moments. Romans called this entity genius, the Greeks daimon, the Egyptians ka. Guardian angel, a Christian notion, may be the closest Western version. Shamanic cultures? Your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul. Love that.

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion guides us here; in the process of arrival we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers and is the carrier of your destiny…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way…a calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Eventually it will out, make its claim. The daimon does not go away.”

Now this is less than entirely logical to me but I am breathing into it and really feeling the amorphous ethereality of this presence. Resting back into the notion of an “acorn theory, which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.” Somehow the world wants us to be here.

So now we are more clear about what we are up to in Cultivating Destiny  Saturday April 27. A full day to wonder about our personal calling, the reason we are alive on the planet, the basic plot to our story. We know it is deeply rooted in childhood. We know this current culture tends to delve into how trauma has shaped us. And it has. But there was also beauty and mystery and myth in our formative years. Why not put our attention here?

Here’s an invitation. If you have old photographs, pull them out, take some moments with them. Commune with that being, curious about your character’s unique shape, the way fate has played out over time. Bits of time for remembering, maybe journaling. We want you to bring these photos to the workshop. The early threads that weave our destiny are alive in the recesses of our bones, our hearts, our minds. Key moments, obsessions, patterns of play, impactful conversations, interests, random occurrences.   Have they manifested in your adult years? Fully? Partially? Not at all?

Most of us spend a lifetime living this mystery. For some, destiny eventually becomes clear. I’ve been teasing these personal threads—dance obsession, body fascination/challenge, music mania, writing fever, nature passion, not to mention cooking and mothering and teaching—and from this senior (did I say that?) perspective I feel the daimon at work in two ways: protector and inductor. A guardian angel who has boldly fought for my life multiple times because his/my/our work is not done yet. And who also prods, pokes and presses me when I am flailing or confused or lagging in spirit. It’s a comfort to know I can call on this being.

The dancing map of 5Rhythms plus juicy, creative art-making is the perfect dual medicinal dose to explore destiny. This is Year Four for Majica and I playing together in this way. What is now apparently a series is such a shining example of destiny. Obviously the daimon was at work four years ago when Cultivating Instinct was already happening but somehow I just knew to call her in to partner.   The next year Cultivating Compassion emerged and we realized that destiny was guiding us to do five years/rhythms. The daimon kept nudging and Cultivating Intuition has now led us to Cultivating Destiny.

I’m grateful for this being that has been working for so long in my wings and I love it when my daimon is communing with yours…..love, bella