Going Through a Crisis
Most change that we accomplish in our life comes about because we are forced into it.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but usually it is—until we reach a certain point in our development, when we begin to actively invite growth.
Usually it’s a growth crisis that gets us moving.
When such a crisis occurs, we don’t go through the crisis and come out transformed unless the crisis seems to swallow us up.
In other words, such a crisis is actually a death experience—the death of how we have known ourselves, opening the way for a whole new experience of ourselves to emerge.
Throughout life, we are in this way continually being rebirthed. Instead of being born again one time, in a sense we are born again, and again, and again as more and more of our essential self comes into being.
Such a death experience feels like our destruction at the time, and we tend to avoid it like the plague. This is why it takes a crisis for most of us.
Yet it’s out of this death that we come into our destined sense of ourselves, which means that such an all-consuming experience, rather than being against us, is the making of us.
It’s the awful feeling of being swallowed up—swallowed alive—that the poet T.S. Eliot refers to when he writes:
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
You can hear the desolation, the loneliness of the growth crisis in Eliot’s choice of metaphors. Isn’t this the awful feeling of being horribly alone that we experience when we are going through a crisis of this kind, whether it’s triggered by a divorce, moving away from our family to college, loss of friends, loss of a job, something with our health, a financial reversal, or any number of possible causes?
What Eliot is showing us is that such a death, though it feels like an ending, is actually a passage into a new experience of ourselves.
Life prods us to grow up into who we really are in our essence—and it doesn’t hesitate to use a sharp pitchfork if it has to.
It’s when we resist—when we bemoan our state, instead of embracing it and allowing it to be—that it becomes painful, even excruciating.
The key element when a growth crisis comes upon us, no matter how much it may seem to swallow us up, is to trust.
At the precise moment that life feels utterly untrustworthy, we most need to trust.
As we watch everything we have known as our “reality” dissolve around us, and feel the impact reverberate throughout our inner world, we are asked to hang onto ourselves, calm ourselves, and allow. This is what trust looks like in practice—a topic we’ll return to tomorrow.
As a friend of mine says, “How this is not our destruction, but on the contrary the threshold of our destined life, is the most mysterious thing in the finite’s dialogue with the infinite.”
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About the Author:
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving–A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors. He writes The Compassionate Eye daily, together with his daily author blog The Sunday Blog, at www.namastepublishing.com
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