Holy Thresholds Back to Life
The garden is going to fallow, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to pull up the tomato plants (and watermelons and salvia!) that had proliferated themselves this summer. By the middle of August, they had grown so bounteous that they actually stopped ripening—they had simply sucked up all of the nutrients from the soil.
And so, yesterday, unplanned, I decided it was time to pull them out of the ground. It was time.
As soon as I did, and started pulling out the copius weeds that had somehow hidden themselves in the folds of the wily tomato mound, I felt the Earth breathe a sigh of relief.
Ahhhhhhhhh. I no longer have to feed these plants.
I can rest.
I can return to myself.
I can return.
Now, too, my soil can return to itself, to the place where it no longer has to feed another, where it no longer has to share its vital life force to create Life.
This is the medicine of the return.
__
Over a handful of client sessions in the last month, as I have begun to return to my dharmic legacy in a much more concerted way, I am watching women at the thresholds of life passages—from maiden to late maiden, and from late maiden to mother, and from Mother to Matriarch, and onward.
And what I witness in all of them, right before they walk through these thresholds, is that there is a profound awareness of the ways that they have been giving their life force to something other than themselves (the sacred, divine self, the true self, God), and they are suffering.
They are recognizing that in their pursuit of whatever unconscious drives have been driving them—collective paradigms, ancestral patterns, personal karmic momentum—they have lost themselves. And they cannot do it anymore. They cannot feed anything other than the sacred anymore. The cost is too high.
And I know these thresholds well—they are the places where true alchemy, true healing, true love is born—where we return to what is true.
When we can finally see where we have given away our power and our presence, and we can meet the grief of that loss, we can begin hold ourselves in the terror of letting everything die that we created from that place of separation.
It is a THRESHOLD, and it is holy—for it is the place where true life is born.
__
There is a wild and sacred and heartbreaking and joyous victory that arises when we return to ourselves. We celebrate, we grieve, we feel the holy heart of life again.
We are free and we are empty and we are full. And life is full of wild, sacred Love.
I don’t know if the soil of my garden feels all of that – but I do know that it feels a palpable relief. And the gift of holy, holy, rest.
And I know that the soil of my soul is in a return so deep and vast and wide that I feel life completely new again-- full of energy for Life and clarity about the path, and a rich, holy, tenderness for the winding walk of forgetting and remembering and reclaiming.
---
This fall, I am offering the medicine of my returns at the altar—the mana and the gold of every time I have severed the cords to all that is untrue, and burned with a fire of devotion to the sacred—one that has brought me Home, over and over and over again.
For 12 weeks, we will walk together – through seven teaching calls, offering a map of the process of awakening cycles, and tools for navigating the depths in a way that supports return. Thorough five practicum sessions, we will come together to sing, pray, meditate and purify—and practice holding ourselves in Love.
For those of you needing individual support, I have created an option for additional 1:1 mentorship as part of the 12 weeks, and have one space remaining.
If you are looking for a community to come to, from the ease of your own living room, to hold yourself as you awaken, this space is for you.
__
Coming home to ourselves, and letting the soil of our souls rest, this is the medicine here now. The holy days of rest and darkness are arriving—and as always—we will find that in the depths, the light of Christ is born.
And so it is.
JOIN US from Equinox (September 21) through Solstice (December 21): https://www.iamjanemayer.com/school/the-return
