Happy Imbolc (the first day of Spring according to the Celtic calendar) and Happy Chinese new year too! As someone with both Chinese and Irish heritage, I love acknowledging the changing tides of both these transition points. After a more aggressive 2022 when the energy was yang tiger, I am very happy to embrace the softer, more hopeful year of yin rabbit! Whether season or animal, I am fascinated by the energy that sits underneath the physical manifestation of things.
Recently a friend sent me this quote “That we are here is huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be".
It got me thinking about one of my favourite quotes by Bill Plotkin “the world cannot be whole until you take your rightful place within it”. What that journey into wholeness might look like underpins our work at ATTIC and the many practitioners we work with help provide tools to support such a sacred endeavour (watch this space as access to such wisdom and tools are soon to be readily available!)
For me, the journey to wholeness begins when you start to consciously cultivate the liminal space where both your essential individual place in the web of life and your absolute insignificance in the vastness of the universe collide. The concept that every system is a ‘holon’- both whole in its own right and simultaneously an integral part of a larger system- has helped me explore the line between individual purpose and collective purpose, the importance of each one of us focusing on following our soul’s path vs how completely insignificant we are as individuals too.
To help put this into context, let us look at a grain of sand on the ocean floor. The grain of sand is vital in itself as if no grain of sand decided to become the ocean floor, there would be no ocean floor. But it is simultaneously insignificant in terms of its individual influence, as alone it is too small to create the ocean floor. We have limited influence as an individual grain of sand but we are also vital as without us there would be nothing greater, no ocean floor. Together we create a new holonic level.
This speaks to the importance of stepping into our true roles, even when sometimes we wonder what the point is, so that we can become an integral part of the larger system and this helps create much needed shifts in the bigger picture.
So how on earth do we find time to work out the role life asks of us? What is our soul calling? How can we hear its cries amongst all the distraction, bustle and noise? How do we step into our own ‘enough-ness’? I ponder this with friends and colleagues all the time and what it seems to come down to is giving yourself permission to find ways to ‘be’ in a world insisting you ‘do’. It can be very hard to instil such time and space to seemingly do nothing.
Maybe you make room for a structured ‘being’ activity, like an hour of meditation every morning or it deepens over time through ‘accidental being’ like stopping to acknowledge the beautiful birdsong or your spontaneous laughter as the wind almost blows you over. But within these spaces sit the liminal moments I mentioned, life at its most real, where our significance and insignificance overlay each other and we are whole for the briefest second.
The more we cultivate these spaces, the easier it becomes to drop into them and this then births the awareness necessary to begin to hear your soul’s voice. It speaks through your body and through your heart, through your intuition and through what the world reflects back to you. Sometimes it whispers and sometimes it screams but what I do know is you must listen and act to move towards the place it calls you, for that is where peace lies :)
So here’s to a kind new year of the rabbit, may it be fluffy and cute, while buoyant and light, zigzagging us into new perspectives :)