Fate, Destiny, and the Courage to Live It
According to the calendar, we have entered a new year. January 1st serves as our administrative new year, but does it really carry the energy of new beginnings? January is when the tax year ends, we get our yearly statements rounded up and reconciled. But in the larger sense, even though Janus is the Roman god of new beginnings, January is the coldest, darkest of months. And as we look to Nature, there is nothing remotely beginning yet.
Because we are Nature in human form, we would do well to tie our annual fresh start and goal-setting to the up and out movement of the Spring/Wood phase rather than struggling against the down, in, and holding energy of the Winter/Water phase. Beginning a new venture with the Spring energy is like sailing with the tide, you have to do less work to get where you want to go. Winter energy will transition to Spring beginning in early February, which is when many cultures celebrate New Year. Keep an eye out for the signs that Winter has released her grip and there is movement happening. You will see it in the form of the sun feeling warmer, the days noticeably longer, the chickadees start to sing, and as the maple sugarers know, the sap will rise. This is the first trickle of new beginning energy. And it doesn’t happen until February.
Maple Sugar House
We are most satisfied and energized when the outward expression of our lives resonates with inner truth of who we are. Unwrapping and discovering who we truly are and what we came for, is the journey of a lifetime. As human beings, we easily get lost, on what typically is a circuitous path to fully living into our true soul’s mission or destiny. It is our dual consciousness that subjects us to this confusion because we have free will. Plants and animals, basically all other life forms on earth, do not have free will and have no such confusion. Maple trees are maple trees, and dolphins are dolphins no matter what. They can only be their true selves. But humans take on all kinds of weird distortions of the truth of who we are, a result of the circumstances we grow up in and encounter along the way. It takes a lifetime to peel back the layers to reveal the light of our own soul and the nature of Reality.
Fate and Destiny
Humanity is unique among the infinite other life forms with which we co-habitate. Unlike them, we are each born with a fate and a destiny.
Fate is all the things that narrow down the arena of infinite possible human experiences to your specific life. Fate is picked at the level of the soul when we choose to incarnate in a particular family, time, and place. I chose to live the experience of a working class, straight, white girl from Massachusetts, with red hair and a particular kind of dysfunctional family that would deliver the trauma and wounding necessary for me to set off on the epic journey of self-discovery and awakening. Among my gifts, carried like a superpower from other lifetimes, are that I am a healer and a seeker. It is like Frodo Baggins’ journey in The Lord of the Rings, where there are forces that test his resolve, obstacles that must be faced before the darkness overtakes him and thwarts his mission.
Only in this case, the dark forces are not outside us. They live within.
They appear as a fear that tells us it isn’t safe to be here as our true selves. Shame that follows us around relentlessly. Guilt that teaches us our needs cause imposition for others. Low self-worth that tells us we must earn belonging. A sense of abandonment makes us wary that love might disappear if we are our true selves. The habit of invisibility learned when it was safer to remain small and undemanding. The burden of over-responsibility that drives us to over-function for fear of all of the above.
These forces are the adaptations that once helped us survive our childhoods, but they were formed by a young child. If left unexamined, they quietly shape and direct our lives from the shadow. They keep us mired down as if in quicksand.
These wounds form the landscape on which the epic journey of our life is lived. The work is to transform them, to meet them consciously—to reclaim agency and the space to choose our responses outside of old patterns and conditioning.
Just like Frodo, we have the invitation to work our way through a handful of themes, over and over again, in slightly different forms until we achieve mastery. And these themes that we get so tired of are the breadcrumb trail to our destiny, the way home.
Our destiny is determined by how we work with the hand we are dealt. It is the work of transforming the places in us that get stuck, over and over again. When we learn to work with these struggling aspects of ourselves, we take ourselves through a right of passage or initiation of sorts. All too frequently, we are overwhelmed by the unseen forces of our trauma history, and old patterns of adaptation. When we are able to summon the courage and resources to work toward transforming these unseen forces, our destiny, our soul’s mission is gradually revealed.
Our destiny is secretly encoded in our unconscious. That is part of the deal of a human life. Unless you are like the Dalai Lama, you don’t get to know your soul’s mission ahead of time. You have to figure it out. At this time of year we have the help of the seasonal energies to take us into the deep, unconscious places in ourselves. Spending time in a flow state through meditation, journeying, dance, art, knitting, ritual, whatever takes us out of thinking mode, that’s where we find the breadcrumb trail of our destiny because the flow state is resonant of the seasonal Winter/Water phase energy. The breadcrumbs live in the dark unconscious places in us. In Winter, we are marinating in the Water phase, so our efforts to touch the Mystery in the depths of our beings are carried by the Winter tide in a big way. The breadcrumbs come in the form of a feeling or a nudge, not a full-blown action plan. We rarely get to see where the nudge is taking us, we just get to be intrigued and go check it out. For this reason, taking the remainder of Winter to go slow and let a felt sense, an intuition, an intrigue captivate us is the invitation to gather and hold the magic of the Winter needed to sprout come Spring.
It is not until February 1st that the first trickle of Spring energy will be released from the holding of Winter and start to move. Let yourself have the remainder of January to dream, rest, and feel into the potential and possibility of things to come. Know that if you wait to take first steps of outer expression until the sap starts to rise and the chickadees start to sing, you will be moving forward, carried by the tide of Spring toward something truer and more real.
Meditation Journey and reflection guide for you
You can find a meditation journey, “The Well Maidens,” Here. The Maidens will assist you in letting go of old, worn out patterns and make space for something new.
You will also find a downloadable pdf of the Winter Reflection Guide.