Opening to Love: There Is Nothing Wrong with You.
To be human is to be constantly traversing the mystery that lives at the crossroads of life. The great in-between.
We pass this place through creativity, birthing a new version of our lives or a new part of our soul into our body.
We pass through this place when we feel we are being squeezed through the eye of the needle of life, in death, loss, failure, disappointment.
It’s the portal we pass through when we make friends with the fullness inside the emptiness of loneliness that turns it into nourishing solitude.
The crossroads is an important place deeply misunderstood and driven into the shadow of the body in a culture that denies death or the life-giving aspect of the holy hag, the aspect of the Great Mother who loves us so much she has the capacity to transform us over and over again through our grief, letting go and trusting the mess.
These are the places our core wounds are the most likely to come up, where our grief and love are required. The places where we have deep shame, doubt, or our mistrust of life or our own creative capacity. These are the places where our addictions are likely to be triggered.
It is no accident that these places, the in-between places, are also the places we have the greatest potential of meeting with Love and drawing her down into our body to feed our soul and our deepest longing to touch life fully.
We are built for this.
The giver of dreams in the night is the same giver of our inner visions for our lives. We have a natural proclivity to touch the liminal spaces to access information, to meet the Divine, to see the interconnectedness of all beings, to fill up our hearts as a source of love that never, ever dies, goes away or rejects us.
This is a holy, sacred ground where we meet shadow and light, addiction and soul, trauma and inner mother, grief and expansion, letting go and trusting the flow.
There is an endless sacrifice we must make of the places we’ve been holding on to. It’s where our culture has us get stuck the most because rather than seeing this space as a wonderful place to dive deeper into refuge of nourishment and tending to the edges with love, we are taught to fill it up or see it as a problem that we need to fix.
Trauma culture perpetuates addiction and disconnection from the Mother that lives within us while keeping us perpetually stuck in the eye of the needle, where we climb on a hamster wheel and call that life.
Grief is what liberates us.
There is sanity in grief. It is the letting go, the opening to love, and the receiving of an opening into a wordless, unformed possibility that again will birth us anew. We are not static and fixed creatures. Life is not what we think it is, solid and fixed, sensible and predictable, controllable and defined.
This surrendering into the mystery only terrifies us, triggers our old patterns, because we have not yet become a safe container to ourselves.
Our body is our great container. She is the one who has lived each day and experienced all that has been and is and will be. When we reclaim the container of our body, we will grieve. It is love. We do not grieve what we do not love. It is the body loving and releasing and doing exactly what she knows how to do to keep us sane, healthy and open to the flow of life that is love constantly birthing us into the new.
Many teachings suggest that the in-betweens, the bardos, are the most important times to take refuge in practices that draw the Divine into the heart. It’s the time to nurture the inner mother, to pour even more nourishment into your soul, to sit in the desires that drive addictions, to examine the seeking and wanting to run away, to find ways to bring some healing balm to the parts of you in pain so you can be free.
There is a deep tenderness in all of this. A grace in what it is to be human. Creating, living, singing, dancing. Letting go. Grieving. Waking up. Falling asleep. Remembering. Forgetting. Remembering again. There is nothing wrong with you. Perhaps it is only that you’ve gotten stuck, but that is not a reflection of you, just a tugging from your heart to come back home.
“Addictions may be the Goddess’s way of opening our hearts to what love is — love of ourselves, love of others, love of the dear planet on which we live.” ~ Marion Woodman
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Dr. Mia Hetenyi is a psychospiritual healer, soul mentor and writer. She has carved out her own path based on 20+ years of clinical experience and an equal amount of time studying and practicing Buddhism, yoga, meditation, shamanic healing, ritual and energy healing. After recovering herself from addiction and experiencing an awakening to her soul, she fused her knowledge of psychology and trauma with both her studied and lived experience of shamanic and Buddhist healing modalities, creating an innovative approach to healing the soul wound at the root of so much addiction, shame and ongoing trauma. You can follow Dr. Hetenyi on Instagram and find out more about her work on her website.