In order to gain everything, You must first lose everything.
Have you ever experienced a birth? Not the way they are depicted on the movies, where a woman grunts a few times from her hospital bed, and then is seen holding her newborn; but the agonizing cries of bringing life into existence. Life comes into being through pain.
As the seasons turn to winter, and the earth hibernates, we witness the slow dissolution of the earth’s manifestation. The sun lowers. Leaves fall. Temperatures plummet. Snow blankets the ground with the promise of things yet to come. And with spring, it breaks free again. Sounds come to life. Birds sing, insects sting, and buds push their way into manifestation again. We don’t witness the pain of emergence, but it is there.
Like a limb that has fallen asleep, when sensation returns, there is a tingling discomfort. The longer it has been asleep, the more pain there will be when blood reinfuses it with feeling.
The Taoists have a concept called the Mysterious Pass, where the energies of metal (death) turn to water (hibernation), and emerge through wood (rebirth.) This is the path of our greatest sorrow, fear, and anger. And we must go through it in order to be reborn into the fullness of our awakened existence. If we don’t, we remain caught in the wheel of never-ending sameness, much like the movie Groundhog Day.
In the fertility arena, or any other area of healing, death comes through letting go of the things that are no longer working in our lives. Sometimes these are certain patterns of relating with the world. Sometimes they are old, conditioned habits that are no longer serving us. Sometimes it is meeting the death of a fantasy, face to face. And in the depth of this death, there is great fear of the unknown. What will life be like if I let go of the way I had pictured my world to be? As we stand in the power of the unknown and face our fears, the tingling discomfort awakens us from our depths, and we can emerge anew. The aspect of our soul called the Zhi germinates from our spirit and we are born anew.
This isn’t merely a conceptual process – it is real. Time and again I have seen courageous individuals allow themselves to go through this journey, and their whole body, minds, and lives are restructured around this reemergence. They give birth to their true selves, and in the process, have new potential for life.