Tulum Pt. 4 - Shapeshifting
13 days in Tulum. 13 sacred days of wrestling with my own inner darkness to learn to let go of control. Giving expression to those parts of me that wanted nothing more than to hide and remain unseen, unacknowledged, and unloved. Giving up the fight, surrendering completely to the unfolding moment, waiting in humble reserves for the flower to unfurl its petals. ‘It’s not a race,’ says the tortoise to the hare. What is ours to achieve anyway? I am just visiting this place, cycling through pent up energy, giving space for love to roam free. Perhaps the grass isn’t always greener on the traveling side, but at the very least meeting myself in unfamiliar terrain meant coming home to more of me.
Exposing myself to the light of realization is perhaps the most petrifying ordeal to experience in life, and yet the catharsis of release makes the journey through pain exceptionally worthwhile. For to reach the mountaintop of any aspiration requires a personal trek. What I am willing to endure will ultimately decide the quality of experiencing the vertical ascent.
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The end is drawing near. As I wait to board my flight back home to California, I wonder what home really is. Where home is, who home is. I left the familiar life for a life unknown, hoping to find a semblance of home. Somewhere deep down lived a petulant stirring, a percolating of anticipation for the start of a new chapter. Impulses are strong and desires hot to explore something new, anything as far in the opposite direction than what I’ve become accustom to.
I am very familiar, comfortable even, in the transition states. In a constant state of ending some old way of doing things and beginning again with some new set of skills, I expect it. I seek it out even. It’s become richly engrained in my physiology to desire change. Embodying such states of fluctuation means I’m never quite satiated, never reaching the pinnacle of the fulfillment I seek. And so I ask myself, is it some end goal that I reach for or perhaps it’s the act of seeking that is most fulfilling. Perhaps I find fulfillment in the process of making the unfamiliar, familiar.
What I am coming to learn about myself through these life experiences is recognition and embodiment of the shapeshifter. Living life as a shapeshifter, one who dances between cycles, means finding rhythm in constant instability. A wind that never rests. A nervous system as unpredictable as a lightening storm. Moods that run hot and cold, determined by the quality of moods around me. A mirror reflecting the world. I am an emotional first responder, and the environment I reside plays a starring role in my evolutionary journey.
Shapeshifters cannot live in one place for too long. We’re wired for change. Routine becomes a stifling crutch in limiting our self expressions. Developing an intuitive sense of inner and outer cycles is paramount in sustaining a healthy disposition, for as we become more attuned to the cycles of seasons, of growth and decay, of the moon and her phases, we begin to understand our own changing states. Sustaining one way of living is not conducive to shapeshifters. We’re here to embody cycles and mirror them back to the world. To show others that life is lived in motion, in riding the waves of change.
All coins have two sides and the caveat of such beingness is that those instinctive desires for safety, security, and emotional stability will never be satiated. I will not find solace in the operational modes of survival. Fear will grip my bearings and unearth me. Every time I reach for those stable states or try controlling any outcome, I am met with psychological annihilation. I am thrown into the smallest, lowliest states of being and forced to claw my way out. Fingers bloody stubs and cheeks soaked in rivers of fear, each time I’m driven here, I learn of my own inner resilience. I meet the face of my spiritual warrior.
My time in Tulum showed me the powerful shadow that casts when greatness is misunderstood, when power is abused for personal gain, and when I slink away from my earth-bound responsibilities. The shadow grows larger as the light grows stronger; thrown backwards into the black becomes more tempting when the potential for human spirituality is realized. Fear resting beside desire, perfectly situated between the light and the dark, the gatekeeper of the pendulum swing.
It is my responsibility to live by my own inner authority, it is me who reaps what I sow and the consequences of my actions are mine and mine alone to bear. It is a lonely path, but the only path for me. To learn and to embody the sovereign way of existing. For it brings me in co-creative discussion with the One who made everything.
