Source;  phillipcarr-gomm.com

A guest post by Maria Ede-Weaving…

Anyone who has followed a spiritual path for some years will know that at points along the path we can find ourselves in a place of stasis. All those techniques and practices that we once found inspiring can suddenly lose their luster; what once made perfect sense can now feel a little meaningless. It can be a deeply frustrating state but one that I have come to believe is all part of the spiritual journey and offers its own special lessons for our growth.

These strange pauses can range in intensity from a mild ennui to a life-changing dark night of the soul; it is a time when we cannot force a shift; try as we might, the lethargy takes root, the colours fade and we wonder whatever happened to the magical connection we once felt.

If you find yourself in this place of uncomfortable spiritual suspension, do not lose hope (even though losing hope is often a symptom of this condition!). The torpor, as excruciating as it can be, gives us an opportunity to examine our relationship with the notions of patience, surrender and trust.  We have, in effect, entered the chrysalis, and no amount of wriggling will release us until that inner transformation is complete. Just as the caterpillar completely dissolves into a gloopy mass before reshaping itself into a butterfly, our sense of ourselves becomes a kind of psychic soup, worked upon by mysterious alchemical forces within us.

So often, we associate times of transition with a good deal of external movement and change but this is only one part of the process. I have found in my own life that momentous external changes – both self-created and that of circumstance – have often been followed by a spiritual slump. It is funny how humans become obsessed with the idea of continual growth and movement. We have an economy based on the idea; it is deeply destructive and doesn’t honour those fallow moments that are vital to the cycles of life.

I have come to believe that on those occasions when the spark has deserted us – despite shaking a fist or two at the gods and bemoaning the fact that our inner compass feels out of whack – this fallow place is the most fertile of voids; our old self – whether we know it or not – is redundant and gradually  dissolving. Any forward movement, no matter how desperately we desire it, will not happen until our new and more authentic shape is fully formed and ready to break out of the fragile boundary of our old being. This all happens in a subtle way beneath our surface; we become like winter soil, still, dark, resting but full of potential.

I have a deep love of the Mineral Kingdom and lately quartz has been teaching me much about this curious pause on the path. As most will know, quartz crystal is transparent, hexagonal in structure and grows to a point. I have been lucky enough to be gifted with a clear quartz and a couple of citrine quartz. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that each of these has the most beautiful phantoms inside them.  Phantoms are wonderful things: at moments in the quartz’s growth it can actually stop growing. A  light sediment of minerals settles upon the surface. When the conditions are right and the quartz begins to grow again, the layer of sediment becomes encased in the crystal and this is seen as a ghost-like shadow of its former self.

My quartz contains five phantoms, very clearly visible and defined; the citrine have several more, some thick bands, some tiny threads that can only be seen if you shift the stone in the light. These phantoms speak so much to me of those spiritual pauses; those resting points between our old shape and our new self waiting to emerge. Phantoms remind me to honour the pause;  like the concentric rings in a tree trunk , they are a record of the many transformations that my spiritual growth has brought along the way.  When looking at them, I get a sense that the moments of my life between the pauses, are indeed like a series of past lives and these layer one upon the other, each the foundation for the next, all of them a part of me. The spiritual pause gives me the chance to examine what has been, to give thanks for it and to open myself with gratitude to the next stage on the journey.

So when you are find yourself feeling stuck and stagnant, when no amount of action seems to cut through the fog, rather than naming it as a spiritual crisis, look at it as a time when the sediment is settling into a beautiful phantom. Not only is it a line that marks the transition from one phase to another, it is an honouring point, a surrendering to the fertile void. When you finally sense the shift into forward movement, that ‘empty’, frustrating time will reveal its deeper beauty.

Finding ourselves in a place that feels like constant numbness can feel wrong, because we have allowed ourselves to be told that if we’re not constantly doing something then we’re not a valuable member of society, and that doing nothing is pure laziness or depression.

This is totally back to front, doing nothing with no distractions is the most beautiful gift we can give ourselves. Most people are uncomfortable with that state of neutrality and so for a long time it has been deemed to be a state of depression. It’s not been recognised that simply sitting, with absolutely no thoughts going through our head is a wonderful place to be. It means that we’ve managed to temporarily close the door to our ‘reality’ and are standing waiting, with open arms, for whatever is coming next.

I’ve been there a few times in the past, sometimes feeling disconnected for weeks, and I’m only now realising that it was always followed by substantial changes, because I was able to follow directions from my guides, that I hadn’t been able to hear in all the chatter.

We all have seasons. There are times when we full on motivated, getting loads of stuff done. Then there are times when we feel like we’re just plodding along, just taking life as it comes. And then there are times when we feel as though we have shut down completely, and just getting through the day is about all we can manage.

All of these states are valid, and all of these states are necessary. We have become far too good at judging ourselves as lazy or depressed just because we don’t want to participate in life for a while. But dropping out occasionally has great value, it’s where we grow.

It can be likened to a caterpillar, cocooning itself (which incidentally goes to mush before reforming as a butterfly), and no-one can deny that that is a hugely beneficial process, life giving in fact.

And we don’t judge trees through the winter months do we? We don’t say to the tree ‘look at you just standing there doing nothing, you can’t even be bothered to produce a few leaves’, because we know that although we can’t see it, the tree is going through a massive transformation, and when the spring arrives, right on cue, it will wake up and begin to sprout new life again.

That’s how we work too, we need those shutting down periods in order to grow and transform, so we need to recognise that it’s ok when that happens. It’s just a temporary phase that we will move through quickly if we can accept it, and let it do what it needs to do.

Asking ‘what’s wrong with me’ will take you on a journey with no answer, and so will hold you in that place until you ask a different question.

And the reason there is no answer is because there is nothing wrong with you, so your universe can’t answer because it’s a question that it literally doesn’t understand.

xx