All,
On February 28th I am offering a completely new workshop: “The Jewel in the Darkness” at the Open Center in NYC. This workshop is the distillation of my past years of experience with ongoing Pluto transits, and their attendant manifestations (which in my case have been chronic illness, separation from loved ones, and the loss, and recuperation, of a home.)
As a part of this work, I went into retreat from public appearances for six months to nurse my wounds, but more importantly to allow myself to receive and fully experience the total impact of the “darkness” that was enveloping my life. It has been said that some souls inherently open toward the light while others move toward the abyss. In my own case, it has been both. As a result, I came out of this period with a profound sense of the value of darkness and of the gifts that could be received if there is enough patience and openness.
All this occurred in my life before the economy crashed, but I look at the economic landscape as an absolutely analogous situation. If you remain, consciously or unconsciously, in the mode of the victim (“How or why has this happened to me?”) you deeply disempower yourself and pass that off to people in your immediate life. On the other hand, if you can take the words of people like Hilda Charlton seriously, who emphatically declared that every problem is an opportunity, you can grow, not sentimentally, but profoundly.
I share from first hand experience the remarkable gifts of illness and loss – insight, knowledge, true compassion, and the literal metamorphosis of consciousness from fixated to free. These things are hard to speak or write of, which is why I want to share the passage through the shadows as a meditative experience in which each person can process their own journey.
This was best expressed by C.G. Jung, shortly before his death when an interviewer asked him about his experience of God. Jung replied (paraphrase) that for me, God is everything and everyone that came into my path that was unexpected, unsolicited, and unwanted. Likewise at the end of his essay, “Self Reliance,” Emerson challenges his readers by asking if they think that a new job, a new love, new found health or wealth will actually make their life any better. Nothing will do it, says Emerson, but “the triumph of principle.”
Just what is this “principle” that allows one to deeply receive whatever life offers and turn it into positivity, knowledge, freedom, and peace? It is neither a mystery nor a “secret,” yet we tend to forget it in the clamor and din of events and illusions fostered by contemporary culture.
This workshop functions as a staff of strength, remembrance, and awareness that we all have the power and ability to come through whatever we have to go through with full integrity, power, and peace.
Rick Jarow
