Disillusionment can be both a painful experience and a great gift. In the process of awakening consciousness, it can mark a time when we begin to see through a layer of illusions, enabling these to fall away and to make space for a more expanded awareness and identity and a bigger view of reality. This can be exquisitely painful as our follies and limitations arise to be seen and our bonds with significant others are tested.
Shifts in consciousness can happen at major developmental life stages such as the mid-life crisis. Around the age of 42, an astrological milestone the Uranus opposition occurs, when the planet Uranus in the birth chart opposes transiting Uranus. This presents a major opportunity for the authentic self to make itself known. Uranus is an archetype of sudden revolutionary change and disruption, and this opposition is frequently a catalyst for what we call mid-life crisis, a state of deep disillusionment which holds the potential for radical change.
Such shifts also happen collectively, such as the major upheavals we are moving through now. We are brought to a halt when a sudden realization of mortality compels a sober look at our limitations and a realisation of what is burning within us to be expressed. Those parts of the self that have been pushed aside and repressed – either through conditioning, to please others, or while we fulfilled other responsibilities – start clamouring for attention. You may feel deep weariness and cynicism with life and with yourself. If your experience isn’t matching your desires and expectations you may take this personally, blame yourself for your failures and lament your shortcomings.”What was I thinking? How could I have been so stupid?” Or, you look for someone else to blame – parents, your partner, politicians or other authority figures, for example.
Divine Discontent
I call this a time of Divine Discontent because our longing and self-loathing carries the seeds for something new.
As the tough love of the soul shines its light on our unconscious choices, and illusions fall away, we may experience betrayal and abandonment, and when we look more deeply, we see patterns of self-betrayal and self-abandonment, recognitions which are painful to face.
Your disillusionment has nothing to do with how successful you’ve been in meeting your own goals or social expectations. You may have created a wonderful life and yet still feel empty and desolate. You shrug your shoulders and say, “So what? What is it all about? What is all this effort for?”
When the blinders are stripped away, we starkly see the stories we have told to maintain our illusions, we see how we have given away our power and compromised our values. We kick ourselves for not speaking our truth when it could have made a difference; for compromising or being overly rigid, for not being clear what we wanted or being oppressively selfish or mean spirited. With stark clarity we recognize our complicity, complacency, neglect and lack of responsibility. These are hard lessons.
Yet, when you give yourself the space to really feel and experience the depth of your longing, discontent, disillusionment, helplessness and despair, you open the next doorway into a more expanded and more authentic life. Uncomfortable as it is, you feel compelled to lift yourself beyond your comfort zone and an unconscious acceptance of limitation.
Bleak Times
I am going to tell you the story of my mid-life crisis because I think it may help to illustrate some of the collective themes we are moving through now.
When I was 38, I became disillusioned with nearly every aspect of my life and an irresistible pull from the inner world drew me towards my spiritual quest.
I was deeply unhappy on every front. I felt alienated from the values of the professional community of therapists which had been a source of excitement and growth over the preceding ten years. The psychotherapeutic framework which had held me, now felt inadequate. Working as a psychotherapist was causing me to see the whole world as one raw, suffering wound. I longed for a way of serving others and being in community which was less subject to human ego and fallibility. The business I had created and expanded to a six women team had become a box too small to expand my full creativity and I was bruised by the demanding work I was doing as an agent of change. I was also coming to terms with the reality that I wouldn’t have children. I’d separated from the man who was a good match for me in some ways but too unpredictable and chaotic to be a long-term partner, and I despaired of ever finding the life companion I longed for. Beyond my personal woes, the ‘80’s was a cynical and self-serving time politically and Thatcher’s Britain bristled with danger. I found the culture narcissistic and ruthlessly competitive, focused on material success and image and all about “me”. Every time I opened a newspaper, I read about another species going extinct, another swathe of rainforest or ancient indigenous culture being destroyed, or another oil rig spilling its deathly cargo into the ocean.
The bleakness of this time overwhelmed me. I knew I would not find fulfillment in the world as it was and I couldn’t find the space I needed to expand into my next unfolding of potential within the prevailing social structures. Increasingly, I took to comforting and numbing myself with alcohol and food. I was on a slippery slope, and something had to change.
Time for Crucial Life Decisions
The ouroborus – the snake that is ready to shed its skin – has its tail in its mouth. What appears to be misfortune is closely woven together with new fortunate beginnings. For me, this transition took place over three to four years. Bleak despair and deep questioning motivated a radical change in my life.
In retrospect some of my actions appear foolish from a pragmatic point of view, yet, if I’d taken a more compromising path, I wouldn’t be who I am today. There was a fierce urge in me to be finished with the old life which was no longer working and to breathe fresh air. I sold the flat I had lovingly renovated and lived in for eight years; left my business and my professional community and the city I loved; and went to live in the far North-West Highlands of Scotland.
Walking away from everything seemed the quickest way to put an end to my suffering. But I wasn’t just walking away, I was also walking towards what I most loved and longed for. From the embers of despair, a fierce rage and a burning desire for justice was born in me. I had found my No to the world’s folly and connected with my power. It felt like a very primal power, like that of the Goddess Kali who destroys and devours as a way of purification.
Here’s how I described some of the joy and the terror of my first foray into freedom in my book, Migration to the Heartland.
The northwest Highlands of Scotland has an elemental beauty, which can be intoxicating. Long devoid of trees, its barren rocks are a moonscape. Great mountain peaks rise from the valley floor, ancient watchers and guardians: Ben Mor Assynt, Stac Pollaidgh, Cul Mor, Quinag, Sulvein.
On still, sunny days it was Paradise. Driving through the mountains and topping the ridge, I marvelled at the mystical seascape of the Summer Isles rising out of winking diamonds on an azure sea. I stood outside time watching the play of sunlight on moving water while my mind flew free across the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to America. Or, driving toward Inverness, topping the first hill, those great mountains like hunkering animals, ancient and still, grabbed whoops of joy from my throat, always.
When I walked the beach collecting firewood, smelling seaweed, fingering the coarse grain of the wood washed up from a Russian boat, I was an old Crone who had walked this beach for many lifetimes.
When storms raged, I sat at the kitchen table with the cantankerous old range blazing behind me, gazing across the grey sea and watching raindrops fall in ribbons down the windows, writing and dreaming, peace within me.
And when gales blew, I hung onto the roof with my mind’s eye and imagined being lifted and spun to Oz, like Dorothy, praying for the lives of fishermen, as women have always done.
On clear nights I wrapped scarves around me, stepped outside to free my mind into the endless black space of the starry sky, and danced my visions for a better future.
Of course it wasn’t always Paradise. Winters in northwest Scotland are long and dark, with night falling as early as three in the afternoon. There was no escaping myself, and few distractions from the grief, fear and despair that had been waiting in the shadows for their time. Once the excitement of making my escape was over, I was shocked by what I’d done. I had said no to the life I had created and given up my home, my little piece of security.
I already had many leavings and new beginnings under my belt. There was the time I left a marriage and discovered the bliss of solitude, poetry rushing like a torrent through my blood; the time I first said no to a regular pay cheque and the illusion of security and became a freelance educator pursuing my calling wherever it led me. I had walked through gateways in search of myself, each one seeming to offer a greater freedom and exacting a higher price. Now, like a Fool I’d stepped off the edge of the cliff again and taken apart my familiar yet unsatisfying life.
I shivered on a precarious edge, staring into the dark for an answer. I had dared to say no to the Mistaken Time. I’d taken a leap of faith into the void. Now the void was all around me and it did not feel friendly. I wasn’t bold and lucky now, nor strong enough to claim my power and freedom. I cowered and looked for a place to hide.
Emptying and Integrating
A year later I realised I was not ready for the radical change I longed for. I returned to the city, bought a smaller flat and re-engaged with my business and with my professional community, taking on new responsibilities. I didn’t see this as a failure, I was in the midst of big shifts in consciousness and life direction, and I needed to develop a core of emotional resiliency to support the necessary letting-go.
This dual movement towards emptying out the old and integrating what remains is crucial in the transformational process. Through a series of inner transformations the surface layer of life is relinquished. What remains is the essential self which continues to grow and be strengthened. Recognising when we are not ready can be a strength rather than a weakness. Deep inner listening and radical self-trust become our only compass.
I was preparing to move into a new more spacious perspective and deeper consciousness, and it took another three years before I made the break Soul was calling me to. Then the crisis resolved in a beautiful way, leaving me in no doubt that an energy and intelligence much bigger and wiser than “me” was moving and supporting me towards my highest values and visions, in perfect timing.
Meanwhile the world was going through its own transformational shifts towards greater freedom, marked by the ending of the Cold War, the destruction of the Berlin wall, and the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. All of which happened within a short period and appeared to come out of nowhere.
When You’re Ready the Universe Shows You the Way
During those three years when I was getting ready to make a big leap, my attention began to shift away from what was not working and all that was wrong with the world. My energy was drawn inwards to nurture and gestate my first book. Five or six years previously, as I was driving from the most northerly tip of Scotland back to Edinburgh, a creative seed had blown in. I had been visiting my partner’s family after his mother had taken her own life. I was deeply stirred by this, particularly since my own mother’s life had been emotionally and creatively unfulfilled. The idea for a book about Women and the Creative Process came to me so strongly I pulled over onto the hard shoulder to write it down. I then put thw idea on the back burner where the seed grew roots. Now these roots were pressing for more space and nourishment.
One weekend in June 1991 I went out of town to stay in a friend’s flat in a ramshackle old house and I wrote the first pages of my book. On the very same day, another friend who lived nearby called and told me she had just begun a powerful new meditation practice. She asked me if I would like to take the three introductory sessions to initiate me into the system. I said yes. The meditation focused on cleaning deeply engrained patterns from the heart. It had an immediate and tangible effect. On the second sitting, the empty space inside me, in my solar plexus, filled with energy, like nectar being poured into my inner emptiness and filling me up. I have been on a spiritual path ever since and explored many teachings and practices, but this meditation practice was one of the most powerful and transformative.
That weekend four life changing decisions arose spontaneously from my inner being, and I said YES to them:
I chose to follow my creative process wherever it might lead me;
To commit to a daily meditation practice as a tool for healing and transformation;
To begin my book and set out on my chosen path as an author;
To refrain from having another intimate relationship until I had learned to live and love consciously.
These decisions opened the doorway into my Soul Journey.
I had no idea what it meant to follow my creative process, but I decided right then to follow my heart’s desire and trust that it would lead me where I most needed to be. If I was to make the crossing to a new system of values: the values of the soul, I knew I would have to let go of old beliefs and ways of seeing.
The very next day I was introduced to a system of meditation which cleansed old patterns etched in the heart. As I meditated tears began to flow and form a river. From now on writing would be the boat, the vehicle to carry me down the river of soul life, and meditation was a bucket for emptying water from the bottom of the boat and keeping me afloat. Now I was no longer pushing the river, nor sitting by it. I was in the river and moving away from dry land.
Migration to the Heartland: A Soul Journey in the Land of the Awakening Dawn.
Whereas my previous soul chapter had been about action, experimentation, relationship, accumulation, building, and being “out there”, the next was about being “in here” as I developed skills to sit, wait, surrender, let go and empty. This was a big challenge and the spiritual practices that came to support me took me to places therapy hadn’t begun to touch. Meditation and spiritual practice were the tools for a thorough process of clearing and cleansing that echoed down the soul line. While still half asleep to what I had chosen, yet irresistibly drawn forward and committed, I dedicated myself to this task of following my soul as I gathered tools for transformation and conscious evolution.
The more I emptied out limiting and painful old patterns, the more I became a channel for creativity. In an earlier life chapter, I’d given up an interesting, well paid job to become a poet. I exchanged the challenge of travelling around Scotland supporting adult education tutors for the creative freedom of the visionary imagination, and then, when I realised poetry wasn’t going to pay the mortgage, I created a business. Now, age 42, I let go of many worldly privileges and possessions – my home, business, therapy practice, professional community, my income, partner and even my homeland. My new life chapter had begun! Searching for the lost pieces of my soul, I set off for wild, beautiful, expansive landscapes, first to the North-West Highlands of Scotland, and then a few years later to New Zealand, where the letting go and emptying process continued.
Amidst the beauty of New Zealand I was intensely creative. I wrote books, explored my own approach to the new holistic discipline of transformational learning and conducted numerous learning experiments with groups. My life was no longer well rounded but had become eccentric. I connected with a rich network of people on a similar path and found soul friends and plenty of space to enjoy the self-intimacy of solitude and a growing relationship with my rich inner life.
