Super Moons and Inner Truths
A Super Moon is an ‘up close and personal’ lunation with the moon moving closest to Earth. A broadly accepted definition of a supermoon results in around 3 or so supermoons each year, following in succession. Apart from the moon appearing larger in the sky during a supermoon phase, there is also a more personal, inner significance.
Interaction between Earth and Moon mirrors the connection between the body and the material world, and the instinctual drives of the feminine (which include our heart’s desire to venture into the unknown, awaken the unconscious, express the emotional and feeling realms, access the intuitive symbolic realm and more). It’s a juicy lunation that can amplify our energies and help us become aware of what is happening in our own souls.
In the daily hustle and bustle of modern existence, distractions pulling our attention outwards abound. To have some cosmic support to reconnect with our inner realm of soul can be a welcome relief. Even so, when we increase in awareness, we often realise that there is some inner truth that needs to be reckoned with too.
Supermoons are like turning up the intensity to show us what is going on and what inner work requires our attention. Initiation functions in a similar way.
When things start falling apart
Inner initiation is what the soul experiences as it grows. It’s rather like the inner spiritual version of going to school – there is instruction, learning lessons, passing tests and then moving on to the next level. Initiation is like the spiritual exam that makes sure we’ve got sufficient mastery over the current batch of life lessons before we move on to deeper spiritual understanding and experience.
One fairly common sign that your soul could be preparing for initiation, is that you feel an onset of challenges in your life. This is not just ‘one thing’ but rather a feeling that everything you have learned is being tested. Again and again situations will arise with different people bring the same problem to your door. How will you deal with it? What have you learned? How can you apply it?
It can literally feel like you are being tested by Life and the Universe for a period of time that may last months or more. I remember asking my first spiritual teacher how long such periods would last. She would smile enigmatically and say, “a true initiate never asks such a question!” which really annoyed me but I understood a deeper meaning to her answer. That was to focus on what needs to be done and let the timing take care of itself.
That moment you ‘get it’
When initiation is completed, it’s a bit like you’ve finally learned a new dance move or a new skill of some kind. There is an ease with it. You feel like you’ve got a handle on a type of energy or situation that would have really rattled you previously and evoked a negative reaction. Now you can respond differently. You realise what is going on rather than feeling confused and overtaken by suffering. You may not like the situation and you may not feel in control of it, but you do feel that you have some mastery over yourself in that situation. You can choose a different response rather than feeling pulled into an unconscious reaction.
This is what it feels like to pass an initiation. Sometimes it will be hugely significant in your life – something truly life-changing. The deep soul initiations are like that. Moving through them literally feels like your allegiance to an era in your life, to an old way of being, has ended.
We can have healing breakthroughs in less radical ways that are still incredibly important and follow a similar pattern to the initiation process. In such cases, your reaction may still be there, but you know what it is within you that is reacting and you remain conscious of yourself and the situation. Instead of getting stuck in anger you can more readily move towards compassion. Instead of fear holding you hostage, you are naturally able to choose trust and confidence.
Cosmic Breadcrumbs and Spiritual Tests
Whether you feel under an intense deluge of spiritual testing from all directions, which indicates deep soul level initiation taking place, or you are grappling with a specific recurring issue in your life, there is a message that I want to share with you. This is the reassuring message of the cosmic breadcrumbs.
I liken the experiences in our lives, the synchronicities and situations that unfold as ways that the Universe leads us on our soul path, like dropping breadcrumbs for us to follow, so we find our way. Why is this reassuring? It means that you’ve been prepared since the moment you were born (even in past lives, actually) for all the challenges in this lifetime, and almost secretly given the special insights, knowledge and skills that you need to overcome anything that arises and manifest your higher purpose.
There is a trustworthy divine intelligence that knows long before we consciously do exactly what we need, what is going to unfold, and how we can best deal with it. So that sacred inner intelligence – you could call it universal wisdom and compassionate soul love – provides us with the tests that will help us master the skills we need to become all that we can be.
The hidden magic in the mess
The spiritual preparation phase is what happens throughout our lives. It is what makes successful initiation possible.
Preparation is where we encounter the mess – things fall apart, we begin to recognise the issues, we start to clean up the mess, healing and evolving into new self-organisation.
When we have figured out how to manage our own mess, embracing it and evolving through it until it becomes a new order (and then the process starts all over again), we can help others learn how to manage theirs.
Through that process we become part of the consciousness generating energy to support collective awakening. Humanity – as a whole – is in a phase of initiation. Those individuals that are familiar with the process on a personal level, can help guide the rest of humanity that are wondering (literally) what on Earth is going on with life and the planet and our broader human family.
Preparation sets the spiritual stage. When we have completed preparation – which takes as long as it takes – we have gained an understanding of the situation at hand and what is needed. We are ready to put our learning to the test. We apply the wisdom. We have learned from what didn’t work and we move with more creativity and higher consciousness, intuiting a different pattern, and learning how to embody it through practice. How do we do this as a collective?
Collective Cultural Shifts
It occurs through cultural shifts and changes that happen because enough individuals wake up to a different, improved, more conscious and wise way of being. Sometimes it is uncomfortable and there can be resistance from those pockets of society that fear change for whatever reason – such as losing power or feeling out of control, fearing uncertainty.
Initiation is typically shorter than the preparation period but also – it takes as long as it takes. Months of practice may be necessary to settle into the embodiment of the new awareness, new behaviours. When we are dealing with a cultural level of shifting paradigms, it tends to be slower. After traumatic events, there can be months for the dust to settle and years for the new consciousness to be integrated and expressed. My sense is that as matter – our bodies included – is awakening to greater consciousness, this process happens more quickly.
Through the preparation phase we are nudged, shoved, pushed, invited and more by the Universe towards the inner healing that is necessary to catalyse our transformation. This can show up as global events beyond our control, and we need to learn how to respond not only as individuals, but as communities. The Dalai Lama has said that the next Buddha may be a community. A similar sentiment has been expressed by some about the return of the Christ. Individual healing and awakening is essential, yet it is collective healing that presents the ultimate benefit.
Spiritual way-showers
Initiation never happens without a spiritual guide. There is always a teacher overseeing the process. It may be an outer teacher or an inner teacher. You may not always be aware of your teacher’s presence if it is a spiritual rather than human guide supporting your soul, but that presence is always there. Although initiation feels like a very lonely process, because the initiate is thrown back onto their inner resources to move through the challenge, there are many who are holding a vision of success for that soul.
Once you have moved through the testing phase sufficiently in your own life, you will become such a spiritual way-shower for others – whether that means an official vocation as a teacher or healer, or that you recognise yourself as a presence of light for others in a more ‘unofficial’ yet still very valuable capacity. You will sense that your energy can change the quality of what transpires in a room. You’ll possibly feel a bit like an undercover lightworker of sorts. There is increasing power and spiritual responsibility to exercise that growing influence with care and awareness.
You’ll know if this is you because at some inner level you’ll feel like you are a midwife of sorts, helping support and ignite inspiration for our human collective to evolve in consciousness. Your passion might be spirituality, or the arts, or the environment, or education and health, or business structures and economics, or even politics and activism. There is a need for spiritual leadership in every facet of life, to keep aligning the group with constructive energy, higher vision, wisdom and nourishment to complete the tasks that can vastly improve our world and help all beings.
Spiritual Intelligence for Cultural Evolution
Such light-bearing souls are the generators of higher consciousness within themselves and through that, in human culture. One of the many benefits created through raising consciousness is the realisation of alternatives – new possible ways of thinking, being and expressing ourselves, with more constructive overall effect, become known to us. We might call this ‘outgrowing problematic patterns of behaviour’ and ‘creating new and improved pathways’.
We need such spiritual intelligence not only to deal creatively with problems in our personal lives, but also to evolve our approaches to collective problems – hunger, war, sickness in people and buildings, environmental pollution and degradation, unchecked production and consequent imbalances that require improved recycling and reuse programs implemented more broadly, economic and political distress, maturing our legal, education and health systems, and so on.
Kindness as a Consciousness Accelerator
So consciousness stimulates healing in the collective, interrupting the repetition compulsion of unresolved traumas in the history of a nation and its peoples, including its wars and social challenges that must be reckoned with. We cannot embrace inspired creativity to overcome problems if we deny the existence of the problem and the historical reasons for it. That is as much the case in a person healing from a toxic family system as a person attempting to individuate from a sick culture.
Consciousness must begin within the individual. Then it can be shared with others. For of course, we cannot share what we do not possess. Self love is the beginning of compassion. Compassion is kindness and kindness arises when we are able to acknowledge what it is to experience hurt, and also realise that hurt can be healed. When we can realise this is a phenomena that all beings experience, we can loosen our attachment to self-grasping, making it ‘all about me’. Then we can become a little wiser, seeing things as they are, rather than personalising everything and becoming the person who suffers so enormously because they are offended by so much.
If people are unkind it is because they have not yet fully grappled with their pain. This is why it takes enormous courage to be kind. When you think of it this way, you realise that kindness is not weakness, nor has it anything to do with being a doormat or a rubbish bin for other people’s unresolved psychological projections. Kindness is an affirmation that you know what suffering is, and you have sufficient intuitive maturity to be able to recognise when it is driving others. You also know how to be kind to yourself by not needing to take the pain of others quite so personally.
Then you can avoid negative attachments to those who cannot help but hurt others. You can have compassion but you can also set boundaries. The boundaries can be an act of compassion for all involved – keeping your own mind and heart clearer, and helping the other person stop generating quite so much negative karma for themselves by behaving inappropriately towards you. Such wise kindness makes healing and spiritual liberation more possible.
Kindness is your soul choosing to add a balm, rather than a fuel, to the realm of suffering. It is an expression of elevated consciousness, and an accelerator of even greater consciousness.
How to put all this into play
Take a moment to ask yourself how you want to show up as a being of love, of spirituality, of evolving consciousness, of kindness. How do you want to live what you have learned on your life path and soul journey? What are the practices and lifestyle choices that support the expansion and grounding of your consciousness? What connects you to your heart and increases a sense of kindness within? Are there boundaries that you need to set to minimise dysfunction and increase positive energy in your lifestyle and relationships?
When you have your experience of initiation, you will feel deeply challenged. Know that there are spiritual beings supporting you and you can benefit from asking for spiritual guides of enlightened wisdom and compassion to help you. There are also communities that want to support you, and having those with similar openness and wisdom walking alongside can help you recognise the truth and value in what you are experiencing. Know that if you haven’t yet found your way to a deep and abiding sense of inner peace, love and quiet energising joy, then you just have a little way further to go. It is there within you, waiting for you. Believe in yourself and honour your courage in taking your unique soul journey.
If you would like to find out more about our Community of the Sacred and how that could possibly support you, please reach out to our team.
Art by Isabel Bryna from Alana’s Earth Warriors Oracle
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