Welcome
Crossing the threshold, beginning again, and graduation as initiation.
After seven years of being a student, I am returning home to myself. It’s a threshold season, a slow softening of my nervous system as I loosen and surrender into the tension I’ve carried on this journey, the scope of which leaves me breathless. As with the closing of many life-altering journeys, it’s a mixture of emotions: ecstasy at the freedom to come, uncertainty around the new beginnings of a private practice, hopefulness at being able to have autonomy over my life and time again, deep grief at the cost of all that was lost along the way.
I unfold.
Seven years ago, the version of myself who I would one day call a clinical psychologist called to me. She has drawn me toward myself, deepening into the fullness of who I am. I saw her, more still, more steady, more gentle, more fully alive than I ever was. It wasn’t until much later on while reading John O’Donohue that I would learn the etymological link between beauty and the poetics of being called, and would know that in being called to be a psychologist, I was also being called to soften into a more beautiful form of who I had always been. The world I had structured for myself was too small, the path too narrow, and there was a fullness and richness, a depth of presence, awaiting my remembering.
I inhale, drawing solace in the words of my favorite poet:
“Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
I stepped across the graduation threshold with a pounding heart in the grip of anxiety. If I presented as easeful and calm, it was all a blessed act, as I received my hood and I shared my gratitude into the microphone that carried my voice across the auditorium. Applause rang out and I stumbled back to my seat grinning at my peers. Initiations are like that, fleeting, perhaps somewhat anticlimactic, but with repercussions that ripple outward reflecting a shift about to occur both in our internal and external worlds. The full effect of the shift won’t come until later, until one begins to live out a new truth, to breathe in and embody all that was learned with a cellular resonance that begins to shape the very reality of one’s life. Perhaps this is what Marion Woodman writes about when she calls us to bring the treasure home from the desert.
I exhale, releasing all that no longer serves.
With initiation comes a death, and maybe this is where the grief lives. The ways I used to see myself, talk to myself, experience myself, are no more. Once we have passed through the threshold, we may look down at our new selves wondering, ‘Who am I now?’ The initiation causes a sense of disruption, a disorientation of all that was familiar. We cannot engage in relationships with others in ways that may have served our past selves. We cannot carry on through life just as we did before. One glance around our intrapsychic space shows that nothing remains untouched. Dreams may begin to reflect the death, with new tragedies and destructions unfolding nightly as the inner poison is transformed to medicine.
I soften.
“Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
There is a newness that comes with this initiation, an expansion. And with it, the desire to create again, weaving words in ways that might articulate a bit of what this human experience means for me. Holding space for the suffering of others continues to transform me. It is a process of beauty, watching people being called to inhabit more fully the expansive nature that exists within them.
With all this, it is my joy to welcome you to Being Called, a space for searching reflections on the beauty and complexity of the human experience, an invitation into loving communion with wonder and reverence in all forms. As a woman, daughter, wife, and therapist, my days are spent engaging in conversation with life’s deepest questions, weaving together threads of beauty and grief, joy and terror, abject hopelessness and honest resiliency. Writing is one way I participate in conversation with these questions, bringing to life disparate aspects of myself and drawing them into a more coherent sense of wholeness. Thank you for being here.
Keep well,
Sarah xx