The Indestructible Drop
A little over a month ago, I turned 35.
One of my favorite things to do is spend the days leading up to my birthday reflecting thoroughly on what I have been gifted over the previous year. I get an existential thrill from sifting through the milestones and bumps in the road, the major lessons and extracted wisdom.
All in search of my gold.
For even deep within the shadows of my year-long dark night of the soul, there are priceless gems to behold.
In Tantric Buddhism, the indestructible drop is considered the seed essence of life and the origin point of consciousness. It lives in your heart chakra, at the center of your being: an ecstatic aliveness. It is believed in this tradition that when the body expires, the consciousness withdraws through the heart back to zero point levels.
It is akin to becoming a black hole when you die.
The concept of an indestructible force of life that could bend space and warp time struck a deep chord in me when I was, simply put, devastated and enraged because life was most definitely not going my way. I returned to this soothing thought many times over the course of my pandemic year. In a way, it became my psychological anchor during a year-long undoing that totally threw my center of gravity. I couldn’t understand why this was happening.
Turns out I was asking the wrong questions.
The thing is, when you enter a wormhole you won’t know where the exit lives or what the escape hatch looks like when you begin. You just hope that eventually you’ll come out the other side.
Like many of you, I got a front row seat to my own SoulTV during this unprecedented passage on our planet. And like many of you, I learned a lot about the nature of suffering.
Which brings me to one of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite poets. In her channeled poem Mosaic, Ariana Reines writes:
What you have been watching should have taught you by now.
You want real? This year gave me plentiful time to fully notice the patterns that had been rotting at the edges of my periphery. I had so much time to investigate all the psychic debris I’d been sweeping under the so-called rug. I wore out my go-to responses and tired solutions; most of my addictions and excuses. In short: I started to surrender the people, situations, and ideas that no longer served the life taking shape in front of me: the future I couldn’t yet see.
That is when I started to really learn about grace.
I find it divinely ironic that around the time I hit rock bottom I began studying miracles. It seemed like a good enough way to spend my days when my business was gutted, my relationship was gone, and my foundational reality was crumbling. Most of my friends lived several hours away in completely different cities. Me on the other hand? I lived at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with definitely no pizza delivery.
But the thing about medicine is that it unexpectedly arrives to find us in the times we need it most.
Especially if we are willing to let go of control.
Y’all, I said it before and I’ll say it again: life is full of paradoxes. In fact, life thrives on a foundation that ultimately defies basic logic. Quantum physics teaches that the closer you get to the truth, the less it makes sense on the surface.
From a human perspective, that is.
Listen, I didn’t write the rules for how it works. I’m simply doing my best to translate the most brilliant teachings I’ve received because of what they’ve done for me.
Thankfully, miracles don’t need our logical minds online in order to do what they do so well: collapse space and time to deliver the unexpected, awe-inducing, and impossible.
When you get out of the way, miracles work better.
What I’m taking a long time to say is that suffering is a gateway: a portal I didn’t expect to bless me so gratuitously at the outset. It took a minute to let go of what I wanted to happen and face what was actually happening, but when I did that everything started to change.
Don’t get me wrong: portals go all ways. You could just as easily wind up in a 12th-Dimensional hell realm.
The chances are the same as finding yourself in a devastatingly beautiful game.
Turning rotten fruit into soul food is a weird sort of kink I guess, but it’s one of the reasons I will forever cultivate my transformational skillset. It’s so profoundly, eternally worth my investment. No matter what happens, if I am here to write about it, chances are that I’ve found a way to love what I thought was awful but is indubitably not.
Friends, that is the secret sauce.
If you welcome a perspective shift, suddenly everything is a teacher –especially our triggers. Miracles are quantum leaps because they teach us about right seeing.
That is one of the keys to rapidly morphing your reality.
A black hole isn’t the typical metaphor most people turn to when they reflect on the complexity and beauty of the human heart. But maybe I’m not alone in noticing some hilarious parallels here. The more I surrender my resistance, my desire to somehow “solve” my suffering, the more I realize this organ is actually a miraculous trapdoor into a layer of existence I didn’t notice before.
What brought me to my knees a few months ago has made me resilient beyond belief. The parts of my life that felt lost forever have returned in new forms, re-arranged and reborn. And me? Ironically, it was through the sustained pummeling of my spirit that I re-discovered my indestructible drop.
I ate dirt last year. Too many times to count. I spared you the details because what matters at the end of the day, what I came here to say, is that I remain UNBROKEN.
I am starting to think that if you want to walk like a God, all you need to do is flip the script on suffering.
My struggle to hold the old life together seems so small compared to what I have cultivated by candlelight in the darkest night. I am humbled to find myself now swimming in waters previously unfathomable, as though rubbing up against my discomfort like it was an enchanted lamp unlocked an avalanche of hidden diamonds.
For in learning how to dance in the ashes of the mess, I found my requiem.
Believe you me, I will never lose it again.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
