What To Do When Things Fall Apart

Consider a situation in which you feel helpless to alter the outcome. One which you’ve done everything in your power to create, transform, heal, or resolve. One which deflates your illusions of control.

An inner pattern that undermines the trajectory of your soul. A relationship whose hearth-fire has vanished in smoke; a change in the marketplace that’s laid your business low and threatens your financial survival; a traumatic event that’s upended your life and brought changes you can neither predict nor control. The death or crippling illness of someone you love. Changes in the political, economic or cultural landscape that threaten the foundations of your world. The loss of a dream, the dissolution of life as you’ve known it, as you’d expected and trusted it would unfold.

Feel your feelings. Feel all of your feelings, for as long as it takes. Hold yourself in your own infinitely tender arms, in your own compassionate, loving heart. Cradle your grief, your lost, abandoned, angry, fearful, sorrowing, broken-hearted selves. Rock yourself, comfort yourself, bring yourself back to the safety and shelter of your soul’s presence, of the love that never falters or fails.

When you’re ready, gather your strength and courage. Draw them from the four corners of your being, from the earth and sky of you. Fill your heart and belly, your skin and bones, your hands and feet, with the lion of your soul.

Place the situation — the hopeless situation — on the altar of your heart. Invite the spirit of Divine Order to enter, to infuse the situation and its entire ecology with the pattern of its true nature, to transform its congealed intransigence into shimmering molecules of fluid, precisely patterned light.

You cannot control the outcome of this process, any more than you could its earlier incarnations. But the situation, and your relationship with it, will be infused with the grace of Divine Order, healed into life, death, redemption or completion.

Whatever the situation, however excruciating the pain or loss it has brought you, in the light of Divine Order it will become your art.