EMBODIED ASCENSION – ascending through your body as your life unfolds

Moment by moment, life unfolds for us, through us – and around us.

Sometimes we love our lives; sometimes we may feel that life does not love us.

Unexpected events can shake things up. What was working for us stops working – or disappears completely. People or situations we counted on change, or leave our lives. We thought we knew – but now it’s clear that we don’t know where we’re headed. We’ve entered a territory for which we have no map.

At times we may shrink from our challenges. Or marshal the strength of our wills to fight against them. In extreme situations, we may be pushed to the limit of endurance.

Life is not an endurance test unless we fight what is unfolding in our lives. We all go through times when we are challenged to be present to our own suffering.

“I know you’re in a lot of pain,” Rima said to me, “but this is an opportunity for a lot of learning – if you’re willing to see it that way.”

When my younger sister died unexpectedly several decades ago, a healer blessed me with this gem of wisdom. Her words brought me peace. When I sat with this idea, I felt calmer. My grief felt a little less raw.

Wisdom didn’t take my pain away. It did, however, ground what I intuitively knew to be so.

Rima’s words opened the space for me to engage the loss of my beloved sister differently – to pay attention to what I could learn, even while grieving. This opened new possibilities in my spirituality and my humanity. I lost a life with her – and gained the knowing that life is precious. At the age of 23, I realized that I had to take my purpose in life seriously. My life meant more to me because I knew I wouldn’t live forever.

Ultimately, her death opened up the space for me to follow my calling – to engage more fully in life – and take a leap into the unknown – the mysterious realm of spiritual awakening.

In order to ascend, we are called to surrender to what is actually happening – to give up what we thought was supposed to happen – what we wanted or planned.

Ascension by Nancy Kern, acrylic on canvas 48×36”

The loss of possibilities – in love, health, home, freedom or identity – can push us to the edge of death, actual or perceived. Whether or not we let go, something gets taken away from us. Holding onto it doesn’t change that it is gone.

We grieve, we rage, we collapse. We get angry at ourselves, at other people or at Source. We get angry at God – or life itself.

Something inside of us dies.

What we may not recognize is that every loss, no matter how great, also opens new possibilities for us. Our Souls have a tremendous capacity for adaptation, for expanding in the aftermath of great loss.

My sister’s death brought with it the death of who I thought I was.

I lost a way of life. I lost my dreams of what I thought my future life would be. I lost the sense that tomorrow would look pretty much like today.

I could no longer take for granted that reality was under my control.

I was plunged into the abyss. I had to let go of a whole way of living and being in the world.

Death is part of life. It is followed by resurrection, reincarnation or new life. We lose our faith and then rediscover it. We say we are reborn. We lose our careers and then create new ones, saying we are reinventing ourselves.

There is no set time frame for regeneration after loss and death. It happens when the internal and external conditions are ripe. As the cycle of loss and rebirth repeats itself, our souls grow in wisdom. Our capacity to trust Source – and to trust how life really operates – increases.

We ascend to the next level in our spiritual development. Our previous spiritual ceiling becomes our new spiritual floor.

The images and colors in my painting Ascension evoke the womb of creation, where our souls originate, also known as the Akashic Records. The Divine incarnates or “enters the flesh” – we are born and live in the world. Here, we are informed by the phenomena of existing as Source in form. The physical world operates differently from the formless realms of pure Spirit. As we evolve, we increasingly merge with our divine nature even as we continue to live in physical bodies.

Source lives through us. To grow in wisdom, our souls incarnate.

Many people conceptualize ascension as a process of forever leaving worldly concerns aside, and rising above them. Some spiritual paths encourage “spiritual bypass” as a way to avoid suffering by not engaging fully in life.

Yet there is no transformative power in rising above life if we do not engage what unfolds in our lives. Repressing our experiences, or managing them to simply cope – not letting ourselves be changed – does not develop wisdom. Without the challenges, losses and breakdowns we experience as incarnate human beings – we don’t get the breakthroughs. Our souls do not evolve.

When we don’t let our sense of who we are and how things are change, we lose the possibility of living in greater surrender to Source. If we try to repress what life brings, we won’t answer – or even recognize the call when it comes knocking at our door.

In the course of your soul’s development, through many repetitions – coming and going through the portal from the world to Source and back to the world, you learn to ascend, to receive wisdom – and embody it in your life. Your soul expands when you surrender, and accept the loss of possibilities – and open to new ones.

Ascension requires us to incarnate through the body, engage the world head on, surrender to What Is – and give up our identities as ‘things’ that can be broken. Every time we do this, we merge more fully with Source. Instead of leaving our bodies through spiritual bypass, we bring Source energy to where we actually are – we live in embodied ascension.