May you find safe passage

Your work is to trust the journey. 

The time between Christmas and New Year brings a sense of the liminal. Something is coming to an end, and something new is on its way, and here you are in the middle of the transition of things. As you’re facing the twilight of a year and the first rays of the next one, it creates a connection with all the beginnings and endings of things taking place in your life and body, too; all the journeys, seperate and co-joined, that are happening in you and around you. 

And of course, with any journey, your utmost concern is your safety and the safety of those you love. Most often, this outworks in our lives through planning and controlling outcomes and working ourselves to the bone to make sure the journey gets you to the right destination. 

But tell me, what is the RIGHT destination? What is safety? Are you looking for the antidote to fear? Immunity for failure? Certainty of belonging? 

The truth is this: the only way you can ever be safe is by planting your two feet (body and spirit) in the rich, dark earth of Divine Love.

Paul wrote to his friends and said: 

“I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

This is Paul’s language for oneness, connectivity, flow, grace. Hope turns the handle, trust opens the door, and when it swings wide on its hinges, you discover that this love (The Divine within you) has always been there; you just couldn’t dare to trust that it was true.

Your work is to trust that it is true. 

It’s not that trusting the journey is about being OK with everything that happens. Life is full of twists and turns, pulling and pushing, joy and pain, grief and bliss, work and play. Some of it's enjoyable, a lot of it isn’t. Trusting the journey doesn’t require you to pretend that it is when it isn’t. It does however, ask you to show up to it all because in it all is the path forward, and that is what you trust. Love beneath you, above you, behind you, in you.

Richard Rohr said: 

“Your True Self is Life and Being and Love. Love is what you were made for and love is who you are. When you live outside of Love, you are not living from your true Being or with full consciousness. The Song of Songs says that “Love is stronger than death. . . . The flash of love is a flash of fire, a flame of YHWH” (Song of Songs 8:6). Your True Self is a little tiny flame of this Universal Reality that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.”

Set your roots down deeply in this love, this being, in God's very self. The soil is the ground within you, not outside of you. When you are grounded here, you can journey anywhere and still find your centre, your point of reference, your hope for the way forward. 

May you find safe passage through this middle place. May you come to know that safety is not out there somewhere on the back of achievement and success, fortune and influence, but is deep within you, almost as if it's buried, and that the journey to this place is your real work behind all other journeys. May you travel well, may you travel safe, may you travel true.

Mindful Prompt: “Believe in love’s infinite journey, for it is your own, for you are love. Love is life.” Rumi.

From my upcoming Christmas series, "Safe Passage" this week with a subscription in the App.

Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco