Pillar XII: Embodiment
This month our focus is embodiment and integration – two of the most central concepts to the practice of priestessing or spiritual leadership. Consider this step the pulling down of wisdom from Crown to Core to Root, from Spirit to Center to Earth. If you aren’t living your leadership, then what value does it hold for yourself or others? Our lived experience is the essence of our purpose. Walking your talk as a priestess is key. And it’s difficult. You’ll find many people who talk the talk but can’t walk it, or can’t walk it for long, because they haven’t yet integrated the wisdom, awareness, and strength of their principles. How you live must be a synchronous and aligned example of what you believe.
Psyche, from Greek mythology, is our patron goddess for this facet of our work together. She reminds us that integration of spiritual lessons, while challenging, is key to learning the lessons of love, healing, and peace. Integration at its core is the recognition of individual soul parts as well as the unification of those parts into a greater whole. Alchemy is certainly part of this process, since soul integration requires an honest inventory of your soul’s wounds and traumas, such that integration includes not only the “light” aspects of your journey but the more difficult and shadowy aspects of your journey as well.
There are SIX stages of soul integration. They are:
- Encountering – the meeting of the individual aspects of your soul in order to recognize and account for them. This is the inventory stage.
- Shedding – this is the releasing of any parts of your soul that will not accompany you into integration, pieces that need to be shed in order for your soul to be liberated and free from constraints of past experience (assuming you have learned the lessons of those experiences).
- Allowing – the receiving and meeting of your soul where it is, and the full conscious recognition of yourself without qualification or limitation of love.
- Retrieving – the locating of any parts of your soul that have been subconsciously or unconsciously lost to you along your path.
- Integrating – the gathering of those lost parts and placement of them in conjunction with the rest of the aspects of your soul and your journey.
- Becoming – the celebration of this new “whole” you, less the pieces you don’t need in order to advance, with the addition of pieces you lost that remain part of your soul’s developmental path.
