Chelan Harkin: The Great Ceremony

This is something that I posted last year that I am moved to share again. May we all be engaged in the courageous and sacred work of allowing our hearts to stay open, to be fluid, to expand and deepen....

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This is a most powerful poem, yet another reflection of the stunning wisdom and sacred truths brought forth by and through Chelan Harkin. Deepest bow of gratitude and love.

Held in this poem is a profound reframing of how it is that we perceive and experience grief, ours and that of one another. What I have come to learn over the course of many years of engaging in my own deep heartwork is that if we haven't befriended our own human grief over the inevitable losses and sorrows we experience in our lifetimes, we will be compelled to push away those who remind us of the unattended places in our hearts rather than comfort, witness, honor, and bless the journeys through grief of those around us.

After great resistance, fear, shame, and disdain in the early years of my healing journey for all the great places of sorrow and loss that I had hidden away in my deepest heart, over time I came to gradually recognize that my tears were the sacred doorway into awakening. The doorway into cultivating and nurturing an ever growing capacity for compassion and empathy, vulnerability and connection, healing and transformation, tenderness and kindness, wisdom and love.

This is a lifelong process, this shedding of the obstacles that we have unknowingly built against love. And yet once we recognize that our triggers, our losses, our unfinished business that arises once again that we had mistakeningly believed was healed all the way through — once we reframe these experiences as yet another doorway into greater healing and humility, understanding and awareness, vulnerability and connection, compassion and tenderness, truth and love... then everything changes. Everything shifts, yet again. And again and again and again. And opens, even more deeply.

And we come to recognize that it isn't that we have to do this work, this heartwork. No. We get to do this heartwork. We get to. And then we are able to truly recognize and witness and support the amazing journeys into greater love of others. Blessed be. 

And bless us all on our sacred journeys. 💗🙏 Molly
 

Photo by Molly

THE GREAT CEREMONY 

 

Bring not your pity

to the great ceremony

of another's grief

 

but rather bring your honor

and celebration

to the great sacred room

of another soul's bravery

as through their tears

they shed the old world

 

Each deep cry

is a right of passage

that should be held as such

 

Lay your reverence

respect

and gratitude

upon the altar

of your witnessing

 

You are on sanctified grounds,

you've been let in

to the temple of transformation

 

What a great privilege

to witness truth

flooding another's body

 

Each deep cry

is a contraction

of the birth

of our new world

and each of us

is called to do

our heart's labor

to be Her mother.

 

— Chelan Harkin 

 

https://chelanharkin.com/