The Dharma of Self Worth
You may already be familiar with the Sanskrit word dharma. Its meaning has nuances depending on the context. On a cosmic level, dharma speaks to the evolutionary process of Nature’s order and balance that emerges out of primordial chaos. The laws of Nature, if you will.
We can look at the phases of the moon and the cycles of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun each day, and the movements of the planets and stars as just a few examples of the dharma of Nature and of Cosmos.
And because we’re fundamentally inseparable from Nature and Cosmos - just as the hands and feet are inseparable from the rest of the body - our individual, incarnated souls have their own dharma too. In this context, dharma becomes the larger, evolving + evolutionary purpose of a person’s life. It’s also essentially Nature moving us, moving through us - much like our hands reach for the cup of tea when we intend for them to.
Ultimately, when we’re in our dharma, there’s a sense of rightness in our lives, the balance and order that comes from living on purpose - which includes the phases of chaos or dissolution that are part of this larger cosmic order, usually preceding a cycle of new creation.
Rightness here is not to be taken from a moralizing perspective (when we’re attuned to Nature through our soul-aligned nature, our dharma, the should-ing commandments of morals becomes obsolete.)
Rather, rightness here is that deeply subjective felt-sense experience of being in right relationship with our soul-bodies, and the lives we’re living from this place.
When we’re in our dharma, we're anchored in the unity underlying the diverse expressions of incarnation - while also dancing to the rhythm of our soul’s particular curiosity for embodied individuation.
We’re both/and.
But there’s a fly in this ointment - albeit one that’s ripe for picking out and composting.
Some 2000 years ago, consciousness decided to explore forgetfulness and ignorance through the collective and systemic denial of the Truth that we’re inseparable from Nature, from Cosmos, from the divinity of our native Source. Repressive institutions of religion, followed by dogmatic scientific materialism and rampant industrialization constructed distorting paradigms. Humans not only enforced themselves as the dominant species, developing ways to control and exploit the natural world, but created systems of violence and harm with which to wield power over, enslave and dehumanize each other.
What arose out of this was a dominant culture hell-bent on homogenizing the human soul through standardization and the straitjacket of being ‘normal’. The numinous and wild human soul was forced to cut itself off from its indwelling Source, its larger Self. Instead, we became hyper-fixated on deriving our sense of self, our identity and crucially, our self-worth from the validations of this soulless, dominant culture.
We had to. Our safety and survival depended on it. Especially for those of us who were deemed too different, too ‘other’ from the artificial constructs of ‘normal’
In this Self-abandonment however, we lost our roots.
Not only the roots connecting us to our Nature-revering ancestors who viscerally felt and knew themselves as inseparable from it; but to the roots of our own felt-sense connection and relationship to Earth + Sky, and to the divinity imbuing all of it, including us.
This was a loss of Self, and crucially a loss of Self-worth, now outsourced from a harm-based - but ultimately unsustainable - culture.
Without an unshakeable sense of Self-worth, we can’t walk the evolutionary path of our soul’s dharma with integrity - much like a building’s foundations require integrity to stand the test of time.
And if we’re alive at this time, our souls have chosen the dharma of participating in being the death-doulas to this expiring state of consciousness, and the birth-doulas to its evolution. This isn't about going backwards to what existed prior to this particular cycle of time, but rather towards the innovation of new creation, and a completely new evolutionary cycle - in our own lives and in the world.
How we participate in this will have our soul’s particular flavor and signature - expressed and experienced through the magical mysteries of the body and nervous system. But we can’t do it unless we’re rooted in the unconditional worthiness of our larger Self.
The auspiciousness and internally derived safety of unconditional Self-worth is one of the things we’ll be invoking through the mythic resonance field of Goddess Lakshmi & the Churning of the Ocean this spring in Root + Rise.