These days we lurch between eclipses and moons, cross-quarter days, and the uncomfortable excavations of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus. Each a tide pulling us from the safety of the shore one minute, racking us against the sharp rocks of unexamined Self the next. The discomfort of the tidal zone is a thing keeping us half-drowning in the quandary of the times - Do we cling to the old ways or surrender to the open sea?

The Tides of Transformation: To Surrender or Resist?

The mythological landscape is full of protagonists who, usually through deep pain, imprisonment or torture meet the resources needed to transition the mundane. Sedna surrendered to the cold deep of the Arctic Sea, Persephone to the fires of Hades, Odin, Ameratsu and Kuan Yin - all dived beneath the surface, and to their surprise met peace there.

Though the work among these pages is spiritual ascension by any other name, it also comes about via these very same paths, well-trodden by the seekers that have gone before us. The mythologies, the philosophies, the practices, the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

For the sake of the writings on this day comes The 37 Practises of the Bodhisattva. A sweet reading that presents to its students a structured path through the vicissitudes of life in the form of a finely tuned set of ethics, wisdom, and methodologies that appear magically to have transcended time and cultural relevance.

They speak primarily to the preciousness of human life, and the critical importance of using it wisely for spiritual practice. To awaken our sleeping Bodhicitta, the mind of awakening, and to walk that path as if compelled to do so. To anchor higher frequencies as if there were no other choice, to walk a path of compassion-based altruism as a lifestyle, and to dedicate all you do to something greater.

If you are here and reading this then no doubt you already know that place because you've already been walking the Path of the Bodhisattva, you just didn't know its name.

The text, a sweet weaving of parable and motherly advice for shitty times offers simple and applicable tenants to help the householder (you and me) overcome attachment, uncover truth, understand emotionality and the alchemy of suffering, and ultimately navigate the grit of adversity with some kind of grace.

And it sits in the belly like sweet milk tea.

The Alchemy of the Wound: The Bodhisattva’s Path

The Path of the Bodhisattva, the ascended 5th and 6th dimensional field, transmits a blueprint, a download of the essential qualities needed to uphold its frequency: generosity, ethics, patience, enthusiasm, meditation, and the realization of truth.

It asks us to use our bruises and cuts, our bleeding wounds and severed limbs, to inform the ascension process. To take the grief and heartbreak of being unloved, unworthy, ugly and denied our original nature, and turn it into the very thing that peel back the darkness. To let go of this strange notion that we are separate and operating on some wholly private frequency, and realize that we are it, and it is us - all of it - the war, the trafficking, the lies, the money laundering, the deforestation, the plastic in the sea, and the politicians we entrust with our voice. This is the practice of the Lojong - of turning adversity into the path - of integrating, rather than spiritually bypassing, and of being honest about our downfall.

We might know this as taking responsibility.

In the tapestry of all things problematic in the world, the Bodhisattva asks us to find love and compassion. Love as the thread, and Compassion as the pattern that it weaves as we choose a lens that sees the uncorrupted truth of our oneness, and chooses the path from there, not just to smooth our own way, but to make good the path for the Whole. This is the vow of the Bodhisattva.

Altogether it’s a reminder of our universal connection and the compassion that flows so naturally from it.

"All beings have been our mothers."

- teaching #8

Put simply, we have sought the same Self-actualization for as far back as we can remember. While these ancient teachings share it as a gradual path of ethical choices, discipline and the getting of wisdom, the days in the photon belt have us moving much faster. Now it feels as if spontaneous awakenings, channelled insights and inexplicable downloads leave us forever changed in mere instants. While I don't believe for a moment this type of acceleration has overtaken the Bodhisattvas message, I do feel it adds another layer that remains, as yet, unnamed.

The language and the dogma between an ancient Buddhist teaching and 21st-century spiritualism are merely semantics - the real work is in meeting the evolutionary quality no matter what or who - Even in those who challenge us. In fact, especially those who challenge us.

Because the bottom line is that your enemy is your teacher.

In all reality, Love must evolve into active compassion if we are to hold the current at the 5th and 6th dimensions with any reliability. That compassion needs to include accountability and extend beyond mere kindness to become a force for change. Ultimately compassion is cultivated, not given, rising out of love and transforming everything it touches.

The sufferings inflicted on us can be easily and lazily translated as punishments and failures by the undisciplined mind. As a very Piscean soul I’m well-versed in the shadow side of suffering, victimhood, escapism and blame. In fact it took a series of monumental personal losses for me to be backed up into a corner enough to stop defending myself, and instead to surrender to their deep for inevitable transformation.

The compression chamber of that dark night delivers us from the evil of our illusion, attachment and separation. It reveals where anger and fear tried to destroy us, where we collided with animosity, blamed others, and distorted the story from the inside out. In the dark of it we meet our ignorance and what the Bodhisattva call the three poisons: greed, hatred and delusion - and we remember that they are learned, gifted, and the distorted lens that keeps us in the 3rd and 4th dimensional fields of linear space and time.

Whatever captures you is a lie.

Whatever liberates you is the truth.

And the most powerful act of Self Love is called Responsibility.

After all, that’s what a Bodhisattva would do.

As Persephone returned blinking into the light, as Sedna awoke transformed in the deep sea, or as Sleeping Beauty finally opened her eyes, we understood that the suffering was not the burden we thought it to be, but the catalyst for a necessary evolution. Like lead into gold, like responsibility into power.

Meditation. The Alchemy of the Mind

Lastly the methodology, the practice, and the doing of it all which comes down to one thing - meditation.

To be able to transform and transmute life’s bad deals we must each touch the Grail of our heartbreak. This isn’t something talk therapy is going to reveal as the waking mind lacks the depth and scope for such work. There is a portion of the Way that must be walked alone, for it requires the 6th sense. Truth simply cannot be seen with open eyes, nor can it be perceived as you might perceive the pen on your desk or the car in the driveway - as it must first arrive as a concept. Imagine it as a drawing down of the higher states of wisdom into the lower expressions of intellect, just as water purifies through the aquifer as it descends.

The thinking mind is all the stuff that keeps the water close to the surface - unevolving, even stagnant. Meditation and breathwork interrupt the mind’s grip, long enough to take you beyond the illusions, projections, patterns and the reactivity you have always known. Do you think fire was conceived in a 3rd-dimensional state? The wheel? Astrology? The pyramids?

When you commit to a meditation practice - a must if we are ever to escape the matrix -you moisten the mind, and as soil needs water to absorb nutrients, the mind must be soft to reveal its wisdom.

The butter has always been in the milk, it’s the process that reveals it.

The Path of the Bodhisattva is a full-bodied plunge into the world, into the suffering, into the grief, into the raw, unbearable knowing that we are bound to each other in ways deeper than time and more enduring than we might want to admit. To feel the weight of that, and choose to love it anyway. To name the one who wounds you, who denies you, or who casts you into the dark as your greatest benefactor. To know the bruises, the fragmented histories and your ripped and bleeding heart as the very materials of the spiritual journey itself. Such that we become wise and not bitter.

Then, as the illusion of separation dissolves, we come to know ourselves as part of something vast, moving, and breathing. From here we can hold steady the energy of the higher dimensions - not as a fleeting moment, but as an unshakable way of being.

And so we sit, in stillness and meditation with it all, not as an escape, but as a great unbinding, until the truth is all that remains.

Because the truth is what sets you free.