​We each encounter catalysts—otherwise known as triggers—for growth in a myriad of ways throughout our lives.

Most of the time, we don’t even recognize or appreciate them through the overwhelming emotions they ​provoke. But I’ve always been fascinated by the dynamic, and dive straight into them every time they arise. Whether it’s a circumstance or a person who offers the invitation is irrelevant, because the opportunity is always the same: to die as we know ourselves to be, and expand into something different, hopefully more loving and wiser than before.

Facing my physical death, from serious disease years ago, didn’t compare to the thousand deaths that came after my recovery. The paradox I’ve come to live in proves to me that the only way I can continue to live as vibrantly as I’m determined to is through the willingness to die to the forms of myself that are no longer a part of me now. Each day is created through the same string of choices to just keep moving, growing, dying and being reborn, never fully knowing who that will be or what that will look like.

A certain kind of magic emerges from each contracted moment of letting something familiar go. An expanded awareness that sees infinite layers of perspectives which simultaneously exist in each encounter in this play of human life. It’s up to us as we grow into this awareness what to create from that point forward.

We can’t always see beyond choices we don’t understand, but the endless quest to understand ourselves doesn’t really end until we see that it doesn’t truly matter if we get it or not. All that matters is we choose to create who we are, fueled by this indistinguishable desire to live—meeting ourselves in everything and everyone as we go.

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Uncertainty burns.

Just enough to ignite a spark of curiosity.
The courageous ones dive into the soul’s unrelenting passion
to unite with its deepest knowing amongst the chaos and confusion.
Cracking brittle walls constructed around the gentlest hearts.
Propelling forward into the shadows of destruction.
Splitting—
With every contraction, a new expansion.
The pulse of life fueling our bones of desire.
To know—
In the well of contrast, Alchemy begins,
again and again.
Engulfed in the flames of divine transformation.
Consciousness meeting infinite expressions of the one in timeless space,
dancing in divine sacred union.
Beyond form
Beyond reason
Beyond belief
Bending—
twisting space and time.
Waltzing through eternity
in endless cycles of harmonized creation.

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Author: Jamie Rautenberg

Image: Flickr/Emilio García

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina