What Is Rebirth?
Q: What Is Rebirth?
A: There is something extraordinary in that we can literally change, transform, and shed psychological skins to be renewed incessantly throughout a lifetime. How many lives have you lived until now? When you reflect on your recent past, do you relate to yourself? As you were a few months ago? What has changed inside of you?
If you go further back through the webs of memories, thoughts, and emotions, can you recall who you were being? The juxtaposition could be astonishing, if we are working on ourselves or if life has worked on us. This is the gift of rebirth. There are no limits as to the changes we can work towards, it just takes a lot of effort. Actually, a tremendous amount and it isn’t without its share of suffering.
For every birth indicates death and we’ve all discovered this in some moment of our lives, whether by the passing of a family member or friend, the end of a relationship, or the completion of a chapter of life. Death is fierce and bizarrely permanent in this otherwise impermanent world in which we preside.
Rebirth is the reprieve from within the continuous cycle of death, rebirth, and transformation. As we change our minds, ways of being, behaviors, and habits, which is so utterly difficult to do, we become new again. Even in the reflection of the slightest change, the new exists, inspiring love and hope.
When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.
~ John O'Donohue
We come to see ‘newly’ in various ways. Through different eyes, our new thoughts arise and inspire feelings not yet discovered. Healing can occur within the psyche and we no longer are who we have been. Intimacy is now a possibility as John O’Donohue so eloquently prescribes as the antidote to anonymity. Required are the amends of past actions and words that are left behind in order to replenish the resulting emptiness with love. And this births new understanding and the fertile soil from which it can grow, in the garden of forgiveness.
Within the impulse of rebirth, space is created either willingly or not. Sometimes life chooses death for us and at others, we can choose a death cycle for ourselves. The death of our old ways of being comes at a very expensive cost of our attachments to who we have been. This requires what has been deemed as ‘super intimate efforts’, causing us to willingly surrender that which is familiar and known. It is astounding at how difficult this can be, to let go of that which is not only not serving, yet also destructive in our lives. The promise of renewal awaits us and still we prefer to suffer unconsciously.
If we are not choosing to ‘metamorphosize’ (new word) by being proactive in our inner work process, life may force us into a cocoon regardless. We may lose a loved one or an opportunity will fail us and we have no choice but to go through the doorway of death. We begin to see that death and rebirth are one in the same. They are the night and day of our existence.
The beauty in these desperate times is that rebirth is inevitable. It is alchemical, scientific as much as it is cosmic. Science rather attempts to explain the cosmic…we do our best. Perhaps poetry is the science of expressing our feelings, to capture the mysterious and present it in a way we can understand. And maybe the cycles of death, rebirth, and transformation are the poetic expressions of how we navigate the cosmos as an essence over time.
Transformation. Alas, spring has metaphorically sprung and we literally feel different. The halls of death can be long, desolate, and endlessly contracting us into inner states we would otherwise never touch. We go in, in, into the ‘winter’ of darkness to eventually come through into the luminous rays of the earliest light. The first inhalation of the new overwhelms us into life and maybe we weep in gratitude, laugh, or become very still. We are changed, forever changed and this is just nature, it simply is.
Nature, the wonderment of which it inspires, continuous exploration and a mirror of self. Can we work ever deeply with nature to experience even more of ourselves? To know who we are, where we come from and why we are here living and breathing? Are we created to love fervently above all else? Perhaps this is also part of our nature, to seek those questions and to rebirth into the answers, again and again.
