By Grace Hui for Incentre

I first read this book when I was in law school 20 years ago. At that time, I enjoyed the lyrical style of Paulo Coelho. As each sentence flowed into the next, it read like a romantic and timeless song. The idea of a quest and a mission, as embarked upon by the tale’s protagonist, a shepherd boy, fired in me the idea of a life of purpose and adventure while the free spirit in me engaged with the idea of destiny.

The boy shepherd was never named - he was quite simply referred to as “the boy” or “the shepherd”. This anonymity gave me the promise that this mission was available and applicable to all. The idea of the “unknown” was tantalising to me.

However, beyond the physical excitement of a potential crusade into the unknown to pursue one’s destiny, I did not understand any further. The idea of destiny and free will also seemed to be contradictory concepts that evaded any deeper understanding on my part. While the book engaged me as I was reading it, its deeper meaning escaped me then. At the end of the book, I put it down as a book well written and never read it again for another two decades.

By Grace Hui for Incentre

Our desire to connect to something sacred is hardwired into our DNA. Although we may have forgotten our connection to the divine, it is still there, awaiting to be reawakened.

Our fixation with looking outwards comes chiefly from an imbalance between our physical and spiritual selves. In our modern life, where the ancient ways have been neglected, there appears to be no fixed point or centre. In other words, we have not made space for a pillar to the divine, living solely within the limitations of our minds and the constraints of our physicality.

The ability to create our own sacred spaces is our birthright. It first comes from inwardly acknowledging the sacred. From within it filters outwards to the spaces in which we inhabit. Instead of looking out to in, we need to look from in to out. We can rediscover the holy places of our private universe by surrendering ourselves to the power of the sacred.

By recognising our divinity and oneness with the universe, we can harness the regenerative power or energy that exists for both our personal use and for social regeneration. We can quite literally heal the world by beginning with the healing of ourselves and our personal spaces.

Indeed, many of the wise masters of old have studied the concept of creating space through the contemplation of divine proportion and geometric patterns which are fundamental to the creation and perpetuation of life in the universe.

These masters understood that we have the power to create the space we want. The space does not create us.

We only have to understand that we have mastery over space! Not vice versa.

As children, our natural state was to explore the world around us with delight and to express the feeling of wonder with unbridled amazement, without fear of judgement. We freely feel and reveal our emotions - be it joy, pain, disappointment, anger, excitement or frustration.

As we grow, society around us begins to shape us. Unconsciously, we learn to hide what we feel for fear that those feelings of vulnerability will be dismissed or worst still, be seen as a weakness. At times, we fear the power and intensity of our own feelings and suppress all that we deem negative.

Out of a desire to fit in, we start to repress ourselves from all that makes us truly human. By so doing, we lose our connection to our true selves and deny ourselves the very power that should be our birthright.

But how do we process and transcend those feelings if we do not first learn to acknowledge them within ourselves?

There is no mastery without awareness.

Oftentimes, hurts are inflicted on us and it is not our fault. We may be victims of circumstances or someone else’s actions. However, how we choose to navigate our way out of that quagmire is our responsibility.

Victim versus Victimhood

Being a victim is temporary while being in victimhood is a permanent narrative that is created.

One can be a victim of something without falling into victimhood. There is a difference.

Sometimes, after we fall victim to something, we become attached to the suffering that the event has caused, not realising that it is something we have the power and indeed the responsibility to shift.

This is not to say that we bury the pain or repress it. In fact, we don’t have to forget that the event happened at all. It’s simply the realisation that while pain is inevitable, suffering is not!

Pain might be the direct result of the event that caused us to hurt. If we allow it to move through us, it does pass. However, if we choose to let it define us, it becomes our all-consuming narrative. So much so that we carry the burden of endless suffering, forgetting that we have the power to shift this!

To transcend, we do not have to forget, we only have to realise that within each of us, we have the power to shift.

Nothing is immutable!

With initiation, we are able to step into the power of our divine selves and discern between what is in the highest good of self and take ownership of what is ours in order to process and progress.

When we truly understand ourselves, we can clearly see what is ours to transcend and what is not ours to take on. We are able to navigate life with love and with healthy boundaries.

The path of the initiate is one that is of constant growth and expansion.

We are all composed of many complex energy bodies, systems and structures. One such system is the etheric body.

Etheric energy is based on Three Wills: the Will of God, the Will of the Universe/Nature and the Will of Humans.

For us to be in perfect balance and to progress on our path, all three of these energies must flow in harmony - in the clockwise direction.

As human beings, however, our Human Will tends to flow anti-clockwise. In other words, contrary to the Will of God and the Will of the Universe / Nature.

At the core of your being is the true essence of who YOU are
Light, power, strength, love, joy, playfulness… and so much beauty.

Between that and what you are experiencing right now is what? Layers of accumulated, emotions, beliefs, identities, patterns.

And because everything is vibration these patterns, emotions and thoughts all are.. vibration!

So where are they located?
In our bodies? In our mind?

The ancient science of metaphysics goes further than that and describes a number of energy bodies that are recipients or containers for vibration.

Spring is the season where life bursts forth. After the hibernation of the dark colder months, the seeds that have been germinating, ideas that have been nurtured now have their time to emerge into the Light.

Ostara or the Spring Equinox is the point of perfect balance between light and dark. Night and day are of equal length and there is perfect equilibrium. It is a time where masculine and feminine energies are in harmony and where there in outer and inner parity.

In a world that has seemingly rejected the ancient ways, we have sometimes forgotten our access to the energy of the Magician.

A reliance on technology and modern thought has meant that we are out of practice in the creation of our own reality. How often have we stopped to realise that we have the power to create something out of nothing every day?

The archetype of the Magician teaches us about creation and our capacity to bring into being what was never there before. It allows us to reclaim our birthright as co-creators of the universe.