Rebirth

Easter is right around the corner, and this time of year many people are thinking about bunnies and eggs, which represent new life, and then of course many are thinking of the Christian tradition of celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus also at this time of year. As you may have read in my previous blogs, I had been going through a sort of death and rebirth myself, as I contemplated my life so far and the things I have accomplished and the direction I wanted my life to take.  This is a normal process of life, and periodically it is good to self evaluate, looking back at the direction your life has taken and make some adjustments, if necessary.

As I mentioned also in my previous blog, I had been studying the Native American tradition of the medicine wheel, and while learning it my teacher had given me a medicine wheel reading, which indicated that I was in the death position.  I wanted to explain a little bit about the concept of the medicine wheel and how it relates to our lives. In the Native American tradition, all of life is medicine. Our lives go around in circles, as also indicated in the wheel of fortune card in the tarot.  We go around the wheel of life, learning as we go, possibly going through similar things over and over until we  get the lesson. Sometimes we may go around the wheel of life slowly, possibly completing the circle only once or twice in an entire lifetime, and sometimes we find ourselves going around several times. Each position in the circle has a meaning. In a future blog I may explain this in a little more depth, but for this particular blog I just wanted to give a short explanation of the concept.

So if we take Jesus' life as an example, I would say by the stories in the Bible that he perhaps went through the death position twice in his lifetime. The first time was the time he went out in the desert for forty days and was "tempted" by the "devil". I am sure that Jesus knew his purpose and was contemplating how to best accomplish this purpose. Whether the "devil" was an actual entity that came to him physically and tempted him or whether it was a voice inside of his head, as we all have sometimes ideas or voices inside of us telling us things that are contrary to what we know to be true, it doesn't matter. He was having a crisis of faith. The idea came to him to jump off a cliff and expect the angels to rescue him and this would give him notoriety and fame. It appears that Jesus was trying to decide how best to get his message to the world, how to be noticed. The second time as we all know was when he gave himself up to be crucified. I imagine this was not his first choice of how to get his message out there either.

 We all have to go through the death process, whether it be a physical death or a spiritual one or an emotional one. We are not alone. We all know how it feels to have something end. Something important to us. Some of us end up getting stuck there. We can't move on from that ended relationship, or that lost dream, or that lost job, or whatever. The good news is that the next position on the medicine wheel is that of rebirth. We have to allow ourselves to be reborn. Just like in the spring the flowers start to bloom, the eggs hatch, the leaves start to bud on the trees once again. In the Christian tradition after three days Jesus rose from the dead. There are words to a song on the radio which say... "every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end..."

So as Easter approaches, take some time to contemplate what things have outlived their place in your life and need to be allowed to die a good death, so that something new can be reborn. It may be just a way of thinking. It may be the direction your life has taken so far. Whatever it is, remember that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.......if something dies then something is about to be reborn. It may not take the form you expected. But it will be good.