This topic is a rather charged one for me, and so I am not exactly sure what I can say about it, except that it happens, over and over.
I am less interested in birth, death, and rebirth in a physical capacity. People are born for various reasons, and then they die as bodies are temporary things. I struggle with a personal belief in any kind of afterlife, which is pretty rich considering my repertoire of personal experiences. I have believed in reincarnation for as long as I can remember to the point that, when I learned it was a religious belief and not just an inherent fact when I was around ten years old, I was shocked.
But birth, death, and rebirth in a spiritual sense? That cycle could pretty much sum up my religious path.
People who have read my blog previously might have guessed these topics are important to me, just by the fact that some of the primary deities I deal with are Dionysus, Ariadne, Persephone, and Hades. That whole birth, death, rebirth thing pretty much falls under their various domains. Britomartis’ primary myth of running from Minos for nine months before jumping into the sea, sometimes dying, and being reborn, is also relevant. In myth Zagreus was born, dismembered, then was reborn, too.
Z sometimes tells the joke that our family member’s idea of a greeting is to stab one another. It is a show of affection, he says. It is funny because it is true.
I live and reenact myth in my life, and that primary cycle is what has been deemed “shamanic death” by some, followed by being born anew. In journeywork, I have been stabbed, drowned, dismembered, and set on fire, just to name a few. Not to make myself sound all hardcore or oh-so-serious. Because yes, dying can be hard and painful. But for me, it is the rebirth stage that I dread for its difficulty. To pick myself up and carry on. To let myself rise from the ashes of my old self, as new changes to my energy take hold. To not only let go, but accept it all.
The reasons for this cycle in my own practice vary from cementing ties with certain entities, to feeding energy into places or objects, to feeding others, to cementing energetic modifications I have made or am having done to me, to healing me from my past traumas by letting them die away.
And then there is something a little more nebulous, somehow. That when the cycle stagnates or stops, my own mental and emotional well-being suffer. That unless I am engaging in this cycle with Z, I feel disconnected and off-balance and feel a loss of direction and meaning in my life.
So there are my vague, disjointed ramblings on something that strikes me as too profound for me to encapsulate in words in a slightly proper fashion, yet.
Reconstructing the Labyrinth 